Tristan and Me; 9 December 2022 talk by Martin Handley

 

The assembled Lit. Soc. who gathered for the Wagner-themed evening in the reassuringly warm space of the Court Hall were gratified to hear our speaker, Martin Handley, approvingly liken it to the Gibechung’s Hall which received Siegfried’s corpse in the Ring Cycle. He was to regale us with the account of the role played by the eponymous hero of the opera Tristan und Isolde in his own life.   Something of a musical Renaissance man, Handley has merged his violin and piano playing, conducting and acting skills into a love of that marriage of music and theatre which is opera.  An Oxford-born, Cambridge graduate Martin started his professional musical career as a répétiteur in Germany for 6 years, following that with 3 years as Chorus Master and conductor at Australian Opera before a 6-year stint as Chorus Master with English National Opera.  This laid the foundation for a national and international career as a freelance conductor and he took his first steps on his road to broadcasting on the BBC’s World Service.  1997 saw him begin a 2-year spell as Conductor of Music for Royal Danish Opera. 

Tristan und Isolde began as light relief for Wagner from the rigours of penning both the libretto and the music for the Ring Cycle but became hugely influential; inspiring Mahler, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Britten and according to our speaker exerting a wider cultural influence on a par with the contemporaneous Das Kapital of Marx and Darwin’s Origin of Species. We were told the work is an inscape, a drama of the soul. The libretto was based on a 12th century account by Gottfried von Strassburg although oral versions were thought to have been around for centuries before that. The tale is set in a triangular, Celtic twilight of Ireland, Brittany and Cornwall and is a commitment to love and sexual passion with the eponymous protagonists experiencing the Liebestod or erotic death and then eternal union in death in a Valhalla of the lovestruck. The cast comprises kings, warrior knights, noble women and dynastic marriage arrangements which are strained by an emotional cocktail of revenge, atonement, duty and love all further complicated by the substitution of a potent and highly efficacious love potion for a lethal draught. These plot lines may have echoed Wagner’s own love life at the time when, in Swiss exile, his growing disenchantment with his first wife, Minna, was further fuelled by his infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a Zurich silk trader, and the presence of his future mistress and wife, Cosima von Bülow, in the wings. Martin interspersed music from the opera to add colour to the narrative.

We then learnt of Martin’s more personal involvement with this opera.  As an adolescent at his co-educational boarding school, his first love, Sally, and he were wont to retreat to the school’s “listening room" on Sunday afternoons to listen to a box set of Tristan und Isolde and we were treated to the pair’s favourite track from Act II:

Isolde: Herz an Herz dir, Mund an Mund      (Heart on your heart, mouth on mouth)

Tristan: eines Atems ein'ger Bund  (The single bond of a single breath)

Together: Niewiedererwachens wahnlos hold bewusster Wunsch (The sweetly conscious undeluded wish never again to waken)

At the end of this duet, Tristan and Isolde collapse onto a flowery bank but Martin did not reveal how he and Sally closed the scene.  The school clearly had an enlightened attitude to developing higher culture among the more cerebral pupils, but you have to admit the German Department must have been outstanding.   

Tristan und Isolde has a reputation in the world of opera similar to the Scottish play in the world of drama and it duly brought our speaker bad luck when he was called on at no notice at all to substitute for an indisposed Tristan on the production’s first night in Copenhagen.  He told us he managed to soldier through the ordeal and thinks he actually enjoyed about 2 minutes of the unsought assignment.  The Swedish dramatic soprano, Birgit Nilsson, has appeared in 33 productions as Isolde and admits the role made her famous, so Martin recounted how he managed to cajole her into granting him an interview when she retired to her native Skane district, north of Malmö.  Birgit had emulated another Swedish diva, Greta Garbo, in her dedication to post-retirement solitude and Handley had to follow a complex set of instructions, more like a demonstration of “tradecraft” for a le Carré novel, before finally coming face to face with his quarry.  He did learn that she felt Wagner required thoughtful, patient and methodical people and that the secret to singing Isolde was “comfortable shoes”.

As befits a Radio 3 presenter Martin wove the thoughtfully selected musical excerpts expertly into his very personal narrative leaving the audience suitably educated and entertained.

William Doherty       

Literary Agents; an author's and an agent's perspective

 In her November talk to the Literary Society, on Crime Writing, Aline Templeton touched on the role of a Literary Agent, which gave rise to some discussion. As I thought it might be of wider interest I asked Aline to write a piece on the role of an agent, from the writer's perspective, and a Literary Agent, Holly Faulks,  to write one from the agent's perspective. LY

The Literary Agent, by Aline Templeton

Being able to drop the words ‘my agent’ into a conversation for the first time – very casually, of course – is a great day for an author.  This is a rite of passage: up to that point you may in your heart believe you’re a good or even a great writer, and your mother and perhaps even some indulgent friends may go along with that, but when an agent offers you her – or his - time, advice and expertise for nothing because she considers that it will pay her to do it, you have the most convincing form of professional approval.

Her judgement may, of course, be wrong.  Her high opinion may not be shared by publishers, but even so many agents persist because they still believe in the book and work tirelessly with their author to get it into print.

It’s an enormously important relationship and there are as many different ways of conducting it as there are authors and agents, and there are bad ones as well as good.    I have had several agents in my time; the first one who approached me on the basis of some short stories I had written gave me such bad advice that I only got my first book published after I left her, and she was later thrown out of the Association of Authors’ Agents.

My next one was wonderful.  I approached her and she would only take me on after very hard work and accepting a lot of criticism on the next book, but the pain was worth it. More books followed, but she made everything enormous fun too.  When one of my books was coming unstuck, she said, ‘Come and stay. We’ll work hard all day to get it into shape, and then we’ll drink and gossip all evening.’  We did,  the book was sorted out and then the other books followed.

All her clients adored her and we were devastated when she decided to retire.  I’ve been grateful to agents since, but I’ve never had that sort of closeness with anyone else.

I’m not good at talking about what I’m planning to write. I have author friends who talk over their plans with their agents before they write them and look to them for plot suggestions but after outlining in some detail the book I was planning on one occasion, I found the drive had dissipated when I sat down to write it and the book never got itself written.  I’ve never done that again.

It's once it’s safely in manuscript form that I look to my agent to be cruel enough to tell me what’s wrong with it and how to put it right.  I hate this stage, but I know I need it; I have also learned to ignore the first paragraph says that she absolutely loves it and it’s brilliant,  and go straight to the ‘But..’ in the second one.  I had one agent who was neither cosy or supportive but I was grateful for the talent she had for spotting exactly what was going wrong and spelling it out despite my squirming. 

Not being meticulous by nature, I need an agent when it comes to checking contracts with publishers and dealing with the intricacies of foreign rights.  Then after publication, the  agent acts as a buffer between you and your publisher; when you’re quite sure that your assigned editor is completely wrong, and the changes being demanded will ruin your book, it is your agent’s job to convince the publisher that he’s wrong, or alternatively to convince you that you are – possibly using the phrase, ‘The person who has the chequebook is one who’s right.’

That brings us to one of agent’s most important duties -  getting the publisher to pull out that metaphorical chequebook, and haggling about what should be written on it. A fair bit of that involves explaining that the book is so brilliant that he can’t afford to miss it and with luck managing to lure other publishers into a bidding war; that’s the highest degree of agenting skill – and then the sky’s  the limit.

It hasn’t happened to me so far, but a girl can dream.  I have no doubt about their value to an author and have no doubt that the percentage taken off my earnings in agents’ fees has been more than covered by the rewards their skills have brought me.

The Literary Agent, by Holly Faulks

A literary agent is involved in every step of an author’s career. When we first take on a client they may only be at the very early stages of an idea. We work together with the author to prepare their work for submission to publishers. This might be a proposal for a non-fiction book or the complete manuscript of a novel. We will then draw up a list of editors at the various publishing houses that we think might be interested in the work. A big part of our job is staying up to date with all the editors and knowing what exactly they’re looking for. We send the author’s work to the editors along with a submission letter and with luck we receive an offer of publication (or more than one offer!) for the author. We then negotiate with the editor(s) to ensure the author is given the best possible offer and guide the author through the process of selecting their new publishing house. We will then go on to negotiate the full contract between author and publisher. At this point, the author will begin to work directly with the publisher’s editorial, marketing, publicity and sales teams to prepare the book for publication, but we will continue to support them through this process, especially if there are difficulties or disagreements between the author and the publisher. We will also ensure that the author is paid correctly and promptly by the publisher, chasing advance payments and checking royalty statements. This support continues beyond the publication of the first book as the author’s career grows. We try to help authors achieve their long-term career goals whether that means negotiating new contracts with an existing publisher, seeking out a new editor when necessary or changing writing direction entirely. Literary agents will also aim to sell translation rights in the work throughout the world as well as TV and film rights. Some agencies will do this directly and others will work with co-agents and sub-agents. Literary agents may also act as speaking or broadcast agents and can handle all sorts of non-book work for their clients.

My Life in Crime by Aline Templeton 18 November 2022

After her aborted visit last winter, victim of severe weather in the south-east, the Lit. Soc was delighted to welcome the acclaimed “Crime Czar” of Small-Town Scotland, revealing her life in crime. Like a mistress of the trade of crime fiction, she set the scene for the audience with a reading from the opening chapter of her novel “The Devil’s Garden” whose pace and intrigue swiftly evoked the requisite uneasy, dramatic tension. Her first faltering steps on the pathway to entry into the contemporary canon of Scottish crime fiction began at age 6 with a fierce grasp of the pencil and learning to fashion printed script. Mystery intruded even in this account of the prototype Mr. Wiz and Mrs. Woz’s weekend in Paris leaving her early readership to ponder on how this adventure was received by the travelling couple’s respective partners. The urge to write has turned out to be a lifelong compulsion. Aline was always a bibliophile and still regards her introduction to her local lending library as a foretaste of Heaven. Reading and writing were her thing although a summer placement in her local library, prior to reading English at Cambridge, proved a mixed blessing. Staff had the privilege of access to the “blue” books, literature deemed unsuitable for an undiscriminating public to consume, and thus the opportunity to thoroughly round off their liberal education but also the burden of hunting down and matching the missing tickets which formed the basis of the classification system in that pre-computer era. Our speaker recounted the discomfiture of the prim chief librarian who eventually yielded to an insistent customer’s demand to see the blue books and his confusion when confronted with this treasure trove of forbidden literary fruit. The engaged citizen had merely been requesting the Government Reports which always bore blue covers!

After graduation and her entry into the teaching profession, she continued to be a slave to the impulse to write. Initial published success was modest with articles in magazines and newspapers but convincing publishers to support her work was a heroic enterprise. She was drawn into crime fiction, an expanding field channelled and amplified by a plethora of crime programmes on television and the conviction among a growing proportion of the population that crime fiction reflected the inherently unfair nature of life. Wigtown Book Festival, the Scottish equivalent of Hay on Wye, provided the launch pad for her first book, honed for the market by the advice of a ruthless agent. Her first 6 books were set in England, but her Edinburgh base and her direct experience of the Scottish Legal System as a Justice of the Peace prompted a switch to rural Scottish settings. Eschewing the fashion for flawed detectives – alcoholics, drug addicts, victims of bipolar disorders – she summoned D.I. Marjory Fleming from her imagination; a farmer’s wife with 2 teenage children and a stable personality. The nine novels in which Fleming is the central figure are set in Galloway, the neglected south-west corner of Scotland, where an impressive backdrop of sea and hills fails to forestall the social devastation caused by the collapse of the fishing industry and an influx of part absentee second home owners. The centralising of the previously regionally based Scottish Police Service demanded a new main protagonist, the maverick DCI. Kelso Strang, a bereaved widower, and former Army officer who can be “parachuted” into remote Scottish locations on an ad hoc basis. Aline acknowledged a transition in her work with the later books being character driven. The abiding impression left from her time with the Law was of the “criminal stupidity” of many of the delinquents; admittedly she only saw the ones who allowed themselves to be caught. It will be intriguing to observe how the reset of her work-life equilibrium after her recent move from Edinburgh to Tenterden affects her literary output. Will the rugged, remote Scottish literary universe she created survive immersion in the soft South?

The evening closed with a Q&A in which the writer divulged she was not a tightly planned, detailed spreadsheet author but one who wrote linearly, allowing the plot flexibility as the characters increasingly took on a life of their own. The books are written to entertain and carry no hidden message and our speaker approvingly endorsed the definition offered by Miss Prism, the governess in Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Pressed to choose a favourite from her work she opted for “The Devil’s Garden” and “Evil for Evil”. Our evening ended happily with a loose scrum forming round the speaker’s table as the audience invested in samples of the Templeton oeuvre, thoughtfully provided in a variety of formats.

William Doherty

TS Eliot: Into the Waste Land, and The Four Quartets - BBC iPlayer (Reviewed by Richard Thomas)

These two programmes were dished up for our delectation by BBC 4 a month or so ago, complementing BBC 2’s "Return to T S Eliotland" (reviewed separately, below).  They will be available on BBC iPlayer for another eleven months.  The first is in “Talking Heads” format, while the second is a televisual version of the solo recitation of the whole of The Four Quartets which Ralph Fiennes has been performing in various theatres in recent months.  Both are well worth watching.

The main thrust of "Into The Waste Land" is that knowledge gained from the release in 2020 of Emily Hale’s letters from their 50 year embargo has made it clear that the poem is built around a strong current both of romantic longing and of the poet’s agony, brought about by his disastrous inability to bring the longing to fruition – which indeed, in the opinion of some of the talking heads, together form the poem’s main genesis.  It is not, as had been the view hitherto, an abstract threnody for the past, accentuated by the horrors of the first world war.  It is a love poem – or rather a failed love poem – magnified into that threnody, and not really abstract at all.

This had long been the hunch of the main talking head, the academic and biographer Lindall Gordon, who had surmised in one of her earlier books on Eliot (three of them) that the key to the poem’s angst was lost or failed love, presumably for Emily Hale, whom Gordon had identified as the “hyacinth girl”.  This supposition had been derided at the time by a number of eminent critics, but she had stuck to it, determined to live long enough (she is now in her eighties) to be able to prove it right as soon as the embargo was lifted.  And sure enough she was at the gates of the Princeton Library at that very moment, and the content of hundreds of the newly accessible letters soon vindicated that long-held hunch.  The poem was the result of an emotional breakdown.

Eliot had then many years later left a posthumous time-bomb, designed to coincide with the lifting of the embargo, in the form of a lengthy and emphatic denial of any serious connection, emotional or literary, with Emily Hale.  He had also ensured that all her letters to him had been burnt.  These two posthumous interventions had more or less confirmed the “guilt”, or desperate regret, that had underlain his composition of the poem.  For, after all, he had declared his love for Hale, immediately before leaving for England and Oxford, where he had then almost instantly met and married Vivienne (or Vivien- she used both versions) Haigh-Wood, a surprising and impetuous act that led inexorably into a miserable failed marriage, with Vivienne’s gradual descent into the mental illness that led, in 1938, to her commitment to an asylum, where she died in 1947.

But the programme is not only about the poem’s emergence from Eliot’s Hale-induced emotional breakdown.  It is a skilful and wide-ranging exegesis of the whole poem, exploring the origins and identities of the various incidents and characters, such as the drive in the car and the “echt Deutsch”, and demonstrating how much both Vivienne and Ezra Pound edited and improved the text.  The talking heads, who include biographers, academics, actors, poets, a composer and a drag model, are wise and instructive.  I only wish, however, that they could be identified more than once, as there are too many of them to remember throughout a fairly intense ninety  minute programme.

Simon Russell Beale reads the excerpts beautifully, and there are plenty of helpful illustrations.  It is a pity however that most of them are displayed as though under rippling water, presumably to render them as “memories” – an irritating and unnecessary affectation.

There is not much that needs saying about the Ralph Fiennes programme, entitled Four Quartets.  It is simply a brilliant tour de force.  Over eleven hundred lines, delivered from memory, perfectly.

Sipping Nectar by Douglas Reid Skinner

 

The first precision atomic clock 

was built in 1955

by Louis Essen and Jack Parry.

It was accurate measuring down

to a millionth of a billionth of a second

and worked by counting the number of times

an atom of caesium-133

flipped from one state to another.

Defined this way, a second is the time it takes

for nine thousand, one hundred and ninety-two million,

six hundred and thirty-one thousand,

seven hundred and seventy spin flips

to have happened in your atom,

which on any one day is much the same time

as an Amethyst Woodstar hummingbird

requires for the eighty wingbeats that keep

it hovering in place and sipping nectar

from a delicate floral trombone.

(From A Short Treatise on Mortality, uHlanga Press, 2022. £7.50, copies available from the author.

Contact: douglas.cranerivieras@me.com)

T S Eliot, by Richard Thomas

 The literary and broadcasting world is awash with Eliot just now. Books and articles galore have appeared, prompted by The Waste Land’s centenary, and the BBC has treated us to three excellent television programmes: T S Eliot: Into the Waste Land, Four Quartets, and Return to T S Eliotland. The first two will be available on iPlayer for another eleven months, but, annoyingly, the third will be there for only another week or so. So perhaps I should address it first, and come back to the other two later.

Return to T S Eliotland is a literary travelogue in which we are introduced by A N Wilson to the significant places lived in or visited by Eliot, and shown both how he used them as building blocks and how he was influenced by them, figuratively or literally, in his poetry: St Louis (childhood home, with its mighty Mississippi); Gloucester, Massachusetts (summer home, with the sea and sailing); Harvard (during his time there he first met his muse Emily Hale); Merton College Oxford (and during his time there he met his first wife, Vivienne Haig-Wood); London (Lloyds Bank and breakdown; Margate and Lausanne (recovery); London again (marriage failure, interaction with Ezra Pound, publication of The Waste Land, editorship at Faber and Faber, Second World War, second marriage – to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, Nobel Prize); Burnt Norton and Little Gidding (visited, with Emily Hale); East Coker (also first visited with Emily Hale – and where he, and many years later, Valerie were buried). 

Wilson is an engaging and highly informative guide, with plenty of lateral, but always relevant, digression on, for instance, rivers (Mississippi, Thames, Ganges, Styx) and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Wilson regards The Waste Land as the greatest poem in the English language of the twentieth century (followed, though only by implication, by the Four Quartets), and he tells us why in an engrossing programme. But he is not starry-eyed. He is outraged by Eliott’s antisemitism and racism, and puzzled and saddened by the way he treated both Vivienne and Emily – in the latter case even posthumously, with a meretricious and wounding disclaimer of even the slightest degree of influence or affection, left to coincide with the release by Princeton University of his letters to her fifty years after her death, which occurred just two years before The Waste Land centenary. (He had already ensured that all her letters to him were burnt.) This programme neatly complements the other two, to which I shall revert shortly. What a pity that it cannot remain with them on iPlayer for a whole year.

Richard Thomas

The King's Touch, by Dr Stephen Brogan: 3 September 2022

 

The Lit. Soc. broke new ground, drilling down on the specialist literature of the distant past when Dr. Stephen Brogan presented his study of Adenochoiradelogia, the 1684 text on the presentation and treatment of scrofula with particular reference to the application of the King’s Touch. The enigmatic title stands firmly in a tradition of medical neologism drawn from the Classical languages and is a three volume anatomick-chirurgical treatise on glands and swellings which explains their nature, describes the clinical presentation and discusses the therapeutic efficacy of contemporary treatments. For both speaker and audience, attention was centred on a specific treatment, the Charisma Basilikon or Royal Touch. The author, one of King Charles II’s surgeons, Thomas Browne, had a ringside seat at the application of the Royal Touch. Scrofula would now be technically described as tuberculous cervical adenitis i.e., the spread of tuberculosis to the lymph glands in the neck, with Dr Brogan attributing the infection to the ingestion of unpasteurised milk from cows with TB. The affected glands could present as swellings which increased in size and became red and tender before sometimes rupturing to form a sinus, a tract from the abscess cavity which opened onto the skin surface and along which pus was intermittently discharged. Nowadays an uncommon clinical condition to encounter but our speaker gave some insight into the medical challenge it posed with a display of 19 th century photographs and watercolours of afflicted patients.

Dr. Brogan emphasised the importance of context in considering illness and healing in the 17th century. Disease was then considered providential, sited at an intersection of religion, health and medicine; a philosophy which may explain the wide spectrum of healers on offer – physicians, apothecaries, barber-surgeons, cunning men, diet advocates and lifestyle coaches.

Tactile healing was not an exclusively royal preserve and the Irish 

J.P., Valentine Greatrakes,attracted thousands of supplicants following his arrival in London in 1665. The busiest monarchical adept of the King’s Touch was Charles II whose production line of medical ministrations followed a seasonal calendar of Easter and Michaelmas, the latter coinciding with harvest time. During these 10-day seasons, the Merry Monarch touched 300 sufferers each morning and the events were trailed with advertisements in The London Gazette. Before participating in one of these sessions, the patient required a referral letter from his vicar confirming the scrofula diagnosis with the vicar being obliged to record the names of those he had referred. To attend the actual ceremony the patient had to collect an admission token from the surgeon’s house beforehand and we can only speculate at the febrile atmosphere which must have prevailed there from the diarist John Evelyn's description of seven deaths in the crush at one surgeon’s door. Lest we imagine that those submitting to the cure were drawn from a gullible underclass, aristocrats also underwent the process although they could avoid the frenzied scramble to acquire an admission token, being favoured with a domiciliary visit and personal delivery. The surprisingly modern bureaucracy which attended presenting yourself for the Touch was inspired by the contemporary fear of masterless men roaming the countryside and possibly, horror of horrors, becoming a charge on the Poor Law although two thirds of victims were actually women. The ceremonial choreography was thoughtfully arranged; the venue was the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, in front of which the King’s father had been executed by Cromwell’s regicidal republicans in 1649. Father and son shared a belief in the Divine Right of Kings, hankered after a French-style absolute monarchy and saw the ruler as the Lord’s Anointed, leaving only a small step to crediting him with supernatural powers; so, dispensing the Charisma Basilikon was a political endeavour for the Stuarts. Charles also took the religious element seriously as well, topping up the royal reservoir of spirituality by taking Communion beforehand and having prayers from St. John’s Gospel intoned throughout with the inspiration for the whole ceremony drawn from St. Mark: they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. St. Mark 16, v.18 (KJV) The king duly laid his hands on the lesions for 15 – 20 seconds. At a second phase of the ceremony the patient was given a gold coin known as an Angel, to be worn from a ribbon round the neck, which contained more of the royal metal, gold, than any other coin in circulation at that time. Nowadays one can fetch anything from £1,000 to £4,000 on eBay. On one face there was a depiction of St.Michael the Archangel killing a wyvern, representing the triumph of good over evil and by extension health over disease, while the obverse showed a ship at full sail coming towards the viewer, signifying a healthy body politic following the true course. The coin’s rubric read "Soli Dei Gloria" – The Glory of God

Alone. Charles II took Touching seriously and is estimated to have touched 100,000 people in his lifetime, probably seeing it as a conservative reaction to the regicide Republic/Commonwealth and the political malaise he felt accompanied it. Browne’s text reports a 75 patient case series, 5 of whom were healed within 2 to 3 days and another 30 improved over 4 to 6 weeks. As in modern medicine, managing expectations was important. Many sufferers were not expecting an overnight cure but wished to be heard on the subject of their misfortune and were prepared to settle for even a slow, incremental improvement. Evidence for a political dimension comes from the refusal of the Calvinist William III or the House of Hanover to continue the practice despite its revival under Queen Anne and its impressive historical lineage, dating back to Edward the Confessor.

As ever, the Lit. Soc. audience rose to the challenge of novelty, firing in a series of intelligent questions in the Q & A.

William Doherty