Roll: What brought you to Kolkata in the first place, Fionn?

Reilly: A trip to India for me had to include Kolkata. The photographs of Raghubir Singh, the films of of Satyajit Ray, the specter of The Black Hole, its history, the reputation for being big and chaotic plus a conversation with a merchant banker from Bombay made it somewhere I had to discover.

When did you start seeing the possibility of a book of Kolkata photographs? What was it that enthralled you as a photographer?

As I started to develop my 30-odd rolls of film from my first trip, the excitement grew. I felt that I was on to something and my passion for the place increased. I had gone to Kolkata but by shooting in black and white my camera was revealing an older Calcutta. I knew I would be going back to get more pictures.

Did your idea of the book change over the period of your visits? Did Kolkata change?

No. I just felt that I wanted to see more and get better pictures. I still do. I would happily continue to do more of the same, maybe making a few more discoveries on the way. I would love to add some domestic interiors to the collection. In the space of four years I saw no change at all.

Being in Kolkata conjures up visits to Naples in the ‘60s, the same open-ness and welcome without its people clinging or demanding anything. How, for you, does Kolkata compare with other cities you’ve known?

Interesting comparison to Naples. I was only in Naples for a crazy Kolkata like taxi ride from train station to port. I cannot think of anywhere I have been with the streets teeming with so much human energy. Maybe Bucharest has a similar thing going on with a population going about its business seemingly oblivious to its backdrop of crumbling empire.

The stereotype of Calcutta, lepers and flea-ridden beggars, has helped to keep it off the tourist map. How amazed most Westerners who discover it must be to find the efficient Kolkata modern subway system that puts the MTA to shame. What are your thoughts in this regard? The reality of Kolkata versus the myth.

India is so paradoxical. Seems logical, in that respect, that the city of so much poverty and suffering IS the “City of Joy”. I have to say that I have seen plentiful scenes of human suffering in Kolkata, as I have in Delhi, but my feeling of Kolkata is that it is a city with a smile on its face. I love the subway. Air-conditioned, subterranean efficiency underneath the boiling chaos above. Each day I would take the metro, in a flash, to the top end of the city and spend all day walking back down town through a labyrinth of streets and back alleys.

My generation was raised with Satyajit Ray’s films — the Bengali Chekhov. I’m glad you mentioned him. I still find elements of Bengali artistic temperament — so different from the Bollywood style of the rest of India — everywhere I go in West Bengal. What about you?

The first time I went to India, it was as a journalist covering the Mumbai stock exchange. I remember asking a banker at dinner what he thought of Satyajit Ray. He said that Ray presented a “very negative side of India”. That conversation made me want to go to Kolkata even more. I can’t imagine films like Jalshagar (The Music Room) or Pather Panchali coming out of Mumbai.

Elements also of the long Communist rule over West Bengal: people fed and clothed at modest expense. Did you encounter remnants of this?

Big yes to that question. I had a 25-cent eye exam in a crumbing old palace. Another time I got sick and got treated for next to nothing by a doctor with a very plummy accent who told me his other practice was in London’s Gloucester Road. Every time I have been to Kolkata there have been marches and demonstrations. The spirit that booted the British out from Calcutta to Delhi remains.

What drew your camera, as you walked around Kolkata? What will we see in your photos? — particular aspects of the city, or all aspects?

My eye is drawn to the visual imprint of time. Time erodes things but that is a backdrop to the force of life going on in front of it. Here we are in the 21st century but In Kolkata life goes on in scenes more akin to Charles Dickens’ London. I love this quote by Rabrindranath Tagore: “In the streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see which drives people to travel to strange places.”

What was it that kept you coming back to Kolkata?

Something about it fits with what I dig about life. I fantasize about living there.

Will you go back again? Or have you exhausted your affair with the city?

I will go back again. I have been four times and I get a little emotional every time I leave. The book is printed and bound but I have not finished.

Roll: All great cities are inexhaustible, and Kolkata is one — perhaps one of the last, its overlapping folds of history as yet unreconstructed. It has been preserved for us from tourist hordes by its reputation, not for violence but for suffering. Yet I’ve found that anyone who knows the city loves it. It’s so nice to have somewhere like that, even if you can’t be there. A true north in the compass of the heart.

A New Kolkata is being built, out by the airport, full of Western hotels and boutiques. In order to say you’ve visited, it soon may not even be necessary to go into the old Kolkata. This might preserve the old city a little longer. Thank you, Fionn, for helping to memorialize that city, and thank you for talking to Roll Magazine.

For more about this inspiring book visit
https://www.kolkatabook.com/

Carey Harrison-photo by Dion Ogust

Carey Harrison recently completed The Heart Beneath, a quartet of novels he began 49 years ago and which he regards as his life’s chief endeavor. (A separate series of novels, the Justice quintet, was fitted in, over the years, as were three more unconnected novels.) The Heart Beneath was published by Dr. Cicero Books in a revised edition in September 2016. That month, Harrison began a year as a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, who awarded him the Fellowship in honor of his lifetime’s output of fiction. He continues to write and teach at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

]]> http://www.rollmagazine.com/a-true-north-in-the-compass-of-the-heart/feed/ 0 http://www.rollmagazine.com/try-calcutta/ http://www.rollmagazine.com/try-calcutta/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2018 04:56:33 +0000 Carey Harrison http://www.rollmagazine.com/?p=15311 Continue reading →]]> I fell in love with Calcutta at first sight, as one falls in love with a woman. (I raise my hat respectfully to all those who know how to fall in love gradually. This is not my way.) Had I expected to fall in love with, of all places, Calcutta? Certainly not. Of course not – what, fall for a place that I had first encountered as a history student in the vile form of the Black Hole of Calcutta; Calcutta that everyone connects to Mother Teresa, picking her brave way past flyblown beggars, the half-dead and the diseased; Calcutta the archetypical home of swarming India, of desperate impoverished millions?

None of this put me off. I have had a high tolerance for squalor ever since a childhood that made me familiar with the back streets, the tenements and the peasant farms of postwar Italy. France, in my teenage years, was little better. No one relishes sewer smells, but if you couldn’t stand them, continental Europe was not for you. India I knew somewhat, South India in particular, and I had lived in Sri Lanka. I’d never been to West Bengal, Calcutta’s home state, home to some of the third largest sociolinguistic group in the world: the Bengalis. Here I’d had a hint of what was to come: when I was 18 I’d been introduced to Bengali culture by the wonderful films of Satyajit Ray, movies with no connection to Bollywood, movies that Chekhov might have made had he been born a Bengali and become a film-maker.

Leaning out of the cab heading for South Calcutta from the airport, I was instantly drunk on the aroma of spices and humanity (not stale or sour or unwashed humanity – I have never known a folk who wash as joyfully and as often as the men and women of the sub-continent). I loved the little ragged shops, crammed as only Indian stores are crammed. I loved the automotive museum of its streets, the boxy little Ambassador cabs, toy car relics of another age. A compulsive novelist, I scribbled a first paragraph, as we drove. It’s hard to say – for me, anyway – what it is in a city that induces rapture. It’s not glorious architecture, much as I love to stroll through, say, Paris streets, it’s not a profusion of remarkable buildings, monuments, museums, great restaurants, or any of the things that I understand draw people to cities. It’s a sense that life is on the streets, already visible in all its aspects, present to sight and smell: Naples was the first city I fell in love with, Naples the famously transparent city, where as you climbed the steps of a sloping neighborhood, the houses around you offered a multi-story diorama of life in all its aspects: on each floor, open to the street in the heat of the night, priests knelt at deathbeds, babies screamed out their first breath, couples embraced, and the laundry clotheslines that all but blocked out the sky celebrated this panoply, this living soap opera, like Tibetan flags waving their blessing. At any rate it was so when I was young; I hope it still is; anyone who was there in those fearless postwar decades will tell you that my account is no exaggeration.

In Calcutta I found my Naples again, in a form one might never expect: everything – food, joy, camaraderie, on the street, but: no beggars. That’s right. No beggars. Nor have they been rounded up and made scarce, as in Giuliana-era New York City. West Bengal has been a Communist state for almost all its history, and its government made sure that food was so cheap that no one would go hungry, and clothing so cheap that no one need live in rags. And they don’t. Bengalis! Beautiful Bengalis, the handsomest race I know, display themselves, the women especially of course, like Berbers with all their finery always on show. And food — remember that all the Western alarm about street food in exotic places is exactly the reverse of where the danger lies: it lies in restaurant food, prepared out of sight, with who-knows-what going into it. In the street – all along the street, in the district of Tollygunge where I found myself – you see your food being cooked before your eyes, at a temperature that ensures your safety. Day after day I ate the most glorious stir-fry dishes, in particular a vegetable chow mein, watching the herbs and spices and chopped-up veg dance in the olive oil of a sizzling wok, before the noodles are thrown in – dear God, my mouth is watering as I write this! – to writhe like a huge, ecstatic bundle of tiny snakes, fit for a rajah, a day’s worth for 40 cents.

Poverty there is, of course; it isn’t drastic but it’s there. Tapwater there is, not to be drunk. (And for me as a vegan, no danger of toxic dairy or meat.) Bottles of water are everywhere, a hundred of them on every block. Noise there is too, of course, plenty of it; the East is never quiet by choice. When I lived there first I was amazed to find even the jungle perforated by vans driving to and fro along the lanes, blasting out music and advertising, all day.

The streets of Calcutta are not clean. But here I have to be honest with you. I dislike clean. I have never wanted to go to Scandinavia. It looks clean, to me. I don’t like bugs or stink or manifest foulness, although I’ve put up with it, as a guest in houses in the Rif mountains of Morocco where we all slept around the edges of a room that contained a hole in the center of the room, a hole to be used for unmistakable purposes, a hole that gave directly onto the town sewer, only a foot or so below the floor. This took some getting used to. But cities should be cities, places where calm is barely tolerated, where people drive like predators and howl like prey, where fires are lit on crumbling sidewalks to heat up food acquired at all-night resto-cafes.

It must be clear to you by now, dear readers, if you’re still reading: I’m not a tourist. I’m a traveler. Guide books are the killing jars of surprise, the thing for which a traveler lives. Guide books are the manufacturers of disappointment. If you’re a traveler, your memory and heart will be full, as mine is, of astonishment: the day, cycling through France, I came over a hill and saw a castle larger, grander, than any dream could have pictured, a castle without peer in the world – Carcassonne. I had no idea it existed. The morning after an all-night train journey with my head against an iron bar, when I staggered unawares into the largest square in the world, the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakesh, the Djemaa as it was in the old days, when the blue men came from the desert and told their stories and fought, bare-knuckled, not as a show for tourists.

The ultimate surprise? It’s this: Calcutta has a subway system of surpassing beauty and efficiency, its platforms and trains wide and accommodating, its digital schedules bright and reliable beside screens that offer filmed previews of current Calcutta theater shows, in an underground that puts not only the MTA (recently voted the worst subway system in the world) to shame, but rivals the best anywhere.

This is all stage décor, of course. What makes Calcutta so truly remarkable is the sheer sweetness of the inhabitants, its faces that breathe kindness, its people that supply it when (and not before) you need it, with a love in their eyes I’ve never known to be so consistent elsewhere. Of course it helps if you have a long white beard. (I’ll lend you mine.) Young men and women jump to their feet on the subway and seat you where they themselves had found a seat. And what’s absent in Calcutta is not only begging but offering to guide. Respect is unfailing. No one stares at you as though you were a Martian or an opportunity. I have never felt so at home in a place.

So what happened to the stereotype of Calcutta? The seething mass of frantic importunacy? What sustained this lying myth, of course, wasn’t only Mother Teresa. It was Communism. Who in our world, wanted to hear about a happy, thriving, loving Communist state? Protected by a false vision of their city, Calcuttans have survived in comparative innocence, saved from the tourist hordes. Who ever even heard of Communist West Bengal, when Communism comes up in conversation? For my part I had the advantage of growing up in an Italian town with a Communist mayor; Prospero Velo was his wonderful name; I had the advantage of spending time in Bologna, a Communist-run city that, like Calcutta, breathed (and maybe still breathes) the joy of sharing.

So where, you will wonder, are my travel photos to bear out the vision I’ve painted for you? Tourists take photos. Travelers just remember and move on, as nomads always have, leaving the soil of their brief dwelling to retain no lasting mark. Leaving it to the wind.

Carey Harrison recently completed The Heart Beneath, a quartet of novels he began 49 years ago and which he regards as his life’s chief endeavor. (A separate series of novels, the Justice quintet, was fitted in, over the years, as were three more unconnected novels.) The Heart Beneath was published by Dr. Cicero Books in a revised edition in September 2016. That month, Harrison began a year as a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, who awarded him the Fellowship in honor of his lifetime’s output of fiction. He continues to write and teach at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

Just this past autumn an astonishing discovery was made, consisting of work hidden away in a crammed desk belonging to the writer Otis Kidwell Burger, mother of the writer and artist Katherine Burger, a Woodstock resident, former longtime director of the Artist’s Residency Program at Byrdcliffe, and currently House Manager at the Maverick concert hall. Katherine’s mother, Otis, is a lifelong writer and artist, as her daughter is. Otis’ longtime home on Manhattan’s Bethune Street was once a writers’ gathering place, frequented by such luminaries as Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, who set part of a novel there, in Otis’ house. The recent discovery is of the sole surviving copy of some of Otis’ work, poetry lost for 60 years: entitled Love is a Season, it’s a sonnet cycle, 47 poems long. Otis, now 94 years old, wrote them in 1957 and, unable to rouse any interest in them at the time, put them away in a drawer.

Otis at her 94th birthday party — photo by Charley Ryan

This re-discovery would have compelling charm, in and of itself. What makes it so much more is that Love is a Season provides us with some of the most moving and surprising love sonnets written since Shakespeare. Those who have known Otis Kidwell Burger’s poetry and other writing, composed during a long life never very far from the typewriter, and published in The New Yorker and elsewhere, will not be surprised that the poetry is excellent. What has taken aback every reader, and the audience at formal and informal readings from the sonnet cycle, is the bold ​originality​ of the collection, which recruits the natural world to validate the poet’s feelings. Heaven itself, she confesses, might condemn her. Neither the poet nor her beloved are free of other entanglements. Love obeys no rules; very well, but where then, does the lover find his or her patent, Love’s writ? In the landscape and its creatures, Otis’ poems tell us, invoking light and landscape, field and forest, and deploying compulsive attention to beasts, birds and insects. This is her cast; these are her judges, and her exemplars. The entire drama, presented with masterly formal control, gives us the birth of passion, and its waning with the winter light: the sequence spans a year.

Otis’ daughter is quick to confess the surprise of this brimming surrender to erotic obsession. It’s as if I’m meeting a whole new side of my mother, Katherine admits.

I hear you like the blood in my own body,
Otis writes,
or like the wind that winds about the house;
Invisible, you spin a thread nobody
But I can follow; secret as a mouse
Beneath its pathways in the meadow grass

The 47 sonnets are Shakespearean in form. There are two, composed during the dismemberment of the passionate ‘season’ charted by the poet, that are loose – as if distraught — in construction. The rest are as faithfully in thrall to metre and rhyme as if they too are the blood in the poet’s own body. And the subject matter, not only love but love’s court of endorsement – a kind of trial of her love — leaps out at the reader in poem after poem, insisting on the interpenetration of human passion and its animal origins. The poet has, she says,
…taken counsel with the breathless fish,
With bird who drink and swim in the air of sky,
And footed beasts between…

Creatures confirm, as nothing else in the world around her can, the overwhelmingly natural ferocity of her feelings.

I am both ass and owl, both snake and dove;
The fearful Name by which men summon love.
…
From all created forms, unreason springs
Cross all the careful roads of history,
All fierce as claws, as scales, as airy wings,
As lung to air, as gill to darkling sea…
These know my reasons, and my reckless love
Will find its pardon there, if not above.

She is a driven soul at the mercy of elves’ gold:

As if the tree of night had showered down
A host of jewels from its shaken leaves,
Opals and rubles from its towering crown,
So is my room ablaze with golden greaves
Of flashing beetle, and pallid moths which fold
As slim as silken pencils; lace-winged flies;
Gay striped bugs with knobby horns, and bold
Big moths, beneath whose dull grey lies.
A tiger-lily underwing; and red
As blood spots, tiny moths; and here and there
Black velvet moths, jet-furred about the head.
And fluttering scalloped browns that beat the air
Like driven souls. A fortune, in light’s thrall.
But, like elves’ gold, with daylight, vanished all.

Finding Otis’ poems has been a little like finding a hidden, undiscovered Elizabethan play — the work carries the same stunning surprise conveyed by something that should have belonged to all of us, should have been part of our national treasury and the mental lexicon of all poetry-lovers. Soon they will form part of our heritage, as they always should have done – just as countless other jewels have been lost forever; but not this one.

Otis at the period when she wrote the poems

Her book belongs to the New York countryside in which it was written; to the species it invokes; to love itself and to its permanence in the very language that announces love’s impermanence. And at the last it is the landscape – the wide impossibility of skies – that she thanks.

Lord Lord, preserve for me this end of dream;
This lucid respite from the personal
When love’s no longer flesh, but hill and stream
And summer light, and every interval
In human plans and passions; let me see
Back-lit with love’s uncanny brightness, all
Mankind and earth as part of time and me
And I of them; enchanted, in the thrall
Or forces far too large to put aside,
Which joined us two by two, that we might bear
Earth, life, Love, flesh, and all the wide
Impossibilities of skies. Oh, wear
Me lightly, time; who once have known
Your puzzle and your promise in my bone.

Love is a Season, by Otis Kidwell Burger, with artwork by Katherine Burger, will be published on March 31st by Dr. Cicero Books, and available shortly thereafter on Amazon.com

At this point — and perhaps for a year or two to come — I am simply researching the worlds of the different novels, and focusing variously on the 21st century American Midwest, on Ancient Rome and its provinces under the Emperor Tiberius, on Elizabethan London, and on deep space travel, far in the future. (The 5th book is set in post-Second World War Europe and South America, where I am a little more at home.)

How will all of this work when it’s put together? Firstly, what form will it take, exactly? Imagine that the five books are a, b, c, d and e. Book ‘a’, whose title is Where Every Stranger (is a ghost), which is also the title of the entire book, is set in the contemporary midwest; ‘b’ (entitled Et In Arcadia Ego ) is Ancient Rome; ‘c’ (Richard’s Fate) is postwar Europe; ‘d’ (A Green Girl in London) is Elizabethan London; ‘e’ (The Museum of Violence) is deep space.

The order of the chapters, each roughly 30 pages, with ten chapters to each separate novel of what is consequently a 1500-page book, is as follows:

Abab cdcd abab cdcd ee abab cdcd abab cdcd ee abab cdcd eeeeee

The reason for this order is in part a matter of the best way to keep the reader abreast of five separate narratives, and in part dictated by the nature of the 5 books and their interactions — how they bounce off each other. As the book moves to a climax, the interaction of the separate books, hitherto only thematic, changes: books ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, and ‘d’ start to bleed into each other across the centuries and continents, in a futuristic setting which belongs to book ‘e’: deep space. The result is that the book as a unified whole starts to emerge as the novels morph, during the final 180 pages (the 6 final, consecutive book-‘e’ chapters), into a common territory.

This much became quickly clear in my head, purely as a result of the formal properties of keeping 5 full-length books going at once: the solution requires strong, clear underpinnings (against all my long-held convictions about how to let a novel find itself according to its own evolving logic), even a reduction to a mathematical form, or to a musical form,​ ​since the abab cdcd structure outlined above is in effect ​a ​rondo, in the view of my friend and neighbor, the virtuoso guitarist and composer Fred Hand, to whom I described my plan.

The intended order of chapters, along with the geographical and temporal settings of all five books and their leading characters, came to me on May 24 2014 (the 100th anniversary of my mother’s birth, surely a good omen) while riding through rain and hail from Asheville, North Carolina, across the Mississippi to Raccoon Mountain campsite outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, as part of a 10,000-mile motorbike journey around the United States in the company of my brother-in-law, both of us Harley Davidson​-borne​. The hailstorm was my first aboard a motorbike, after 50 years of biking — but not the last of our 10,000-mile journey. Hailstones banging off the steaming metal of the bike, and off my helmeted head, made me feel at the mercy of a celestial drummer, and may have beaten some rhythmic sense into my brain as I planned the book. The chapter pattern, if you imagine it as a poetic rhyme scheme, is not original: the central 30 chapters turns out to imitate the ababcdcdee decastich rhyme scheme of the Ercil form introduced by James Gray in honor of fellow-poet Ercil Brown; and that of the Ravenfly, a form created by Amanda J. Norton, with the same rhyme scheme.

​The idea for the novel as a whole had been gestating for a while, though in a totally different form. ​Some years earlier, I had given vent to my sense of having many more stories to tell (coiled, unformed as yet, but ready to be unleashed) than the world wanted to hear from me, by imagining taking a year off from teaching to write 50 1-hour radio plays, one a week​, with no planning, starting from scratch — what in French is called partir à zé ro — each week​. ​I felt pregnant with countless untold tales (as indeed we all are) and wanted to give birth to as many as possible, even though ​I had already ​been ​what a local magazine called “uber-​prolific​” for years​, producing ​more than 200 scripts, novels, ​stage and radio plays. This would be different. I proposed to my radio producer, Georg Bühren of SüdWestFunk in Köln, Germany, that he assemble a team of six radio directors who would in turn, over a period of 50 weeks​,receive my weekly play, cast it and record it. If nothing else i​t would be a newsworthy feat. Georg smiled patiently. It had taken all his charm, he reminded me, to persuade his radio station to broadcast one of my plays each year, never mind fifty. ​I knew this. I brooded. ​Between the early 1970s and the turn of the century I had written radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation; this was a noble horse — serious radio drama, for what was mostly a very small audience​ — that had died under me; the World Service Drama unit, my final stable, closed; Germany, which had translated and broadcast many of my plays, became my sole outlet, my last ride.

It then occurred to me that I had a radio station near ​my home in upstate New York, a station whose owner had allowed me to host a weekly interview show for the very magazine in which you are reading this, the brainchild (this magazine and the radio show) of my beloved friend, editor Tom Grasso. Simple, then: I would write the 50 plays, and each ​one​ — to make the project even more challenging, and enable the material to survive beyond the broadcast​ — would also be a chapter of a novel, an extremely long novel, since each chapter/one-hour play would be at least 30 pages long. ​A 1500-page novel. Well, why not? But how did the 50 plays, which I had originally pictured as entirely disparate stories thought up week by week, cohere as a novel, or, as it turned out ​ when my ride through rain and hail prompted me​, a stellium of novels? I was grateful when the hyper-awareness and concentrated focus of motorbiking allowed the dreaming mind to wander off and come back with the very large posy of wildflowers that was Where Every Stranger (is a ghost).

The chief site of pilgrimage on my bike journey (others were William Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, and the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio) was the cemetery at Wounded Knee. I had recently met the great historian of the West, Bobby Bridger, whose understanding of American history as an epic of denial — denial of genocide carried out on the continent’s native tribes — gave my motorbike journey meaning. Through ​Bobby’s words​ I understood ​afresh ​the place I was in, the place I was seeing. Th​anks to​ ​this,​ my newborn work took shape. Starting in ghost-ridden contemporary America, the narrative threads would include ancient Rome, Elizabethan London, post-World-War-II Europe and South America, and deep space in the distant future, where all the threads would pull together and mingle in one weave, one variegated meditation ​- the ancient one, the same one that has preoccupied writers and thinkers since Aeschylus on the challenge posed by man’s hereditary inhumanity to man.​

All well and good. But the last thing The Maker in the Head ever wants is to shuttle back and forth between dream-materials. Writing more than one book, script or story at once is anathema to The Maker. I’m praying that The Maker will make an exception for these 5 novels, because of their thematic unity: they sh​are nothing, except theme — and yet that theme is all. It is the problem of how to transform the long and all-essential heritage of human violence, all-essential because each of us is descended from a successfully violent primate forebear (otherwise we and our line would be extinct) — how to transform this inheritance into a life still fruitful and rich, and not a neutered paradise. What would life be without danger? And danger is itself the threat of violence, which must be real if there is to be real danger.

I shall report on whether the Maker’s mercy is upon me — when I have ingested enough (but not too much!) research to start letting go of it all and responding to nothing but the passion kindled by the overall story, and by its subsidiaries. Maker willing, my chariot will then be hitched to five snorting horses trying to pull the reins out of my fist, and I’ll be off on the wildest literary ride of my life.

Author Harrison

My new novel, Dog’s Mercury, is available now from Amazon.com, and from the publishers, Dr. Cicero Books, at drcicerobooks.com. It is a meditative, comic tale of a history teacher who abandons his career and his family to become a hobo, only to come across a murder and be drawn into the murderer’s life, and so back again into the world. The photo (below) shows me en route to the book launch, book in hand, and with a supporting cast of portraits painted by my masterful artist wife, Claire Lambe, and until recently exhibited at Oriole 9 in Woodstock.

Till next time, dear reader!

​

They don’t come any better than Us & Them, the new series of documentary programs —“stories from the fault lines that separate Americans” —by multiple award-winning documentarian Trey Kay.

Kay is a local boy — these days: a Hudson Valley resident, in Red Hook. Originally Trey hails from West Virginia (it’s West Virginia Public Radio that hosts the Us & Them podcasts), and he has a ton of countrywide experience as a radio interviewer and program-maker. His radio broadcasts have been heard on all the leading public radio programs including This American Life. The breadth of his knowledge of America, plus a singular talent for listening, and for bringing out the best in divergent viewpoints, are the two consistent aspects of how Trey Kay has helped us to hear America at this time of so many acute and painful divisions. You want to hear both sides of the story? This is the podcast for you.

Us & Them addresses some of the most intriguing and thorny issues that divide Americans: class; race; education; sexuality—and sex education; religion and the American soul. Kay’s programs are broadcasting at its best: never lecturing, never partisan, open to hear the passion in all points of view, no matter how they might relate to his own upbringing in the South, or to his views as an adoptive Northeasterner.

A former Spencer Fellow at the prestigious Columbia Graduate School for Journalism, Trey Kay’s most celebrated program is The Great Textbook War, a 2009 investigation of the battle over school textbooks in his native state of West Virginia. It opened the ears of listeners at large and of the radio journalism profession to Kay’s exceptional skills as an even-handed reporter, and the program was honored with an exceptional trifecta: the George Foster Peabody Award, a national Edward R. Murrow Award, and a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton.

In Us & Them, Trey Kay’s new project, he deliberately sets out to expose the most painful conflicts that beset our embattled society, and enable us to hear a true dialog between different sides. In the best tradition of fair-minded journalism, Kay’s life mission is to address the world of ‘echo chambers’ in which we speak to, and hear from, only our own point of view. Happily for us, Trey not only knows America, but has an uncanny ability to enable his interviewees to feel safe and speak out; they sense Kay’s own natural openness, and know that they are not being ambushed but, on the contrary, allowed the full freedom of the microphone. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear a master journalist at work and, through his interviews, consider what may, almost certainly, be points of view contrary to your own, as well as points of view that match your own. America is a more rich and complex set of inter-connected worlds than most of realize. Meet them on Us & Them!

To hear Us & Them podcasts go here 

On October 16, the Kindle version of the book is the subject of a Bookbub promotion and is available free on Amazon for 5 days. That’s to say, Part One is free – the e-book version comes in 3 books, which are all available from Amazon. Carey will be reading from the book at Bard College’s Bard Hall at 5:00 PM on Friday October 17. Everyone welcome!

The Maker has been the subject of some attention recently, ever since my new novel, Who Was That Lady? (previously mentioned in Roll in The Maker in the Head IV), came out this summer and readers who have reached the end of its 700 pages have been reporting back. The psychologist Leon Festinger‘s investigations into what he called ‘effort justification’ suggest a tendency to like anything into which we’ve invested a large amount of time. I believe it applies to reading long books, and if so this is good news for those of us who like to write epics.

In fairness to the book, some of the reports on ‘That Lady’ do seem to go beyond the pleasure conferred by effort. A most excellent celebrity (and old friend, I should confess, in the interests of full disclosure), Eric Idle of Monty Python fame, declared it a masterpiece in the knowledge that this m-word and his name would appear side-by-side on the book’s cover, and that he would have to stand by it for ever, God bless him. This is more than either sustained effort or old friendship requires. Other enthusiasts can be found among the reader reviews on the book’s Amazon page, and if only I can find some way to exceed my usual ceiling of 70 or 80 books sold, it will be time to break out the bubbly. (My good friend John Froud likes to describe his books as selling ‘in the several,’ a term I’ve gratefully adopted.) But ah that sweet m-word: at least I’ll always have that. It’s been 30 years since anyone chose to use it in public about my work, and on that first, glorious occasion it was uttered by a most distinguished person, Mary Ann Caws, the President of the Modern Languages Association, in her speech to the Association at the end of her term as President. The event took place on what I recall as a kind of faux paddle steamer moored (for no reason I ever understood) off San Diego, where I used to teach literature and creative writing at the University of California. My then girlfriend was known to Ms Caws, and I found myself invited on the short trip the ship took around the bay. As the President reviewed her career and her favorite books, I was staggered to hear her mention my novel, Richard’s Feet, as a ‘masterpiece of dislocation.’ It was the only book by a living writer that she cited. My usual readership of 78 people did not, so far as I knew, include this wonderful scholar and critic — who to this day I’ve never met. Astonishingly and most wonderfully, she came to Woodstock on Saturday of last week, to take part in an event at the Kleinert-James Gallery, where at last I ambushed her and delivered my 30-years-belated thanks.

It’s not, of course, that as its recipient you have to take the m-word seriously. It’s a ticket to ride in one location only — on a dust jacket, a ticket without which you barely make it to the Barnes and Noble fiction shelves. Over-used hardly even describes the word: it’s sullied, flattened, lying prone in the gutter of literature. I remember a great many years ago seeing with distress a huge hoarding in Bristol (the Bristol in my native UK) which announced ‘Paul Theroux’s Latest Masterpiece,’ as though in his hands masterpiece was simply another word for ‘book.’ I felt ashamed for literature, for advertising, for the culture and for myself, who had no expectations of seeing that word attach to my person, and now couldn’t even dream of it without distaste. No offense to Mr Theroux. But no-one, not Theroux, not Dickens, not Tolstoy and not Shakespeare, simply produces their ‘latest masterpiece.’

But back to my new book, of which I never quite knew what to think, and am suddenly eager to believe that it is indeed the worthy effort that writer friends say it is, one of them willing to call it my ‘crowning work’! How lovely to slip on the costume, crown and all, for a few moments in the costume bay of life, and pretend to be a king, before returning to reality. And thank God for reality and a life which has convincingly ensured that I cannot believe my own publicity for more than those few moments.

The fact that I had no idea that anyone might see this book as my best effort still puzzles me. Who Was That Lady? was born in the midst of a strange carnival of productivity, during 2005 and the early part of 2006. I’d just seen the second night of Spamalot on Broadway — thanks to the kindness of that selfsame Eric Idle, the author of Spamalot - and I had come home, ungratefully wondering if I couldn’t do as well myself, in the musical comedy genre. (I can’t, or haven’t been able to so far, but I sat down and wrote the book and lyrics for a musical, which is still around and currently being revised by the third composer to tackle it. This was ten years ago — and the three scores have taken up all that time, two-and-a-half scores rather, since Jimmy Roberts (wonderful composer of I Love You, You’re Perfect — Now Change!) and I are only at the end of Act One in his new, hugely improved version.

But here’s what happened next, in 2005. I hadn’t written a novel in some time, and owed the world and myself the fourth and final novel in a quartet of which the first three volumes had been published a while back. I had taken two quite separate 300-page stabs at this final volume, and abandoned both. So I thought I would warm up with some other story, just to get myself going. Do a bit of throat-clearing. Some throat-clearing: seven novels (none of them the final book of the unfinished quartet) followed in short order, within a year.

My diary shows that on May 8 I completed the book and lyrics for the ​musical, which I’d begun on April 17, and then began a novel on May 9 and finished it on July 4, began another on July 5 and finished it on July 30, began the 700-page Who Was That Lady? (temporarily called A Perfect Innocent, and originally That Was No Lady), on July 31 and finished it four months and eight days later on December 8, began Justice (published last year) on December 9 and finished it on January 15, 2006, began a fifth novel, called Personal Assistant, on January 16 and finished it on February 25, and began no.6, Clear to Kill, on February 26, at one point writing it alongside no. 7, As An Unperfect Actor On The Stage, while I researched Britain’s wartime Special Operations Executive​ for Clear To Kill​, and completed Clear To Kill on March 29 and As An Unperfect on May 8. As the year came around, ​May 8 ​proved to be​ a Monday, the day of the Sony Awards for which the BBC had generously flown me from New York to London in honor of my nomination in the radio drama category (doubly generously since I didn’t win).

While I visited British friends and relatives over the preceding weekend I saw the May 8 anniversary coming at me as I scribbled the final pages of the last book on trains and in spare bedrooms, and I slowed down, as if coasting into a petrol station on the last fumes of my tank, so as to write the very end of book 7 on the 365th day (I had thought it would turn out to be six books but another one popped out unexpectedly at the end, the last puppy of the litter), to lend a neatness or completeness to the whole surprising venture.​ It certainly should have felt like the last fumes of inspiration, but instead I felt oddly wired, like a marathon runner who both longs to stop, as he or she breasts the tape​, but who also feels programmed, almost compelled, to continue — the body no longer able to grasp the idea of ‘stop!’. I felt as if I could go on indefinitely (I had no subject in mind, but neither had I always had one when launching myself at each new novel, the day after finishing the previous one), and ​all that prevented me from​ starting another book was a sense of the pointlessness of filling up the void with novels, especially w​hen I had no agent and no publisher (they’d melted away since my last creative burst, years before)​, no public,​ and no expectations​ of any of these​. Indeed it’s only after nearly 10 years of fruitless search for an agent, let alone a publisher, that the books have begun to see​ the light of day. And thank goodness I still only have seven to offer​ at this point​, rather than seventy.

As I reread what I’ve written here, I suppose it might be striking that I simply ‘finished’ each book, in a matter of weeks, instead of proceeding to a second draft, and an editing process helped along by readers. Instead I edited as I went along (contrary to universally recommended practice), since I find that all changes made after 72 hours – whether days, weeks or years later — disimprove as much as they improve, and although my rule of thumb is that I find half the new edits worth keeping and the rest no better than the first draft, I’m soon no longer sure which​ are the good edits and which the bad. Other people’s edits are no better. ​So I simply write, look back a few pages at what’s recently written, fiddle with them a bit and keep on going. ​During the 12 months ​in which I wrote the 7 novels ​I was teaching university classes fulltime; my writing time was before breakfast every day, plus all day Wednesday, my free day.

​My good friend and wonderful writer, Rose Tremain, has urged me to write more slowly. I would; I’d love to; but I’ve forgotten how. As I always say, it’s not at all like eating or walking more slowly. As the words arrive — in my case not torrentially but certainly steadily, and without a block of any kind — if you don’t use them you lose them. When I reread any of the seven books, I have no sense of wishing I could polish, cut or add to them; it’s not that I think they’re wonderful, let alone perfect; to me they read like the best I could do, and I still feel I would make them worse, and would have made them worse at the time, by re-working them. As some Americans so stoically say: it is what it is.

As you’ll see from the diary chronology above, I let no grass grow under my feet between novels. Finish one then start another the next day, was my only rule. Get up, take a shower (nothing like running water to stimulate inspiration — the Greeks knew this and connected water with creativity), sit down and work — 6:00 or so — until time to make breakfast. I often had no idea where I was headed with the new book, but as I mentioned this wasn’t always the case; although none of the books are remotely connected, several times I picked up old, long since discarded threads. I like to think the Maker might have granted me an entirely new one if I’d needed it, but I also wanted to take some of those lost threads, those loose ends of ideas faultily begun or never begun at all, just toyed with, and try and tie a bow at last. The first of the seven was entirely fanciful, although I’d always wanted to write an unsolved murder story (and the book turns out to be full of them, as well as a whole contingent of unapprehended murderers, each with a single, separate murder to his, her or its name); the second picked up a book I’d drafted and abandoned ten years earlier — I decided not to even look at the first draft but completely re-invent it, which happily provided me with the ending I could never previously find; the third was Who Was That Lady?, which grew from purest fancy after seeing a man at a party whose noble head and whose profession — I was told he was a psycho-therapist, but of no school known to my informant – led me to the alarming project of inventing an entirely new form of therapy (I’d written so many Freudian or post-Freudian therapists, those sweetly absurd people – enough!), which was all I had to go on when I began; book 4, Justice, was pure invention again, but launched by a sentence I read in a newspaper review  of a book about 20th century European history, which mentioned that five years after World War Two, every single Italian police chief elected under Fascism was still in place (this sentence was all I had to start with, but I also had Italy and my childhood there, like a perfume sealed into a bottle and never opened onto my writing before); then came Personal Assistant — a chance meeting on a Polish bus gave me the basis for the story — and Clear To Kill — a story about wartime assassination which I’d been longing to write for years – and As An Unperfect Actor On The Stage, a story about amnesia (I’d always longed to do an amnesia story) for which I only had the location and the opening instant. Personal Assistant took flight from the tale told me on the bus by a young Polish boy who’d visited America; Clear To Kill I’ve always wondered if I stole from some forgotten movie — I’d been longing to tell it — about an assassin parachuted into enemy territory, who becomes more and more sure that his intended victim is in fact innocent and that the traitor he’s supposed to kill is someone else — but he goes ahead and kills the intended victim anyway, as he is insistently and repeatedly instructed to do; and for ‘As An Unperfect,’ set once again in Italy, all I had was a view – blazing sunlight, a thunderous sea and a beach before you, and behind you a cliff face and houses, steep and claustrophobically close, and no memory of who you are and how you got there.

(Very different stories, each one. My actor parents always talked about ‘coming out of a new box,’ every time, surprising your audience and yourself, although as actors they had less control over what that new incarnation might be, and usually had to wait for an interestingly surprising offer; their generation of actors rarely initiated projects. The only thing preventing a writer, painter or sculptor from changing direction is past success and the fear of disappointing the audience. I count myself fortunate – I’ve never had enough success to encounter this fear, and now, even if I was ‘discovered,’ I’m too set in my contrarian ways. Besides, consciously ‘branded’ art surely isn’t art at all.)

With no reputation to potentially damage, I simply forged on during that year. Even when I already had a start, an Ariadne-thread leading me into the labyrinth of a novel, I still had to charge in like a Theseus unafraid of the distant bellowing of the minotaur that devours writers and their stories in mid-stride. Charge in; hesitate and you might never enter. So I left no day without pages written, for 365 days, without, it seems, an entirely wrong turn. And without drying up. This plenitude had in a sense been in store, perfectly preserved, freeze-dried – it was years since I’d written a novel, my true calling. Years spent teaching and establishing a financial base for parenthood (I’ve helped to raise seven children). The story-telling appetite was banked up, the muscles rested, ready. I do look back at that writing year in some wonderment. But at the time it was just a daily rite, mysteriously accomplished without seeming to encountering an obstacle. The books vary from the farcical to the dark, each time changing key, changing tone as radically as possible before beginning a new novel.

And surely some infinitely forgiving guardian angel was looking down on me; just as this or another angel looked down on me this summer, as I rode 10,000 miles on my Harley, seven-and-a half weeks traversing the country from Woodstock to the Pacific coast and back (the southern route going out and the northern route coming back), without harmful incident. My riding companion, on his own Harley, was blessed by the same good fortune. (It was of course an indescribable, magical feast of a trip, a feast for eyes and smell above all, and my website, careyharrison.net, carries a blog-report of the entire trip, with daily photographs; it’s under ‘The Latest,’ if you scroll all the way back to the start of the blog.) My lifelong good fortune prevailed on the road, as it did ten years ago at the computer, tapping out my litter of seven puppies.

Reality did finally take over, in the form of refusals from literary agent after agent (including both my previous agents, the US-based and the British). Good fortune dried up. I think the total number was between 80 and 90 agent-rejections until I found my dear current agent, and publisher-rejections galore, certainly 50 or more. One for the record books, perhaps. This is where patient persistence is the only option (despair is fortunately not in my vocabulary), and has been all my life. Eventually the gloomy weather breaks and the sun shines through. I do recognize that by the time most writers have been treated to even a fraction of the rejections I’ve endured (similarly 30 years ago, until I finally found a publisher with faith in me), they’ve fatally fallen out of love with their rejected work, and take up something else. (The accordion, I usually say. It’s a forgiving instrument.) Rejected authors often end up hating and destroying their work, when enough people have rebuffed it; unrequited passion goes soon cold when your soul is laid so bare. But I never had anything else I wanted to do with my life, other than write. This has turned out to be a blessing, despite the lean times. The publisher who had faith in me, 30 years ago, soon retired from publishing, sick of the industry and its decay into dumbness. After three books in the UK — only the long one, Richard’s Feet, found a home here in the US — I went into hibernation, to emerge 10 years ago with my cicada-children, all seven of them. (There was also one more early novel, Freud, which derived from a BBC TV series I wrote – the series wound up on Masterpiece Theater — that Penguin published in Britain, and Viking in America, supposedly. I’ve never seen a copy of the Viking edition.  A colleague once purchased a copy of the Penguin version in the airport at Alexandria — the one in Egypt. So it goes with our orphaned children. They wind up anywhere.)

And now the novels are coming out into the light at last, thanks to a small imprint called Dr. Cicero Books, Brazilian in provenance, which opened an American office and publishes wonderful, strange, challenging fiction and poetry.

Patience, says the Maker in the head. Pazienza. It will come around.

Thank you, mighty Maker. I’m grateful and at peace. And now… now I thought that with the publication of Who Was That Lady? I could take a back seat as far as huge projects were concerned. If I’d listened harder I would have heard the Maker’s laughter.

As I set out on the monstrous bike ride, a monstrous novel-project arrived from the Maker. 1500 pages long; five entirely separate 300 page novels, each one set at a different historical period and in a different country, with different characters, but all five novels gradually bleeding into each other — not quite in a David Mitchell mode, but more alarming, morphing slowly into a finally 120 pages of pure carnival.

More of this next time.

Carey Harrison is British-​​born, the son of the stage and screen actors Sir Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, and was raised in America. He has divided his life between the UK and the US, writing and teaching on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently the artistic director of the Woodstock Players theater company, and is Professor of English at the City University of New York. Harrison is the author of close to two hundred plays for stage, radio, film and television, and 16 novels; his work has won numerous literary prizes and been translated into thirteen languages.

If you have followed this series of reports from a writer’s life and working practice, you may have wondered – during the longish pause since the last installment – whether the Maker in my head had fallen silent for a while. It happens. At any rate I understand that it happens, in many if not most writers’ lives. Not, for better or worse, in mine. (Maybe my Maker could do with a vacation. It doesn’t get one. Or maybe a Maker never needs a vacation, but I’m the one who needs one. I never feel in need of a rest, though: my Maker-in-the-head and I are a happily tireless team, two oxen, as it were, pulling the plough at the same steady, unyielding tread.) So: no, no creative pause, rather a relentless, blissful output which has left no time for dispatches, till now.

During the summer, The Woodstock Players premiered three new full-length plays of mine, Hitler’s Therapist, I Won’t Bite You, and Rex & Rex; my new novel, Justice, was published in June by Dr. Cicero Books, and the British edition, from Skyscraper Publications, was launched in London in July. During the rehearsals of the plays, I felt inspired – rehearsals now seem to have this effect on me, year in year out – to write new plays, and I produced three full-length ones, I am Your Own for Ever, Alice in Rehab, and, begun during the performances of I Won’t Bite You, in which on some nights I played the wordless walk-on part of a brutal prison guard, and completed in recent months, my latest effort: My Name is Peter Van Wyck.

I also began a new novel, largely to try and stem the pointless outpouring of novels and plays – I say to stem it, but really only to slow it down, because there is no stemming it altogether – by setting myself the task of writing a novel set in tribal Afghanistan (the book is called Warlord), an environment I know absolutely nothing about and which I’m finding it mercifully hard to research.

And much of my potential working time (shoehorned in around my fulltime teaching) is now claimed by my editorial functions at Dr. Cicero Books, for whom I am editing a number of new novels by a wonderful range of authors, as well as copy-editing my own novel, Who Was That Lady?, due out in June. Re-acquainting myself with this book has been the most gratifying experience of my writing life – a span now closing in on 50 years. My fellow-editor at Dr. Cicero has long been telling me that That Lady is the best thing I’ve done, and I’m discovering – re-reading your own book after an interval is usually like reading a totally strange new book written by someone else (which in an exact sense is always true, since we are scarcely the same from day to day, let alone year to year!) – I’m discovering that I (more precisely the Maker, not I) wrote a book at the very pitch of my capacity for invention, both on the small scale of sentence-by-sentence wit and on the larger structural level of plot. The book is long – it’ll be close to 700 pages – which makes the consistent quality and the formal coherence even more surprising to me. I wrote a kindred book 25 years ago, called Richard’s Feet, which achieved for me whatever standing I have in the literary world: a small standing, but the book won the literary prize which was at the time the second most valuable (in terms of cash) in the UK, and the praise it garnered helped find me the jobs I obtained at American universities and, finally, the post as Professor of English that I’ve held at the City University of New York for what will soon be 18 years. Richard’s Feet was a kindred book to Who Was That Lady? insofar as it described the arc of a life through many adventures and several countries; both books turned out the same length, around 280,000 words (That Lady is a few pages longer than the Feet) which, since none of my other books are even half as long, makes them seem like the twin towers (alas a perilous metaphor but inescapable) of my output, separated by a quarter of a century. Richard’s Feet was the book I learnt on; learnt to write a long novel on, as one might learn horse-riding on the forgiving back of a particular horse: I took 12 years to complete it. It was preceded by a short novel, Cley, which I adapted from a screenplay of mine that almost reached the screen but never did (it was cast, the hotels were booked, the director prepared, and then the money vanished). The Feet — still available online, incidentally, in second-hand copies from Amazon and other sites such as abe.com – was a sequel to Cley; I knew it would be long; that was all I knew when I began it. The 12 years it took owed part of this span to a lack of time, as I worked on other jobs, teaching and script-writing. The places in which the book was written, ranging across the world from Britain to California to the Far East, make a travelogue in itself, and in these places a few months or even a year purchased by teaching were dedicated to the book. I think the actual writing probably occupied five years out of the 12. Often I doubted I would get it done; and would anyone care if I did?

The Maker in the head cared. I cared, and for the writer to whom writing is a calling the reward that a good paragraph brings is always enough to sustain you through the tedium, the shame, the self-loathing, the embarrassment and the disappointment that learning a writer’s trade bring with it, as you stare at what you’ve put on the page. But a good paragraph! If that doesn’t clothe you as nothing else does; if that doesn’t give you a skin a last, an identity – giving you mere pleasure is nothing: I say if that doesn’t give you a skin to turn the shapeless mess of your personality into a person who has lived and returned to tell the tale, you’ll never stay the course of a writing life. That may sound like the bad news – I mean the quantity of boredom, frustration & self-disgust you may have to weather on the long road to a true voice – but the good news is that if the good paragraph rewards you as richly as in my description of it, above, there is no pleasure in the world like it. It is the world, because it allows you entry, allows you to live, to believe in your own life. If the good paragraph gives you no less than this, you will probably persevere. And if you persevere you will ­– I say you will, not you might – become the writer you want to be. Whether anyone else likes what you produce is another matter altogether, and not your concern. The approval of others, whether it’s your mother or the Nobel prize jury, is still nothing compared to the intrinsic reward a good paragraph brings – if you’re truly a writer.

I persevered. Richard’s Feet was my reward. And now here’s the new monster-book, its twin. This one didn’t take me 12 years. It took 4 months, almost to the day. Ridiculously little time; but that same year I produced 6 other novels as well, and I was on a roll, to put it mildly. Still teaching, but squeezing in writing time: before breakfast, and on Wednesday, my free day, all day. And I was ready. The work was ready, simply waiting to emerge at a turn of the spigot. I’d being paying my dues as a practitioner and student of the craft during the intervening 25 years since the Feet, and during the 12 years of writing that book, and the dozen years of writing that preceded it. Close to fifty years of seeking to understand how to craft a narrative. The Maker in the head, a very Saturn of a schoolmaster – severe, requiring patience and hard work and a preparedness not only to wait for worldly reward but perhaps resign yourself to never receiving any, and then, only then, rewarding you – smiled at last. I was ready for him, and he for me.

Similar in length and scope, Who Was That Lady? is a different book from Richard’s Feet in many respects. Both are first person narrations – hard to sustain for 600 pages and still intrigue and enchant the reader – and both narrators are, in differing ways and to differing extents, fools and dupes. (What else can a narrator be? An all-knowing narrator is an utter bore.) But Richard Thurgo in the Feet is a dark, violent, serious person (more fool he), while Roley Watkins in That Lady is a merry soul, not unlike Bertie Wooster in P.G.Wodehouse’s wonderful novels. Poor Roley just has no Jeeves to sort out his life and deflect the interfering Aunt Agathas of his world. Roley is part of a duo of psycho-therapists who invent a new form of therapy that sweeps the world. But of course… therapist, heal thyself! It doesn’t help Roley to see his own life clearly. And whereas Richard’s Feet is largely set in Germany, permitting me to explore my fascination with Germany, from which my mother escaped before the Holocaust could claim her, and the German language itself; and as Justice, my newly published novel, allowed me to explore the Italy of my childhood, and the gorgeous Italian language which was one of its gifts to me; so Who Was That Lady? offers me a narrator raised in Paris by an adoptive Parisian mother, a background which at last let surface the French which has been my constant sub-text in the head since my education in New York at the French Lycee there – all my life, French has run under my words like a sound track audible only to me, but ensuring that everything I say feels like an instantaneous translation from a French original (it was my first school language) and I – the self you see and hear — one of those bewilderingly quick United Nations interpreters barely a syllable behind the speaker. Roley Watkins also spends six years in the Far East, during the 1980s, where I sojourned while writing Richard’s Feet, at the same period – now providing not only material for That Lady but a hand stretched from one book to the other across the two poles of my working life like the miniature, horizontal lightning of a crackling electrical current.

So much for my current editorial life. Back to the Maker’s apparent delight in force-feeding me new plays. (I certainly don’t need to produce new novels, since after Who Was That Lady I have five more due out between now and 2019. This is why I’m looking to the impossible project that is Warlord to choke the novel-springs and limit the flow. In reality this may be a doomed strategy; but my editing duties for Dr. Cicero Books may do the job.) I’ve still got yet another play completed last year and waiting in the wings, due for the Woodstock Players in September: this is Nero at the Movies, a play about what happens when the Emperor Nero gets hold of a movie camera and decides to film his murderous life and career to a script commissioned from the playwright, Seneca, using his imperial court as the actors. It’s a play that, unlike man of my recent ones, requires a huge cast. 28 characters; cast of 24, This should be a lark, and an appalling task (getting even 6 people together at the same time is hard enough, in our busy lives).

The first of the recent plays to be born was I Am Your Own For Ever – Iago’s words to Othello in Shakespeare’s play. This one came out with a bewildering sense of certainty, even by my Maker’s standards. Remember, please, those of you who’ve read earlier installments of this column; and be aware, please, newcomers: of the origins of this ‘Maker’ phrase. I have very little sense of guiding my own fictions – most if not all writers have this experience, and surrender to it in time even if they began, as I did, as would-be control freaks in their own creative life (a futile project, thank goodness – how dull and limited our fictions would be if we wrote them ourselves!); once I’d surrendered to the Maker in the head (in the spirit, really, and in the heart, but finally, as their interpreter, in the head) I discovered who I was, what my voice was. I say I discovered it, but I don’t really know, even now, who this person is, or these various persons, responsible for the work published and performed in my name. (I wish it weren’t in my name, and that all work – mine and that of anyone else who feels as I do — were announced as simply being by the Maker.) My knowledge of anonymity is entirely through creative work. Before I surrendered to it, what I knew of self was a wrestle to prize selfhood from chaos, which is a form of anonymity but not a very comforting one. I Am Your Own, which the Maker gave me at such bewildering speed even at my current accelerated rate, is a complex dance for 12 characters. It squeezed itself into the world during two to three weeks of brief moments here or there.

And what about re-writing, I hear you cry. Don’t you ever edit? When I was learning the craft I spent forever editing and re-working – that’s what learning is, after all. After 50 years, for better or for worse, you reach for the tools and the wood – I once watched an elderly carpenter at work and the wood appeared to flow into his hands as if by telekinesis or the work of a friendly poltergeist – you reach for them and they’re there along with what the Maker wants you to do with them. For 48 hours after drafting a passage it’s still molten and you return to it (I always do) to see what can be improved, amplified, or cut. After 48 hours it’s set – set, not in the sense that it can’t be improved (anything can) but because you can no longer judge from inside the ongoing inertia of the work with its ongoing search for the next moment. You might say that it’s precisely from outside that immersion in the forward movement of a narrative that you can judge best. Not in my experience. We live in a very puritanical culture, where editing is regarded as infinitely superior to the errors of a spontaneous original. Of course: who would want to privilege error? But there’s another way to look at it. ‘Error’ is in fact a part not only of spontaneity but of a true creative process; strictly speaking there is no such thing as error. (Allen Ginsberg: ‘First thought, best thought.’ But our current culture is deeply opposed, even bitterly opposed, to such an idea, and prefers what it takes to be a proper disciplinary canon of procedures, applying industrial no-fault models and algebraic or engineering models to a process – the creation of an art-work – that when it is true to beauty is obstinately irregular, asymmetric, incommensurate, incongruent, ill-disciplined and unexpected, conforming only to the rhythm of the human imagination. Truth to beauty cannot be schooled; it can be learnt, by the soul’s exposure to beautiful art. The rest is freedom.)

And bear in mind that the greatest danger of returning to a narrative work-in-progress to view it ‘objectively,’ after giving it some ‘distance,’ is that contrary to what is universally believed, there is more objectivity in the initial forwards-moving wave of the creative impulse – the first draft – than there will ever be again. Only atop that wave, and only once, does the creator hold in head and heart and soul the rhythm that is the true, objective, criterion by which he or she best decides when to move off a topic and on to the next. As in boxing, it’s not the big punch that lands the knockout, but the rhythm of punches; when a reader praises a line, it’s usually because the reader was seduced by the preceding lines, not the line itself; and in returning to edit a passage, most writers are tempted to remove fluff, faff, pudding, triviality, and unnecessary mess, leaving only the jewels. But how little objectivity there is in this! Jewels are only jewels in the light of their setting; joints work not by bone alone but by bone separated by cartilage; and, most ‘objective’ of all considerations, the economy or dynamics or reading requires regular rest-moments within a paragraph, when maximum attention is allowed to lapse. And here’s the problem: it is beyond the wit of man or woman to add deliberate neutralities – which would be a truly ‘objective’ proceeding – even though this is always imperative in creating beauty. The only time such ‘rest’-notes come naturally to the creator’s mind is in atop the wave, creating the original rhythm. Fail to trust this and you will undermine even the very best blooms in your paragraph by trimming to the chase, only to find the prey, beauty, vanished.

But to return to the play I wrote with a title borrowed from Iago. Writing it was a bizarre experience: I began to realize that I was writing the very play I should have written almost 50 years ago, the very play I would like to have written immediately following my first play – but didn’t know how. I couldn’t have written it then. And it seems so sweet to me now to have been gifted with it at this (relatively) late stage. Never too late. But most surprising all the same. In subject matter – the dance of multiple romances – and in tone, it is exactly the play I might have written in 1966 if I’d had the capacity. I’m happy that I didn’t, because things come best in their own due time, and premature ability is often a prelude to premature decline, unless you’re Mozart.

The impetus for the story of I Am Your Own For Ever derives from a real event. Shortly after graduating from college in the UK, my first play was seen and noted by the National Theatre, and I was offered a job there which included auditioning actors for small parts in the resident company. One of my first picks was Clifford, a lovely, reedy Welsh actor with a touch of Sir John Gielgud. Clifford, little did I know it, was on the verge of a breakdown which arrived when he was carrying a spear – literally – in Laurence Olivier’s celebrated Othello. Clifford, standing at the back of the stage while Othello (Olivier) and Iago (Frank Finlay) played one of their most impassioned scenes, suddenly decided that they were in fact talking about him: about Clifford, not about domestic matters on the island of Cyprus. He walked downstage and stood between Othello and Iago, so that they would realize the game was up and that he, Clifford, knew what they were really discussing. Olivier and Finlay realized nothing of the sort, of course, but moved away, startled and bewildered. Clifford followed them and once more stood in between them. The actors moved to the other side of the stage, attempting to continue the scene. Clifford followed. Finally someone had to remove Clifford from the stage; and someone else – it was me – was deputed (deputized, indeed) to take Clifford home. Clifford never returned to the stage, at the National or elsewhere. I remained in touch with him; he required lengthy treatment and, when I last saw him, was well medicated and living a life of improbable amorous complexity. In 2012 I had finally begun a long-meditated novel which employed Clifford’s deliciously bizarre onstage breakdown as a starting point (and pursued the central character’s life in directions of my own devising, rather than Clifford’s, although still distantly inspired by my old friend). This spring I suddenly realized – and how absurd it seemed to me that I should ever have missed this! – that what I should be writing was not a novel called I Am Your Own For Ever but a play. I had the opening scene, after all: a production of Othello. For reasons you will discover if and when we stage the play locally, or if you read the play (it’s the only as yet unperformed play in the second volume of my new plays, published this year), this scene from Othello occurs twice more, in different guises and with a changing cast, during I Am Your Own For Ever, and theater itself is the ruling metaphor of the play even when it is not the play’s setting.

If I had been able to write the play in 1966 (or rather ’67, following Clifford’s quietly spectacular public meltdown), would it have changed my life and career? Possibly. But catching a different bus in the Waterloo Road, at any time in my life, might have changed it just as much, or as little. Why even speculate? And my life has been so fortunate that it seems blasphemous, to me, to toy with alternative pasts. In any case, the plays I wrote after my first effort were all staged to enthusiastic reviews, and when my stage playwriting career faltered, in the ‘70s, it was replaced by a scriptwriting career that lasted thirty years and enabled me to help raise seven children. Could one ask for more? At long last I returned to writing for the stage, having meantime become a novelist, my dearest dream, and out popped, among other plays, this perhaps stillborn child of my imagination of four decades earlier. Part of it is in blank verse; as are parts of The Emperor Nero; as were parts of Magus, the play with which The Woodstock Players was launched in 2010. I’m not sure I could have brought any of this off, or would have dared to try, when I began as a playwright.

After I Am Your Own For Ever I wrote, as I mentioned earlier, two more full-length plays this year, and both have a relationship to I Won’t Bite You, my formidably long, scary, challenging and exhausting one-woman play so brilliantly performed by Holly Graff this summer. Simultaneously, the play was being rehearsed in the UK by the British actress, Tara Dominick; Tara decided to drop out – and the production itself expired as a result – after finding the material too brutal. Brutal it is, featuring two monstrous cases of sustained abuse, inflicted in turn on a woman and, many years later, her grand-daughter, Dorothea Farber, who tells the tale of both horrors in I Won’t Bite You, and who has, in her turn, become a killer. I promised to write Tara a less forbidding one-woman show, and I did: this is Alice in Rehab, a comedy set in a lunatic asylum (I know – another charming prospect, right? – but it really is a much lighter piece than Bite You) and featuring a woman who has surrounded herself with a gallery of imaginary friends and relations.

The final play, My Name is Peter Van Wyck, that demanded to be written this year, was born during the performances of I Won’t Bite You while, as I mentioned earlier, I was sitting offstage waiting to make my entrance as a non-speaking character (you might almost say a ‘spear-carrier,’ as poor dear Clifford literally was in Othello all those years ago). Listening to the terrible tales Dodie Farber has to tell in the play, and especially listening to Holly Graff’s superbly vivid and caustic rendering of them, was almost more than my spirit could bear (the tales, though purely imaginary, seemed singularly real to me as their creator), and the only way I found that I could stand to be there was to write my way through them, listening for inspiration from Holly’s words but also dreaming up another story. In I Won’t Bite You, the perpetrator of the first acts of sustained abuse (these occur in Holland during World War II) is a young man called Peter van Wyck. In Bite You he is never caught and punished, although he is seen briefly again, years later, before vanishing once more. Into what future? I felt called to write his story, and My Name is Peter Van Wyck is that story, narrated by the Jesuit priest van Wyck ultimately becomes, after half a lifetime of horrific adventures. The men and women who partake in van Wyck’s life and dreams are played by one woman and one man taking many parts, much as Freud believed: that our life is a shadow play reviving the ‘primal scene’ of baby, mother and father, over and over.

And now? I’m hoping that the Maker in the head, while puzzling over my Warlord novel like a tiger with an indestructible, infuriating heavy-rubber toy that will not yield to his teeth, will morph – at least part-time – into the Editor in the head, so that I can continue to devote my attention to the books and plays (by other people) that I’m preparing for publication, as I hope I will be continuing to do for many years to come. My own output needs no addition. (When I completed the 7 novels, none of them connected, on the 365th day, in 2005, I felt there was no reason not to simply continue, and produce seven a year to the end of my life. But what would be the point, I reflected. No publisher will match that output. And a handful of good novels is as much as any writer need aspire to. Two is ample; one, indeed, will do.) As it is, I have 5 plays awaiting production and 6 novels due to be published. I have not so much outlived myself (though maybe that too) as outwritten myself. And very pleasant it is. I am the tiger with a heavy-rubber toy – but also a whole freezer-full of genuine meat to keep me supplied well into the future.

May that future be no less kind to you, dear Reader!

CH

Carey Harrison is British-​​born, the son of the stage and screen actors Sir Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, and was raised in America. He has divided his life between the UK and the US, writing and teaching on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently the artistic director of the Woodstock Players theater company, and is Professor of English at the City University of New York. Harrison is the author of close to two hundred plays for stage, radio, film and television, and 16 novels; his work has won numerous literary prizes and been translated into thirteen languages. 

Woodstock is justly proud of its reputation as the most famous small town in the world. For the most part this title glances back at Woodstock’s headlining past. But there are performers here who keep that historic glow shining bright, and Sharon Breslau is one.

Take it from me: Sharon should be on Broadway; she should be on TV; she should be a nationally known name. But fame is a roulette wheel, and it hasn’t yet landed on Sharon’s number. She’s been polishing her writer’s and comedienne’s art, and we have the privilege of enjoying it as one of America’s better-kept secrets. Not for long, if there’s any justice. But catch her while she’s still ours — that’s a special pleasure we can enjoy.

There’s a teasing, defiant saying, in the theater, that where acting is concerned there are no small parts, only small actors; it’s no less true that there are no lesser arts, only lesser artists, and in the hands of genius, cabaret becomes as miraculous an art as opera or mime. It takes sublime mimicry, shameless daring, and exquisite wit to hold an audience for an entire evening with quick-sketch characters that plumb to the depths of human behavior. Sharon Breslau belongs with monologists like Whoopi Goldberg and Tracy Ullman as masters of the genre. In truth, it takes more than wit and daring to bring off what these actors achieve: it takes something akin to possession. Breslau’s art is at its best when unconnected to drama or to revue material, at its best when it aims for no punch-line, no narrative surprises and no connections to the other brilliant shards of reality she conjures up, but is simply a starburst of outrageous, unselfconscious character, observed with a candor that is fond and brutal at the same time. The monolog that closes the first half of her show, an inhabitant of St. Mark’s Place leaning out of her window and commenting on life below, is the gem of the evening.

Sharon’s riffs arise out of a shamanic need to be other people in their most alarming nature; the impersonations reveal an impulse to both exorcise a horror at the absurdity of others and embrace it as intimately our own in order to belong, in a world of human beings horribly familiar and unbearably strange to us. They are us, of course. Not for nothing does Breslau make many of her characters in this show orphans seeking or confessing adoption. This is of the essence of her inspiration: other people make us feel adopted, and Breslau’s work, her natural affinity, her genius, her compulsion, is all about turning the entire world into family, even its most alien members. Don’t miss this show — or any of Sharon Breslau’s shows. You will come out, having laughed yourself silly, feeling reconciled to humanity.

Gloriously Naked & Flailing plays at Byrdcliffe Theater on Friday and Saturday, July 26 and 27 at 8 p.m  |  Sunday, July 28th at 5 p.m.

Call 845–679-7900 for reservations.
www.performingartsofwoodstock.org/

More about Sharon Breslau & Gloriously Naked and Flailing

Carey Harrison is the Artistic Director of The Woodstock Players
www.iwontbiteyou.com
www.thewoodstockplayers.com