Wednesday 31 December 2008

Porphyria's Lover

Browning's perverse meditation on sexual desire sees Thanatos triumph over Eros. Or does it? As the febrile narrator of Porphyria's Lover strangles his lover with her own long hair, in the ultimate act of possession, he must confront the irony of having lost the object of his desire at the very moment of fulfilment. Because his sexual mastery of his lover means her erasure. And of course, pre-Freud, Browning intimates that desire itself is nothing more nor less than a taunting demon. One of those hounds of hell leading lovers unwittingly towards a deep damnation. Or as Browning puts it more succinctly elsewhere ' ... a man's reach must exceed his grasp ...' And that grasp - reaching for nothing more nor less than the ghosts of Freud's family romance - is doomed to clutch at thin air. What desire can never know, is that it seeks a spectre.

So the necrophiliac narrator of Browning's poem, having eliminated the object of desire, will be doomed to reincarnate her in yet another elusive love object. And as God remains silent in the face of murder itself within the poem, we can be sure that eros, erotic adventure, will urge the narrator on to enact yet further scenarios of sexual possession. In other words, desire never dies.

It was this ultimate irony at the heart of Browning's poem which led me to explore the notion of desire always being in excess of the object of its attentions. Of desire's deathlessness. I wanted to literalise those ghosts of family romance. So I chose the setting of a spiritualist bordello for my novel inspired by Browning's Poem.

My novel, Porphyria's Lover, sees Gabriel Feaver: actor, seducer and master of ceremonies at The Resurrectionist Club, join in an uncanny alliance with whore, Kathleen Mangan, to take on the worlds of Victorian sexuality and spirituality, in a bid to make their fortunes. But they soon find that faking love and disinterring dead passions, has haunting consequences they could never have imagined ...

Sunday 14 December 2008

Looking For Mr. Rochester

Polidori, the author of The Vampyre, may well have been fictionalising his own crush on Lord Byron in describing his literary protagonist as having ‘formed his object into a hero of romance; and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him.’ The hero as an imaginative projection of desire is, of course, central to the history of the novel - trailing resonant poetic clouds that go right back to Milton’s sexy Satan. The ultimate malcontent, Lucifer, as has often been observed, gets the best lines and so becomes the compelling focus of Paradise Lost. And this privileging of the bad boy has gone on to become a staple of fiction.

My own first pre-pubescent literary crush was on Mr Rochester. His saturnine countenance, but even more the teasing double speak that marks his verbal seduction of the poor, plain little governess, made it as hard for me, as it was for Jane, to see the real object behind the Byronic aura of this English gentleman. For Mr. R comes complete with all the seducer’s props: big house, horse and carriage, jewels galore, and a frowning opacity that serves like an odurate wall to repel any insolent investigation into his personal life. It wasn’t until I was much older that the tinsel of Bronte’s masterful creation began to shed its gilt. A pathetic liar and bigamist? Yes. As well as being a sadist who incarcerates and dehumanises a wife who may or may not have had mental health issues! And yet ... still I couldn’t quite get over him. Searching in vain for tempestuous-browed, frock-coated gentlemen amidst the irritable throng of bowler-hatted clerks who patronised the Charing X library where I worked as a library assistant. Then the BBC went and cast the grimly delicious Timothy Dalton, he of the swooping vowels, as Mr R and I was lost all over again. Now I had a clearer picture of the object of my fancy. Jut-jawed, cleft-chinned, raven-haired and with a voice that was erotically baritone. But if there were any Byronic heroes still remaining to haunt the highways and byways of these post-lapsarian times, they weren’t, as far as I could tell, to be found on the prosaic streets of London. So I went back to the books; grew older, and sagely acknowledged that Mr Rochester and the rest of his devilish tribe were best left to skulk in the foothills of fiction.

It was around this time, the early eighties, that I first read Jean Rhys’ incomparable riposte to Charlotte Bronte. Wide Sargasso Sea spoke to me like Keats’ Belle Dame, in language strange and true. Language even a Bronte couldn’t envision. In effect, a sensuous prose poem! And Rhys’ recreation of Mr Rochester’s wife not only gloriously prises Bertha from her musty attic, but it sets out a whole new female agenda for the Byronic hero which Charlotte, unlike sister Em, could never have begun to imagine.

For Rhys’ Rochester is a creature of sexual ambivalence. Byronic in his paradoxical social unease and sense of entitlement, he is basted on the narrative spit of attraction versus repulsion. In desiring a woman whom society teaches him to despise, his very sense of selfhood is threatened. (Interestingly, Rhys omits Rochester’s name from her fiction.) And therein lies the problem. For if the romantic hero is to retain potency he must remain masterful. He must not be safely domesticated. He should above all remain a seducer rather than a husband. And yet ... Rochester needs the money. Big Houses athwart the moors have to be maintained. And status, too, is important. Mr. R wants the plaudits of that same society he professes to scorn. Like any actor, he needs an audience. So ... he fakes it. A real marriage takes place to the Creole heiress. But once the dowry is secured, Mr R resumes his old life, and with her indoors conveniently shut away, he can pretend to be single; carry on the bachelor life as before, singing his tormented arias in the grand opera of seduction. And the outcome we all know from Bronte’s fiction is, of course, the foregone conclusion to Rhys’ own novel. The hell fire that ignites Thornfield Hall would seem to signal the demise of the Byronic hero, that ultimate desire object -now hobbled; a lame Vulcan - in the marriage project that wraps up ‘women’s fiction’.

And Yet ...! Read Rhys again. The metaphorical flames of her fiction are those of an Eve realising, late in the day, that the devil was in her all along. The devil who wasn’t up to the job of keeping her with him in that pre-lapsarian bliss. Who let her sidle off with poor-old, dully reliable Adam into hard graft and bloody childbirth. From the sweet ease of the garden of Eden into the fetters of wedlock. Read Rhys again! Incendiary fiction. And like Copperfield, admit you want to be the hero/mistress of your own life. Or at least your own psycho drama; as I did, sitting down to write my slant on the Byronic hero as object of desire, in the novel, Lily: The rain fell heavily, like nuptial rice, - I wrote - the morning Jonathan Hopgate brought home a limp bride who would begin dying in the east wing at High Withens.

Thursday 20 November 2008

What was Lady Macbeth's problem?

Lady Macbeth's rapid trajectory from dominatrix to hysteric poses the question: just what was her problem? Her hounding of her husband to commit murder appears to be predicated on skewed notions of masculinity. Thus she taunts Macbeth to prove he is a man through an act of regicide. In fact, her greatest vitriol is reserved for what she perceives as her husband's lack of manliness. But why is she so consumed with scorn when Macbeth hesitates to murder their kinsman and guest, King Duncan? Of course, Shakespeare leaves us in no doubt as to her ambition. But surely her demasculating jibes have a far murkier motivation? However, the swift pace of the play means that the 'back story' of the main characters happens offstage. And we are left to hazard breathless guesses at the sexual dynamics of their marriage.

Intrigued by what Shakespeare left out - the source of Lady Macbeth's personal demons - I followed my own quest to find the answer in writing Lady Macbeth's Tale. Right from the start, I sensed that those vituperative interrogations of her husband's masculinity could only have sprung from a primal sense of disappointment. Disappointment in men! And it is this profound rage against the first man in her life who had let her down which drives Lady M, not that much vaunted ambition. A disappointed daddy's girl! Looking to the one man who could save her from the turmoil of eleventh century power politics, in which she finds herself a pawn, she discovers only weakness. Her royal father abandons her to fate in a warring kingdom. Yet still she hasn't learned the lesson that a man can't save her. And so like many a heroine - or should I say anti-heroine? - who would follow her over the next five hundred years of so of fiction, Lady Macbeth's problem was that all along she longed for a hero - not a husband!

Saturday 18 October 2008

Lady Macbeth's Tale

It’s the smile! The teasing smirk of a woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it. The gilt-framed painting dominating the reception area of Tralee’s Grand Hotel is an absolute mistresspiece of feminine seduction! As a regular guest at the hotel I’ve spent many transfixed moments trying to work out the mystery of that smile; in its way as curious as the Mona Lisa’s. The painting of a woman sprawling on her fur rug seems to be depicting one of those Biblical temptresses such as Delilah. Yet with her golden pre-Raphaelite tresses and rouged cheeks, she’s what the Victorians would instantly recognise as the fallen woman incarnate. Not least because of her smile with its unashamedly wanton invitation. A leer that buttonholes the viewer as impudently as any 19th century Haymarket harlot. There she lies on the skin of a flayed animal (no prizes for guessing what that represents) offering herself to the presumably male gaze. A good-time bad girl. Certainly no Victorian angel of the hearth. And yet ... still I couldn’t get that smile out of my head. Because it’s not just naughtily seductive ... there’s something else. Something almost uncanny. A smile of delighted malevolence! Which got me thinking about all those mythical women who get their rocks off on ruining the male of the species: Medea, Medusa and yes, those Biblical babes, Salome and Delilah. But the queen of them all, as far as I’m concerned, is Lady Macbeth herself. The great shrew of literature who nags her husband into murder. Just exactly what it is - that hold Lady Macbeth has over her husband - has been another puzzle I’ve worried at like a dog with a bone over many years of teaching the play. So there I was in the Grand Hotel, looking at one wicked woman and being reminded of another.
But it was in the grounds of yet another Kerry Hotel that my inchoate thoughts coalesced into some solid ideas for a new novel. As I stood on the ruins of the medieval fort at the edge of the achingly beautiful Lough Lein - the site of Killarney’s inimitable Lake Hotel - I suddenly saw it all: Lady Macbeth’s sexual hold over her husband resulted from a deeply rooted sense of disappointment. Disappointment in men!
And so my journey into the past began. A journey which would take me back into my own Irish roots in ways I couldn’t have possibly imagined.

I was born in West London but have been regularly making trips to Tralee, Eire, where my mother’s people are from, since childhood. And it’s the breathtaking Kerry scenery itself which has turned out to be the final ingredient in the cauldron of ideas and emotions which went into writing my latest novel, Lady Macbeth’s Tale. For once I started researching the eleventh century history behind Shakespeare’s mythic play, I discovered that the histories of the peoples of the British Isles were more deeply intertwined than I had imagined. Travelling to and fro between Scotland, Wales, England and Ireland was just as much a habit back in the Dark Ages as it is now. Even if rape and pillage have been replaced by business and tourism.
But it wasn’t until I began researching the historical Macbeth that I discovered something closer to home. For the real Macbeth was a member of the royal house of Scotland which had its roots in Ireland. The Dal Riada, Kings of Scotland, hailed from Northern Ireland. Riada - anglicised to Reidy. The Reidy tribe! Recent researches into my own family had turned up a Reidy great grandmother. So was it possible Macbeth was my own - fifty million times removed - cousin? An exhilarating thought. But in fiction more than history, anything is possible.
So although I made my Lady Macbeth half Cornish, I had her abducted to Ireland by the Thane of Cawdor and was able to use all those haunting Irish landscapes to colour the novel. Thus, the lushly wooded region of Killarney, the tranquil Loch Lein, Caragh Loch and the misty Slieve Mish mountains figure as part of Lady Macbeth’s magical journey into her own destiny. A fictional destiny which functions as a dark prologue to the events in Shakespeare's play. So while I must ultimately acknowledge the Bard himself for inspiring this novel, I have to record my debt of gratitude to the Management of The Grand Hotel, Tralee, for allowing me to reproduce their stunning painting for the cover of Lady Macbeth's Tale.