Daphne and Branwell Bronte

Daphne is about Daphne du Maurier during the time in her life when she was writing a biography of Branwell Bronte - trawling through the Brontes' lives and manuscripts to try and resurrect the reputation of the dissolute brother of the famous three. A popular 'lady' novelist - and not considered 'serious' because of it, Du Maurier has a complicated marriage, is a cousin to the boys who inspired JM Barrie's Peter Pan, and lives in the rambling Cornish home that inspired Rebecca - a place thronged with ghosts.

Knitted into this, is the story of a man called Symington who has a similar fascination with Branwell, and once stole Bronte manuscripts and notebooks, hoarding them against a time when he hopes to write a biography of Branwell himself. He is also on the fringes of alleged forgeries of signatures on Bronte manuscripts that muddy their provenance.

Symington's getting older and more confused ... and leads Daphne a merry dance as he tries to share what he has while keeping the best for himself. A third strand in the narrative follows a young woman in present day London who is studying Du Maurier, while battling to make her marriage work to a man who is still 'haunted' by his first wife... remind you of something?

A fourth strand is that the novel itself clearly represents the author's own obsession with Du Maurier and the Brontes and how the two overlap. This serves to make the novel feel highly authentic - and fascinates for that reason - but at the same time the author obsession makes the novel less engaging because it keeps reminding the reader that it is a story.

Daphne also feels too much like non-fiction writing at times as Picardie lays the ground work and then builds on it with back-story and current action, often repeating herself to be sure the reader has understood. The three stories and their similarities and coincidences feel a bit laboured - again, like the author is pointing and saying 'look at this and this and this' - and the language is too 'nuts and bolts' to really get us inside her characters' skins.

Having said that, the real stories Picardie has drawn on are fascinating for a Bronte fan with a Du Maurier bent, and I admire the trail she's followed to bring this material out into the world. Her novel adds rather wonderfully to The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan that I read earlier this year - a novel that fictionalises the lives of the Brontes and made me see them properly for the first time. Now I am inspired to go and read more of the Brontes and more Du Maurier.

In a lovely coincidence that Picardie would revel in, my daughter's in the middle of reading Jane Eyre. I keep saying, 'where are you up to?' And she answers in single sentences to fend me off. The last one was: 'she's bored with the house.'

Hope

Thanks to UK author, Justine Picardie , for this. How exquisite it is. Love the alignment of hope with a bird.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - 
by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Found on the excellent  Poetry Foundation website . Worth a visit. 

What will survive of us is love

Two friends of mine died on September 25 a year apart. Two such different friends and such different deaths - one a successful businessman with a young family whose life was cut brutally short, the other a sculptor who'd lived a long and colourful life. My heart goes out to their families, for it's still too short a time - a year in one case, two years in the other.

English author Justine Picardi lost a sister this same week some years ago and writes - in her usual lucid and meditative way - about living with the loss in a post titled: What to read in memorium. The 'what to read' is Philip Larkin's poem 'An Arundel Tomb' which ends with: 'what will survive of us is love.'

And there are these lines which Picardi quotes:

                                      ....Light
Each Summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came...

Which is apposite. For here we are in spring again, light thronging the glass, yellow kowhai littering the ground, blossom frothing the trees, tui crazy with chortling, and I remember driving to the hospital where my friend the sculptor was dying, and stopping to steal a branch of blossom to take with me. Outside his hospital window a line of birds perched shiny in the sun waiting for him to feed them - as he did on a daily basis wherever he was.  I put my stolen blossom in a vase. I sat with him awhile and said good-bye. The birds stared at me implacably.

For my other friend it was autumn. We heard he'd kissed his family, picked up his briefcase and stepped into their leafy London street. He would have felt the nip in the air. Perhaps he was already wearing his winter coat. It was spring here, of course. The day was bright and hot when the call came, and the birds were singing at full throttle.

When the world steps in

I visit a number of blogs that I like. The ones I enjoy most have something to say about books and writing. They are wide-ranging, generous, refreshed regularly and possess something of the character of the person writing them. Dropping by is like reading a terrific newspaper column or having a conversation with a very interesting person.

There are usually hints at the real life that surrounds these blogs - mention of a husband, a knitting project, trees being cut down across the road, strawberries in the garden. A photo of a dog and a stick. A well-fed cat on a cushion. A view from the window. Where the eye falls. But only a hint.

Generally, I don't want the life stories of these people I visit (although there are some who captivate me - always exceptions -- here's one.) The thing is, I have family and friends and lives enough jostling mine. But for those bloggers who don't confide, there can be a moment when that changes. It's usually a crisis of some sort which forces the change and it can be a shock to the blog-reader like me who comes for the usual take-out to find something altogether different. It takes a moment sometimes to realise what's happened, to realise the person I have come to rely on has been derailed and is talking about it with me.

Children's/Young Adult writer Neil Gaiman broke from writing about his books and his wide-ranging life as a writer [with asides about the lovely white dog above, and a daughter who visits] to talk one day about the sudden and devastating death of his father. I read it and some of the follow-up posts and was hooked by the story of this man and his family, and moved and devastated for Gaiman whose blog I usually go to for stuff about books [and my dog has a crush on his dog.]

Justine Picardie - an author in the UK - has a regular post she does entitled 'Bibliotherapy: What to read ...' and she offers up a review of a book to cover a particular circumstance eg. 'What to read in an English January...' '...when you're trying to stop drinking...' '...when you're not going to the party...' They are clever, well-written, amusing reviews. The suddenly one day she writes a post entitled: 'What to read when your husband has left you for another woman' and underneath she has no review just this: 'Any suggestions? All help gratefully received, on this rainy black night in february...'

Some people commenting after the post seemed to know what had happened, but others flicked up some fun reading suggestions by such as Fay Weldon and Sylvia Plath. And then the penny dropped. Picardie's husband really had left her for another woman, suddenly and unexpectedly, and her grief was profound, and all her blog readers (me included) felt just terrible for her. Food and books were sent by those who knew where to send them including one anonymous donor whose gift of Nora Ephron's Heartburn led to the post being written at last: 'What to read (and what to eat) when you husband has left you for another woman.' And there it was : a terrific review of Heartburn (must read the book now) and a cake recipe. Justine Picardie was back.

There have been other examples of this in my blog roll - Gondal Girl 's heartfelt post about trying to come to terms with a trio of deaths in her family especially one perplexing one, The Paradoxical Cat 's few but incredibly moving lines about the death of her mother, and then there was the time I wrote about my daughter being unwell and put up a photo of her swinging in the air when life was good. I'd given glimpses of my family until then but the focus of the blog was books and writers so I didn't intend to give more. Then there she was.

Why does this happen? Having done it myself, I'm still not really sure. It's as if the blogger believes it would be intellectually dishonest somehow not to declare an emotional derailment. And perhaps it's also that for many of us a blog is, amongst other things, a kind of journal, and when we can't do it justice we feel some sort of responsibility to say why.

Or perhaps the enormity of what's happened cries out to be recorded by one who always records. Or perhaps it's simply that as writers we turn to words to contain this thing, and understand it, and make sense of it, and it's only a small step to then press 'publish post' and create a public container for the grief. 'There it is,' we say, 'only that paragraph, that photo - it's not so awful, so ungraspable after all - and everyone can see.' As if that anchors it somehow.

Or perhaps it's a bit of all those things.

Oh, and my daughter's a lot better now, but I still flick back to that post now and then as a way of confirming that fact, and of recalling another day six years ago when she swung in the air, the camera catching a glorious split-second of joy and sunlight and flung hair.

practically perfect in every way

'In January 1907 Travers Goff [father of Lyndon known later as P.L. Travers] feared he was about to be demoted [at the bank where he worked] yet again; he became ill with a high fever, and died several days later. His daughter Lyndon was seven, the oldest of three little girls. Some time afterwards her mother, still grieving, ran out of the house during a thunderstorm, crying that she was going to drown herself in a nearby river.

'Lyndon wrapped a quilt around herself and her two younger sisters, and told them the story of a magical white horse that could fly even though it had no wings. Retelling this tale in adulthood, Travers identified it as the origin of her authorial identity; as Lawson observes, 'Lyndon believed the magic horse ran underground, and came up eventually as Mary Poppins.' ' The Daily Telegraph

Go here for more of this fascinating article on Mary Poppins and author P.L Travers. It's written by UK author Justine Picardie who also talks about it on her blog here. Picardie reminds us that the book was written in the 1930's and so is freshly relevant in the recession of today; it's also a darker work than the Disney film. Little known fact: Mary Poppins was published by Peter Davies who was the adopted son of J.M Barrie and the inspiration for Peter Pan.

The article also notes that Peter Pan influenced Travers who in turn influenced a certain J.K. Rowling. Think magic, flight, childhood...

If you're a really keen Poppins follower, go here to read Neil Gaiman's blog which among other things (roll the post down) talks about a book called Myth Symbol and Meaning in Mary Poppins - the Governess as Provocateur, by Georgia Grilli, introduction by Gaiman. I'm sure Mary Poppins would have had something to say about that.