Love Stories: An Anniversary Post

My original intent in this post was to write about the thrilling week I've just spent discovering what for me might be the best book ever on writing and being a writer: About Writing: Seven Essays,Four Letters, and Five Interviews, by the noted science fiction and literary writer, critic, and teacher, Samuel R. Delany.

But it seems I'm going to be taking a leisurely, personal, even sentimental route to get to it. Because as a romance writer who's recently celebrated my fortieth wedding anniversary, I figure I'm entitled to say it by way of a little love story.

And as a romance writer who's also a literary theory groupie, I'm gonna begin that story with some thoughts about the romance genre, my best understanding of which comes from my mother, a fiercely energetic reader of mostly midlist literary fiction and mysteries.

A stalwart fan of my writing, Mom wasn't thrilled when I was about to be published in romance. (While as for my erotic, Molly Weatherfield books -- take it from me, there are certain things most of us will not want to share with close family members.) But in a brilliant flash of female and readerly intuition, she nonetheless gave me the most helpful overview of the field I was entering that I'd ever heard (and have yet to hear better, after years of podium speeches at rubber chicken romance writer luncheons).

"Well," she said, "I can understand the appeal of it. Because, after all, the most important story in my life has to have been the love story of how I met and married your dad."

Most important story in her life. What does it mean to have a story in your life? We might have many, but my guess is that for lots of us the love story might be the most important -- or at least the one most easily understood and valued as a story.

Because courtship (at least when it's successful) always seems to fall into narrative form, with irony, complications, surprises, artful turns, missed connections, and near total disasters before it all gets worked out (or before it becomes the work of having a life together).

I've heard romance writers say our genre is so popular because life is so difficult without stories. And while this might be true, to me it comes awfully close to saying that many women's lives are so awful that they need romance to compensate.

I'd put it differently. I think that part of being a woman at this time in human history is having that romance story at your core even if you don't read the romance novels. And even if (even better perhaps, if) you have a richness of other resources and activities in your life.

Because so much of adult life isn't -- nor should be -- story. Romance fiction, I think, is written in counterpoint to the tough, necessary, workaday, not-so-awful but awfully routine, redundant, and non-narrative parts of life. To remind us of how it feels to be at the center, to be heroine of an honest-to-God thrilling story. Thereby bringing us closer to the story we each carry around at our center.

The question is, I suppose, how you like your stories. Me being a nerdy sort, I like them slightly off center (and thanks again, Dear Author bloggers, for noticing).

Some of my favorite stories -- and favorite love stories -- are the edgy, marginal ones, hidden in plain sight like the lady's intriguing missive in Poe's "The Purloined Letter." It's one of the ways that the romance and mystery genres share... well, a genealogy, if you like. And it's why one of my favorite romances in fiction -- between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill in Jane Austen's Emma -- is one that's hidden in plain sight among the workings of the main protagonists' romance plot (and why Emma reads rather like an ancestor of a country house detective novel).

Bringing me at last to how I found what I think is the best how-to-write book ever.

Or at least to the romantically hidden-in-plain-sight way it was recommended to me, some years ago, by my husband Michael, at a reading at the bookstore he and I were part-owners of for many years.

The reader was -- to get back to the original subject of this post -- Samuel Delany, the brilliant and (as Michael aptly put it in his introduction), "the nicest titan of contemporary letters you will ever meet." It was certainly the nicest bookstore event in my memory -- a long, generous, intimate-feeling reading, q&a, and discussion -- and the hundred or so fans and friends who'd gathered seemed to think so too.

But the most important part of the evening for me, though I didn't know it at the time, was another part of Michael's introduction, where he said that if anyone needed one short piece of writing instruction, one couldn't do better than the essay "Of Doubts and Dreams," reprinted as an afterward to the book we'd come together to celebrate, Aye, and Gomorrah, a collection of Delany's short fiction.

I was very busy at the time -- working fulltime at my then day job as a computer programmer after waking up at 4 to make my deadline for rewrites on my first contracted romance novels. And so I didn't even consider checking out the essay until sometime after I submitted the rewritten version to my publisher, when I picked up the copy of Aye, and Gomorrah that was still floating around our bookshelves. (I love the physicality of books, how sometimes they to fall into your hands when you need them most. Someday I suppose I'll get an e-reader. Someday.)

Anyway, I opened to "Of Doubts and Dreams," read it through with profit and delight and... a dawning suspicion.

"You were addressing that comment to me, weren't you?" I asked Michael. "About what a terrific resource that Delany essay is?"

He nodded. "You were so busy," he said. "I didn't want to pressure you. But I knew you'd be able to use it."

Perhaps it's not one of those scenes in a Regency where the host suddenly raises his glass of champagne to declare his love, transforming a shy mouse of a girl into the toast of Mayfair with all the ton in attendance and applauding.

But it worked for me and still does. A little love story, hidden in plain view amid the everyday crush of working life.

While as for the "Of Doubts and Dreams" itself, more recently collected in the (for me) indispensible About Writing, let me, in the time and space I have left, introduce you to two of its points.

The first ought to be familiar to writers of historical fiction, though it's not surprising to hear it from a science fiction writer. Delany says he "filched" it from another science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon (and I'm not sure which of the words are Sturgeon's and which are Delany's). But for me it's news that stays news and maybe it'll help someone else out there as well:

To write an immediate and vivid scene... visualize everything about it as thoroughly as you can, from the dime-sized price sticker still on the brass switch plate, to the thumbprint on the clear pane in the unpainted wooden frame, to the trowel marks sweeping the ceiling's white, white plaster, and all in between. Then, do not describe it. Rather, mention only those aspects that impinge on your character's consciousness.... The scene the reader envisions... will not be the same as yours -- but it will be as vivid, detailed, coherent, and important for the reader as yours was for you.

Modestly, Delany sums this up as "don't overwrite." But perhaps from the bit I quoted you can imagine much he subsumes under each of the simple points that constitute this essay: don't overwrite, avoid thinness, and don't indulge cliche.

And perhaps you can see what an important thing his points add up to. Which is that there's a moment of writerly doubt that's the right moment of doubt, when you sense clutter or thinness or cliche. That writing happens at that moment when you make a choice to work to correct the clutter or thinness or cliche -- because it's those things that steer you away from the story you're really telling.

Which would be a terrible thing to do to the story at the center of a reader's life.

Your turn. Writers, tell me about what books or what advice has helped in your writing. (I notice it's National Novel Writing Month, where we're advised to put aside our doubts and hesitations -- does that approach work for any of you?)

And anybody who wants to share the shape of a love story -- please fell free.

Richard III & Anne Neville: a love story ??

I never noticed that this portrait does show one shoulder slightly higher than the other ... but I believe it's the wrong shoulder!

I don't know about you, but my introduction to Richard III and the Wars of the Roses, perpetuated for decades by the feuding dynasties of Lancaster and York, was through William Shakespeare. I was in high school at the time, and it would be years before I learned that the man rarely let the truth get in the way of a good story.


Now that historical research is part of my bailiwick, I'm having great fun re-reading Shakespeare's history plays and separating the factual details from the fanciful ones.


As I've been delving into Richard's life for my third work of historical nonfiction, currently titled ROYAL PAINS: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Bastards, and Bad Seeds, I thought it would be fun to revisit Shakespeare's text after having a "eureka!" moment during my research into Richard's actual, factual, life.

Richard had a happy marriage.

Who knew?

Consequently, Richard and Anne Neville didn't make it into my post some months ago about happy marriages in Shakespeare; but today they get their due.

And by the way, Richard was also not born with a crookback, or a withered arm. Or a full set of teeth, or shoulder-length hair. Nor did he gestate in his mother's womb for two years. These physical descriptions are the products of Tudor-era propaganda, most of which no rational person, at least in our day, would credit. And yet -- the humpback, and even the useless arm, have stuck with us, providing the image of a Yorkist Bob Dole (yes, I know Dole isn't hunchbacked). The truth appears to be that Richard had one shoulder (the left one) that was slightly higher than the other, and that he was frail and slight as a boy, in stark contrast to his handsome brother George, Duke of Clarence, who was a charismatic jock-type, or his 6' 4" oldest brother, Edward IV, a ladykiller, bon vivant and fashionisto until job security after 1471 turned him into a louche and lascivious gourmand and womanizer.

Richard did indeed have to push himself to overcome his frailness as a boy in order to excel in the usual manly pursuits of the era from martial skills to horsemanship, falconry, riding, and dancing. He did in fact know how to "caper nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute."

But back to Richard's marriage.

In Act I sc. ii of Shakespeare's Richard III, our protagonist, then Richard Duke of Gloucester, woos the widowed Anne Neville in exceedingly reptilian fashion. The encounter takes place on a London street in the middle of a funeral cortege. Anne was the younger daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, known as "the kingmaker" for his Karl Rove-like strategic (and martial) talents in securing England's throne for the Yorkist usurper Edward IV, then backing the man Edward had deposed, the Lancastrian Henry VI. Anne's older sister Isabel had, against the wishes of King Edward IV, married George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV and Richard, Duke of Gloucester.




Anne Neville's father, Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, known as "the kingmaker" -- hardly a St. Francis-type. This drawing is from a chronicle of the time known as the Rous Roll.


In Shakespeare's wooing scene, Anne has recently lost her husband, Prince Edward (the former Prince of Wales), son of the deposed (and subsequently assassinated) Henry VI. Edward fell in the battle of Tewksbury on May 14, 1471, which decimated the Lancastrian forces, ushering in years of Yorkist supremacy.

Anne Neville: note her long red hair

Throughout Richard III, the late Prince Edward is described as noble and virtuous. The real Edward of Lancaster was an arrogant 16-year-old jerk. He and Anne (b. June 11, 1456), who married him on December 13 1470 at the age of 14, had a purely dynastic marriage. And, contrary to Shakespeare's text, Richard (b. Oct. 2, 1452) did not personally stab him to death; During the battle Edward was in fact set upon in a melee. The identity of the man who delivered the fatal thrust remains unknown .

In their famous scene in Richard III, Anne is not lost for epithets to sling at her pursuer: "fiend," "dreadful minister of hell," "foul devil," "defused infection of a man," "devilish slave," "hedgehog," and "homicide." I think "defused infection of a man" is my personal favorite, though "hedgehog" comes in a close second. Richard's heraldic device was the boar, so maybe this is one of the ultimate inside jokes, a deliberately bitchy twisting that reduces a noble, if overbearing, creature to a woodland nuisance.

Here's a sample of Shakespeare's version of this highly unusual -- and exceedingly swift -- courtship:

GLOUCESTER: He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband,
Did it to help thee to a better husband.

LADY ANNE: His better doth not breathe upon the earth.

GLOUCESTER: He lives that loves thee better than he could.

LADY ANNE: Name him.

GLOUCESTER: Plantagenet.

LADY ANNE: Why, that was he.

GLOUCESTER: The selfsame name, but one of better nature.

LADY ANNE: Where is he?

GLOUCESTER Here.

[She spitteth at him]

Why dost thou spit at me?

LADY ANNE: Would it were mortal poison, for thy sake!

GLOUCESTER: Never came poison from so sweet a place.

LADY ANNE: Never hung poison on a fouler toad.Out of my sight! thou dost infect my eyes.

GLOUCESTER: Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine.

LADY ANNE: Would they were basilisks, to strike thee dead!

This spirited sparring comes from one of the finest, and most famous, scenes in Shakespeare's canon, and I can attest that it is also one of most fun to perform -- but it is pure fantasy.

England was more or less embroiled in civil war when Richard was a boy, thanks to the perpetually warring factions of Lancaster and York. He was sent out of harm's way to lodge with Warwick's family at Middleham, the earl's Yorkshire estate. Richard and Anne were childhood playmates, and as such, were always fond of each other.

In 1470, the reign of Richard's older brother Edward IV was being challenged by a conspiracy to reinstate Henry VI, fomented by none other than their own brother the Duke of Clarence (who had the dim and addlepated notion that he would eventually be crowned) and the Earl of Warwick, Clarence's father-in-law, and the pestilence in his ear.

Richard, still in his late teens, headed to command and secure the north for his brother Edward, but before departing he requested, and was granted, permission to wed Lady Anne Neville. When he returned from the north to claim his bride, he discovered that Clarence, husband of Anne's sister Isabel Neville had decided that Anne was his ward (Warwick having been killed at the Battle of Barnet on Easter Sunday). Clarence intended to claim Anne's portion of her inheritance for himself and Isabel and therefore had no desire to see her wed, even to his own kid brother.

In fact, it is Clarence who is the villain of this particular portion of the story. He disingenuously insisted to a confused and angry Richard that Anne was not in his household. After an exhaustive search, Richard found his betrothed in London disguised as a kitchen maid in the home of one of Clarence's friends. Like a true romantic hero, he rescued her and brought her to sanctuary at St. Martin le Grand, thereby shielding her from any efforts by Clarence and his adherents to nab or harm her. He assured Anne that there were no strings attached to his chivalry; his action in no way obligated her to go ahead with their marriage.

Insisting that he was the girl's guardian following the death of her father, Clarence ultimately consented to permit Richard to wed Anne on the condition that Richard inherit none of her estates.

Anne and Richard were cousins; in order to legally wed they required a papal dispensation overlooking their consanguinity. But having finally secured permission from his family to marry Anne, Richard was too impatient to wait for the Pope's paperwork to arrive. Instead, on May 14, 1472, political expedience being as pressing as passion, he claimed his beloved from St. Martin le Grand and they were wed on the spot. The bride was one month shy of her 16th birthday. The groom was 19 (and he'd already fathered two children by then; I don't know the mother[s]' name[s].)

When was the last time you saw a production of Richard III where the characters were played by actors young enough to look like teenagers?! I'm betting never.

The couple --who were genuinely in love, at least according to Richard's eminent twentieth-century biographer Paul Murray Kendall -- immediately set off for Wensleydale castle, far from any of their grasping relatives. They had only one child, a son named Edward born in 1473, whose health was always delicate and often prevented him from traveling with his parents. He was invested as Prince of Wales on September 8, 1483, but he died during the spring of 1484 at the age of 11. Richard and Anne were inconsolable, and it was said that the boy's death hastened her own demise.

Unlike Shakespeare's plot, in which Richard is ultimately suspected of poisoning Anne in order to wed his niece, Elizabeth of York, Anne developed consumption, the same disease that killed her older sister Isabel. Wasting away from grief and illness, she died on March 16, 1485, a little more than five months before Richard met the sharp end of a sword at Bosworth Field on August 22.

Richard still remains an enigma to us, a product of the violence of his times; a loyal brother and talented administrator, but unquestionably he had blood on his hands. In Shakespeare's "defense," he based his history play on the Tudor-era writing of chroniclers Edward Hall, Raphael Holinshed, and Thomas More. The Bard of Avon was in fact incorporating the history of Richard's life, as he (and his audiences) knew it. It would be centuries before much of the 16th c. propaganda would be exploded. And yet there were enough eyewitnesses to Richard's conduct to confirm that he was indeed a ruthless man. The fifteenth and sixteenth-century accounts of his life, while they may be somewhat agendist, do contain many truthful details about his actions. And numerous record rolls still exist that, when analyzed, point to the fact that he was just as ambitious and grasping as any of his adversaries, or for that matter, as any of his relations and in-laws.

Still ... a happy marriage. Richard III. Who'd-a-thunk it?

Have you ever discovered that the truth about a specific event thoroughly contradicted what you [thought you] knew about it? Would you let the truth get in the way of a good story? How far would you go, as a writer? And as a reader, how much tinkering with the truth will you accept in your historical fiction if the plot, action, and characters are complex and compelling?

Can the Snood Save Christmas?

What a surprise---I checked out The Wall Street Journal Yesterday to see the headline in the style section: Can the Snood Save Christmas?

Really????? The SNOOD?

Now as a medieval writer, the snood conjures something entirely different from what was shown in the style section. I was more than surprised to see the tube-like scarf I used to wear on the ski slopes take a new form into this massive, blanket-like head-scarf…a hot fashion item, according the Journal, that designers are determined to foist upon us during the economic down-turn, because it represents an apparel item that is new, that we don’t already have.

Naturally, the History Hoyden in me drove me to do to a little research about snoods:
From the all web-encompasing summary source, Wikepedia: A snood is a type of headgear, historically worn by women over their long hair. In the most common form it resembles a close-fitting hood worn over the back of the head. The band covers the forehead or crown of the head, goes behind the ears and under the nape of the neck. A sack of sorts dangles from this band, covering and containing the fall of long hair gathered at the back of the head. A snood is sometimes made of solid cloth, but sometimes of loosely knitted yarn, or other net-like material---now this, as a historical writer, is what I call a snood.

More: “The word is first recorded in Old English from around 725 and was widely used in the Middle Ages for a variety of cloth or net head coverings, including what we would today call hairbands and cauls, as well as versions similar to a modern net snood. Snoods continued in use in later periods especially for women working or at home.

In Scotland and parts of the North of England a silken ribbon about an inch wide called a snood was worn specifically by unmarried women as an indicator of their status until the late 19th or early 20th century [1]. It was usually braided into the hair.

Snoods came back into fashion in the 1860s, though the term "snood" remained a European name, and Americans called the item simply a "hairnet" until some time after they went out of fashion in the 1870s. These hairnets were frequently made of very fine material to match the wearer's natural hair color (see 1860s in fashion - hairstyles and headgear) and worn over styled hair. Consequently, they were very different from the snoods of the 1940s.
Snoods became popular again in Europe during World War II. At that time, the British government had placed strict rations on the amount of material that could be used in clothing. While headgear was not rationed, snoods were favored, along with turbans and headscarves, in order to show one's commitment to the war effort.
Today women's snoods are commonly worn by married Orthodox Jewish women, according to the religious custom of hair covering.”

And with regards to The Wall Street Journal’s fashion commentary, I think below explains it all very nicely:

“The word has also come to be applied to a tubular neck protector or warmer, often worn by skiers or motorcyclists. The garment can be worn either pulled down around the neck like a scarf, or pulled up over the hair and lower face, like a hood. A commercial company making women's clothing also uses the word as a trademark and sells a decorative variant of the sports snood as its signature product.”

Retailers today are apparently trying to give the snood a new name (have to admit, it’s a fun word to say)---they want to call it the “infinity scarf, or infinity loop”---not so fun, IMO.

At any rate, I still prefer the historical and traditional version of the snood---the lovely hairnet, oft adorned with pearls or beads, used to capture the cascading tresses belonging to the ladies centuries past.

Will the snood, in any variety, save the Holiday Season of 2009? One can only hope. I think there is something romantic in general about a lady covering her head or capturing her hair.
Have any of you ever worn the modern or the historical version of the snood?

The Influence of Dorothy Sayers and Peter & Harriet

The great discussion following my recent blog on The Scarlet Pimpernel inspired me blog about another series of books that have had a huge influence on me as a writer and on my Charles & Mélanie books in particular. Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey series, particularly the books featuring Peter and Harriet Vane.

My mom introduced me to British “Golden Age” (twenties and thirties) mysteries when I was a teenager. They became some of my favorite books. In particular, those with an ongoing love story/marriage that unfolded across various books–Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion and Amanda Fitton, Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn and Agatha Troy, and above all Dorothy Sayers’s Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. Typically for me, I read the books completey out of order. I started with Have His Carcase, the second of the four full books featuring Harriet which Sayers wrote (there have since been two continuations written by Jill Paton Walsh). I knew they ended up together, but I so wanted to read more. It was a Sunday, so the library wasn’t open. I still remember how sweet my father was, driving me to a bookstore that day where the only book I could find was the fourth, Busman’s Honeymoon. Then I read Strong Poison, where Peter and Harriet meet (Harriet is on trial for murdering her lover), and finally Gaudy Night.

There’s so much I love in these books. The finely drawn characterization. The interplay between the mysteries and the developing love story stretched out over multiple books. The nuanced look at the development of a relationship (which doesn’t stop evolving with marriage). The difficulties, particularly for a woman, of maintaining your own identity in a relationship. The risk of trusting and letting down emotional barriers. The wit and passion of the two main characters. The emotions which are all the more intense for being kept in careful restraint for so long. Strong Poison starts sets up Peter and Harriet and their emotional conflict perfectly. Have His Carcase is a wonderfully intricate mystery (probably my favorite of the four as a mystery) while at the same time revealing more layers to both Peter and Harriet and moving the relationship along. Gaudy Night is one of my all time favorite love stories. Purely as a mystery it’s not my favorite, but the thematic interplay of the mystery and the love story is brilliant and the character development is fascinating. Busman’s Honeymoon is a wonderful look at a developing marriage, by turns funny, wrenching, and heart-stoppingly romantic, and also a great study of the darker side of investigating a murder and proving someone guilty.

I’ve always loved romantic detective partnerships. And I find they offer wonderful scope for developing a story. The twists and turns of the mystery can echo the twists and turns of the relationship, the theme of the mystery can echo the theme of the issues the hero and heroine are confronting. The same elements that have me rereading the Peter and Harriet books have me rewatching episodes of The X-Files to analyze Mulder and Scully’s evolving relationship.

Of course Dorothy Sayers has been a huge influence on me as a writer. There’s a code-breaking scene in Secrets of a Lady that’s an homage to the wonderful code-breaking scene in Have His Carcase. And I started Beneath a Silent Moon with an image of the final scene between Charles and Mélanie, which was inspired by the final scene between Peter and Harriet in Busman’s Honeymoon.

Who else is a Sayers fan? (I know Lauren is, because we've talked about the books.) Writers, what books that particularly inspired you as a writer? Readers, what books have helped form your reading habits? And am I the only one who reads series hopelessly out of order?

PATTENS

I’m starting work on a series of articles for my Regency Writer’s Group (RWA’s Beau Monde chapter) and I’ve been reviewing my archives and pictures for inspiration. One of the cooler items of clothing that I’ve rarely (if ever) seen featured in a book are pattens.

They were usually comprised of a wooden platform sitting atop two metal rings, with a leather sandal or mule for the shod foot to rest in (think about trying to balance on this while walking across wet cobbles!). But simple platforms and “geta-type” clogs existed, too (not surprising considering the era’s obsession with all things Asian). The whole point of the patten is to help keep the feet dry, and/or to keep the shoes clean. An important and hard to achieve goal when ladies’ shoes were barely more solid than a modern ballet slipper and the streets were a morass of dirt, mud, animal droppings, human excrement, and water (it rains a LOT in England).

So here are a series of pattens dating from the 1730s (green silk), the 1790s (little white bow) and two pair of “carriage clogs” from the 1820s.

Oldies and Goodies: Zane Grey

I’ve been on an “oldie” reading kick of late, spurred in part by my Ladies Lit book club’s selection of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage as our October book. Published in 1912 and set in southern Utah in 1871, the novel is an eye-opener on a number of levels.

Zane Grey is credited with launching “the western” as a literary genre. The East (which at that time extended up to Missouri) was fascinated by things western, and especially so in the years following publication of Riders. Grey brought to life the hard-bitten characters of the Old West, the gunman, the cowboy, the strong but ruffly female. Reading the work now may be a study in stereotypes and cliches about character, but Grey had a tale to tell and he told it the only way he knew how.

Riders addresses the issue of the Mormons in Utah, the prejudice they endured because of their practice of polygamy and the prejudice they inflicted on the non-Mormon “Gentiles.”

“That year, 1871, had marked a change which had been gradually coming in the lives of the peace-loving Mormons of the border... villages to the north had risen against the invasion of Gentile settlers and the forays of rustlers. There had been opposition to the one and fighting with the other. And now Cottonwoods had begun to wake and bestir itself and grown hard.”

Grey thought there was a middle ground, and he set out to make the Mormons understandable, even acceptable, to his readers. At issue is a young Mormon woman’s right to befriend a Gentile. In the process of writing the book, however, Grey created characters who represented the worst of a religious sect’s narrow-mindedness so that any astute reader could see that the “bad guys” were not the gun-slinging rustlers but the hide-bound religious elders themselves.

This “message” of the work is not (in my view) what made Grey’s publishing fortune. Instead, for me, it’s the really terrific descriptions of the Utah landscape. The word “purple” occurs 62 times (I was told by a Kindle reader). The “purple sage” is beautiful.

“Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar-trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty...a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.”

This passage made me want to visit southern Utah! Preferably during a thunderstorm, which Grey describes thus:

“Black night enfolded the valley... He felt the dogs huddle closer to him. Suddenly the dense, black vault overhead split asunder to vividly clear and luminously bright in his sight. Upreared (sic), vast and magnificent, the stone bridge glimmered like some grand god of storm in the lightning’s fire. Then all flashed black again - blacker than pitch - a thick, impenetrable coal-blackness. And there came a ripping, crashing report. Instantly an echo resounded with clapping crash. The initial report was nothing to the echo. It was a terrible, living, reverberating, detonating crash. The wall threw the sound across... from cliff to cliff the echo went in crashing retort and banged in lessening power, and boomed in thinner volume, and clapped weaker and weaker till a final clap could not reach across the waiting cliff..... The golden glare vanished; all was black; then came the splitting crack and the infernal din of echoes.”

Yeah, he used a lot of adjectives, but I could feel the thunder in my ears.

Here is Grey’s description of a horse race:

“When Wrangle’s long mane, lashing in the wind, stung Venters in the cheek, the sting added a beat to his flying pulse. He bent a downward glance to try to see Wrangle’s actual stride, and saw only twinkling, darting streaks and the white rush of the trail. He watched the sorrel’s savage head, pointed level, his mouth still closed and dry, but his nostrils distended as if he were snorting unseen fire. Wrangle was the horse for a race with death. Upon each side Venters saw the sage merged into a sailing, colorless wall. In front sloped the lay of ground with its purple breadth split by the white trail. The wind, blowing with heavy, steady blast into his face, sickened him with enduring, sweet odor, and filled his ears with a hollow, rushing roar.”

Wow.

Source: Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey, Walter J. Black, Inc., Roslyn, New York, 1912.

La Recherce du Buildings Perdu

Please forgive me if this post isn’t quite as coherent as it should be. I just stumbled off a plane a few hours ago, after spending a week in Paris, wearing holes in my shoes looking for buildings that weren’t there. Just to make it more ridiculous, I already knew they weren’t there. Some of them succumbed to age, some to fire, others to the grand schemes of Baron Haussmann. (Hmph. Boulevards. Who needed them?) But it was instructive to see where they might have been, to situate them on my mental map and try to imagine what they might have looked like when they were still in situ.

The first building that wasn’t there was the old Prefecture, which formerly lived on a cul de sac called the Rue de Jerusalem on the Ile de la Cite, not far from the Quai des Orfevres. Elizabeth Sparrow, in her book, Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792-1815, describes it as a “sinister place” with “vaulted ceilings and walls [] supported by great timber stays… subdivided with mezzanine floors accessed by endless winding corridors and steep, narrow ladder like staircases”. Brilliant for sinister interrogations, not so great for modern working conditions. The building burned down in 1871, presumably lamented by none of the personnel who had to work there. The Ile de la Cite was extensively renovated by our old friend Baron Haussmann, so the Rue de Jerusalem can only be found by extensive squinting at old maps and pacing up and down the same bit of Quai, muttering, “Here. It must have been here,” until Parisians give you strange looks and walk their dogs on a wide berth around you.

Likewise, many of the old prisons in which that demmed elusive Pimpernel and his buddies would have been detained are no longer there. The infamous Temple Prison, demolished in 1860, is marked only by the Temple Metro stop. The Metro as a form of torture? Perhaps. But not the right kind. (And certainly not nearly so bad as the New York subway.)

The book I was researching opens with a scene in the Abbaye Prison, where a hapless conspirator in an 1804 plot to kidnap Napoleon (more about that in a later post) was being put to the question. Abbaye wasn’t just a clever name. It was called that because it was part of the Abbey of St. Germain de Pres. These days, only the Abbey church remains, but it does retain, in front of it, some of the large, round old cobbles that you can see in contemporary pictures of the old prison. Inside the church, one can also find a plan marking out where the various buildings of the Abbey would have been in the 18th century before they were knocked out for the laying out of boulevards. I’ve never been good at spatial relations, but my guess, from the map, is that the rough location of the old Abbaye Prison would have been somewhere across the modern Blvd St. Germain, where a few shops are now. It is an interesting mental exercise to try to knock out all the shops, the people, the traveling accordion player (yes, there was a traveling accordion player) and the very streets themselves to imagine the older city as it would have been at the time.

Even buildings that do still exist have to be mentally rejiggered prior to use. On my last day in Paris, I took a day to go to Malmaison, Napoleon's wife's country house (avez vous la plume de ma tante? it does sound like a French exercise, doesn't it?). Although the façade is largely what it would have been in 1804, it’s missing some bits. There would have been a tent-like building off to the side, housing the servants, as well as a small theatre that was put up so that the family could participate in amateur theatricals. The rooms that once belonged to Josephine’s children, Hortense and Eugene de Beauharnais, still teenagers when she purchased Malmaison, have been knocked together to form a showcase for the Imperial china collection. Yep. Cue more wandering around, muttering, “But the wall must have been here!” or "No! Why 1805? I needed 1804!" followed by growling noises. Fortunately, the guards were very blase, clearly used to the strange behavior of Americans, even ones who pace around with little notebooks, muttering.

The building I most regret is the Tuileries Palace, the official residence of the Consular (soon to be Imperial) couple. This picture is me, looking mildly sulky, standing somewhere around the site where the old palace would have been (that's the Louvre in the backround). It's rather amazing that one can just lose a whole palace. It was rather big. And stony. But it was burnt down in 1871, its empty shell finally demolished a good decade later, leaving only the arch in the middle and the Jardin des Tuileries to mark the memory of where it once stood.

Do you have any favorite missing buildings?