Members' Evening Friday 21st April 2023

 Our next gathering will be on Friday the 21st April in the Lower Court Hall, at 7 for 7.30pm.  This will be a Members' Evening with the theme being Women Writing, so feel free to bring your individual contributions; anything from the measured, matronly austerity of Jane Austen to the halcyon days of chick lit and the boisterous, bonhomie of Bridget Jones.  For those aligned with Wordsworth and who wish their powerful feelings to overflow spontaneously, poetry offerings are also encouraged.  Concerns over stage fright might be allayed by a preliminary free glass of wine!  Looking forward to seeing you all there.

To the Life - A Reminiscence with Charles Moore 24/3/23

 

A larger, more secular congregation than usual was shepherded into St. Thomas’s Church to hear the distinguished journalist, editor and author Charles Moore discuss his experiences in the writing of his acclaimed, prize-winning, 3-volume authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher.  A religious setting may have been particularly apposite for a subject who had been styled “The Blessed Margaret Thatcher, the Leaderene”, by the playfully camp, intellectually adroit, if arguably tactless Norman St. John – Stevas.  Given the political alignment of the publications with which our speaker has been associated, audience members attuned to the season’s Scriptural offerings might have speculated on whether they would be hearing “a disciple’s tongue”.  In 1997, while editing the “Daily Telegraph”, Moore was invited to write the authorised biography of the former Prime Minister, an unsought, if attractive, offer for which he had to set aside his verdict on political biographies as being generally “stodgy”.   He did express an admiration for Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”, particularly from the point where the Great Lexicographer first encounters his amanuensis.

The plethora of source material was an early problem.  Mrs. T. herself was still alive and Charles felt that knowing and being able to meet with his subject was on balance an advantage.  In 1990 she had “written her own memoirs” in conversation with a series of ghost writers which were unhelpful and were worryingly indicative of a disorganised mind.  The subject’s personal and Government papers were also available for study and the most useful insights into the workings of the former Premier’s mind came from her own notes and under- linings on the official documents.  Lady Thatcher did not seem to understand the fact gathering nature of the historical interview, seeing it more in terms of a continuation of political combat.  In addition, she was latterly in evident cognitive decline and could not be considered an altogether reliable witness.  There were numerous media interviews, newspaper articles and a host of living oral sources to be scrutinised.  Civil servants proved most useful among this group in that they had minds trained to remember detail while politicians, notably Michael Heseltine, were rather cavalier in handling facts.  An exception was John Major whom this biographer felt demonstrated a “natural” civil servant’s mind-set.  So numerous were the oral sources that the interviews with over 500 of them in North America had to be contracted out to an assistant.

This wealth of material created a challenge when it came to building a narrative “architecture” but our speaker laid down some useful ground rules; hold a firm chronological line and avoid the distraction of “flashbacks”, eschew partisanship and antagonism, try to understand the subject’s motivation and to move as close as you can to the well springs of their thought and action.  Baron Moore detected a discernible difference between the public and private Margaret Thatchers.  While the relative contributions of Marxism and Methodism to the genealogy of the Labour Party remain a steady staple of political debate, our visitor felt that Margaret Roberts’ father’s auxiliary vocation as a Methodist lay preacher was crucial in engendering a “work hard, make money and donate some of it” mentality in his offspring.  Margaret emerged from the local grammar school with a place at Oxford studying Science, both unusual destinations for a woman at that time.  The only instance when the interviewee’s veracity came into question was on the topic of boyfriends: - the party line was that the far from handsome Denis was the only one but our intrepid representative of what Denis, in his “Private Eye” incarnation as the author of the “dear Bill” letters, would have termed “the reptiles of the press” unearthed the detail that his subject was managing to entertain 3 swains concurrently before Denis swam into her ken. 

 The congregation filed out, uplifted by an inspiring sermon and fortified by the Final Blessing, but possibly divided into true votaries with heads bowed in silent prayer for the canonisation of Blessed Margaret and perennial sceptics wondering whatever happened to that famous Downing St. Mission Statement from the prayer of St. Francis: -

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.

Where there is despair, may we bring hope.      

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)