Dorothy Johnston
Welcome to the website of an Australian author of literary and crime fiction.
September 26, 2013 — 4:27
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Australian poetry Comments: 2
This is the second of my promised blog posts featuring Australian poets – this time it’s Joan Kerr, who writes delectable prose as well as poetry – more of that below.
Joan’s poetry has been widely published in Australia, including two appearances in Best Australian Poems (Black Inc, 2004, 2006). Joan has been published in the US and the UK and has been featured on Radio National’s PoeticA. She has won numerous poetry prizes including the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Prize, the Henry Kendall Poetry Prize, the Woorilla Prize, the W.B. Yeats prize and the Dorothy Porter Poetry Award, and minor prizes in the Gwen Harwood, Max Harris, Val Vallis, Tom Collins, Rosemary Dobson and Melbourne Poets awards.Her collection Human Voices was shortlisted for a Varuna Publisher’s Award in 2012. A selection is included in Triptych Poets Issue 3 (Blemish Press 2012). She also has a poem in the recently published Australian Love Poems (Inkerman& Blunt)
that time of year thou mayst in me behold 
cloud light arches giving onto fields
and sometimes water, lying by the land
what are my walls what is sky water or earth
clouds the air’s shadow over the walls
like a gliding loss
the sound of my steps in vanishing corridors
under fog the water is so still
each boat stands on its own stiff shadow
and autumn burns the trees again
From: This vision thing (Melbourne Poets’ Union 2003)
Doctor
When the phone rings in the night to tell him someone’s died
not unexpectedly, and without giving trouble,
he thinks as he lies down of the hurt red setter
he had to shoot, what, forty years ago? His heart flinches again.
His house flowering quietly around him
in this contented suburb, he lies awake until
the trees step out of the shadows. Fifty.
He wonders what he did for the rest of that day
and why he’s never seen, these forty years,
those trees with the ripped and shaggy bark
and under it, the silky heifer skin. That sky
so clean and glittering
it makes you want to weep.
‘Doctor’ was broadcast on RN PoeticA 12/3/2000
The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
You knew genius when you saw it, you said.
Perhaps your cultivated
insignificance created shadow
in which it shone more brightly. Gertrude Stein
was your own household genius, not so much loved
as taken on, as an oriental monk
takes on the burden of the gods, whose service
depends on order. Bells are rung
to rule, and certain kinds of sweeping must be done.
For monks, it goes without saying
the gods are not indifferent to menu,
or to trademarks, or to fashion
and all their foibles are a kind of glorious cheek.
Because they can, they do
and this works well, as long as the god is stone.
But you are bolder and more knowing than monks
and you want more. Because you know
that genius is not stone, because you understand
how genius needs accomplices.
How like a blubbering child your genius is
standing at the head of the stairs
uncombed, half-dressed and pleading for your kindness.
You whisk by towards the kitchen.
Some third person is picking up its pen.
From: Best Australian Poems 2006 (Black Inc)
Here are some thoughts about poetry that Joan would like to share:
A poem is “an experience, a story, a piece of music, a set of images…” (Steve Kowit, In the palm of your hand, p. 125)
“Poetry expresses the passage from not-knowing to knowing through which we represent the world, including the perspectives of others, to ourselves and those around us.” (Kowit, p.14)
“The substance of a poem is not merely an expression of individual impulses and experiences. Those become a matter of art only when they come to participate in something universal…” (Theodor Adorno, quoted in Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, p. 43)
Mary Kinzie (A Poet’s Guide to Poetry) advises both reader and writer of a poem to think about:
“Words: you are not just reading messages or extracting meanings or drafting editorials to put into lines: you are thinking in words. You are thinking so hard in the atmosphere created by words that they enter you like your breathing. This means, first, looking at words by themselves, with all their weight and subtlety; it helps to think about their length, complexity, and language of origin too.
Sentence versus line: along with the form and sound of words by themselves, you are concerned with their connection into sentences, in whole or in part; some of these parts fall neatly into lines, others work against the lines.” (Kinzie, p. 6)
With her sister Gabrielle Daly, Joan writes comic novels under the pen name Gert Loveday. Writing Is Easy, by Gert Loveday, has recently been released as an ebook and you can find it on Authors Unlimited. It’s a great read!
Gert writes with authority on peculiar diets, exercise regimes, body makeovers, extreme fashion, gurus, pigeons, religion, poetry, politics, the health bureaucracy, gourmet cooking, reality TV and literature from the Norse Sagas to Jeffrey Archer, with a sharp eye for character foibles and the pricking of pomposity. Writing is Easy was shortlisted for a Varuna Publisher Fellowship in 2011.
August 14, 2013 — 23:23
When I came across AS Byatt’s description of the modern sentence, it was with a sense of deep familiarity.
‘A good modern sentence proceeds evenly, loosely joined by commas, and its feel is hypothetical, approximate, unstructured, and always aiming at an impossible exactness which it knows it will not achieve.’ (A. S. Byatt, “True Stories and the Facts in Fiction”, in On Histories and Stories, Selected Essays, Harvard University Press 2001)
The sentences Byatt described were the kind that I wrote naturally, it seemed to me instinctively, that I felt at home in. And I immediately recognized the irony; for it is precisely the feeling of being ‘at home’ that is unsettled by such syntax, interrogated by it.
Nevertheless, it felt good. It seemed that, during the years I was teaching myself to write, finding my voice as a writer, I had tapped into a mode of contemporary English that was meaningful because it expressed doubt about meaning, because expressions of doubt and uncertainty were fundamental to it. I had found a sentence construction that belonged to my time and I had made it mine.
Some months ago, I had the opposite experience. I received a reader’s report on a fiction manuscript I had submitted, a report complaining about my sentence construction. The reader described my parenthetic sentences as ‘like listening to a radio that isn’t correctly tuned to the station.’ I didn’t understand the criticism, and puzzled over it. I tried to initiate a dialogue with the reader, but this proved useless.
I finally concluded that, not only did this particular reader have no interest in what was happening inside my sentences, but she had no sympathy for the modern traditions I was writing out of; indeed, to her, they weren’t modern. They were, if she bothered to consider them at all, a thing of the past.
This experience has led me to look differently at writing trends, and to think back over the novels I have reviewed over the last fifteen years.
Many of the books I receive for review are written in the present tense. The present has become the norm, and normative. Sentences which are constructed out of it are shorter and, for the most part, direct; the visual image I have is of sentences all facing the same way.
Partial, verbless sentences are common, or ones in which the present participle is expected to do the work of a whole verb. The idea, I believe, is that this way of writing brings the reader right up close to the characters and the subject matter. The word ‘immediacy’ is often used on back cover blurbs. But I have never, either within an individual review, or in the discussion that goes on around them, found anybody making a case as to why immediacy, conceived in this way, matters. The beneficial effects are taken for granted.
I would love to find a discussion somewhere about what might become lost as this fashionable style spreads. Ambiguity has its dangers; I’m well aware of that. But I wish someone would explain to me why getting rid of ambiguity is better, or convince me that prose that strikes my ear as glib and shallow has more to offer than I give it credit for.
The present tense is supposed to bring readers right up close to the action, to make them feel that they are part of actions that are happening right now. These are illusionist’s tricks. You might argue that all writing makes use of illusion, and it does. But what troubles me is that the ubiquitous present, unrelieved by any other tense, unrelieved by even the pretence of narrative distance, makes it all too easy for the narrative voice to celebrate superficial reactions and emotions and to look no further.
Another way of putting it, is that the novels read like a rehearsal for the books they might be, if only their authors would reflect more deeply, and make sure their readers were given the space and the time to reflect as well.
You can read an essay I wrote for Spectrum on the present tense here.
July 25, 2013 — 8:21
Last May, ABC radio national’s program, Poetica, focussed on the villanelle.
The villanelle is a very old poetic form, medieval in fact, but it has become popular with contemporary poets in Australia.
In this blog post – the first of several I plan to write about poetry, which I love reading, but don’t write myself – I am focussing on the Australian poet Suzanne Edgar, who has this to say about the villanelle.
“The villanelle is an old Italian lyric form that was originally sung; it needs a consistent metrical musicality. There are rules about its rhyme scheme, the refrain lines and their position in the poem. The refrain needs to be strong enough to carry the emotional load of its repetition. My villanelle ‘After Drought’ was written in a joyful mood, during a downpour of summer rain. It was included in Mike Ladd’s `Poetica’ program.”
Photograph by Judith Crispin
AFTER DROUGHT
How sweet it is, the sound of falling rain
after years of unrelenting dry,
I thought I’d never hear the sound again.
The falling plays a favourite refrain
as soft as stroking, quiet as a sigh.
How sweet it is, the sound of falling rain
that soaks the bark and leaves a greenish stain
as if it had been coloured with a dye.
I thought I’d never hear the sound again.
Deep ruts are overflowing in our lane
and clouds are spreading froth across the sky.
How sweet it is, the sound of falling rain ‑
new droplets form on wall and window-pane
making shapes that glitter, blend and die.
I thought I’d never hear the sound again
of steady raindrops humming in my brain
their plaintive rhyme; for no one will deny
how sweet it is, the sound of falling rain.
I thought I’d never hear the sound again.
‘After Drought’ was first published in Quadrant (June 2008). It inspired a piece of textile art, exhibited by Lynne Taylor at Fairfield City Museum & Stein Gallery, N.S.W., in May 2009. Ian MacDougall composed music for it which he’s sung (with viola, violin and guitar backing) and recorded on a CD. This is in the School of Music library, A.N.U. The CD was played on `Macca All Over` (ABC RN) on 3 March 2013.
The more sombre `Resolution’, in Edgar’s collection The Love Procession (Ginninderra Press, 2012), involves a domestic argument that goes around and around in circles. “It should not be read as strictly autobiographical though,” says Edgar. “Matthew Arnold’s words are always on my mind: `The despotism of fact is unpalatable to the Irish.’ ”
RESOLUTION
We’d argued through a long and foolish fight.
Though there was nothing useful left to say
it simmered in the evening’s muted light.
He’s always bloody sure he must be right,
the sort of man who’s bound to get his way –
we’d argued through a long and foolish fight.
I shoved our tell-tale budget out of sight
to read again some later, peaceful, day.
It simmered in the evening’s muted light.
He swore he had suspected I was tight,
repeated it was high time I should pay.
We’d argued through a long and foolish fight.
I took the bills and set each one alight
till they, and I, became an ashy grey
that simmered in the evening’s muted light.
Because I couldn’t face a sleepless night
I sold some shares and paid up straightaway.
We’d argued through a long and foolish fight
that ended in the evening’s muted light.
Edgar comments that “Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled (Arrow Books 2007) provides witty advice about the villanelle as a vehicle for ‘rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or fatalism’. I recently finished the rather mournful ‘Lament’; it has the refrain,
‘Thinking, tonight, of all the books we’ve read,
I know we’ll miss ourselves when we are dead’.
Wendy Cope, however, has written some amusing examples, see ‘A Villanelle for Hugo Williams’, in her Family Values (Faber 2011). This poem displays the form’s rules in the guise of advice to another writer who’d got them wrong!
Other old French forms I’ve used are the rondel, ‘River and Rock’, and the triolet, ‘Malunggang’, both in The Love Procession. Once the formal pattern for such poems is in place I will overlay it with naturalistic or colloquial diction and tone, to avoid any effect of rigidity. This approach was also used in the petrarchan sonnet ‘Corteo d’amore’ which begins that book.
Poetry arises from watchfulness and alert waiting. There remains the exciting, rejuvenating work of refining. I would hate to be labelled a formalist, a modernist, or any other `ist’. It would be restrictive, whereas I feel free to write in any way I like. I agree with Camus: ‘Poetry that is clear has readers. Poetry that’s obscure has commentators’. I mistrust the current vogue, particularly among academics and their imitators, for writing poems in which meaning is cerebral, convoluted and difficult. They write only for the page, have turned poetry into words.”
June 20, 2013 — 4:36
My short story collection ‘Eight Pieces on Prostitution’ is now available for $9.99 on Authors Unlimited, part of the ASA website, as well as
Amazon, Apple iBookstore Australia,
and Booki.sh.
The stories span the whole of my writing life and include my first published story, ‘The Man Who Liked to Come with the News’, which Frank Moorhouse included in ‘The State of the Art’, 1983. My first novel, ‘Tunnel Vision’, published the following year, is set in a Melbourne massage parlour, and I have continued to return to the subject of prostitution in my novels and short stories, notably in ‘The House at Number 10’ and in this collection. ‘Where the Ladders Start’ is a long story, almost a novella, based around a suspicious death. Many of the stories are set in Canberra, where I lived for thirty years. Once the city gained self government, it pioneered the de-criminalisation of prostitution, which remains an interesting prism through which to view our national capital.
The cover design is a based on a painting by Bartolome Esteban Murillo called ‘Two Women at a Window’, which is held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Though the women in the painting are probably prostitutes, it is not absolutely clear; there’s an ambiguity about them, as well as an amused self-awareness. I like this very much and feel that it suits my stories.
June 16, 2013 — 8:57
My story, Mrs B, is now up on Meanjin’s website, along with many of the contributions to the Canberra centenary issue, including David Headon’s wonderful essay on the Griffins. See my earlier blog post on this.
I really like the illustration Meanjin has chosen to go with my story, in which flowers play an important part.
Here’s an example. Mrs B, who has had to give up her dress shop at one end of Acland Street, St Kilda, finds work in a massage parlour at the other end. She receives a lot of flowers.
‘They had a kind of lop-sided concentration about them, as if, in their freshly watered folds, was stored a knowledge of all the flower arrangements clients had ever bought for their favourite girls. They were smooth to the touch, even the rose thorns were smooth, as though, out of nature or beyond it, they might never wilt. And yet they were real flowers. They had been plucked alive.’
‘Mrs B’ is one of the stories in my soon-to-be- published collection, Eight Pieces On Prostitution.
April 29, 2013 — 2:26
My review of Julienne van Loon’s novella Harmless was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Canberra Times last weekend, prompting me to think again about the novella as an art form and all that’s been said about it over the last few years. As many readers and commentators have observed, the novella has been enjoying something of a come back, due in part to the digital revolution and in part, in Australia at least, to the Griffith Review novella competition, which received more than 200 entries. Julienne van Loon was a judge of this competition, along with Craig Munro and Estelle Tang.
Harmless exhibits one of the classic features of the novella, in that the action is compressed and tightly constructed – a point I make in my review. But what I didn’t go into – 600 words imposes its own kind of compression – was how that action and those characters are made richer for the reader by the scope van Loon allows herself to explore the characters’ past lives and what has led them to their present impasse.
Harmless could have been an excellent short story, tense and full of a sense of impending doom – not that those qualities are missing from the novella – but it takes longer to reach the climax. It takes its own good time.
While I was writing my own attempt at a novella, called Ashes from the Headland – it made the finals in the Griffth Review comp and you can read more about it here – I was helped in my thinking by an excellent essay called The Novella: Some Tentative Suggestions by Professor Charles May. May talks about various hallmarks of the novella, including ‘an ordered situation broken up by disorder’, a character having ‘to make a choice of nightmares’ and a setting that is ‘cut off from the everyday world of normal reality.’ All of these apply to my novella and to Harmless, a title that contains frightening levels of irony.
It’s a fascinating question, and of course one that will never be answered definitively – how long a work of fiction needs to be in order for the themes and characters to find full and satisfying expression.
April 2, 2013 — 22:51
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Canberra Canberra centenary Canberra writers crime fiction crime series ebooks electronic crime Tags: Canberra, crime fiction, ebook launch, electronic crime Comments: 0
My Canberra crime quartet is about to go digital – all four books at once! I’ll be offering special deals and giveaways and using this blog to let readers know about them.
The first three, The Trojan Dog, The White Tower, and Eden, are published by Wakefield Press in Australia, and the first two in America by St Martins Press. I’m glad they’re being released as ebooks this year, when Canberra turns a hundred.
I lived in Canberra for thirty years before returning in 2008 to Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, where I grew up. Writing a mystery series was one of the things I turned to, to try and understand Australia’s national capital both as the city I loved and as a seat of government that is often misunderstood and derided by the rest of the country. I decided early on to write four novels, one for each season, beginning with Canberra in the grip of a hard winter and ending with The Fourth Season, which is set in autumn.
I’ve always been fascinated by the physical aspects of the city, the way the clear inland light seems to promise truth, the way it shines on the Parliament’s enormous, overbearing flagmast. Canberrans have in their mist an imposing castle on a hill; they must struggle to define themselves against it, even if they do this subterraneously. The fact that inland Australian light shines brightly on our castle, that it is seldom veiled in mist like Kafka’s, makes it more, not less mysterious.
All four books feature Sandra Mahoney, and I’ll pause to say a word about her name, which has a good literary pedigree, as in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony; and an architectural pedigree as well, as in Marion Mahony Griffin, whose superb drawings were submitted along with her husband’s prize-winning design entry and are held in the National Archives. I’ve added an ‘e’ to my protagonist’s name, but that is neither here nor there; I often think about literary and architectural traditions when I’m writing about Canberra, and in some ways see my Sandra as an heir to them.
Sandra is an everywoman, falling into her first investigation, and soldiering on from there. My other series characters are a Russian IT person, Ivan Semyonov, and a Detective Sergeant called Brook, who suffers from leukaemia. Sandra’s two children, Peter and Katya, also play important roles.
And my other character is cyberspace. Electronic crime features in each book of my series. In the 1990s, when I began writing it, hardly any Australian writers were focussing on electronic crime; it seems odd to look back on that now. The ACT government once planned to make Canberra the IT capital of Australia; that’s a quaint notion now as well. Yet electronic crime seemed to fit well with the place that for thirty years was my hometown – the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, or pretending not to know – the government as the country’s biggest spender and therefore an attractive target for thieves and charlatans of all kinds – and something else, less easy to define.
I used to think a lot about Umberto Eco’s description of three types of labyrinth when working out the kind of mystery novels I wanted to write.
First, Eco says, there is the classic labyrinth of Theseus. Theseus enters the labyrinth, arrives at its centre, thanks to Ariadne’s thread, slays the minotaur, then leaves. He does not get lost. Terror is born of the fact that you know there is a minotaur, but you do not know what the minotaur will do.
Then there is the mannerist maze. As Ariadne’s thread is unravelled and followed, the Theseus figure discovers, not a centre, but a kind of tree with many dead ends, many branches leading nowhere. There is an exit, but finding it is a complicated task.
Finally there is the net, which is so constructed that every path can be connected to every other one. The labyrinth has no centre and no one entry or exit. Cyberspace is clearly this third kind of labyrinth. The computer criminal, hacker, virus king etc can be tracked, but the mode of tracking, of following the thread, soon corresponds to becoming lost in the maze, which indeed itself can become the minotaur.
I find this space enormously appealing, though its complexity has far outstripped by ability to comprehend it. Yet what also appeals to me is the traditional structure of a crime investigation – a fictional crime investigation, that is – the progression from a beginning to an end where the criminal is identified and caught. I like the tension that’s created by putting one inside the other, and I strove to create this tension in each of the books comprising my quartet. They represent a sizeable chunk of my writing life and I’m glad they’re going to have new lives of their own.
March 17, 2013 — 23:52
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Canberra Canberra writers literary communities short stories Tags: Canberra, literary journals, short stories Comments: 14
Canberra has turned a hundred, and March is the birthday celebration month. Meanjin’s centenary issue was released last week and I’m lucky enough to have a story included; it’s called ‘Mrs B’. At just over 2,000 words, my story is a modest contribution, and indeed fiction is modestly represented in the issue as a whole. There are four short stories, compared with sixteen non-fiction pieces – essay, memoir, the section titled ‘Perspectives’ which begins the issue, and the superb Meanjin Papers section about Walter and Marion Griffin. Add to this the conversation with Christos Tsiolkas and the twelve poems, and you’ll see what I mean.
Does this matter? Not a bit. The qualities I look for in a good short story – originality, attention to detail, authenticity of voice – are there in abundance in the non-fiction pieces, and – it would be a surprise if this weren’t the case – in the poetry as well. I read the issue in several sittings – or rather lyings on the couch – over the weekend, and, as I sat down to write about it, I realized that it was the simple acts of bearing witness that moved me the most, the way the different contributors have of homing in and saying, ‘Yes, this is way it is; this is the way it was, and is.’
I’ll go further and say that I believe it is these simple acts of bearing witness, rather than arguments and counter-arguments, that will, in the end, dismantle the myths about our national capital, myths too well known, and enumerated by me in other places, to repeat here.
I’m not going to refer to every contribution that impressed me; this blog post is by not meant to be any kind of comprehensive review; but I’ll begin with Andrew Croome’s quiet and reverent description of Mount Stromlo after the 2003 bushfires, and his comments on the observatory’s history, as an example of the kind of ‘witnessing’ I mean. On the subject of fire, there is the excellent poem, ‘As Flames Were My Only Witness’ by Russell Erwin. And going back in time, David Headon’s ‘The Genius and the Gypsy: Walt and Marion Griffin in Australia and India’ is a piece I cannot recommend highly enough. If you read the issue for nothing else, read it for this. Headon’s scholarship, his elegant prose, and his own humanity shine through.
It is fitting that monumental buildings are given their due place, but it’s the ironic, scaled, human perspective that drew me in and made me want to read about them. Two of the memoir pieces – ‘Very Happy to be Here’ by Yolande Norris, and ‘Constructing a City, Constructing a Life’ by Marion Halligan are good examples of a refusal to be over-awed by generalised assumptions, but to state, in lyrical and careful prose, what is.
I plan to write more posts about Canberra’s younger generation of writers in the coming months, as well as Canberra’s not-so-young-any-more, but not as well known as they should be writers too.
March 9, 2013 — 2:13
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
My review of Iris Lavell’s debut novel, Elsewhere in Success, was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Canberra Times online today. It’s an interesting and well-crafted novel, the more so, in my view, for not flaunting its achievements. I’ll be posting more about this review and others soon. Just in case you’re wondering about the novel’s title, Success is an actual suburb of Perth, Western Australia, named after the HMS Success, and ‘Elsewhere’? Well, I recommend that you read the book.
February 20, 2013 — 22:41
Twice so far in my writing life, I have had the experience of being contacted by a stranger and told that the name I had chosen for a main character in a novel was her name, that it belonged to her. I’m wondering how many fiction authors have had similar experiences.
In one case, the person contacted me directly, in another through a relative. The first time it happened shortly after The House at Number 10 was published. I was contacted by Sophie Harper’s sister. Sophie Harper is my protagonist, and ‘the house at Number 10’ a brothel in Canberra, where my Sophie, recovering from a marriage break-down, and with a four-year-old daughter to support, finds work. Not surprisingly, the real Sophie Harper – and I’d chosen the name without thinking about this – was unsettled by my choice.
The second time it happened, the name belonged to one of my series protagonists, Sandra Mahoney, the main character in my Canberra crime trilogy.
This time, the contact was by email, and the real Sandra Mahoney was amused by the co-incidence.
I kept our emails, which I think provide interesting reading for anyone pondering the choice of a fictional name, especially a series name that a writer may have to live with for decades.
The real Sandra Mahoney’s first email:
Hi Dorothy well how about that!!! I was killing time waiting for a download to finish, doing searches on my name to see if anything came up and there it was Sandra Mahoney!!! Actually my married name is different but I was Miss Mahoney for a good 30 years. Now I can’t wait to see what I got up to. I wonder how many of us there are. Naturally I am curious as to how you came up with the name and if you have a spare minute I would love to hear from you.
My reply:
Good to hear from you. I’m wondering if you’re any kind of a detective, like my Sandra? I wanted an Irish surname, and Mahoney has a degree of literary fame, (as in ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’), though you’ll see I’ve added an ‘e’. And Sandra struck me as a good solid Christian name. Actually you’re the second person to bob up and claim one of my protagonist’s names. The first was Sophie Harper…
Sandra’s reply:
No I am not a trained detective but I do fancy that I could have been one. I find myself thinking like one when problems happen. I read on your website that your Sandra has some dealings on the internet. I did too. I was going through a separation and found myself in the chat rooms and two years later have a new love through internet dating. The 2 years up to that point were wild, amazing, enlightening and voyeuristically crazy. I have often thought there was a book in it but as yet haven’t put fingers to the keypad. If you’re interested in the stories let me know. There was one point where I was so fed up with the lies and double crossing that goes on with the chat room people – I was seeing a man that I had met there and found out he was seeing several other women at the same time, so I set him up, with fantastic success. My best detective work yet. It was funny and very satisfying…
A nice example of nature following art? Perhaps. More a case of the wily dance art and nature are always engaged in, I think, a dance that can be intriguing for both writers and readers.
What did not strike me at the time, but what strikes me now, thinking back over the experience, was how defensive I felt, as though my choices were deliberate, when really it must happen every day that a fiction writer hits on a name belonging to a living, breathing person.
Then, a little while later, I began to feel proprietorial. I had as much right as these strangers did to the small words that we happened to hold in common. The books in question had been published; there was no going back. And the identity of my imaginary people was very much bound up in their names. I knew what their names meant to them, and the wealth of meanings that they carried, not just for themselves as characters, but for other characters as well.
I wasn’t vain enough to predict fame and fortune for them, but convinced myself that the point remained a valid one. Who could imagine Pride and Prejudice without Jane and Elizabeth Bennett, who an Anna Karenina without precisely that name?
I’d stumbled on something obvious, yet disturbing: Juliet was wrong. When she asked that famous question, Juliet was guilty of a piece of special pleading, understandable in the circumstances. The names of things and people do matter, and the meanings that accrue around them matter even more.
Those two instances I had, of being made to feel that I had ‘taken’ someone’s name, occurred quite close together, and, for the next few months, I nervously waited for the next one, the next phone call or email; perhaps, this time, having to face someone who was angry and accusing. It didn’t happen and my worry lessened until I more or less forgot about it. But I haven’t been able to think about those characters in quite the same way since. Shadows branch out, behind and to the sides of them, and I realize I’m still waiting for these shadows to take a form I recognize.
