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August 22, 2007

Speaking of Fitzgerald

Back in the eighties and nineties, the Annoying Question I Most Often Found Myself Obliged to Answer was the following: "Do you consider yourself a gay writer?" Now that I'm about to publish The Indian Clerk this question has given way to another one: "Do you consider yourself an historical novelist?"

In both cases the answer is, more or less, the same.

Answer to "gay" question: "No, I consider myself a writer who happens to write, often, about gay men and lesbians."

Answer to "historical" question: "No, I consider myself a novelist who happens to have written a novel based on real events and concerning real people who are now dead."

The term "historical novelist" carries unhappy connotations. To me it calls up yellowed paperbacks from the seventies, with pictures of high-bosomed ladies on the cover and first lines along the lines of: "It was a quarter to twelve in the Petit Trianon, and Marie Antoinette was in a huff." For a long time it seemed that most writers I knew shied away from the past, and from real people; indeed, that they shied away from history itself. Then, in the nineties, this started to change. I credit this change, mostly, to Penelope Fitzgerald.

As she recounts in her book The Knox Brothers, Fitzgerald's father was the editor of Punch. Her Uncle, Dilly Knox, worked with Alan Turing on the breaking of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park. She herself did not start publishing fiction until she was in her sixties, and then she published with alacrity until her death, in 2000, at the age of 83. All her novels are great, but the greatest are the trio that take place in the past: The Gate of Angels, set in Cambridge just before the Great War; The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow at the same moment; and The Blue Flower, which is set in Germany in the age of Goethe and tells the story of the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (known as Novalis) and his mysterious passion for a seemingly unremarkable twelve year-old girl named Sophie von Kühn. The Blue Flower gave me the courage to wrestle, in my own way, with the muse of history, and led me to read a number of other very good "novels based on real events and concerning real people who are now dead," among them Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and Joanna Scott's Arrogance, which is about the life of the Viennese Secessionist artist Egon Schiele and which I had the good fortune to read in Vienna, much of it at the Konditorei Aida, while eating gugelhupf and drinking a melange.

More to come...

Posted at 06:03 AM in Guest Bloggers, Indian Clerk Week |

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Comments

BT

It is a bonus that David Leavitt is both a gay writer and a historical novelist. The two, I feel, go hand-in-hand and compliment each other.

Being gay gives a person, whether a writer, an analyst, or whatever, a particular insight.

Reading the Alan Turing book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, being a gay reader I can, somehow, get a more indepth feel to what David is writing when he delves into that fascinating mind and character that is Alan Turing. I share Alan's pain and awkwardness, because I can relate to it more personally.

But quoting a recent article by Dan Savage, by just being awkward in sex, doesn't make a straight man, gay. Hell, I contend, we gay men are much more complicated than that.

Posted by: BT | August 23, 2007 at 04:36 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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