Back in the saddle

It’s almost the end of September and I haven’t written a word since July.

This of course is an exaggeration. I have written a great deal – some blog posts (though not enough), a number of long e-mails, and some advertising material for my recently published booklet. So when I say I haven’t written anything for two months, what I actually mean is that I haven’t added so much as a line to either Children of Eden or Albion’s Millennium. And it’s beginning to get me down.

There have been the usual disruptions to my routine, some pleasant – like a house guest – some not so pleasant – like a sick cat – plus I have had paid editing work that needed to be done. Nevertheless, I have been complicit in letting these daily events stand in the way of my productivity. I have let perfectly good half-hours slip through my fingers because each one didn’t seem long enough to get started so I might as well check Facebook instead.

This is the subtle art of procrastination, an art which I have practiced all my life. I know I’m not alone in this and may, in fact, be less guilty than many. And it’s true that I don’t have the full-time helpmeet or amanuensis that every writer needs to smooth the path to productivity (and nor does anyone else these days). But the bald fact remains that I don’t make the best use of my time for the purposes of writing.  

Yet, if I don’t write, my mental health begins to suffer. My sense of purpose gets buried, making me lose track of who I am and what I need to live a full and satisfying life. And I am always conscious of how fast time goes by and how little one can afford to waste it.  

So it’s time I got back in the saddle. Like exercising, it can be hard to get back to it after a layoff but once you do, everything seems possible – the 10lbs you’d like to lose, the novel you’d like to finish – instead of a far-off goal separated from you by insurmountable obstacles. I can’t wait to feel like that again.  

Lost in a Haunted Wood

W.H. AUDEN

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."

One Woman's Imagination

On my recent trip to the UK, I was getting out of a cab at King’s Cross train station when I saw a long line of people queuing outside the station. Curious, I walked to the front of the line and found that all those people standing in the heat were waiting to have their photograph taken against a plain brick wall with a sign that simply said Platform 9¾.

No explanation needed. This was incontrovertible testimony to the power of one woman’s imagination. That and the 450 million Harry Potter books she’s sold and the eight movies that have grossed $7,672,299,413 worldwide. Not to mention the merchandise, the theme parks, and the forthcoming interactive website PotterMore.

I was at King’s Cross to take a train up to Scotland. While in Edinburgh, I had tea and a slice of Victoria sponge cake at The Elephant House. This was the coffee shop where that very woman, J.K. Rowling, then a penniless single mother, used to sit for hours nursing a coffee and putting her imagination down on paper, her baby daughter asleep in a stroller beside her.

Which is where it starts for all of us writers of fiction. Applying the seat of the pants to the chair and putting one word down and then another and another. Not being afraid to write badly, not letting your internal critic get in the way. Being bold and brave and confident, even when you are writing about something that you doubt if anyone else will ever understand – a world that you carry around in your head, that you are creating out of nothing, out of thin air. Just telling the story and not thinking or caring about what becomes of it afterwards. Writing because it makes you happy and because you just have to do it.

Bringing to life a whole, rounded, full-bodied story is – and must be - a satisfaction all of its own. But if you find your book makes people so excited that they queue round the block to have their picture taken with a blank wall that your imagination created, then that’s the icing on the cake.

Blowing in the wind

I don’t suppose there will ever be another week in my life in which I go through an earthquake and a hurricane. I certainly hope not. Having grown up in Scotland on the shores of the North Sea, I am no stranger to gale-force winds and torrential rain, but these suburban houses aren’t built with two-foot stone walls to withstand the elements. On Sunday morning after a long, sleepless night and a near miss from an enormous snapped-off tree branch, my husband and I felt fortunate that our house emerged from Hurricane Irene with the power still on and the basement dry.   

Our recent double whammy from Mother Nature brought to mind a story by Jack London that describes the horror of a cyclone striking a low-lying atoll in the South Pacific. The story, called The House of Maputi, is set in the Tuamotus Islands, which are a long chain of atolls (an atoll is a flat coral island consisting of a ring of land round an inner lagoon) roughly 200 miles north and east of Tahiti. In the 19^th and early 20^th century, they were the center of the Polynesian pearl shell industry, and people from all the other islands in the South Pacific would flock to the Tuamotus during diving season to find work.  

When a cyclone (as hurricanes are called in the Pacific) hits an atoll, there is no escape - no hills to climb to escape the enormous waves or to shelter from the battering winds. The only way to go is up – into the coconut palms.

In Jack London’s story, a trader named Alexandre Raoul lands on the tiny island of Hikueru to bargain for a magnificent pearl. As the cyclone roars in, he lashes himself to the top of a writhing palm tree, and from this perilous perch, watches the clusters of people clinging to the treetops like “bunches of human fruit.” As the wind increases, he sees trees being uprooted, “flinging [their] load of human beings to the ground. A sea [wave] washed across the strip of sand, and they were gone… He saw a brown shoulder and a black head silhouetted against the churning white of the lagoon. The next instant that too had vanished... The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe cocoanuts. The subsiding wave showed them on the ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and writhing.”

Jack London was using his imagination but he was describing a real hurricane, one that had struck the Tuamotus on January 13^th 1903. Between the winds and the accompanying forty-foot tidal wave, 377 people were killed, and not a building remained on Hikueru, which had previously been a sizeable community of houses, churches and warehouses.

Among the dead was Alexander Brander, the oldest son of Princess Titaua (my biography of whom has just been published) who had been living on the island and selling pearl shell and copra to visiting schooners. His common-law wife and one of his two daughters also perished in the storm. And three years later, another hurricane was to claim the life of yet another of the cast of characters in Children of Eden. Narii Salmon, the handsome and gentle youngest son of Ariitaimai and Alexander Salmon, was drowned along with his son when his trading schooner was smashed to pieces in the even more ferocious cyclone of 1906.

Thus can fiction illuminate the bald facts of people’s lives.

When the earth moved

I was lying on my bed on Tuesday afternoon just before 2pm when my house distinctly shuddered. As I sat up in alarm, the shudder became a violent shaking, like sudden turbulence on a plane. I staggered along the upstairs hallway, wailing with fear and confusion. I couldn’t think straight but my mind reeled with visions of a massive gas explosion or a bomb blast. But the reverberations went on and on, and I clung to the banister while the house heaved and rattled and rumbled around me. It felt like the world was ending.  

It wasn’t till the movement finally subsided that I was able to uproot myself and run for the front door. My neighbor shot out of his house barefoot, looking as stunned as I must have looked to him. “What the f--- was that?” we called to each other, and he pointed to my windows which were still gently undulating. I hadn’t thought solid matter capable of moving like that. Still thinking it might have been an explosion, I dialed 911 with shaking hands but got a busy signal. But within five minutes every TV channel had switched to emergency coverage and was announcing that we’d just had the strongest earthquake on the east coast since 1897.  

It turns out that where I live in Maryland is part of an “active seismic zone” centered on a faultline that runs through central Virginia, south of Washington DC. And apparently there have been 200 earthquakes in this area just since 1977. I even remember feeling a couple of them - in one the house shuddered under me once as if a particularly heavy truck had just driven by and in another I was woken in the night by our window air conditioner unit seeming to move and settle in the window. So I’d come to think of earthquakes on the eastern seaboard as being a barely perceptible shiver in the earth.  

But this was a whole different ballgame. Because it was so utterly unfamiliar and unexpected, it felt supernatural, as if a great wizard had pointed his wand at the land and said: “Commoveo!” (That’s the Latin imperative for shaking something violently – I looked it up.) In fact, I remember wondering as I clung to the banister if this was what Judgment Day would feel like.   

In describing his experience of the 1835 Concepción earthquake in Chile, Charles Darwin, while remaining calmly scientific in his account, described exactly the “strange idea of insecurity” that being shaken like dice in nature’s palm produces.

“I happened to be on shore, and was lying down in the wood to rest myself. It came on suddenly, and lasted two minutes, but the time appeared much longer… There was no difficulty in standing upright, but the motion made me almost giddy: it was something like the movement of a vessel in a little cross-ripple, or still more like that felt by a person skating over thin ice, which bends under the weight of his body. A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; - one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced. In the forest, as a breeze moved the trees, I felt only the earth tremble, but saw no other effect. Captain FitzRoy and some officers were at the town during the shock, and there the scene was more striking; for although the houses, from being built of wood, did not fall, they were violently shaken, and the boards creaked and rattled together. The people rushed out of doors in the greatest alarm. It is these accompaniments that create that perfect horror of earthquakes, experienced by all who have thus seen, as well as felt, their effects.”

Perfect horror though it was while it lasted, I’m glad I went through it, especially as no one was killed or badly injured, because nothing is more valuable to a writer than first-hand experience. And I now know my imagination would never have done it justice.

By the North Sea

Jim Tribble, myself, and Glenn Jones
Picture courtesy of Kevin Dunion



I’ve just come back home to the suburbs of Washington DC after a three-week visit to the United Kingdom – hence the absence of posts on Midatlantic over the last month. I spent lots of quality time with my mother and other family and friends, but my trip was also notable for the launch of my booklet-length biography of Princess Titaua of Tahiti (From the South Seas to the North Sea) in my home town of Anstruther on Thursday July 28th.

Two events on that day celebrated the Princess. In the afternoon, there was a ceremony to mark the installation of a plaque on the outside of Titaua’s Anstruther house, Johnston Lodge. Placing blue information plaques on the exterior of buildings that have been lived in by notable people is a tradition in Britain, and this was the Princess’s turn. A group of people gathered in the rain to commemorate the event. A local historian, Dr. Stephanie Stevenson and I each said a few words, and a couple of photographers took our pictures for the local press. Although the weather was a bit uncomfortable, it felt appropriate because the same conditions prevailed at the Princess’s funeral in the same town 113 years ago. Afterwards, we hurried down the road for tea and biscuits at the marvelous Scottish Fisheries Museum, where I used to work in the school holidays.

The rain had stopped by the evening when the Kilrenny and Anstruther Burgh Collection held a reception at the town’s bookshop, East Neuk Books, to celebrate the Burgh Collection's publication of From the South Seas to the North Sea. I gave a short talk and slideshow about the Princess’s life in Tahiti and her strong connections with Scotland. The evening was particularly memorable for me for the chance to reacquaint myself with some old friends from my childhood, including my outstanding and inspiring high school English teacher, Alistair Leslie, still going strong in his mid-80s.

My thanks to Glenn Jones and Jim Tribble, the chairman and publications officer of the Kilrenny and Anstruther Burgh Collection, for their efforts in bringing the booklet to fruition and to John Barker of East Neuk Books for hosting the launch. And to everyone who came and bought copies! All proceeds will benefit the Burgh Collection’s work in preserving the written and oral history of Anstruther.

The evident interest that the Princess’s story evoked in Scotland has led me to decide to write a longer book about Titaua and her two Scottish husbands, focusing on her great love for her second husband which estranged her from her children and caused her to die 10,000 miles from home. Of course this will be in addition to Children of Eden, the book I am already writing on the Princess’s Anglo-Tahitian birth family, the Salmons. At this rate, I may spend the rest of my professional life working on this story but I can’t think of more interesting and enjoyable way to spend it.

From the South Seas to the North Sea: The Story of Princess Titaua of Tahiti can be ordered from: East Neuk Books, Rodger Street, Anstruther, KY10 3DU by phone (01144-1333 310474) or e-mail (eastneukbooks@tiscali.co.uk). The book costs £4.99 (£3.25 for bulk purchases) plus £1.50 postage for UK orders or £2.50 for overseas orders.

Finally... in print!

My short biography of Princess Titaua of Tahiti – the eldest daughter of the Salmons – is being published by the Kilrenny and Anstruther Burgh Collection on July 28^th 2011.  

From the South Seas to the North Sea: The Story of Princess Titaua of Tahiti can be ordered from:

East Neuk Books, Rodger Street, Anstruther, KY10 3DU

tel: 01333 310474

e-mail: eastneukbooks@tiscali.co.uk

The book will retail at £4.99 (with a trade price of £3.25) plus £1.50 postage for UK orders or

£2.50 for overseas orders.

Thanks for your support everyone!