It’s time for elvillano to sit under the sun and enjoy a little rest. The posts on here have been growing less frequent for some time now and I think that now is a good time to draw a line under it.

I won’t promise complete silence – but for the moment, I’m off elsewhere.

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Image credit: Mike Baird

From the “Beginning Life at Sixty Series“ by Kenneth Moore, first published in The New Beacon, 1970.

Stop. Stutter. Start.

Most writers tell that before they got going they had to overcome initial disappointments. Even so successful a writer as P. G. Wodehouse confessed that at the start of his career he acquired a collection of rejection slips with which he could have papered the wall of a good sized banqueting hall. He commented wryly that what he always felt about rejection slips was that their glamour soon wore off, ‘when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all’.

At the outset of what I hoped would be, if not a career, at least an interest, I could compete in one respect with great writers such as Wodehouse, I, too, had my rejection slips. The blind would-be writer, however, has one advantage over his sighted counterpart – he just can’t see the wretched things. Also, contrary to what is alleged about some blind people, I have not acquired keener sense of hearing. Consequently I have not always heard and been depressed by the dull thud of returning manuscripts dropping through my letter box.

Publishing

Spared the worst visual and audible indications of failure, I might have gone on indefinitely with benefit only to the Post Office, if I had not received a helping hand. It came from a friend I had met in rather different circumstances some year earlier, when in full possession of my sight, I had been seeking with a co-author to interest a publisher in a technical bibliography we proposed to compile. Eventually we were recommended to see Lewis Phillips, then the technical editor of a firm of publishers.

I had never been in a publisher’s office before, and I wondered just how it would be organised. Would it be modelled on the lines of one of those high-powered executives’ offices I had encountered? The sort that had a withering secretary to greet you and kept you cooling your heels for an inordinate time. When you were finally ushered in to the great man’s presence he scarcely acknowledged you, as from the far side of a large bare table he remained engrossed in the paper before him.

Listening for the nightingale

Lewis turned out to be the very reverse. Beaming, he came downstairs to greet us and Ied us back up several somewhat rickety flights of stairs to a room which even now, fifteen years later, remains vividly in memory. Everywhere there were books in cases, on side tables and even on chairs, while his desk was smothered in galleys and page proofs. A bookish man indeed. Putting aside business, he first enquired about our interests, our families, the difficulties of travel, wasn’t there a famous priory at Malvern? We had barely touched on the subject of our proposed book when, seeing how the time had gone, he invited us out to lunch.

His publishers accepted our proposal to compile a technical bibliography and whenever in London we had a lunch date with Lewis. These occasions were enriched with anecdotes about his long life and varied interests. He spoke of his work as a licensed lay reader and of the Sunday morning sermon which he customarily preached at St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London. On Christmas Eve, he told us, how slept in the belfry of that church, an eerie experience surely in a deserted city. Because there would be no transport next morning, only thus would he be able to attend early morning service on Christmas Day. To celebrate the publication of our technical work, he entertained both authors and wives to dinner. On our way, ho stopped among all the traffic in Berkeley Square held up a finger. “Listen”, he said, “for the nightingale”.

A helping hand

When Lewis heard that I was blind and was trying to make a start as a writer of fiction, he offered to help place my stories. First of all he got valuable advice from an editor. Up to then I had naively followed the command given by the White Rabbit to Alice: “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end and then stop.” The White Rabbit, it seems, was speaking before the days of expensive newsprint. I must now write to fill the precise space available. I tried again and once more passed the result to Lewis. Immediately came a reply from the editor of the children’s page of a famous Church weekly, not only accepting my offering but promising to consider any further stories on the same line. It had not even occurred to me that such an austere journal would run a children’s feature. I didn’t exactly stride down our country lane telling all and sundry of my breakthrough. Nevertheless, I had the same sense of elation as that felt by Scott Fitzgerald when he ran down Broadway, New York, and stopped strangers in the street to tell them that his book This Side of Paradise had been accepted.

Later, more soberly, I took to pondering whether or not this was a flash in the pan. I had recorded on tape some sobering thoughts by a mentor whose name unfortunately escapes me. He gave this advice: “When you have discovered that you are able to make people see what is in your mind, to understand what you are trying to say, then comes the discipline of cultivating that muscle of writing, as the athlete cultivates his muscle.” The question thus remained: was I capable of cultivating such writing ability as I possessed?

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image credit: geoftheref

(The first bit of magazine writing that I’ve done for three months. Published in Madrid)

Five different love stories with Valentine’s Day looming

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Of all of the complicated things that we have to contend with as mature human beings – tax returns, plumbing and Méndez Alvaro bus station being examples – there is still little that troubles us quite as much as love.

Love is life’s great enigma. We can’t decide whether it is an emotion or an ideology. It is impossible to predict when it will come or when it will go. It can be boundless, dangerous, tragic, blissful, complicated or unrequited. And in an attempt to comprehend what we will probably never understand, we’ve spent much of the last few thousand years composing songs, penning sonnets, drawing pictures and writing books. All of them about love, many of them written – for some reason or other – while sat under a tree.

But what makes a good love story? What key traits are shared by those books that lie at the heart of romantic literature?

Well first of all, of course, a good love story requires an equal measure of pain and suffering. Romeo and Juliet, those ‘star-cross’d lovers’ are a perfect example of this: a couple who lived together only in their imaginations, any chance they had of blissful tranquillity dashed by the feud between their families.  Romeo and Juliet are perhaps our most celebrated lovers, and it is telling that their story ends not with them happily fastened together for evermore but with them both dead on the floor.

Pain, then, is love’s ubiquitous partner. And in many of the great works of literature the two appear together: in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë or The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

It is the job of one of literature’s archetypal characters, the White Knight, to ensure that love stories are not all about suffering. Also known as a Knight in Shining Armour or a Knight Errant, such a character is another useful ingredient in a successful work of romantic literature.

I’m assuming that you know, but for any of you that don’t the White Knight is a heroic character who usually appears in the final third of a love story, before sweeping a miserable female off her feet then charging away triumphantly with her, off into the sun.

Of these White Knights, none are more famous or popular than awkward Mr. Darcy who appeared in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Stiff, awkward and obsessed with form and principles, Mr. Darcy was an odd kind of White Knight who first of all appeared cold, heartless and aloof, but later transpired to be something else entirely. His character has been an enduring success, to the extent that a century on Hugh Grant has fashioned an entire career out of reprising the role, over and over and over again.

Next, and certainly not to be forgotten, is sex and scandal. These were the two things that readers were in search of in 1960 when the queued around the block in London to buy a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book that had been banned for more than 30 years for it gratuitous sexual scenes and shocking use of language. These characteristics, however, were the making of the book and nowadays Lawrence’s novel is considered one of the finest love stories ever with the sexual scenes enlivening the pages like electricity ripping along a wire. His story charted the magnetic, irresistible but dangerous attraction between Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, her gamekeeper. The love between the two was so alluring to the reader because it was forbidden.

So that’s it for my brief overview. A successful love story is pain and tragedy and triumph and sex and scandal. The only thing that is missing, if you want to have a stab at writing one of your own, is an incompetent man, oblivious to what is going on around him and doing absolutely everything that he can to make the story as awkward as possible. And if you want to read a fine example of this, then I suggest that you go and read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby.

It’s staple material for women trying to understand men, and one of my favourites.

Five Love Stories with Valentine’s Day on the horizon

1. Romeo and Juliet

2. Pride and Prejudice

3. The English Patient

4. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (don’t take on the metro)

5. High Fidelity

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Image credit: Thai Jasmine

Hopefully that will all change in 2010. Expect something of a spring cleaning session early next year.

Not that I haven’t been busy.

1. I’ve been blogging at My Digital Notebook
2. I’ve been preparing (um. blogging) for the Africa Rally (that’s our car up there)
3. And I’ve been busy building websites for work

In the meantime, I’ll leave you in here with all my old articles. If you’d like to get in touch then @petermoore is a good way to go.

Past Mist... by Robb North

MA-Writing

For the past year (and a bit) I have been researching and writing an account of a famous nineteenth century murder as part of an MA at City University.

It was a horrifying case, committed in a small Worcestershire village in 1806. The full terrors of the crime were not exposed for almost twenty four years and many locals still know of it today.

The first draft of the book is almost done, and for all of you who have been kind enough to ask how it is coming along – I’ve decided to put the prologue up on this blog. Any comments are welcome.

So far (it’s not over yet), it’s been an exhausting but exhilarating experience. As George Orwell said:

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

The whole process has been made much more rewarding due to the help of two top editors, Julie Wheelwright and Kate Summerscale.

The story:

“At a little after five o’clock on Midsummer Day, 1806, the Reverend George Parker was shot and then clubbed to death as he gathered his milking cows from his glebe meadows. The clergyman’s supposed murderer then vanished and it was almost 24 years before the case was solved. Damn His Blood is the story of a horrific crime, committed in a little village in a revolutionary age.”

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image credit: Robb North

Fist by Al Fed

Two hours and thirty two minutes

Trawling through the archives while researching bits and pieces for my MA, I keep coming across curious news stories. Some of them are amusing, others odd. In any case, I thought that this account of a fist fight – or early boxing match – from the nineteenth century was peculiar enough to republish here.

(I’ve added a more Internet-friendly system of formatting for this article. People did not really believe in paragraphs in the nineteenth century.)

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7 January 1824

The great fight between Spring and Langan for the championship, which is to be found commemorated by a print hanging up in almost every inn and public-building in England, took place in Pitchcroft, the ring being formed just opposite to the Grand Stand.

Considerably more than 150 guineas were paid to the managers of the fight to ensure its taking place at Worcester. The stakes were 300 guineas a side; and the betting two to one on Spring, who was a native of Warwickshire; while Langan was an Irishman.

Not less than 40,000 people thronged Pitchcroft as spectators, many being perched upon sheds and booths, erected temporarily, and let out as standing places at considerable prices. During the second round one of these erections gave way, and a number of persons were precipitated to the ground, a distance of twenty feet, amidst the broken timber, and trampling upon each other.

At least thirty people were carried to the Infirmary with serious fractures of the limbs or ribs, and one unfortunate fellow died of an unfortunate fracture of the leg.

Spring came on the ground at half-past twelve, but Langan could not be found for some time. He was, in fact, making off, and his backers brought him back with some difficulty.

Lord Deerhurst and Sir James Musgrave kept time; and Colonel Berkeley acted as umpire. Spring was exceedingly cautious, and Langan impetuous, and the greater part of the rounds ended in wrestling, in which Langan often succeeded in throwing his antagonist.

By the eighteenth round the ring was broken in by the crushing of the mob, and not ten feet of space was left for the men to fight in.

After an hour and a half’s fighting the affair seemed as little near conclusion as at its commencement.

At the eightieth round, Langan planted a tremendous blow on Spring’s head; but at the eighty fourth, Spring knocked Langan down with such terrific hits, that he fell as weak as a child.

The cry then became general to take him away, but although covered in his gore, he refused to give in, and was at last only removed by force.

The battle lasted two hours and thirty-two minutes – a most unheard of length of time.

At the next assizes, Mr. Justice Park, in his charge to the grand jury, administered a severe rebuke to the county and city magistracy for winking at, and permitting this affair.

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Image Credit: Al Fed