Hidden-Machinery-Preview.Pdf

Copyright © 2017 Margot Livesey All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or repro- duced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embod- ied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210. Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Livesey, Margot. Title: The hidden machinery / by Margot Livesey. Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, OR : Tin House Books, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016056392 | ISBN 9781941040683 (alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-941040-69-0 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—Authorship. | Creative writing. | Livesey, Margot—Authorship. Classification: LCC PN3355 .L557 2017 | DDC 808.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056392 First US Edition 2017 Printed in the USA Interior design by Jakob Vala www.tinhouse.com Contents The Hidden Machinery: Writing the Life, Shaping the Novel · 1 · Mrs. Turpin Reads the Stars: Creating Characters Who Walk off the Page · 35 · Nothing but Himself: Embracing Jane Austen’s Second Chances · 67 · Hush, Shut Up, Please Be Quiet: Letting Our Characters Tell and Show · 93 · Even One Day: Considering Aesthetics with Virginia Woolf · 123 · Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be: Paying Homage · 151 · Gustave and Emma: Finding the First Novel · 185 · How to Tell a True Story: Mapping Our Narratives onto the World · 219 · Shakespeare for Writers: Learning from the Master · 249 · He Liked Custard: Navigating the Shoals of Research · 279 · The Hidden Machinery Writing the Life, Shaping the Novel Life is Monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate . To ‘compete with life,’ whose sun we cannot look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us, to compete with the flavor of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and separation . here are indeed labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary . No art is true in this sense; none can ‘compete with life’ . —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, “A Humble Remonstrance” I ON THE BOOKSHELVES of my house in London are the books I read as a child: Robert Louis Steven- son’s Kidnapped, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonder- land, George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie, and a strange book called The Pheasant Shoots Back by Dacre Balsdon. This last, a kind of Animal Farm for birds, describes how a family of pheasants outwits the hunters and lives to fly another season. My great-aunt Jean thought it a suitable gift for my fifth birthday. Certainly I appreciated the sky-blue cover and the sim- ple line drawings, but the black marks that covered the pages were a mystery, and not one I was eager to solve. Reading struck me as much less important than tree climbing or bridge building or visiting the nearby pigs. Sometime that autumn, however, my priorities shift- ed. I remember standing in the corner of the nursery, 3 Margot Livesey where we had our lessons, refusing to read, when, quite suddenly, the words turned from a wall—like the one I was staring at—into a window. I was looking through them at a farmyard filled with animals. I emerged from the corner and read Percy the Bad Chick. Here was someone like myself—small, naughty, friendless—yet look how Percy triumphed over the other animals, in- cluding Dobbin, the farmer’s horse. From then on I embraced books. I had, although the word remained unknown to me for several years, discovered novels. Who do you want to be when you grow up? the grown-ups around me asked. Not you, I wanted to say, but I was a well-brought- up child. A nun, I responded, a vet, an explorer, Marie Curie. Each profession came from a book I had read. I was slow to grasp that the person I wanted to be was not someone between the covers but behind them. By the time I went to university I had relinquished my ambition to discover a new element and was studying literature and philosophy, mostly the former. Our curriculum began with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer and zigzagged erratically forward until we reached Virginia Woolf, still at that time a relative- ly minor figure. Then we came to an abrupt halt. One faculty member was rumored to be doing research into a living author, the Australian novelist Patrick White, 4 THE HIDDEN MACHINERY but that was a private activity; he lectured on the safely interred: Eliot, Pound, and Joyce. Nonetheless news reached me from the larger world that there were authors—Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Solzhenitsyn—living, breathing, making novels out of the fabric of contemporary life. Among my fellow stu- dents one or two claimed to be writing poetry, but the evidence was scanty. The year after I graduated from university I went traveling in Europe and North Africa with my boy- friend of the time. He was writing a book on the philosophy of science and after a few weeks, bored with exploring cathedrals and markets alone, I began to write a book too. I did not know enough to write a history of the Crusades, or a biography of the Brontës, but, after sixteen years of reading, I felt amply qualified to write a novel. After all, this was the only training that most of my favorite writers had undergone. “Read good authors with passionate attention,” runs Robert Louis Stevenson’s advice to a young writer, “refrain al- together from reading bad ones.” I began writing “The Oubliette” in October. (The title refers, with unwitting irony, to the French dun- geon in which prisoners were kept until they were for- gotten.) In campsites and cheap hotels I did my best to imitate Trollope, writing for so many hours a day. l 5 Margot Livesey wrote in pencil, rubbing out frequently, on every other line of a spiral notebook. I filled one notebook, began another, and filled that too. My novel was growing. By the following June I had a draft: four hundred pages of made-up people, doing made-up things. While I wrote, I was doing my best to follow Stevenson’s advice. I read Richard Brautigan and Elizabeth Bowen, Malcolm Lowry and Edna O’Brien, Henry James and Ralph Ellison, The Tale of Genji, and lots of Russians. It was a year of glorious reading. Then, shortly before my twenty-second birthday, in a campsite in Romania, I sat down to read something less than glorious. Ever since I read Percy the Bad Chick, books had transported me. When I opened Great Expectations, sentences and paragraphs vanished. I was on the marsh with Pip and the fearsome convict. But “The Oubli- ette” left me obstinately earthbound. Once again I was staring at a wall, rather than through a window. I told myself that this strange stodginess was the burden of authorship: words, which could transport others, were mute to their maker. One respect in which I followed Stevenson’s advice during my year of travel was by reading two of the many authors who had been excluded from my university curriculum: Henry James and E. M. Forster. I bought The Portrait of a Lady before we left England. 6 THE HIDDEN MACHINERY As for Forster, he was enjoying a wave of popularity. In hostels and bookshops there was almost invariably a secondhand copy of Howards End or A Room with a View. These novels were the opposite of mute; they res- onated with my Scottish childhood full of tacit agree- ments and dark betrayals. How well James and Forster understood that embarrassment is a major emotion, that we are all governed by the opinions of others and by the great triumvirate of class, money, and, in For- ster’s case, race. Of course I believed myself, as I wan- dered the gardens of the Alhambra, or explored the Casbah of Tangiers, to be a successful fugitive from such bourgeois notions. What a pleasure it was to look back on that world I had left behind. “Only connect,” I murmured. Forster’s work, in particular, enchanted me, but what did his witty, urbane novels have to do with mine? Unfortunately, not much. I had no idea, not an inkling, of how he put together his seamless, deeply serious books. The notion of dismantling a novel, of examining, say, the point of view or the transitions, was still entirely foreign. But even if I had attempted to take apart a few chapters of Howards End, I suspect I would have been baffled. Forster is so tenacious in his intelligence, so deft in his handling of point of view, so subtle in his structure. And then there is the voice, the 7 Margot Livesey penetrating, insightful voice, rising over everything, controlling every umbrella and slipper and semicolon. It took me several years to understand that “The Oubliette” was bad in more ways than I can easily enu- merate. It was simultaneously farfetched and boring; the characters spoke like Nazis in old British films, their English oddly stiff; the descriptions read as if they came from guidebooks, which, in some cases, they had. I had no sense of pacing; no thought for what sort of unit a chapter could, or should, be; no understanding of the importance of setting; and, perhaps strangest of all, no notion of the crucial role of suspense, especial- ly in longer fiction.

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