Her Majesty's a Pretty Nice Girl

At the back of my cutlery drawer, my fingers graze the tarnished coronation teaspoon that was the sugar spoon in my family for all my growing up. My mother came by it in 1952 upon the accession of Princess Elizabeth Windsor to the throne of England. I sincerely doubt that my ever-thrifty mother went out and bought the spoon. It was probably a freebie handed out in the kind of forced celebration we have been witnessing this week upon the death of said queen. Yesterday, to commemorate the queen's funeral, the entire UK was shut down - no airplanes, no doctor's visits, no chemo appointments, no weddings, no other funerals. If they could have sutured pregnant women's vaginas shut, there would have been no births either. 

You would be forgiven for thinking this kind of state control smacks of the deaths of dictators in more repressive regimes, but in some ways it is worse. You can force a reluctant populace to go through the motions of grief, but in London at Westminster, there were subjects lined up for miles and many hours, wiping their tears as they walked past the queen's coffin (whether or not there was an actual body inside.) The last couple in line told reporters that this was the biggest day of their lives, surpassing the births of their three children. 

The BBC, which used to have a reputation as an upstanding purveyor of news and quality television, has shifted in recent years to toeing the government line. So, once the death of the queen was announced, the beeb went into overdrive, covering the queue past the coffin at Westminster twenty four hours a day. 

I understand that we live in desperate times, that the three year pandemic has taken its toll on the minds of humankind. If you want to dig deeper, you could recognise this mental instability as a result of the breakdown of the Empire and or of Christianity which is on very loose footing these days on the British island.  The ebb of a moral compass that has governed the hearts and minds of a populace back into the misty shades of recorded history is no inconsequential drift. 

But the hysteria surrounding the passing of a ninety-six year old monarch in England (judging by the sparse attendance in Edinburgh's Holyrood Park, the Scots felt differently) was, well, hysterical. The Left Bank TV production The Crown has in recent years displayed for all to see the depth of dysfunction that lies at the heart of this royal family. I won't go into the untimely death of Diana (though satirist Trevor Noah did), but the proscriptions for who should marry whom, the poor children left to the care of nannies,  the pathology of the "stiff upper lip," the strangeness of lives lived to the drumbeat of a past (and brutal) empire, would give any good psychologist a field day. 

It's hard to topple icons. It is proving near impossible to indict obviously criminal former American president Donald Trump. But when that icon lives rent free in the minds of its subjects, the task is even harder. We all grew up wth Queen Elizabeth as the model of decorum, as the height of a social ladder  that only the pedigreed few could climb. When I was a girl, I marvelled at royal speech. No one else quite speaks like that. It requires a certain quality of pole in the rectum. But back then I didn't want to be another anonymous Scottish girl with a Scottish accent. In the sixth verse of the empire hymn, the National Anthem, is a line about crushing the rebellious Scots.  I didn't want to be in the way of the crushing engine that levelled my agency and left me no credence.

Many, many years later, royal speech, like royal authority, rings hollow in my ears. You cannot ignore the steam roller that accompanies the march of the Empire and everything the royal family represents.  The younger royals have tried to look more accessible, have tried to present themselves as just anther family. But what does it do to the mind of a little George VII that he will one day ascend to the throne of England?  The best of the royals have tried to get out, but there is never enough time to escape the swipe of the steam roller. Princess Margaret, Princess Diana, many others who were hid from sight, and now Prince Harry have tried thrusting through the thorny forest to escape the shadow of the castle. 

In the past week, I have had to look away from the spectacle of a week-long funeral pageant in the name of such an obviously flawed institution. As a Scot, coming down from ancestors who were moved off their land in the Highland clearances and who were disregarded by the powers that have since 1707 resided in London, it all leaves me with a nasty taste, a bitter pill, and not one that even a spoonful of sugar from my mother's royal spoon will ever dispel. 

The queen's death at Balmoral in the highlands of Scotland was well orchestrated. She famously feared the break up of the Union, and this was her final gesture. But, as a Scot by birth,  it is my hope that this symbol of the queen's death in Scotland will carry into history a different weight. Just as the icon of the British Empire gave out her last breath on Scottish soil, so let the union follow swiftly behind.

THE DIVIDE BETWEEN A WRITER AND HIS/HER CHARACTERS

Years ago, I studied for a week with author Paul Harding.  His book Tinkers is one of those books I keep going back to, because the language is so rich and the images so captivating. I rarely find those qualities in a modern book (though another is James Galvin's The Meadow.) Harding won the Pulitzer prize for Tinkers, and nothing he has produced since has come close.  I think he got self-conscious, as tends to happen when great accolades are thrown at an author. I remember him saying to me that he was afraid all the attention would just disappear. And it did. But, as I told him, the book that won the prize is still worthy, still in print, ever more worn and thumbed through on my shelf. 

I recently came across a diary entry I made during that period of study, and I wanted to blog about it, because I think it raises an interesting question about how much of their own self a writer interjects into their characters.  

One last harp on having studied with Paul Harding a couple of weeks ago and then I'll let him go: I had a question I was bursting to ask him or any other significant writer which had to do with how much the author inhabits his or her characters.  See, when I started my own book Veil Of Time (which then became a trilogy) I thought to myself that for once I would have a protagonist who wasn't sort of a mirror doppleganger of myself. It's not that I'm an especial egoist or overly vain (though I might also be both of those things), but just that somehow my protagonists mostly are me with my set of values and ideas, my cosmology. I called this character Maggie Livingstone, who was a childhood friend of mine (still is, in fact, and lives now in the exact location of my book.)

I wasn't going to make my protagonist Maggie Livingstone, who is a veterinarian and sort of a no-nonsense type of person, but I thought if I gave her that name, she wouldn't end up spouting my religious beliefs and my longings and my moral values. I kept that up for a while, but the more my character moved through the scenes and the book came to take shape, there I was in the middle of the action, masquerading as my friend. 

So, my question to Paul Harding was just this: how can you keep yourself out of your writing and create rounded characters who aren't you. (I put this to him when the rest of the class had gone on coffee break.) I was a little bit surprised by his answer, because (being an egoist and vain) I had thought this was a problem unique to myself. But no, he said he had struggled with the same thing and that every author did. He said from time to time he wondered that if he were a better writer, he might be able to write protagonists that weren't him, but ultimately the author is putting his or her self on the page and that's the way it should be. (I'm not talking about genre writing here - John Le Carre didn't need to be a spy himself, though he did need to have an overwhelming interest in the subject. Formula novels don't run into this problem so much because the characters are more cookie cut out of material that is already made to a certain recipe.) 

I was looking at Elizabeth Strout's new book "The Burgess Boys," her follow-up to "Olive Kitteredge." I wasn't surprised to find another Olive Kitteredge between the pages doing business under another name. Location was the same, character almost the same. It's just that our psyches are populated by certain characters or archetypes and the author would have to twist him or herself into all kinds of contortions to make this inner world come out on the page as something else.

So Herman Hesse wrote a large number of books and basically they all come with the same message, the same set of values and the same array of characters. (I read them all nevertheless.) DH Lawrence, the favourite of my youth, wrote the same book over and over.  The point is, in the words of Martin Luther in the fifteenth century, "Hier stehe ich. Anders can ich nicht" (the famous, "Here I stand, I can do no other.") 

So I got my question answered, and I feel better about Maggie Livingstone turned Claire McDougall (though she may not!) Paul Harding said that the opening of "Tinkers," where his protagonist hallucinates that the ceiling is cracking and falling in on him springs right out of his own history with  his grandfather. 

BEARS N' THINGS

 October 15th 2021

I have spent much of my many years fighting. That's not the way I started, though. I am told I was the most laid-back of babies, always smiling, never disgruntled. Somewhere along the road, and I think fairly early on, I started trying to go through walls instead of around them. Just last week, pain in my chest and a racing heart took me off to the hospital, where everything settled down quite quickly, and I was given the all-clear. In retrospect, I am wondering if these were symptoms of anxiety.  

With English PM Boris Johnson trying to run Scotland into the ground and after four years of Trump corruption in USA, most of us have learned to walk a fine line between resignation and despair. If you're like me, it has turned you into a nail-biting news junkie. In my case, a Twitter addict. After all, the best line of defense has always been offense. Finding myself up at 4 am, checking the latest round of Breaking News, should have sounded some kind of alarm.  

Then came Covid, another platform over a dinky swimming pool for the clowns that run the world to dive into. I had Sars2 early on, even before it had been named in the popular press. Over days of 104 degree temperatures and what felt like a sickness unto death, I was forced to fight.  

Another thing I stay up in arms over is my country. Like a persistent bagpipe drone, Scotland's struggle to free itself from "servile chains," to regain its own self, is mine by dint of birth. Scotland wants out of the United Kingdom, because this union serves only the overlords in their mink and pageantry.  

Because of these things, life often feels more like a battle field, with me in the middle in a state of profound amnesia about how I once looked out on a calm sea from these sea green eyes. 

Two nights ago, under cover of dark, a bear came into my garden to raid my apple trees. It broke branches and shat all over the grass and even in my raised strawberry beds. One bear can produce one hell of a lot of scat. By daylight, I walked around, stepping over the piles, weary as I am these days, with no inclination to cut down the broken limbs or scoop up the piles. 

Later, however, I noticed the magpies picking out half-digested apples from all that bear poo. And in that moment of epiphany, I saw something I have been apparently slow to take on board: it is easier to see the glass half empty. It is hard to navigate around the wall, when complaining about the wall requires nothing but standing your ground.  

I have always had great eyesight, but perhaps my inner focus has been too honed in on the next standard to raise, the next fight.  Perhaps I should unlearn my adult self and become more like the bear that smells ripe fruit, climbs over a fence, eats apples, shits and leaves. The bear that is not disgruntled by the fact that it soon needs to find a place under the snow to exist in limber close to death until the earth cycles round and begins again to feed it. 

Perhaps it's time to let go of Tyger Tyger Burning Bright, and look instead for the bear-necessities. It would make for fewer walls, more open space, more oxygen, even a little clarity. And no doubt a steadier heart rate and better sleep as well.

 

Travels With Steinbeck

 May 28th 2021

Time was, I would write a blog every week.  This is the first blog since December 2020. But I just got back from Monterey, California, a sort of Mecca for me, because it is the home and muse of John Steinbeck, and I have this to share: as far as writers go, they don't come any better than Steinbeck. 

I feel a bit guilty about this, because in my own country there are fine writers. Lewis Grassic Gibbon is at the top of the list. I have been to the countryside in the North East of Scotland he wrote about; I have  been in the little museum that shows the film about his life. I have been to see his gravestone in the nearby church. Sunset Song is one of the finest novels in any language.

But there is something about Steinbeck that calls to me, and when I am in the places he lived and moved, I drift into a different space altogether. The hotel I picked was in Pacific Grove, a town that Monterey merges into and where his family had a summer cottage by the sea. Here he gathered his anecdotes and stories for what would become Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday. The Grapes of Wrath came out of his experience helping desperate migrant workers exploited by California's fruit growers. He said, "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this." I love Steinbeck for his social conscience and because he cared about the people he wrote about. Perhaps he wrote about them because he cared.

During the school year, Steinbeck's family lived half an hour inland in a farming community called Salinas, and where these days his childhood home has become a museum. Stepping into the hallway of that house, walking through the rooms with some of the original furniture, I come under a spell. Here were the stairs that led up to the room, where he wrote small offerings for magazines when still a child. (None was published. ) Here is the spot in the dining room where as a grown man he set up his writing station and tinkered with what would become his celebrated story "The Red Pony," while his mother died slowly in the bedroom opposite. 

In Monterey itself, there is barely anything to suggest it was an author named John Steinbeck that made Cannery Row famous. The Cannery Row of today is a bustling tourist trap, with T-shirt shops and tacky restaurants. He is not remembered much here, because the people of Monterey resented Steinbeck for bringing attention to "the poem, the stink, the particular quality of light" that was this town in its fishing days. In Salinas, they burned his books for their supposed obscenity and because he stood up to the landowners. When he was driven home, he would have to lie on the floor of the car so that no one took a shot at him.

In America, there is much hullabaloo about Steinbeck's contemporary, Ernest Hemmingway. Everything  this author ever touched has been enshrined and immortalised. America's Public Broadcasting Station just came out with a six hour documentary on the  man. But then, this is what Ernest Hemmingway was after. Before Hemmingway ever wrote a book, he was looking for an entourage, for fame. Steinbeck, on the other hand, had no time for publicity. He understood the threat that acclaim can pose to an author's authenticity. 

Steinbeck wrote about the people and places he knew. I don't think he ever ended his stories particularly well, but between the covers is a rich feast of words and images, crafted sonorously as only he knew how. And, too, there's always a strand of humour in Steinbeck's writing, always the oddly funny character, even when he is plummeting the depths. His facility with the sentence, especially with those spoken, is unmatched.

 When Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature, the American press crucified him. They said he was not worthy, and he agreed. But he never recovered. Although he was not yet an old man, he never wrote another word of fiction. Still, the speech he gave at the Nobel ceremony is tight and singing, wonderful and profound: Literature was not promulgated by a pale emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

He wasn't a perfect man. He probably died a couple of decades early from the toll he exacted on his body. But he was a man of heart, a man who saw deep, but was never caught up in his own image or in his own importance. 

For all these reasons I am an unashamed fan. I will keep going back to Monterey and Salinas because it feeds something in my own creative process.  You can take your Hemmingway and the cult that surrounds him, and leave me on the steps of the Pacific Biological Laboratory that belonged to Steinbeck's much beloved friend Ed Ricketts. He ran up that staircase many, many times in pursuit of ideas and what was true about the world. It is magic here on this step. The wooden railing is peeling now, and the place looks odd, towered over by the bustle and the modernity. But it is the only spot on Cannery Row that still has a hum, a peculiar quality of light. It is here, I encounter John Steinbeck, the very best of writers.

The Age Of Aquarius

December 21st, 2020 

I have been in labour three times, all home-births, all unmedicated. There is a moment or two on the other side of that life-changing event, once the baby is out and just before you fall in love, when you are in a sort of death zone:  in the tunnel, still waiting for the light.

Things feel a bit like that now, hunkered down in a pandemic, waiting in the dark with Joe Biden as president-in-the-wings (and if you're Scottish, on the edge of independence with Nicola Sturgeon!)  Life in general at this moment in history seems to be teetering on the brink.  

Today is the winter solstice. Astronomers tell us that in the night sky tonight we can see the convergence of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, a once in an 800 year alignment. According to astrologists, what we are witnessing is the passing of the age of Pisces an age of ego, deception, power and money, populism, authoritarianism; interestingly enough, also of world religions. The new Age of Aquarius has instead qualities more readily associated with woman: ying, rather than yang; the soul; individual freedom; humanitarianism, inclusion, "me" in the service of "we."  

Birth is a process, and so too the passing of an era. The male dominated age of war and authoritarianism was never going to pass without a final raised fist, a last flail of its dragon tail. It has been a rough show from the poor players that are Boris Johnson and Donald Trump fretting and strutting their hour upon the stage.  Crouching in the wings, this woman is ready to see the curtain fall on the sound and fury and accept the offer that humanity has better heights to scale than Rule Britannia and "bombs bursting in air." 

Every mother knows that the most intense part of labour comes very close to the end. It's called transition, and I hope that we will get through these birth pangs, to a better place, where the tight fist unfurls at last and eases a new life into the world.                                           

     

Sailing the Covid Sea

 30th October 2020

I caught Covid way back in January, got very sick for a few weeks, and this was months before "the official" first case. I know I had Covid because once antibody tests were available, I tested positive. I am not the only one with a story like this. Also not unique to me, as a person who makes her life among the arts, is that Covid has forced me into something of a reckoning. It's not that anything has changed much in my daily life: I live rurally; my desk still sits in my office; a superstitious collection of feathers and other lucky charms still hangs over my chair. For me, this hasn't been a time of great privation.  The things I miss, I can do without: travel, an evening of theatre or cinema with a bite to eat after, interactions with whomever, whenever I choose. 

But oddly something has changed. That handy little button on a Smart Phone that flips your phone camera round to your own self, is kind of permanently on these days. I have been looking at my reflection, and I have been seeing what I perhaps haven't up until now been willing to tackle: without the near death experience, a sort of life review. And I see what has motivated me through my many novels and screenplays, has been too much the lure of fame and glory, that shining something always waiting round the next bend. It's why I have written nine novels - if I finished one and it didn't immediately sail into the glory sea, I would start another. It has always been the next one, and then the next one, and no surely this one will make it.

Famous dufus comedian Jim Carrey describes this endless circling succinctly when he writes, "I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer." 

But what is the answer? That is what I have been contemplating during my Covid introspection. I have been asking myself: if fame and glory and their trappings were never to come, would I be content with what I have produced, and even be inspired to keep on writing? Is the art in and of itself enough?

The answer is:  it has to be.  

Jim Carrey again: "The peace that we're after lies somewhere beyond personality, beyond the perception of others, beyond invention and disguise, even beyond effort itself." 

I'm going to spend this Covid time going through my novels again, get them in order. I will come to look at that canon as my contribution to posterity.  Perhaps that is all it ever was and the best we can hope for. I can watch these paper ships I have created. They don't need to reach China. All they need to do is float. 

Mucking Around In The Ashes

 September 4th 2020

To all intents and purposes, this era of COVID is something to be endured, an historical event that has upturned the apple cart. People (myself included) have become sick, some have died; schools have closed, businesses have had to close up shop, events have been cancelled. My trip to NYC in March got postponed until May and then to November, but now that isn't going to happen either. My performing arts children are all out of work. My husband's small business took a hit. We spend half of our waking lives behind masks; we can't hug (and I don't even like hugging - strangers that is); we are not permitted to sing in public; we're all acting like sociopaths, crossing the street to avoid each other.

But if you put your ear to the ground, something else is happening beneath all these privations. People are re-assessing their lives, their locations, their priorities. As trauma tends to do, it is forcing us into the rarified atmosphere of fine-tuning the things that matter most in life. And they are hardly ever "things."   

In my small community of Aspen in the mountains, there's a sudden influx of people who initially came to kill the time during quarantine but now don't think they can go back to their regular lives. A hundred new students have registered at the local school. Ketchum, Idaho, a similar mountain resort, is seeing a similar increase. The same thing is happening to small towns in Vermont. Real estate sales in the New York suburbs are going through the roof. Who wants to live in Manhattan when you don't have to? 

With time on our hands, we are thinking outside of the box. People are beginning to wonder if an economy based on mass production supported by workers who studiously clock into their 9-5 jobs might not be the only way to go. What if a gig economy might even make people happier? What if this division between caring for our children and earning money doesn't need to be so stark? What if money is not the be all, after all? 

As Carl Jung famously wrote, "In all chaos there is cosmos." Perhaps cosmos is even engineered to cyclically fall into chaos. As much as human beings like to think they order their little universes, from time to time we are thrown into a chaos that underlines the fact that we do not. Perhaps it is good, though uncomfortable, that the structures we thought of as solid are now showing signs of erosion. We are being freed to consider why we buit those structures in the first place.