The Private World of Georgette Heyer, by Jane Aiken Hodge

I've always loved Georgette Heyer, but I never used to talk about it much.

However, as time passes, I'm becoming more open about my socially unacceptable side. I am now happy to admit:

1) I hate cats (and although I'll probably pretend to believe your cat is cuter, fluffier, more super-smart than any other cat, I will still hate it).

2) Sorry, but I have absolutely no idea when anyone else's children's birthdays are - I have enough trouble remembering all their names.

3) I spend a lot of time, while talking to other people, thinking about how to escape.

4) I love regency romances, particularly Georgette Heyer's.

So, it was without shame that I took a Heyer biography out of the library last week. And, it is equally without shame that I note down a few facts that I found interesting:

• Born 16 August 1902, she published her first book (The Black Moth) when she was only 19 - it was a story she had made up to amuse her brother, Boris, who was a haemophiliac and spent a lot of time convalescing.


• She suppressed her 4 early 'straight' novels (all focused on the class structure of English Society): Instead of the Thorn (1923), Helen (1928), Pastel (1929) and Barren Corn (1930).


• She found men more interesting than women who either talked of nothing but 'servants and the weather' or worked and suffered from 'a magnified sense of their own importance.'


• She was also a devoted spectator sportswoman and loved golf and the Test Match.


• In 1925 her father died of a heart attack, leaving the family with no finances, so Georgette Heyer became the family's main bread winner (putting her brother Frank through school and Cambridge Uni). Her brother, Boris, and her mother, would always need her financial support.


• She married Ronald Rougier (a lawyer who became a QC in 1959) just two months after her father's death and the marriage lasted nearly fifty uneventful years .... 'happy the marriage that has no history'


• The success of her early books without any publicity demonstrated the public exposure she shrank from was unnecessary (although, had she met the critics, her immense personal style might have suggested her books were more than mere romantic cliche). She said later: 'As for being photographed At Work or In My Old World Garden, that is the type of publicity which I find nauseating and quite unnecessary. My private life concerns no one but myself and my family; and if, on the page, I am Miss Heyer, everywhere else I am Mrs Rougier, who makes no public appearances and dislikes few things so much as being confronted by Fans. There seems to be a pathetic belief today in the power of personal publicity over sales. I don't share it... Console yourself with the thought that my answers to the sort of questions Fans ask seem to daunt them a bit! Not unnaturally, they expect me to be a Romantic, and I'm nothing of the sort.'


• Books like The Conqueror (1931) show her as a master of military strategy.


• 1932 she gave birth to Richard George Rougier ('my most notable (indeed peerless) work').


• She aimed to produce one historical and one detective novel a year.


• Her husband collaborated in the detective novels and would provide the plots, while GH developed the characters and relationships... She later declared, ''Why Shoot a Butler?' is so complicated it baffles me.'


• She kept reams of notes and background detail and slang in Regency life. She dates her books effortlessly with a casual reference to contemporary event, e.g. The Foundling's reference to the Prince Regent sets the book after 1811 and one to Princess Charlotte's death in childbirth places it after 1817. However, her files do not mention sources - she was a collector rather than a scholar.


• Many, including her family, think An Infamous Army GH's best book - she uses Wellington's own letters and reported speech to portray him.


• She mocked her own heroes: Mark II - 'suave, well-dressed, rich and a famous whip'; Mark I - 'the brusque, savage sort with a foul temper.'


• Equally true of her heroines: Mark I - a tall young woman with a great deal of character and somewhat mannish habits; Mark II - a quiet girl, bullied by her family, partly because she can't bear scenes.


• Faro's Daughter (1941) has one of her most elegantly worked out plots (and a Beatrice v. Benedick central relationship).


• Penhallow (1942)began, 'Jimmy the Bastard was polishing the shoes'. It was intended as a contract breaking book and was duly turned down by Hodder. It was also the last detective story she wrote for 5 years.


• GH has described Friday's Child (1944) as 'my own favourite', and says that The Unknown Ajax and Venetia are 'the best of my later works'.


• She had a letter from a Romanian political prisoner who kept herself and her fellow prisoners sane by telling the story of Friday's Child over and over ('as I have a very retentive memory I was able to tell it ... practically verbatim').


• GH often accused of repeating herself, and Spring Muslin is at once a classic case and a demonstration of how little it matters. Amanda and her Brigade-Major owe a great deal to Juana and hers in The Spanish Bride, & Amanda's relationship with the poet Hildebrand harks back to Pen Creed's with her childhood sweetheart in The Corinthian and Cecilia's with Augustus Fawnhope in The Grand Sophy. These are themes, used just as Mozart used themes from Figaro to make a point in Don Giovanni.


• Many battles with the Inspector of Taxes.


• Like many remarkable people she needed comparatively little sleep - her son remembers her writing into the night and still leading normal life of wife and mother in daytime.


• Men as well as women read Heyer, and not just the detective stories. Lord Justice Somervell bequeathed his Heyer collection to the library of the Inner Temple Bench, an unusual accolade for a romantic novelist.


• GH had a wonderful way with irony, ref. Frederica:

Lady Buxted's disposition was not a loving one. She was quite as selfish as her brother, and far less honest, for neither acknowledged, nor, indeed, recognized her shortcomings. She had long since convinced herself that her life was one long sacrifice to her fatherless children; and, by the simple expedients of prefixing the names of her two sons and three daughters by doting epithets, speaking of them (though not invariably to them) in caressing accents, and informing the world at large that she had no thought or ambition that was not centred on her offspring, she contrived to figure, in the eyes of the uncritical majority, as a devoted parent.

• She also made numerous attempts at literary criticism, but few got published (the suggestion is that her fame as a romantic novelist militated against her). One impressive piece is about Mr Rochester:

Charlotte [Bronte] knew, perhaps instinctively, how to create a hero who would appeal to women throughout the ages, and to her must all succeeding romantic novelists acknowledge their indebtedness ... He is the rugged and dominant male, who yet can be handled by quite an ordinary female: as it
might be, oneself! He is rude, overbearing, and often a bounder; but these blemishes, however repulsive they may be in real life, can be made in the hands of a skilled novelist extremely attractive to many women ... She doesn't allow Mr
R's rudeness to take the form of unendearing vulgarity, any
more than she permits his libertine propensities to show themselves, except in retrospect... She had the genius to state that he was not a handsome man, thus lifting him out of the ordinary run of heroes. What, in fact, did this ugly hero look like? Had he a squint or a harelip? CB knew her job better than that! 'He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow.' Promising we think, already a little thrilled. But what were his defects? We learn that he had a chest too broad for his height, and find nothing to disgust us in this. Nor is it long before we read of his 'colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth - all energy, decision, will,' and, like Jane, we succumb to this splendid creature.'

The Fiction Class

'You still feel something every time you pick up a book: you still connect to characters in ways you've never connected to the people you actually know, and you know you're more than you appear to be. You have to give it one more shot: you have to see if you can be a writer'

- Susan Breen, The Fiction Class -

I can't resist the pull toward books about writers' clubs. First The Jane Austen Book Club (Karen Joy Fowler) and now The Fiction Class.

Perhaps one day I'll actually join one. Perhaps one day I'll actually finish something I've started writing myself.

I was watching 'Child Genius' last night, and was so impressed that adolescent-genius, Michael Dowling, had already published three novels that I promptly ordered the entire trilogy from Amazon - I will talk in another post about whether it was a insightful impulse buy or a complete waste of money

Anyway, back to The Fiction Class. One of the things I liked at the book were the exercises the protagonists sets her writing class at the end of each session:

1. Make a list of your 5 'obsessions'


2. Think of a person from history who intrigues you. Write a 2 to 3 page description of that person eating a meal. What would s/he eat? How would s/he eat? What would s/he be thinking about as s/he ate? Would someone be sharing the meal with him or her? What would they talk about? Remember to bring your character to life


3. This is an exercise in learning how to write a climactic scene. A boat sinks during a storm, and only ten of its passengers make it onto the lifeboat. One by one the survivors are knocked off until, after a month at sea, only two survivors are left. There is not enough food for both of them, and one of them is going to have to get rid of the other. Once of them is a teenage girl who is very strong for her age, but she is blind. The other is a musician from a successful boys' band. He is twenty-six years old and smaller than the girl. Who will survive? Write the final scene.


4. Think about a family gathering. Write about that gathering in the first person from the point of view of a child.


5. Write about a place that was important to you growing up. Don't put people in it. Just describe it as though you were painting a picture with words


6. Two people are having a conversation. It can be any two people you want, but this is the first line of dialogue: 'Kiss me.'


7. Imagine a moment of crisis: someone shooting a bullet into you, someone about to be hung, someone falling in love at first sight across a crowded room. Writing a few paragraphs describing the crisis, trying to expand time as you write so that the moment becomes as tense as possible.


8. Choose a novel or short story that you like and try to discover its theme. How does the author get the theme across? Title? Plot? Names of characters?


9. This is an exercise in finding creative solutions to write yourself out of a corner. There is a man sitting in a tree, and he is wearing a tutu. What happened?


10. Write a short story (just a few paragraphs) with this proviso: you can only use words of one syllable

It wasn't that I particularly liked these as examples (although I've already found myself doing a number 8 with several of my favourite books). And I suspect that many were simply included to lead in to particular plot points within the novel. For example, number 3 just seems like a lead in to a moving piece of dialogue between Arabella and her dying mother:

Her mother opens her eyes. They are wet. 'They're both going to die,' she says. 'Neither one of them stands a chance.'

Arabella feels her heart seize, feels her heart break.

'It is a foolish question,' her mother says.

I love the idea of combining genres: writing advice + novel (shades of Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate - recipes + novel). Fairclough liked it so much he created a name for it - 'interdiscursivity' (1992, Discourse and Social Change).

Anyway, moving away from English degree speak, what I also liked about the book was its focus on the idea of 'theme':

'your theme is how you interpret the world'

Perhaps that's why my own attempts at writing haven't quite made it yet. And why I prefer reading the words of others. I simply don't know what my theme is yet. Will I ever?
Anyway, that's enough for now...

Books I have read since the last post:

Ann Patchett, Run
Colin Dexter, The Wench is Dead & The Secret of Annexe 3
Peter Robinson, Playing with Fire
Susan Breen, The Fiction Class

Books I intend to read soon (and probably should have already read):

Dickens, Bleak House (several characters in books have now described this as their favourite book, which has to be some sort of recommendation!)

The Portrait, Iain Pears

I am utterly addicted to reading. I have tried to wean myself off it, and sometimes manage for a week or even a month at a time, but it never lasts.

The problem is that my mood and thoughts are far too influenced by whatever book or magazine I am reading that day. Yesterday (Ian Pears, 'The Portrait') was a violent, vengeful kind of a day. My husband got his head bitten off (almost literally) for daring to question my mental arithmetic, before being ignored for the rest of the evening as I devoured the book.

Some brilliant ideas and phrases that I just wanted to record somewhere:

'It is the great curse of the portraitist, to be so aware of one's own decline. I have spent years looking at people's faces and bodies, know which muscles need to sag to produce that look of diminution in the elderly. I see a face and can trace the lines creeping across the cheeks and forehead, theway the eyes sink and lose their lustre. I have to see my fate every time I look in the mirror. I can foresee the future.'

'You become the weather you live in - I know it's a cliche, but I never realised quite how true it was. The drabness of the English climate produces drab people, wrapped up, desperate to keep the outside at bay. They wear an emotional overcoat throughout their lives and scowl upwards, wondering whether it is going to rain again ... it is not uplifting, to be enclosed by a feeling that if it isn't raining now, it will be tomorrow. And we Scots ... how can anyone understand colour when half the year it is only light six hours a day?'

'I had thought that directness spoke for itself, but hadn't realised that the English like their ritual and distrust plain speaking as somehow mendacious. Everything has a hidden meaning, does it not? And the more direct the speech, the more carefully hidden the true meaning must be, the more effort must be expended to understand what is really being said.'

'It's all very well being wedded to your art, but someone has to notice. Someone has to approve, or appreciate, or buy. No one is so sublimely confident that they can do without any applause, however faint and sporadic. But Evelyn rarely showed her pictures, scarcely ever sold one.'

'I know how hard it is to acquire good technique. I acquired mine by constant labour and study, year after year, day in and day out... To get what you want - exactly the effect you have in mind and no other - you have to have mastery, otherwise you are like a man trying to speak English with only a limited vocabulary. Unless you have that range, you end up saying what you can say, not what you mean. And once you do that you begin to tramp the road of dishonesty, persuading first others and then yourself that there is no difference between the two.'

'your son was sitting on your lap - such a good, devoted father you are - and dropped a glass on the table. It shattered and dozens of shards of glass spun across the table, onto the floor. The noise was remarkable. I remember. It didn't just break, it positively exploded... Some of the fragments scudded across the table towards you. And do you know what I saw?
Let me tell you. You moved your child - both hands around his waist - you moved him very quickly a few inches as you turned your head away. But not to safety; not out of the way of the shining, twinkling fragments. Into their path. You moved your own child's body so he would serve as a shield. Oh 'twas but a moment, but I saw it, although I forgot it immediately afterwards. It couldn't be right, could it?
...It doesn't make any difference. Or does it? Why do I feel that half a second cannot be erased by hours, days, years of different behaviour? Why is it that half a second gives the lie to a reputation for fearless courage and audacity. built up over so many years? Because it is the truth, and because the child knows it too. It is his inheritance from you, that moment.'

'I discovered that I could not even rush to the side of a beloved colleague and friend without thinking of myself. Not only seeing myself offering aid and comfort, but also feeling irritated because my working day had been disrupted.'

I won't try and analyse these quotations, because then this would feel more like an English essay than a blog.

I thought the book was fantastic, and it had this great section at the end - almost like the 'Special Features' option on a DVD - where they interviewed the author and gave his book recommendations.

I was particularly interested in his description of the ending. It felt like a 'twist' ending, but you 'guess' what's going to happen from quite an early stage. I found myself wondering whether I ought to feel critical of this (I didn't). Pears says, wisely:

'The Portrait is not a mystery. The whole tension of the book depends on building up emotionally to a climax, not on keeping the ending hidden'

I also wanted to keep a note of his Top 10 Favourite Reads, because I am returning the book to the library tomorrow...

• A Harlot High and Low byHonore de Balzac
• The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
• The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• The Bacchae by Euripides
• Tom Jones by Fielding
• The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• Dialogues by Lucian
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• The Maigret Books by Georges Simenon

Thrisis

I don't know what has happened to me, but I have begun to find myself knowingly nodding along with the self-indulgently grumpy articles and editorials that puff up the Sunday papers.

This latest one was in the Sunday Times' Style magazine (of all places) where Kathryn Knight welcomed me to the idea of the 'mid-thirties crisis'.

Knight quotes Gladeana McMahon - probably because she has such a yummy name for a director of The Centre for Stress Management. Gladeana describes her highly successful, 'driven' patients (love that adjective, 'driven', it suggests you are either too rich, or too pissed, to drive yourself).
Anyway, back to these 'driven' folk. Well, apparently:

'By their mid-thirties, a lot them are tired. They're sick of life and they wonder what it's all about. They start questioning their values and what they're doing'

'Sick of life' is pushing it a bit, but I happily nodded along with the rest of it.

Hence this blog. If I'm destined to have a nervous breakdown during my thirty-fifth year, I thought it might be interesting to 'blog' about it.

Instead of reading self-indulgent grumpiness, I can start writing it.

Or maybe I'm hoping to become a Woman on the Web - or Wow O Wow - as Style magazine ( a fountain of knowledge this week) reliably informed me such women are commonly described by the group of 'America's most successful and well-connected women' who have launched 'Wowowowow.com'.

I was intrigued to read about 'the power of the menopausal woman' (ok, I'm not quite there yet, but ...). Until I saw the photograph provided of these 'alpha women'. 'Energetic' and 'inspiring' they may be, but if they are so resistant to being stereotyped or 'defined', why do they all look so spookily similar?











Well, I guess that's enough for now. I'm not sure how you are supposed to sign off on a blog, being new to all this (might have to read a few to find out). But I thought I'd end with a quote I've found interesting/thought-provoking.

Post's quotal ponderings:

This is from Bryan Fuller, the writer/producer behind Pushing Daisies, describing the movie Amelie:

'All the things I love are represented in that movie... It's a movie that will make me cry based on kindness, as opposed to sadness'

Books read since the last post: Colin Dexter's 'Last Seen Wearing' and 'The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn.

Verdict. Loving them, not least for the fact that Dexter manages to slip in quotes from Shakespeare, Chaucer, Eliot and Kierkegaard, along with a crap joke about a striptease artist, and an untranslated German quotation.