A vintage car, Middlemarch and hedgehogs

Posted on October 18, 2014 by hilarycustancegreen

Not having blogged for a while, this post includes a somewhat random collection of subjects. There will be short stories and more paintings again next time.

First, can anyone identify the make of this English car of the 1920s?

Next, while I blush at the years that have passed before I got around to reading Middlemarch (George Eliot), I finally accomplished this. If I had read it as a schoolgirl, I might have been a better writer, but hopefully it is never too late to have an improving influence. Eliot has a way of lightly skewering a character onto the page, with the result that they are forever real in your mind. There are no saints or villains to be seen; every character has strengths and weaknesses, can fascinate or disgust.

A few words on Mr and Mr’s Vincy’s relationship with their daughter, Rosamund, tells so much about all their characters.

Vincy, blustering as he was, had as little of his own way, as if he had been prime minister,…

Rosamund… listened in silence, and at the end gave a certain graceful turn of the neck, of which only long experience could teach you that it meant perfect obstinacy.

And Bulstrode’s endless rationalisations are a total giveaway of sanctimonious hypocrisy.

… is it not one thing to set up a new gin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old one?

The fates treat everyone with impartial kindness or cruelty according to random whim. Yet the plot is tight, intricate, totally believable and immensely satisfying. This is exactly what the title implies, a novel woven round a community, and yet this is no old-fashioned pastoral, the individual stories still grab you today. People’s mistakes and aspirations are still recognisable today. I’d better stop. Basically, Eliot has all the skills I am striving to acquire and my envy of her is too blatant.

I started Middlemarch in high summer, but autumn has more than set in. The hedgehogs are still feeding; we almost tripped over one last night, snuffling just outside the back door. He scuttled off, but returned quickly when I put food out. They will not eat in the rain, so if it is wet we put the plate under the back porch. Finally, my favourite rose, Just Joey, has decided to have a final summer fling and the cosmos chocamocha is flowering madly.

Reading pile-up and Reality exhibition

Posted on October 10, 2014 by hilarycustancegreen

My reading has reached crisis proportions. Middlemarch, which I started months ago, has been cruelly and endlessly sidelined, though each time I pick it up, I am right back in there, the characters are old friends and I am in happy awe of Eliot’s every, exact word. Grabbing a volume slim enough for handbags and waiting rooms, I also started Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story source of an opera. For iPad reading on trains, I have Carol Balawyder’s Mourning has Broken, a very moving and fascinating set of essays. Also downloaded months ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, which I foolishly started… just to see what it was like. Sandwiched between these, but finished, have been a list of nine books both light and heavyweight and ahead are another five books to read ‘immediately’.

So, I made a resolution, NO NEW BOOKS until all the above are finished, and I MUST carve out some real writing time.

I have just started a ten-afternoon writing course at the wonderful Sainsbury Centre, at the University of East Anglia (UEA). I signed up for this at a low moment when re-reading the final, supposedly fully edited, manuscript of Border Line, and having concluded that I still had everything to learn about writing.

The course tutor is Patricia Mullin, so I downloaded Patricia’s novel, Gene Genie, and have been reading that on the train.

The writing course is attached to the current exhibition of modern and contemporary British painting, Reality. This is a stunning exhibition (no photography allowed), but we have a free run of the exhibition for the ten days of the course. Many paintings have intrigued me, but one by John Keane (website screen grab), has set a story going in my head.

His other work is fascinating too and on his website he says:

I am interested in the process of painting, and I am interested in why  human beings want to kill one another for political ends. These two  apparently diverse preoccupations I attempt to reconcile by smearing  pigment around on canvas in an effort to achieve a result whose success  can be measured by how well it disguises the sheer absurdity  of the attempt.

And what is the writing course homework? Trawling for great opening lines and writing our own story first lines. I spent a happy and feverish week reading old favourites: Kipling stories (The Maltese Cat, Without Benefit of Clergy, Little Tobrah, The Head of the District etc), and Salinger (For Esmé With Love and Squalor etc), Saint Exupéry (The Little Prince) etc, etc, etc I also opened all my most-loved books, only to find that the majority had nothing dramatic about the opening lines. They were often quite conversational. Though one of my favourites is Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine which opens:

When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me.

Is it just me, or are others caught in the same reading maelstrom? How does one extract oneself, brain intact, from such a reading pile-up? (sorry about mixed metaphors.)

I shall go and sweep some leaves and pretend that my list of tricky phone calls to promote Border Line can just as well be tackled next week… I read this and then made myself ring a local newspaper.

Reading, Writing and (A)rithmetic

Posted on July 16, 2014 by hilarycustancegreen

After a stressful day (actually week) on the book-publishing front, I am baffled. This is clearly an absurd enterprise, since at the same time I am reading – and enjoying:

Middlemarch (George Eliot); Surviving the Sword, Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East 1942-45 (Brian MacArthur); One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). I have started Americana (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and Morning has Broken, (Carol Balawyder); The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe). I have dipped into The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt) and I am looking forward to And Then Like My Dreams – a memoir (Margaret-Rose Stringer); A Serious Business (Roderick Hart)… and then there is Bring Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel) and The Luminaries (Eleanor Catton) staring at me from the bottom of a pile of books on the other side of the room.

Oh and I will be picking up The Rosie Project (Graeme Simsion) from the library and polishing it off for a meeting on the 6th of August… correction I am going to the opera that night – but I will still read it.

With writing like this, the world does not need books by Hilary Custance Green. Any which way you calculate this, it doesn’t add up. I should stick to cultivating my garden, reducing my ‘to read’ pile and my stress levels.

However.

I’ve invested too much time (years), energy (and some money) in writing, editing, revising, researching, submitting and rewriting this book, never mind all the pfaff of getting a tax identity in the States, and learning how to create ebooks (nearly there with the older novel), to give up now. Also I am too bloody-minded. Also I owe all the kind friends who have supported me. So I shall add another few straws to the giant hayrick of books swamping the world – even though it fails to add up or make any sense at all.

Some rejected book covers to laugh at. I’ve learned a lot about InDesign

PS. I have now finished the Surviving the Sword, sobering and good for realigning one’s priorities.

Writing women and peonies

Posted on April 24, 2014 by hilarycustancegreen

I recently finished Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing.

Researched and written in the 1960s and 70s, first published in 1977 and revised and expanded in the 1990s with a new edition 2009 much reprinted since, this study of British women writers has stood the test of time very well. There is much to fascinate a writer today. Perhaps most astonishing is that this study, by an American, was so ground-breaking. As Elaine travelled “…around chilly municipal libraries in England in quest of women writers’ archives, I was often rewarded by becoming the first scholar to read a harrowing journal or open a box of letters.” Studies of women’s writing have abounded since those early days and much of the introduction (written twenty years later) is taken up with the (often negative) reactions by later scholars, pundits and activists to her analysis of this subject.

The book itself is a treasure trove of discoveries, of women who wrote the best-sellers of their day, but have been wiped out of history, of changes of taste, of changes in the roles of women, of transformations (or the lack of them) in the reactions of men. It back-fills the story that seems so often to consist only of Austen, the Brontës, Eliot and Woolf and gives a structure to the history of two centuries of writing.

Elaine’s original title had been The Female Literary Tradition in the English Novel, but Princeton University Press changed this to the current one – not, as so many have assumed, in reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but a quote from John Stuart Mill in 1869 in The Subjection of Women. He wrote: “If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have a literature of their own.”

Although this book started life as an academic treatise it is highly readable and full of insight. It has changed my understanding of the journey so many British women writers have taken. There are also some quotes to make your blood boil and your mouth drop open.

On a completely different subject. It is tree peony time here. Finally the long-watched buds are opening.

White tree peony

Over Easter I saw this Molly-the-Witch in the local Botanical Gardens. Molly is usually a clear yellow, but this is a very delicate cream with peachy markings. Definitely on my want list.

Paeonia mlokosewitschii

There will be more in a later post.

Green Writing Room

Hilary Custance Green's reading and writing notepad

Tag Archives: George Eliot

A vintage car, Middlemarch and hedgehogs

Reading pile-up and Reality exhibition

Reading, Writing and (A)rithmetic

Writing women and peonies

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