Soho, Streatham, Southwark

I took a little writing sojourn to London recently, a long weekend in the wilds of Streatham Hill to live with a cat named Trevor. I spent a day in central London first though, visiting various places I’d been meaning to go to for ages. Saint Paul’s Church, Covent Garden – otherwise known as ‘the Actor’s Church’ – is where many a famous thespian is remembered. I got teary-eyed before I even made it inside, as each of the benches in the churchyard carries a commemoration, from Beryl Reid (‘So much love…’) to a long-serving head librarian at the RADA. The church itself was officially closed but I snuck inside by holding open the door for a man carrying a set of bongo drums. Inside is a lovely modest sort of church with plaques everywhere for the great and good of British stage and screen. That’s one reason I wanted to go, another is that legend has it that the first of London’s plague victims is buried here, one Margaret Ponteous, 1665. And yet another is that Henrietta Street, which runs alongside Saint Paul’s, was home to the Hell Club, an early New Romantic hangout, before they were called New Romantics and before they took over the Blitz. Steve Strange tells an amazing story of how everyone was on acid one night in Hell and the club was so hot they all spilled out into the graveyard and danced around there, tripping their noodles off in their outrageous costumes. Isn’t that an amazing image? I liked it so much I've drafted an entire novel plot around the idea. 

Having soaked up these lovely pagan vibes, I emerged into the decidedly more Christmassy environs of Covent Garden looking for coffee, which I found in a state of near perfection at New Row Coffee. The coffee is incredible, go there. They’re lovely folk too. Revived, I then walked to Soho to have a nosey at the Soho Hotel where one of the scenes begins in the novel I’m working on. There’s not much to see, Dean Street turns into a little mews with a red brick and quite Mancunian-looking structure piled up the end, which is the hotel. There’s a large shiny black Buddha cat in the foyer. From there it’s a short walk to Soho Square. I make a little pilgrimage here from time to time, especially when it’s cold, to sit on a bench and play ‘Soho Square’ by Kirsty MacColl, whom I adore and miss terribly... ‘… kiss me quick, in case I die before my birthday…’

Next stop is Southwark and I decide to take a Boris bike. Opposite the bike park at Soho Square, Will Young is waiting for a cab, holding a bunch of flowers. My mother wants me to marry Will Young so I wait at least until eye contact is established, but it’s brief. I guess the flowers are not meant for me. Will gets in his cab with barely a glance and I hop up on my bike. I love Boris bikes. It only costs a pound – and almost my life at Piccadilly Circus – but before I know it I’m sailing past the Thames, over Blackfriars’s Bridge, and into deepest Southwark. (When is somebody going to put something interesting where that old sandwich shop is at the bottom of the Blackfriars’s Bridge by the way…?)

Southwark is my very favourite bit of London, even more so now that I’ve been to the Cross Bones Graveyard, which you can read about here, and also because I discovered yesterday that Stock, Aitken & Waterman’s Hit Factory was round here too, on Vine Yard. I love Borough Market of course, and Tooley Street, and I’m even coming round to the idea of The Shard. Maybe. Yes, Southwark is the place for me.

From London Bridge I catch the train to Streatham Hill, deep in the South London suburbs. Angela Carter country. I arrive in the dark, meet Trevor the enormous handsome cat, do some writing, and go to sleep early. In the morning I leap out of bed and go for a jog in the dazzling autumn sunshine. I plough into the school run for the primary school a few doors down and from there I run to Brockwell Park, run right around it, and home. It’s downhill all the way and uphill all the way back. My legs are still in considerable pain four days later. It is the last jog I am even able to do for the rest of the trip. None of this bodes well for the sponsored 10K I am meant to run in May.

After a day of writing I catch the train back to Southwark. London is steeped in a marvellous silver fog by now. I walk over Tower Bridge, which is every bit as exciting as Brooklyn Bridge tonight. I walk down Park Street which is magical and Dickensian. We are looking for The Rose Theatre, London’s oldest surviving theatre, and the very first to open on Bankside. Tonight they are performing The Winter’s Tale on a small fenced stage above the excavation site of the ancient theatre. The Rose preceded even The Globe just along the river, opening in 1587. Shakespeare performed here as an actor and staged two of his own plays here too. The layout of the theatre, the outside wall and jutting stage, is described in red lights so you can see where the building once sat. It’s thrilling. I can feel old voices and ghosts coming up through the ground. Musicians play over in the far corner of the excavation site, lit by candles. The performance is lovely too; enticing and fun and heart-breaking. Francesca De Sica’s Hermione is wonderful. I am given a flower (at last!) by guitar-playing troublemaker Autolycus, but even he reclaims it at the end of the play. I take it as a good omen though. I fall for The Rose, and they have just this week heard they will be getting a Heritage Lottery Grant to complete the excavation. If/when The Shakespeare Girl is published I want to have my launch party there. Some fine ale follows in The George, off Borough High Street. There has been a pub on this site since at least 1543 and the current building dates to the mid-seventeenth century. Yes, Southwark is the place for me.

I am then firmly holed up for the next couple of days, churning out thousands of new words and feeling the spirit of what I first planned to write all those months ago. Twenty-three thousand words in, The Shakespeare Girl is coming to life. Missing social events and getting used to solitude gets easier the longer you write. Having a terrifyingly close deadline also works wonders. Angela Carter’s last novel, Wise Children, was a large part of the original inspiration behind the story. Streatham Hill is next to Balham, where Carter grew up, and I find out her old school is not far away so I take a walk there. It proves impossible to find mention of the house she grew up in though. I expect the present tenants would like to avoid legions of bespectacled girls in maxi skirts, and me, leaving flowers at the gate. Anyway, she’s in the leafy air down there somewhere and I go home and write a scene about a famous actor who goes out into the Soho night in drag, and I think she would approve.

Angela Carter's old school.

The Shakespeare Girl : a novel

‘GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,

TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE.

BLESE BE THE MAN THAT SPARES THES STONES,

AND CURST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES …’

I’m writing a novel. Yes, another one. My first one is currently sitting unpublished in a  metaphorical sock drawer, as all first novels should for a time. One day I will take it out, dust it off and take another look, and possibly cringe, or maybe even re-consider and re-submit it.

In the meantime I have an MA in Creative Writing to complete. My final piece of work for the course is a novel: The Shakespeare Girl.  As part of the project I’ve set up a website to accompany the novel, which you can look at here. I will be adding various reviews, images, news items and guest posts to the site over the coming weeks, and eventually I will post an extract or two from the novel itself. 

The opening quotation above, as you might know, is taken from Shakespeare’s tombstone. If we believe, as many do, that these words are amongst the last ones written by the playwright himself, they reveal an anxiety about exhumation which also makes an appearance in sixteen of his thirty-seven surviving plays. When I first read about this peculiar obsession, I was intrigued. I began to read about the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried, and discovered that the building sits right on the riverbank, hovering over the waters of the Avon, and that it is in some state of dilapidation.

Erosion, disrepair … a thought occurred to me: What would happen if you had to dig up William Shakespeare…?

That was the starting point for a story, which I decided to people with characters whose lives are somehow connected to the Bard: a professor, a student, an actress… In homage to Angela Carter’s Wise Children, I also decided to include some type of reference –obvious, oblique, or somewhere in between – to every Shakespeare play in the course of the book. Not to be clever – I’m learning about Shakespeare as I go – but to try and neatly dramatise the way in which Shakespeare infiltrates our daily lives, often without us knowing.

So, whenever time permits, I’m working away at the novel. The plot, I think, is decided. The characters, I hope, are beginning to come off the page. It’s ambitious, hopefully funny, certainly accessible, and I can’t wait to finish it.

If you’d like to get in touch about my writing, or about anything Shakespearean, or better still, if you’d like to contribute something to my website, then I’d love to hear from you, at this address here. If you’re on Twitter I also have a dedicated account to follow, here.

Thank you for reading …!

Speed Reading: Part 1

I’m devouring novels for my MA in Creative Writing. I’ve been on a heady journey from a post-War US college to the foggy streets of 1950s Dublin, from Trinidadian streets to harsh South African farmland, from genteel Edinburgh to tempestuous Malaya. I’m going to do some microblogs about the novels I’ve been reading, starting with …

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1961)

‘This is nineteen thirty six. The age of chivalry is past…’

So says Jean Brodie, progressive schoolmistress of Edinburgh, trapped between the romance of a Renaissance past and a brave new Continental future. The novel dramatizes a dilemma: when you foster independent thought, how are you to cope when those minds independently begin to disagree with you?

‘You will get used to our ways. What religions are you?’

Not even Maggie Smith’s note perfect rendering of the on-screen Brodie can overshadow the powerful eccentric charge of the book. I quote it endlessly. Brodie is no heroine but the novel in its cruel way makes you yearn to turn her into one.

‘It is seven years, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman …’

The style is classic Spark: droll, precise, bathetic. Fay Weldon adopted a similar style for the duration of her career proving its endless, wondrous durability.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (1953)

‘In the beginning Pnin was greatly embarrassed by the ease with which first names were bandied about in America…’

Pnin is a towering comic creation. Pnin himself does not tower, he is ham-fisted, wonkily self-translated, a klutz. But under the blissfully comic veneer of the character lies the sadness inherent in exile literature. Pnin’s Russia is far away and perhaps no longer existent. When he is among exiled countrymen he flourishes, his language asserts itself, it’s a joy to witness.

‘Now a secret must be imparted. Professor Pnin was on the wrong train…’

The narration is a lesson in control, the narrator attempts to coerce the reader into a mockery of Pnin but the writing gives you the space to resist, and you do. The narrator too relents eventually. An evening spent witnessing a drunk colleague unkindly aping Pnin leaves him with ‘the mental counterpart of a bad taste in the mouth.’

Sometimes the writing is so lyrical that it’s a sorrow when the line ends:

‘There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark…’

It is also a campus novel, and a good one. Pnin’s University department is to be phased out, the coming of Cold War hostilities places a Russian professor in something of a new and unsettling light. The image of Pnin driving away from the town and off the page, befuddled and alone, is a unique modern tragedy. If you love John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces, you might find its spiritual parent in this novel.

The Millstone by Margaret Drabble (1965)

‘The thought of marrying Roger was pleasantly exciting and most unattractive…’

The fact this is an ‘issues’ novel alone can explain its presence in the repackaged ‘Penguin Decades’ series. Thin writing can’t evoke the sympathy sufficient to bear the narrator Rosamund, who charts a largely sexless and uncommitted single life, followed by her pregnancy and the birth of her child as a single academic living in her wealthy and absent parents’ flat in mid-sixties London.

‘I felt ashamed of an emotion as irrational as dislike…’

If you’re not sure what kind of feminist you are, read the novel. If you find yourself shouting a great deal, you’re probably a socialist feminist. The novel is not completely without merit. Lydia, the protagonist’s best friend and lodger, breathes fiery energy into the passages in which she appears. Her life runs parallel to Rosamund’s but free of the sour mixture of self-pity and self-importance that makes the latter more or less unbearable and appears to function little in the story.

‘I could not rid myself of the notion that if Octavia were to die, this would be a vengeance upon my sin…’

Even Elaine Showalter’s introduction seems unsure of the novel’s merits. Given that ‘A Taste Of Honey’ had played twice in London in the years prior to this novel's publication it seems as if working class versions of these stories are of only prurient and not literary interest if Drabble’s work is to be considered innovative (Drabble’s version conflates the gay man and the black man from Delaney’s play into one white gay man who fathers Rosamund’s child). Some time capsules are best left in the ground where they can be better built upon. Two short years after The Millstone saw the light of day, Fay Weldon (her second mention in this blog, I realise) publishes The Fat Woman’s Joke, rendering Drabble’s type of novel mercifully unnecessary for the foreseeable future.

New fiction endeavour in Manchester: The Hidden Gem Press

Manchester has a small but formidable publishing output. Carcanet has made its home in the city for forty years as one of the foremost independent poetry publishers in the country. Manchester University Press has been publishing leading academic research for a hundred years, third only to Oxford and Cambridge in terms of output. In the world of fiction, Comma Press continues a fruitful love affair with the short story, unearthing talent and winning awards along the way. And now joining the fold is The Hidden Gem Press. About to be launched by husband and wife team, Brian and Sherry Ashworth, the press has a perfectly simple and ambitious remit, ‘to publish good quality novels from the best of emerging writers – and we have a distinctly north-west flavour.’

Manhattanchester spoke with Sherry Ashworth ...

How long has your idea for a Manchester fiction house been incubating?

Sherry: Forever. My experience as a writer has typically been that of long trips via Virgin down to London to be lunched by Camillas and Chlamydias who have no idea of life up north. It struck me as a real pity that there wasn't a fiction house here in this far more exciting city. But also more recently it's becoming very clear that the publishing industry is going the way of the music industry – away from big labels/multinationals towards indie – indie publishers all over the country are scooping awards and selling books – and we want a piece of the action. And also as a creative writer tutor at MMU I see so much talent and don't want it to go to waste.

Do you think it’s harder than it might have been in the past for new voices to find their way into print?

Yes it IS harder for new writers to break through – in these recessionary times the big publishers aren't taking risks. Or they need to make megabucks in order to justify themselves to the men in suits – hence the great success of Susan Boyle. But indie presses will change all that.

How will The Hidden Gem fit in with your day jobs?

Easily. Brian is retired so he actually WANTS to dash here, there and everywhere in the interests of promoting good fiction. I just love reading new writing and shouting about the good stuff I find – this isn't work – it's fun, fun, fun!

Whose idea was the name, it’s terrific!

The name was my idea – came to me in the middle of the night. It IS a nod in the direction of the church, but will also describe out books and our writers.

Are you optimistic for the future of The Novel as a form?

Yeah – while people are still literate there'll always be an audience for a good read. They may be reading on their Kindles, but they'll still be reading.

What will be the first title from The Hidden Gem stable?

Our first title is *ta dah* Hungry, The Stars and Everything by the wonderful Emma Jane Unsworth. Emma is a freelance journalist who's had her short fiction published in a number of places. Hungry is her debut novel. It's stylish, funny, and absolutely delicious. The heroine – Helen Burns – now where have we heard THAT name before?? – is a restaurant critic, with a loving partner who cooks her gourmet meals and now she has an assignment to review Manchester’s latest and best new restaurant, tipped for a Michelin star. But who is the mystery chef? And how come each morsel on the tasting menu is so exquisite, and triggers Helen’s memories of a not-so-perfect past? Hungry is not so much chick-lit as chic-lit – and I know it will be to everyone's taste.

The Hidden Gem Press will officially launch at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Thursday 25th November at 6.30 pm. Admission is free and the bar and café will be open for the duration. Emma Unsworth will be reading from her novel Hungry, The Stars and Everything alongside Zoe Lambert, who'll be reading from her new short story collection The War Tour.

Hungry, The Stars and Everything will publish in 2011.

International Anthony Burgess Foundation, The Engine House, Chorlton Mill, Cambridge Street.

Map here.

The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt

‘I haunted the Upper West Side …’

The protagonist of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold is, for the bulk of the story, aged about twenty two, a period of life in which certain things – art, lust, ideas – can seem to needle more prominently at your conscience. This is one of the things Hustvedt’s debut does well, outlining the youthful need to define things and be defined. The novel rings with the urgency of conversations, events and thoughts, but equally frustrates with inertia and the inability to make things happen, which of course is just as youthful.

Iris is a grad student, an eye through which we see New York and its difficult parameters, where she attempts to bring herself to life in a number of guises. Iris is also the author’s first name reversed, inviting an autobiographical reading of the text and, told in four temporally-fudged parts, the story does operate as a convincingly fragmented exploration of the way memory and recall work, and how slippery they can be. The migraines that trouble and eventually hospitalise Iris add another veil of frustrated perception to her tales.

Whether posing for a photographer or translating an obscure German novel, interactions with art and artists colour Iris’ sojourns through a city that’s often masterfully indifferent. She is negotiating not only the streets and their heavily masculine terrain, but her identity. She attempts to forge some kind of rewarding path there, all the while striving to obtain a self-image she can trust. This is almost always done in relation to difficult and inappropriate men. Set in the late seventies, it’s possible this is a woman who literally does not know what to do with her own liberation. In fact, the possible liberating effects of fluid personalities means reality itself is frequently wrong-footed. At one point it seems a posed photograph of Iris has taken on a life of its own. The power of self-image can be too great.

Hustvedt interrogates a number of female stereotypes in The Blindfold: woman as model, as muse, as student smitten with older male intellectual. These scenarios aren’t subverted as you might anticipate, rather our protagonist is left sprawling and helpless beneath their sheer accumulated power. The subversions she does undertake, such as cross-dressing for the purposes of safely bar-hopping in the small hours, liberate her in terms of social barriers, but come at the cost of her own body; she literally begins to wither away. When negotiations with identity break down, so eventually does Iris. The last and most affecting of the female tropes the novel deals with is of women gone mad. The scenes set on a female hospital ward, with its array of bedraggled outcast women, showcase best what a terrifically powerful writer Hustvedt can be.

330 Words

"330 Words is a blog for writers. Or more specifically, writers with a digital camera or a camera phone.

The concept behind 330 Words is simple. Take a photograph and let it inspire you towards a piece of fiction.

Let your photograph form the foundation of your story. Choose your own genre and style. Keep the entire thing under 330 words"

Simple!

Check out my photograph and story here ...