My Tango With Barbara Strozzi (12 page)

‘Hi, Constanze,’ I said. ‘How’s it going with the music?’

‘Very slowly,’ she said. ‘I’d like to have a go at fiction for a change. I’ve got a couple of ideas for stories but I don’t know how to get started.’

‘I have the same problem,’ said one of the serious men.

‘Me too,’ said one of the female course-takers. ‘I have things in my head but when I try to put them down on paper I can’t get past the first line.’

‘That’s what I’m here for,’ I said.

‘It said in the brochure that Ken Hackett would be doing “The Search for Page One”,’ said Constanze.

‘He’s got flu,’ I said, ‘but not to worry – there’s nothing I don’t know about searching for Page One.’

‘What about finding it?’ she said.

‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘We might get lucky. The most common failing of the inexperienced writer is thinking that you have to begin at the beginning.’

‘Where else would you begin?’ said the dead-serious young woman whose bulging rucksack threatened many pages for me to read.

‘Wherever the thing presents itself to you – the arse or the elbow or the foot. The raw material is showing you that because it’s what you can bring everything out of by working backwards and forwards from it. Look at the opening of
Daniel Deronda
– it’s not the chronological beginning of the novel; quite a few things have happened and most of the main characters have appeared in the story earlier but not on the page, so from that opening scene in the casino Eliot has to develop people and events around the psychological centre which is the action between Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. Because that was the beginning.’

‘In media res,’
said she of the serious rucksack.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘In the middle of things is where you often find the beginning.’

‘How many Is in Eliot?’ said one of the course-takers.

‘One,’ I said. ‘What I’d like all of you to do now is to give me whatever you’ve brought with you so I can start reading. If you haven’t brought anything you should write whatever you can for me to look at tomorrow. Don’t demand too much of yourself – heavy expectations tend to be self-defeating.’

Those who had manuscripts passed them along to me while the others scratched their heads, looked around, and slowly put pen to paper. Constanze’s was the last of the mss. It was a single sheet of blue A4 copy paper, somewhat crumpled. On it was printed a single line: ‘“
That’s what uncles do,” he said
.’

‘Uncle Teddy?’ I said as various of the group turned to look at me.

Constanze nodded. I put the page into a folder and picked up a thick wodge of paper from the dead-serious girl whose name was Clara Petersen.
Low Pressure Love
was the title. ‘
It rained whenever we met
’. was the first line. ‘Listen to this,’ I said to the group, and I read them the line. ‘That right away pulls me in,’ I said, ‘because it rings true: there are times like that and there are lives like that. I want to read on and find out who the narrator is and what’s coming next. I already care about the narrator and I want to get into the action. If your story doesn’t engage the reader and make him or her
want to know more you haven’t got a story. It doesn’t have to be a person that the reader is drawn in by:
Bleak House
opens with “implacable November weather”, with mud and smoke and fog and you want to go where the weather is taking you because the writer has made you care by putting you into a place and an atmosphere of impending excitement.’

Some people nodded, others took notes, others did both. I refrained from launching into the first page of
Moby Dick
although damp drizzly Novembers are a regular feature of my internal climate and I asked Clara to read the whole first page of her ms to the group. It was a good Page One and I made good comments after the reading. The whole novella, which I read later, was excellent. Clara had talent and the necessary strength of character for the long haul and I told her I’d do my best to put her in touch with an agent. She was quite a good-looking girl too, very intense with her dark hair worn long and a
Wuthering Heights
air about her which would do nicely in jacket photos and book promotion. I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to live with her and I was glad I didn’t. But now I’m going to leave Clara and the rest of the group in order to report my conversation with Constanze about Uncle Teddy. After supper I found her waiting for me. The summer evening was mild and the sound of the sea had a confidential air.
Secrets!
it whispered in the hissing of the waves on the strand,
Secrets! I hold them, I keep them
. There was a little thin sickle moon hanging in the clear
sky. Lights glimmered all over Diamond Heart and a murmur of voices rose up with the smell of cannabis and the sound of an accordion and someone singing, in Russian, the song in which the English refrain begins with ‘Those were the days, my friend …’ We passed the Xanadu dome where the drinkers mostly stood outside and made pub noises.

‘Where are we going?’ I said.

‘Kirsty’s Knowe,’ said Constanze. ‘I like to go there to be quiet.’ She took me to a grassy hill overlooking the sea where the susurrus of the waves made a whispering stillness that seemed to wait for something.

‘What’s it waiting for?’ I asked her.

‘Ah!’ she said, ‘you feel it too. This place is haunted. There was a Kirsty who hanged herself when her lover abandoned her. Kirsty’s Fetch, her ghost is called, and men who see it are fated to be drowned. And they say if you go to the Deil’s Hurdies you can hear the voices of the dead.’

‘I don’t see Kirsty’s Fetch so far,’ I said.

‘I don’t think you’re destined to drown.’

‘Are you going to write about Uncle Teddy?’

‘I don’t want to but that line jumped on to the paper and it’s pulling me after it.’

‘All of us have the ghosts of ourselves inside us,’ I said. She turned to me and her five foot ten seemed smaller and unsure. Mostly she looked like a confident winner but now she was touchingly vulnerable – I wanted to cuddle her but it would have been a wrong move and
unwanted as well. Moshe Leib’s words recurred to me. ‘There’s a sorrow in you,’ I said, ‘just as there is in all of us. This sorrow clothes itself in various memories. I find it’s best to let the thing get on to the paper. You can always tear it up later if you want to.’

Looking out into the sea-dark she said, ‘He used to take me on his lap. Once, when I was ten, he put his hand …’

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Don’t talk it out – get it down on paper and maybe it’ll lead to something further.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll start tonight then because ideas are coming to me right now. See you tomorrow.’

When we parted I watched her walk away and Moshe Leib’s words about the burden of one’s sorrow came to mind again. There’s a lot of it about, I thought. Barbara’s face came to me then, with her look of unknowing that was so characteristic of her. Perhaps it mirrored the look on my face? It’s very difficult to know anything, really, and here I was teaching people as if I knew something they didn’t. I was experienced in some ways – I was like a tracker who always found the turds of his prey but never caught the animal he was after. I stopped in at the Xanadu and ordered a large Glenfiddich.

One of the men in my group came up to me and nodded. I didn’t remember his name. ‘Geoff Wiggins,’ he said. ‘I’d like to write but I can’t think of anything to write about.’

‘Write about that then,’ I said. ‘If you do it carefully and honestly something will come to you.’

‘Does that always work for you?’ he said.

‘Sure it does. What comes to me is crap a lot of the time but that’s how it is.’

‘I guess if you were more successful you wouldn’t need to teach courses like this.’

‘And if you were capable of sitting at a desk alone you wouldn’t need to take courses like this,’ I said.

We both smiled hard at each other and he walked away.

Hoping I wouldn’t see any more familiar faces I had a look around me. Diamond Heart, definitely not a retreat, was a cruising ground offering interesting people of all sexual persuasions, most of them with a look of easy availability. It was rather like an auction where you had to be careful not to scratch your nose. It was the kind of scene I used to enjoy but now I found the whole thing dissolving into visual noise like a computer picture infected with a virus.

I had manuscripts to read but I put it off yet awhile. I finished my drink, went outside and walked back to Kirsty’s Knowe. I sat down on the still-warm grass, closed my eyes and listened to the sea. The warm summer air seemed a medium of transmission and Barbara’s face came to me then. I’d never been able to recall it accurately before but here it was utterly clear and real. I didn’t think any words, just looked at her face while the sea whispered me its secrets. At the beginning of these pages I’ve given my first impression of her that Saturday night at St James’s Clerkenwell. I described her
as having a long oval face, a sullen mouth, and an up-yours expression. But attractive, I said: a face that pulled the eye. A
shapely
face that followed up the shapeliness of her legs and referred itself to the hidden sensuality of her body. As I looked at her now her face asserted its Strozzi attributes: the sombre eyes; the small mouth with its full underlip; the round chin that completed the juiciness of the mouth and led the eye down to the full breasts. Now my Barbara had become Barbara Strozzi and now the face flickered between the two of them, proclaiming the mystery of itself and the unknowability of Woman and sorrow. Tears rolled down my face; almost I could believe in God, or at least a demiurge. My empty hands moved as if kneading the dust of stars into wet clay. I looked up at the sky wondering what effect Mercury and Venus, all unseen, might be having on me.

Without being aware of having walked there I found myself at the guest dome where I was staying. Feeling strange but not sleepy I read Clara Petersen’s novella and several of the short bits from the group. When I fell asleep I dreamed that Barbara Strozzi kissed me and put my hand on her breast.

Next morning Constanze arrived at the group session with the pages she’d written. First I gave my comments on Clara’s ms, then I went through the short bits I’d read. I’m never brutal in my critiques but there’s no escaping the fact that some would-be writers have it and some don’t. Many of the people who take these courses
have a modicum of talent but very few will ever be published because talent isn’t enough: you need the character that will drive the talent as far as it can go.

‘Are you going to read this out?’ I said to Constanze.

‘Yes,’ she said, taking up a position at the front. ‘This is the first chapter of a novel and the title is
Uncle William’s Lap.’

‘You’ve been doing this to me since I was ten,’ I said.

He smiled down at me while he took his pleasure. ‘Well, love,’ he said, ‘this is what uncles do.’

‘Not any more,’ I said, and reached under the bed for the knife. We came together, then I cut short his enjoyment and a very messy business it was. After I’d dismembered the body and buried the pieces in different places far apart I burned the bedclothes, had a long hot shower, opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and thought about the last fifteen years.

She went on to read the whole first chapter which was five pages long, her South African accent adding a little something to the eroticism and the nastiness of it. When she stopped there was spontaneous applause from the coarser element of the group. ‘Don’t stop!’ was their cry. ‘Go for it! Give us more!’ Clara shook her head sadly.

‘That’s all she wrote so far,’ said Constanze, ‘but I’ll keep working on it.’

After supper I found her at the Xanadu surrounded
by admirers. ‘What you read out today was quite different from your songwriting,’ I said.

‘The songs are my art,’ she said. ‘This is for money. Do you think I’ll get it published?’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Under your own name?’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t you feel at all strange about it?’

‘Why should I? This is a legitimate commercial product – it’s entertainment.’

‘Yes, but the songs are a class act and this is something you’d be better off not putting your name to.’

‘Are you applying to be my uncle now?’

‘Why? Is the situation vacant?’

‘Who knows? You might get lucky.’ Gasps and giggles from her audience.

‘Thank you but I’m fully committed elsewhere.’

‘No problem. But tell me: Haven’t you ever wanted to write something that wasn’t boring?’ The circle of admirers had backed off a little to give us space but now there were more gasps followed by bursts of laughter.

I felt a hot wave of anger rising in me but I tried to stay cool. ‘What I write doesn’t seem boring to me,’ I said, ‘and it takes up my whole self so there’s nothing left over for any other kind of writing.’

‘I think you might be a self-defeater, Teach. Maybe you should take up another line of work.’ General tittering from the sidelines.

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Plumbing maybe. It’s a useful trade, it gets you out of the house and plumbers make a lot of money.’ She was swaying a little as she spoke. Evidently the drinks following on her popularity had somewhat gone to her head.

‘Thanks for the advice,’ I said. ‘I appreciate your concern.’

‘You’re welcome. And I’ll be there tomorrow with the rest of the swine to pick up any pearls you might be throwing our way.’

‘I think you’re going to have a hangover in the morning, so I’ll wish you a good night now.’

‘Goodnight, Uncle Not.’ Accompanied by two or three well-wishers and the scent of cannabis she departed.

I walked out to Kirsty’s Knowe again and waited for Barbara’s face to come to me. It didn’t come and I sat there asking myself how I could make ends meet without teaching.

Constanze didn’t turn up the next morning. She left a note for me with Geoff Wiggins:

Dear Uncle Not,

I think it’s best if I leave now. I’m too embarrassed – for you.

See you around. Or not.
Constanze