Hilary Mantel Revisited

From time to time I find myself interviewing someone so interesting that I can fit only a fraction of what they say into my article. This was the case with Hilary Mantel, whom I wrote about recently for ww.europe.org/culture. She has kindly given me permission to use some of her unused observations on this website, so here they are.

    She described her novel The Giant O’Brien as ‘a bookend’ to her French Revolution epic, A Place of Greater Safety, in that it examines what is it to be human and where the frontier lie of personhood lies – and for her the defining question in the French Revolution is: ‘What are human rights and who shouldhave them?’  She went on:

    ‘I’m hoping to write a little book about Stanislawska Przybyzewska [1901-1935], the Polish playwright, called The Woman Who Died of Robespierre. She locked herself away and starved herself to death and became a morphine addict in the quest to write the perfect play about
the French Revolution. This curious story I would like to use as a starting point for how we remember history, and then broaden it out into what we think we’re doing when we write historical fiction. That would be my other little bookend to A Place of Greater Safety. She seems to me like one of the widows left over from the Revolution…She’s out of time, and I’m interested in that in an occult sort of way – how people sometimes attach themselves to another time and say, “That’s really where I belong.” I thought I’d done that, till I started writing about the Tudors.’

    I asked her whether she had a favourite among her books. She replied:

    ‘In a way A Place of Greater Safety is the one which is closest to my heart, because it was the one written against the odds, as an act of faith. It was about something important. If I were to rate them I think Wolf Hall is a much better book, and my favourite is the one I’m writing now, because it’s always so – you think, “This is the one that’s going to pull things together.” ’

    Her present project is a sequel to Wolf Hall called The Mirror in the Light. When did she realise that the story demanded a second volume?

    ‘I realised quite late. I was about halfway through, and the plot and the sheer variety of characters and narratives began to look so overwhelming; then I saw that the great contest between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell seemed to be something that in Cromwell’s life had enormous personal repercussions: it wasn’t just important politically. If I was writing from the point of view of his character, it was important at every level; and it seemed wrong to go on beyond that point [More’s execution], because that would make it just one incident on the way to many; and it seemed to me that that was a kind of high point in the narrative: after that you should break.

    ‘The new book takes up with the long run in to the destruction of Ann
Boleyn, and if I’d tried to put that in[to Wolf Hall] it would have made the More business seem negligible. I just came up against the problem of what one novel can contain, and I felt I’d pushed it to its limit. The Mirror in the Light takes up in the autumn of 1535 and goes on to the autumn of 1540 – Thomas Cromwell’s execution.’

    She is also planning an African novel:

    ‘I’ve written a book called A Change of Climate which is set back in the Apartheid era, but I would like to write something about Africa at the time that I lived in Botswana, which brings us to the beginning of the Eighties, just before AIDS. That was a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, becauseBotswana was devastated by AIDS.

    ‘It gives me a creepy feeling looking back: I worked in a secondary
school and you knew that syphilis was endemic. My children would say, “Sorry I’m late – I’ve been at the hospital.” They’d been for their penicillin – I soon stopped asking. I know that many of the people I taught will have died.

    ‘You felt on the borders of knowledge. It was a boarding school, and
many of the children were very miserable and I think clinically depressed. And you sort of knew that the little girls weren’t safe – that the boys and indeed the masters were predatory; and as the only white woman on the staff I had no place to stand and say anything about this. And of course I thought the African women on the staff should do something, but to them it was just, “I went through this system, I’m all right.” My experience of teaching there was interesting but quite miserable, because you felt so powerless.’

    Exactly when she will write ‘that little novel’ she isn’t sure, as the
publication of The Mirror in the Light is likely to be followed by a year spend promoting it. But overall she is very happy with her lot.

    ‘It’s lovely for me now, because over the years I’ve done a great deal
of literary journalism and I really had to do that to keep an income flow,
because I never earned much from fiction. But now I don’t have to do it, so I’ve got that freedom again to work every day on my book, and it’s like going back to being unpublished: you don’t have those constraints any more. No one expects you to win the Booker twice, so some of the pressure’s off. It’s all working well at the moment.’

The Two Williams

A contribution to the Phoenix Ark website. You can see an illustrated version at http://phoneixarkpress.com/phoenix-cultural-essays

      Recent travels have brought to mind two poets. Several weeks ago I was in Ireland, and thought inevitably of Yeats, whose poetry illuminated my own upbringing there. A fortnight later I visited Wordsworth country, which I’ve come to know only in the past few years. What, I found myself wondering, would each of these great writers have made of the other’s milieu, had Wordsworth not died fifteen years before Yeats was born? And what would they make of their domains today?

      My Irish visit focussed on County Laois – not a region strongly associated with Yeats. But the Georgian mansion in which I stayed (now beautifully and painstakingly restored , as a hotel) was instantly evocative of his Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation, celebrating the virtues of gracious living:

…the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow
Where wings have memories of wings, and all
That comes of the best knit to the best…

      Many such houses were burned to the ground in the 1920s, and those that survived in the area have had widely different fates. Birr Castle remains the home of the Earl of Rosse, though its grounds and Victorian observatory are open to the public; Stradbally Hall is the setting for Ireland’s leading music festival, the Electric Picnic; Leap Castle (the country’s most haunted) is being restored single-handed, by a professional tin-whistle player, Sean Ryan.

      In the Lake District, I visited the village of Lorton, four miles from Cockermouth (the town in which Wordsworth spent his early childhood). Lorton’s most famous inhabitant is an ancient yew tree, to which Wordsworth devoted a short poem, including the lines

This solitary tree! A living thing
Produced too slowly ever to decay;
Of form and aspect too magnificent
To be destroyed.

      This has proved over-optimistic: the tree is only half the size it once was; but it is still an impressive sight, and the fact that Wordsworth made the pilgrimage to see it brings a small thrill.

      Wordsworth did not, to my knowledge, ever visit Ireland, nor Yeats the Lake District; the one place they had in common was London. The fact that Wordsworth, the great poet of nature, should have written the most famous of all poems in praise of the capital – Upon Westminster Bridge – has always intrigued me. It is curious too (though in keeping with the tradition of the Irish artist in exile) that Yeats’s most famous poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, was inspired by a shop window in the Strand:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake waters lapping with low sounds by the shore.
When standing on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep earth’s core.

      Wordsworth might have found in this an echo of his own Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, with its gratitude for memories of nature ‘’mid the din/Of towns and cities’. But I doubt that he would have thought much of Yeats’s lake and ‘bee-loud glade’: it’s far too tame, a world away from the grandeur of the Cumbrian scenery ,which formed his own sensibility with its ‘huge and mighty Forms’. The waterfalls and seascapes which characterise Yeats’s early West of Ireland poems would have left him equally unimpressed, for all the delight of fairies dancing

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light…

      Yeats’s Celtic Twilight is a soft, dreamy thing which the harsh winds that blow with ‘strange utterance’ through Wordsworth’s The Prelude might rip away in a moment.

      Let us turn the tables, though, and imagine Yeats visiting Wordsworth at Dove Cottage. He would certainly have approved of the domestic set-up – Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth, indulging William as he himself was indulged by his young wife Georgie. But the building itself? Surely not in keeping with Yeats’s notion of the poet’s role in society: for him the Duke of Urbino’s court or Lady Gregory’s Coole Park were where a great artist belonged, at once creating beauty and finding inspiration in beautiful things. Even the much larger Rydal Mount, to which Wordsworth moved in 1813, would hardly fit the bill.

      Perhaps Wordsworth takes him across the fells to visit the family’s old home in Cockermouth. Now owned by the National Trust, it ranks second only to Cockermouth Castle in the town. ‘That’s more like it,’ thinks Yeats; but Wordsworth has a bitter tale to tell about the aftermath of his father’s death, and the failure of John Wordsworth’s employer, a landowner on a grand scale, to repay an enormous sum owing to the family. No wonder he doesn’t share his guest’s enthusiasm for the splendid dwellings of the rich.

      He might approve, though, of the home Yeats creates for himself in later life. Thoor Ballylee in County Galway is a ruin restored

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge…

but even after refurbishment it’s pretty uncomfortable. To Yeats its greatest importance is as a symbol from which he draws inspiration for ‘The Tower’ and other great late poems. Wordsworth is stirred by ruins, too, from those of Tintern Abbey, to the ruined cottage which symbolises a peasant family’s suffering in the eponymous poem.

      Can we picture the two men working side by side as Wordsworth did with Coleridge? Not easily. For one thing, Wordsworth likes to walk while he is composing, while for Yeats writing is ‘sedentary toil’. But from time to time he climbs to the top of the tower and looks about him. How different Galway in the 1920s is from the gentle countryside of his youth!

      In the final part of Mediations in Time of Civil War he sees phantoms of hatred sweeping across the sky in a ‘rage-driven, rage-tormented and rage-hungry troop’.

Perhaps Wordsworth accompanies him up onto the roof after dinner and they confront the tumult like a pair of King Lears, the wind blowing their white hair into haloes. But I suspect not: Wordsworth has seen enough of bloody civil strife during the French Revolution – for him such things are best considered in the light of a new day, as in Resolution and Independence:

There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods…

      For today’s visitor to the Lake District, these lines recall the terrible floods which assailed Cockermouth and Workington last winter. I think Wordsworth would be impressed by how his birthplace has picked itself up again, and reassured that the stoicism of the local people still endures – though saddened by the way in which traditional agriculture has been eclipsed by tourism.

      As for Yeats’s homeland, it is significant that when Ireland was forced to accept the EU’s financial support a few months ago, the Irish Times quoted his September 1913 in its leader:

Was it for this…
…………that all the blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?

      Only Yeats at his most magnificently scathing could do justice to the ignominy brought upon his country and the spectacle of picturesque landscapes lost to thousands of unfinished houses.

      It is possible that the two great poets would not have got on at all. Wordsworth was not known for his kindness to younger writers, and made a poor impression on Keats when the latter came to pay his respects. Yeats counted Wordsworth among his early heroes, but was more critical of him in middle age:

‘He strikes me as always destroying his poetic experience, which was of course of incomparable value, by his reflective power. His intellect was commonplace and unfortunately he had been taught to respect nothing else.’

      Nevertheless, roaming the countryside together, I think they would have found shared sympathies – for example, their concern for ordinary people, such as the shepherd deserted by his son in Wordsworth’s Michael, or the old pauper in Yeats’s Adam’s Curse breaking stones ‘in all kinds of weather’. Indeed, if I had to choose the poem by Yeats that brought him closest to Wordsworth, it would be his description of his ideal reader, The Fisherman:

….his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream…

What Is The Most Highly Prized Quality In 21st-Century Writing?

Economy.

Stumbling Into The Celtic Twilight

      August sees the publication of Daniel Swift’s study of bombing and poetry in World War II, Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War. It promises to be fascinating. Daniel is the son of Caroline Moorehead, the highly respected biographer of Martha Gellhorn and Iris Origo, and grandson of Alan Moorehead, whose brilliant books on the Nile captivated me as a teenager; his sister Martha is the co-author of Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery. Clearly, he has writing in his blood.
      ‘Writing in his blood’: how often I have wished that might be said of me! I’m not sure why: I’ve always thought Martin Amis and Alexandre Dumas Fils diminished by having literary parents, and should be proud of having pulled myself up by my bootstraps. Do I envy them their entrées to publishers’ offices, or the assurance lent to their pens by DNA?
      Not that I am starting from zero: my mother wrote most of a book about the translators and copyists of the Bible, only to be thwarted by the death of a vital interviewee, the Dead Sea Scrolls expert Père de Vaux. A cousin, Brian Inglis, wrote several books on history and the paranormal, and also edited The Spectator – but as I never met him, I feel little sense of kinship. I was far more excited when my brother-in-law emailed me recently with the details of a book of poems called The Secret Hill, published in 1914 by my first cousins twice times removed, Ruth and Celia Duffin. I was aware that they and their sister Emma (known to my mother as ‘the Summerhill aunts’ after a family house in Northern Ireland) had been involved in the Cuala Press started by Yeats’s sister Elizabeth, and a few weeks ago I bought the only copy of their book I could find on the internet.
      My expectations were disloyally low, but the poems – though obviously derivative of Yeats – were better than I expected. (They even went into a second edition.) It is their derivative quality, in fact, that makes them so interesting. We may read of the Celtic Twilight’s great figures, but it is only by examining the work of their neglected followers that we can appreciate the ripples sent out by the movement. The Secret Hill has the full panoply of fairies, mythical warriors, holy fools and beggars lamenting in dialect – things to our mind completely at odds with the horrific reality of the violence about to engulf Europe, though Yeats with his genius managed to adapt them to the times.
      Here is a traditional love poem – Ruth Duffin’s When We Are Old, written in her very early twenties.

“When we are old,” you said, and plucked a rose
And held it to your lips, “it will be sweet
To walk together in the June-tide heat
Just such another day, when the wind blows
Warm from the south, and buttercups unclose
Their varnished goblets where still pools repeat
The heavy trees with cattle at their feet
Knee-deep in grasses. Will you come?” “God knows.”

“God knows,” I said. Today I come again
Along the path that once our footsteps knew ;
The sunset reddens all the frozen wold
Where no flower opens, and the winds complain
In naked boughs that once were green – and you
Long, long are dead, and I, thank God, am old.

Class Unconsciousness

      Is it really possible to change class? This was one of the questions raised at last week’s Royal Society of Literature meeting about memoirs, featuring Maggie Gee, Candia McWilliam and William Fiennes. It was a relief to have the subject aired after the long pretence that we live in a classless society: something which, on the evidence of several recent books, has started to damage our understanding of history.

      This struck me first when reading Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger. To her credit, she does address the issue of class directly; but there is a false note struck at the beginning of the book when the daughter of the patrician but down-on-their luck Ayres family mentions their money troubles to the narrator, Dr Faraday, whose mother was a servant in their house. That such a conversation could have taken place in the 1940s with anyone but a relative or close friend (and then only in extremis) is unthinkable.

      D.J. Taylor’s  new 1930s novel At the Chime of a City Clock is similarly flawed – which is surprising, given how impressive it generally is in its use of period detail. James Ross, a would-be writer who has been reduced selling carpet-cleaner from door to door, is described having been at public school, but shows no sign of it in his speech or behaviour. When he is invited to stay at a smart country house, he has barely to say hello to the butler before this ‘white-haired old boy’ starts to mouth off about his mistress’s eccentric habits. Might this have happened in real life? Of course not.

      John Boyne’s The House of Special Purpose contains a far more serious misjudgement – one which undermines the entire book. Here the protagonist is a Russian peasant boy who saves an archduke’s life and is rewarded by a post in the imperial household looking after the Tsarevitch. That much is just about credible; but before we know it Georgy is wandering around the Winter Palace unsupervised, chatting to the Tsar about Fabergé eggs and snogging a Grand Duchess. Nothing could be less plausible in a world obsessed with rank.

      Those keen to discover what Candia McWilliam has to say on the subject may have a bit of a wait: as she revealed at the RSL, her What To Look for in Winter is due to be delivered at the end of this month, but she still has nine versions to choose from. (This is clearly an occupational hazard in the computer age: how, when making changes is so easy, can one hope to keep track of all the different stages of a manuscript?) Judging from the extracts that she read, it is a book to look forward to: I particularly enjoyed a reference to her long hair as ‘a personality in its own right’; and the story of the blindness from which she has now thankfully recovered is a fascinating one. One version, she revealed, was entirely dictated, another written while holding her eyelids open.

      Jean Findlay is halfway through her biography of Scott Moncrieff, the translator of Proust, which will shed new light on his relationship with Wilfred Owen. Elisa Segrave is nearing the end of a book about her mother, drawing on the latter’s diaries – including some which she kept, contrary to all regulations, while working at Bletchley Park. And my neighbour Jamie Buxton has finished two novels for children set in the Dark Ages – the first to be published in June and its sequel in December.

The Value Of Clichés

     What will be the first great cliché of the new decade? My money is on ‘curate’, which seems to be sidling pretentiously out of art galleries and into the mainstream. Tickets for the evening to celebrate Seamus Heaney’s work at King’s Place in London earlier this week bore the legend ‘curated by Poet in the City and the Royal Society of Literature’, which made the great man sound like a taxidermist’s handiwork glowering from a glass box. What’s wrong with ‘organise’?

     Grinding my teeth over this in the middle of the night, I came to the realisation that clichés, maddening though they are, serve a useful purpose as a kind of shibboleth. Talking on Desert Island Discs recently, Professor Mary Beard gave a good account of herself until she let slip the word ‘empower’ – arguably the greatest cliché of millennium so far, with the possible exception of ‘putting measures in place’. In that moment she betrayed an insensitivity to language and a laziness of thought which made it impossible to take anything else she said entirely seriously.

     Anyway, I am happy to report that Seamus Heaney proved to be very much alive and in great good spirits. Four other poets paid homage to him by reading from his work, and it was particularly interesting to hear Andrew Hagan declaiming Irish verse with his Scottish accent; but the highlight inevitably was the Nobel laureate himself reading, and conversing with Bernard O’Donoghue. It was particularly moving to hear Mid-Term Break followed by The Blackbird of Glanmore and be told that the anniversary of the death they commemorate was to fall the following day. He also read ‘Had I Not Been Awake…’ – about a ‘visitation’ – which he announced as the first poem in his next collection.

     At the end of the evening he remarked that, just as Flann O’Brien had said that there was no such thing as a large whiskey, there was no such thing as a short poetry reading; but I doubt that anyone leaving the hall begrudged their one and a half hours there. It was one of those events which leave you more alive to the world outside, your senses more finely tuned. I’m delighted to say that Professor Heaney gave an interview to one of the four other poets, Jon Stallworthy, which will appear in the next issue of the Royal Society of Literature Review.

     If anything cast a shadow on the evening, it was the death of Patrick O’Connor, many of whose friends were to be seen at King’s Place. I was lucky enough to have Patrick as my first boss when I joined Harpers & Queen as a trainee sub-editor, am deeply indebted to him for his kindness, patience and encouragement. A fine obituary of him, evoking his extraordinary range of knowledge and enthusiasms, can be found on the Guardian’s website. Ironically, I had been reminded of him a few days earlier by a headline in the same newspaper: Learn To Write Fiction. Patrick used to keep pinned above his desk a quotation from Juvenal deploring ‘this plague of writers’ and I can imagine him throwing up his hands in horror at the current notion that anyone who half fancies himself as an author could and should be putting pen to paper.

     One project he would undoubtedly have approved, though, is Ariane Bankes’s plan to write a short biography of an aunt she never met – her mother’s twin, who became Arthur Koestler’s first wife and died within a year of parting company with him. The question is whether there are any publishers left with the courage to take on biographies of people who are not famous. In the meantime Ariane is busy arranging the programme for (not curating) the next Dovedale Arts Weekend with Mark Chichester-Clark. This delightful small festival takes place in Derbyshire from 10th to 12th September, and will have Lynne Truss and Thomas Pakenham among the speakers. (More details can be found at www.dovedalearts.co.uk).

While You Were Sleeping

     I am always fascinated by other authors’ working habits (see previous entry), so I was delighted when P.D. James and Andrew Motion brought up the subject at last week’s Royal Society of Literature discussion of writers in public life. Both described themselves as larks who like to put pen to paper soon after 6am; and since P.D. James considers two and a half hours’ writing a good tally for the day, she must often finish work before I have begun. I felt embarrassed enough about this until I discovered that Jonathan Keates sometimes comes home and works on two books after a day’s teaching: he is at present writing a biography of Donizetti, and a novel about Henry II’s beloved Rosamond Clifford – as it happens, the subject of Donizetti’s opera Rosmonda d’Inghilterra.

     Sadly P.D. James does not have a book under way at the moment – she explains that she has too much correspondence and administration to catch up with – but she hopes to begin on ‘something quite different’ at the end of the month. As she celebrates her 90th birthday in August, it is a splendid thing that she should be breaking new ground.

     A mere decade behind her is Miles Gladwyn – published as Miles Jebb – who turns 80 next month. He has recently completed a biography of Patrick Shaw-Stewart, the brilliant Eton-educated scholar and poet who died in action in the First World War, to be published this summer. In the same tradition of Etonian classicists is Harry Eyres, who is writing a book on his love of Horace’s poetry and its effect on his life, for which the newspaper-editor-turned-literary-agent Richard Addis is inviting bids.

     I have to thank Miles Gladwyn for introducing me to Philip Ziegler, whose life of Edward Heath will come out just before the Conservative party conference in the autumn (he is hoping for renewed controversy over the party’s stance on Europe to give it topicality). With a book on Harold Wilson already to his credit, he was asked by Heath’s executors to suggest an authorised biographer; he then realised that he couldn’t resist writing it himself, since the two were two sides of the same coin – men from very similar backgrounds who had risen to the leadership of the two great opposing parties. Which did he like better? ‘To have dinner with, Harold Wilson, certainly. As Prime Minister, Edward Heath – at least he had some scruples.’

     Admirers of Aamer Hussein will be glad to hear that he has completed his novel The Cloud Messenger, though they will have to wait until March 2011 to read it. Michèle Roberts is at work on a collection of poetry. And as for me, I have just been in China on an assignment for the Sunday Times Magazine, and took the opportunity to do some research for my next novel, which is partly set there. I first visited the country in the 1980s, and a good deal has changed – though in many ways the mentality remains exactly the same.

The Science Of Speed Writing

     Brenda Maddox is one of the few writers who bridge the gap between art and science, so it was no surprise that her Christmas party was a happy meeting of the two worlds. My first conversation was with a collector of mediaeval musical instruments who owned several crumphorns; my second, with two lighthouse experts.

     Among the guests was Antonia Fraser, whose forthcoming memoir of Harold Pinter I mentioned in an earlier entry. She revealed that she had written 100,000 words of it in ten weeks, which set me thinking about speeds of composition. I consider 1,000 a good day’s work; Graham Greene would always stop at 500; Evelyn Waugh could manage 3,000 when he was in full flow. A memoir is probably the ideal format for rapid writing, since it involves neither the imagination of fiction nor the detailed research of most other genres – though of course one has to dredge one’s memory and check facts. In my experience momentum is an important factor – if you take up a book after weeks of neglect the first couple of hundred words are likely to involve a long struggle; on the other hand, the quality of your work is bound to suffer if you try to do too much.

     As for slow writers, there are no end of stories, but my favourite was told to me by a distinguished publisher. Falling into conversation at a party with an author he had known for some time, and find him very interesting on a particular topic, he suggested that it would make a good subject for a book. ‘Actually,’ said the author, ‘you commissioned it from me thirteen years ago.’

     Antonia Fraser has just started reviewing crime fiction for The Lady in a column ingeniously entitled (her suggestion) Lady Killers. Might she write a new whodunit herself? ‘I wouldn’t rule it out.’

     Meanwhile, her niece Eliza Pakenham has made a change of direction: her next historical work – which has a nineteenth-century subject – will be for television; her next book, a children’s adventure story set in Ireland.

     Another guest at Brenda Maddox’s was Frances Osborne, who is following her biography of her great-grandmother Idina Sackville, The Bolter, with a novel about a house in Park Lane during the First World War. It is due to be published the year after next; will she finish it before she and her husband George move into 11 Downing Street?

The Books That Might Have Been

     It’s gratifying to record that within a month of being set up, tomorrowsbooks.com has scored its first success. One of London’s most enterprising publishers was so taken by the extract from Gail Hallyburton and Rosanna Kelly’s Student Suppers that he immediately emailed the site to express his interest in putting it between covers. The authors are now working on a high flame to bring it up to date.

     On the subject of literary Kellys, those who followed the incisive articles of Rosanna’s sister Rachel when she was property editor of The Times will be interested to hear that she has written a book on the subject of depression. The sad news is that it is based on her own experience; the happy news, that early reports of it are extremely good.  Meanwhile, their mother Linda is at work on a history of the Holland House set.

     There are tidings of great joy, also, for admirers of Amanda Foreman, who have had to wait more than ten years for a book to follow her enormously successful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.  (She has persuasive reasons for the delay, among them the birth of five children.) At a party given for her in London last week by her friend Caroline Dalmeny, it was revealed that her next work had reached the indexing stage. A World on Fire tells of British men and women who took part in the American Civil War – an estimated 50,000 of them – and is scheduled for publication in October 2010. ‘It was,’ she writes, ‘the largest non-British war ever fought by British men and women. Never again, not even during the Spanish Civil War, would so many risk their lives on behalf of a foreign  cause.’

     Although this web log is devoted to books which are in production, the subject of books which might be – or might have been – written is equally fascinating. At a recent Royal Society of Literature meeting, A.S. Byatt mentioned a novel agitating for her attention, on the subject of two parents who are so in love that there is no room in their relationship for their child. ‘I probably won’t live to write it,’ she said, ‘but there’s a good one to be done.’

     What are the great unwritten works of literature? Wordsworth’s projected three-part epic poem The Recluse is certainly one, while Coleridge had any number of uncompleted – or unstarted – projects. (Adam Sisman’s excellent recent study of the two, The Friendship, quotes Hazlitt’s telling description of Coleridge out for a walk, continually crossing from one side of the footpath to the other: ‘He seemed unable to keep on in a straight line.’)  There are of course plenty of promising books left uncompleted at the author’s death, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, Jane Austen’s Sanditon and Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood among them; but here the epithet  ‘great’ demands – to my mind at least – heroic ambition. In this category I would certainly place Richard Hughes’s projected series of novels The Human Predicament, of which only the first two – The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess – were actually written.

     Returning to completed books, it would be churlish of me not to mention a forthcoming novel by my own publisher, Chip Martin. Proie, which comes out on 2 February, begins with a house party in Provence: to quote the blurb, ‘There is a fire: a handful of decadents die. Who dun it? Cui bono? One survivor, half-burnt, goes in quest for answers along the Riviera…Encountering yachties, a wealthy designer, an actress, would-be gangsters, twin young men, an old salt and others half-reflecting his past, he moves towards a future where no motive is sure…’ Chip eschews as a point of pride what he calls ‘the slick big time’ of publishing, but with such a promising scenario he may find himself thrown into it whether he likes it or not.

     Fascinating, too, is the premise of Sebastian Barry’s latest play, Andersen’s English: Hans Christian Andersen arrives without warning to stay with Charles Dickens and his family at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, and because of his poor English does not at first appreciate the tensions beneath the household’s jovial surface. Directed by Max Stafford-Clark, and with a cast including Niamh Cusack, the play opens at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds on 11 February and will then tour England and Wales. ‘So the bright lights of Suffolk are calling,’ I said cheerfully to the author when I saw him in Dublin recently. He shook his head lugubriously: ‘I think they’re preparing the stocks.’

Short Memories

      There comes a time in life when one notices not only how young the policemen look, but how young the memoirists have become. Ferdinand Mount, when his enormously enjoyable Cold Cream was published last year, seemed far too boyish to be looking back across the decades; now Maggie Gee and Candia McWilliam are about to follow his example with what seems like indecent precocity. But no doubt their readers will forgive them: Maggie Gee’s book, which is due in March, has already been greeted with enormous enthusiasm by Claire Tomalin, and though we must wait until August for Candia McWilliam’s, that too should be a treat (at least, if what she has previously written about her Edinburgh upbringing is anything to go by).

     Visitors to tomorrowsbooks.com have, of course, already had the pleasure of an extract from Piers Paul Read’s memoir about his father. His admirers can now look forward to a new novel, to be published by Bloomsbury in the spring, entitled The Misogynist. I discovered this at the launch of The Rivers of Heaven when I mentioned to him that my wife’s grandfather Ronald McNair Scott had written a novel called Misogyny over the Week-End. (It features in an anthology of weird book titles, Fish Who Answer the Telephone, which includes such classics as The Glands of Destiny and To Lake Tanganyika in a Bath Chair.) It transpired that Piers had read and admired this work, though it had not influenced his own. His wife Emily describes The Misogynist as ‘disgusting but very funny’.

     Among the biography shelves, a battle is being fought over the late Lesley Blanch, author of The Wilder Shores of Love and The Sabres of Paradise. This week I received an email from her literary executors Georgia de Chamberet and Susan Train warning of the unauthorised life by Anne Boston to be published by John Murray in January.  Their chief complaints are that ‘Anne Boston’s claim that all Lesley’s papers were lost in a house fire is incorrect’ and that ‘more third party material’ (particularly from Lesley Blanch’s memoir about her husband Romain Gary) has been used than was ‘fair or right’; the book, they claim, is ‘an unfounded attack on Lesley Blanch’s reputation’. Meanwhile, Samantha Weinberg (another of my former colleagues at Harpers & Queen) is at work on an official biography; as she is a supremely adventurous spirit in the mould of Blanch herself, it seems to me that she is the ideal choice.

     Ted Hughes is to be the subject of a biography by Jonathan Bate, following his brilliant study of John Clare.  (The great thing about researching a writer who died comparatively recently, Bate told a Royal Society of Literature meeting, ‘is that there are people around who can answer your questions’.) Selina Hastings, introducing her glowingly reviewed The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham at a talk organised by Primrose Hill Books, was asked whom her next biography would be about: ‘Sybille Bedford, I think and hope’ was her reply.

     The last book I read by Somerset Maugham was his early novel Liza of Lambeth. I can’t think of many works which show such fascinating development on the part of the author: at the beginning the working-class characters are surveyed from a distance as objects of curiosity; by the end Maugham has begun properly to engage with them, and in the final scene you can see glimpses of his future greatness. Touchingly, Selina Hastings emphasises how grateful the poor of Lambeth were to meet in the young Maugham a doctor who took a real interest in their lives.

     Like many of my generation I discovered the excitement of reading largely through Puffin books. For this I have to thank Kaye Webb, founder of the Puffin Club, whose biography by Valerie Grove is being published to mark Puffin’s 70^th anniversary – an occasion which, Valerie tells me, they have chosen to celebrate next May. This reminds me of a hilarious press release I received recently with the headline ‘2012 CHOSEN AS YEAR OF CELEBRATION FOR DICKENS’S BICENTENARY’. Given that he was born in 1812, one would have thought that the options were – to borrow Sam Weller’s words – strictly limited.