The Hidden Machinery

THE NAME HELGAFELL means “holy mountain,” but when the mountain comes into view it is barely three hundred meters high. The track leading to it follows the shore of a small lake fringed with rushes. Dozens of swans, all facing in the same direction, drift on the dark waters. At the far end, I park beside a fence. A narrow path zigzags up the hill through the long grass. Despite its size Helgafell is famous as the home of Gudrun, a heroine of the Icelandic sagas, and as a place where wishes are granted. I climb slowly, taking in the ever-expanding view, occasionally startling, and being startled by, a sheep. Then, quite suddenly, I am at the top, standing on a broad plateau littered with broken rocks as if a giant with a hammer had vented his rage. The wind that only ruffles the lake below here blows at full force. Ravens arc and circle on the currents. I am struck by the loneliness, and by the fact that no one knows where I am. I make my way to the ruins of a hut, which my guidebooks variously describe as having belonged to a shepherd, a hermit, or some early Christian saint. Standing in its shelter, I take photographs. The landscape is typical of what I’ve seen of Iceland so far: bleak moors, bleak lava fields, volcanoes, active and extinct. Looking toward the sea, I glimpse three kilometers away the fishing village of Stykkishólmur, birthplace of my heroine Gemma Hardy. I picture Gemma standing in just this place, hearing in the cry of the ravens the voice of her lost fiancé.

As a young writer, I didn’t realize that doing research is one of the deep pleasures of writing fiction. My early stories suffered from a surfeit of imagination and a paucity of accurate detail. To my youthful ears the very word “research” suggested dusty books, indexes, and crabbed notes. If I had wanted to spend my days in the stacks of a library, I’d have stayed at university rather than becoming a waitress. Writing short stories, in which often all that was needed was a glimpse of a combustion engine or one brief fact about breeding dalmatians, allowed me to maintain this prejudice. I had heard, too often, the old admonition: write what you know. But I was slow to understand the obvious fact: research could help me to know more. Slower still to understand that research has its own dangerous siren song.

After some years of working on stories, I wrote a novel set in contemporary Edinburgh. My research for Homework consisted of walking the streets of the city, visiting the zoo, talking to friends. After it was finished and published, I decided to write a pair of novels based on the lives of my dead parents. The book about my mother, Eva Barbara Malcolm McEwen, who died when I was two and a half, would be largely imagined. I knew almost nothing about her, but I was fascinated by the stories people told about her relationship with the supernatural. Patients complained that the hospital wards where she worked as a nurse were visited by poltergeists who moved the furniture around. She had companions who were invisible to most other people.

The book about my father, John Kenneth Livesey, who died when I was twenty-two, was an even more inchoate undertaking. He was fifty when I was born and his early life, like that of my mother, was shrouded in mystery. But I had read wonderful biographies about people who had been dead for much longer than him. Someone knew what Sartre was wearing when he visited Delphi; someone knew what Katherine Mansfield said to Virginia Woolf at tea. Surely I could find out about my father’s boyhood, and surely something in the stories I discovered would suggest a novel?

My father had been dead for a dozen years when I decided to write about him, and for ten years before that we had been estranged. He was disappointed in me. That is the word I remember from his letters; he carried them into the room where I did my homework and set them on the edge of the table. I wish I had kept them—there were only three or four—but I read them hastily, at arm’s length, and tore them up. I never spoke of them; neither did he. A small victory for British reserve. I stayed up late doing my homework, desperate to leave our remote farmhouse, to study, to travel. I never outwardly disobeyed my parents but my father felt—how could he not?—that I was bitterly at odds with my stepmother, the woman he had married a year and a half after Eva’s death. He had long ago chosen her over me, and he continued to do so at every turn. Night after night when the three of us sat down to supper, I ate quickly and spoke little.

During these difficult years, and for as long as I can remember, my father had emphysema and smoked heavily. His false teeth were yellow with nicotine, as were the fingers of his right hand. His clothes, the two suits he wore for teaching, were threadbare to the point of embarrassment. Need I add that I was young and had no mercy? His last letter to me, written shortly before his fatal heart attack, once again described his disappointment: I was wasting my degree; I did not seem to want either marriage or a career. Of course I didn’t answer and a few days later left to stay with friends. The next time I saw him, he was in a coffin at Perth Crematorium.

I did not expect writing a novel about him to make me love my father, but I did hope to recover that part of him that had been largely eclipsed by my stepmother. (And I should say I now believe he was right to choose her; only she could give him the care and companionship he so sorely needed.) John Kenneth was born two years after the death of Queen Victoria and grew up in the Lake District, where his father was the first incumbent of Skelsmergh, a small rocky parish a few miles north of Kendal. His mother nicknamed him Toby. As a boy he went to the local school and climbed the hills looking for peregrine falcons, but at the age of fourteen he was sent away. A grateful parishioner, whose son had been killed in France, paid for him to attend Shrewsbury School in the west of England. (Shrewsbury is a public school in the tradition of Eton; its most famous pupil is the Elizabethan poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney.) My father went on to Clare College, Cambridge, where he did a BA and played golf. After graduation, he taught in several of the boys’ private prep schools that flourished in Britain at that time. In his early thirties he moved north to Scotland, where he spent most of the remainder of his teaching life at Trinity College, Glenalmond, a school founded by William Gladstone in 1847 and still, I’m happy to say, going strong. His colleagues, for mysterious reasons, called him Silas. His pupils called him Jackal for his initials, J. K. L.

My father seldom talked, and I seldom asked, about his early life, but the various all-male institutions he attended kept excellent records. I sent letters—this was before e-mail and the Internet—to Shrewsbury, to Clare College, and to my grandfather’s church, asking anyone who remembered my father to get in touch. I received a heartening number of responses, and over the course of two years I met with many of the elderly letter writers. These meetings almost invariably involved a journey of several hours on the train from London to some small town. There I would ask directions or take a taxi to the home of the interviewee. Tea would be served. The weather and my journey would be discussed with a thoroughness worthy of a Jane Austen novel. Then I would turn on my tape recorder and ask eagerly about my father.

“You knew John Kenneth Livesey. Do you remember how you met? What your first impression of him was?”

I hoped for stories—detailed, vivid, scandalous—that would bring my young father to life.

“Well, I remember him,” my interviewee would say.

“What did you do together?”

“He smoked. I remember he offered me a cigarette.”

“Was he a rebel? Did he have a girlfriend?”

“Have you tried the shortbread? My daughter made it.”

What I gradually learned was that these elderly men, who had kindly responded to my request for information, remembered my father—they could recognize him in photographs—but they did not remember anything about him. This was finally brought home to me when I went to talk to Godfrey Clapham, who had shared a study with him at Shrewsbury in 1916. By the time I met him, in the 1980s, Godfrey lived in a small flat in a leafy suburb of South London. I was struck, when he opened the door, by his beautiful long face and by his frailty. He seemed barely to exist inside his suit. We shook hands—his, despite the summer’s day, was very cold—and he ushered me into a small sitting room before excusing himself to make tea. I sat poised with my notebook and tape recorder. This man had lived with my father for two years.

Godfrey returned carrying a tray, the teacups rattling. No wonder his handwriting was so shaky. He asked me to pour the tea and began to talk about the swallows nesting in the eaves of his house, and the local train service.

“So you shared a study with my father,” I said.

“Yes. I dug out some photographs to show you.”

He produced two large black-and-white photographs showing rows of boys in dark uniforms against a dark building. “So here I am,” he said, pointing to a plump, awkward-looking boy.

“And is my father here?”

After some searching Godfrey pointed to a pretty, fair-haired boy standing at the end of a row, staring directly, unsmilingly, at the camera.

“So what was he like?” I said. “Was he studious? Did he play sports? Did you stay up late at night talking? Did he believe in God? Did you talk about the war and whether you’d fight when you were old enough?”

There was a long pause. Then Godfrey said one sentence about my father: “He liked custard.”

While he described how awful the food at the school had been during the war, I wrote down the sentence. Like most of my interviewees, Godfrey went on to talk about what really interested him: himself, his memories, his life. And I, as I had with the other elderly men, asked questions and took notes. If I could not find out more about my father, I could at least learn about his peers—that generation who had the blessing and the burden of being too young in 1914, too old in 1939.

By this time I knew a good deal about the First World War. In order to understand my interviewees better, I had read widely in the library at the Imperial War Museum, and elsewhere. Although this was before Pat Barker published the Regeneration Trilogy, before Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, there were many nonfiction accounts of the savage waste and sad heroism of what used to be called the Great War. I devoured John Keegan’s The Face of Battle and Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme.

He liked custard. It is not a lot to build a novel around, but in my dozens of interviews it was the most specific thing I learned about my father. The novel I hoped to write sank beneath hundreds of pages of notes. This was how soldiers trained, this was how the lines of command worked, this was the amount of the tea ration and the bread ration, this was what happened to the wounded if they were lucky, or if they weren’t. I still know a good deal about the First World War. I am still eager to talk to octogenarians. But I was never able to turn all the wonderful details about life in the first three decades of the twentieth century into fiction. My father remained shadowy, my plot vestigial, the psychological arc sketchy.

As for the novel about my mother, that too had a perilous voyage. It began on a misty October morning in 1987 when my adopted father was driving me to Pitlochry station. “Did I ever tell you,” Roger said, “that the most profound experience of the supernatural I ever had was in the company of your mother?”

“No,” I said. “Tell me.”

Roger, like my father, had taught at Trinity College, Glenalmond. Now he described how he had visited Eva to make a phone call. In 1950 she was, as the school nurse, one of the few people who had a telephone. Eva left him alone to make his call and, while he was on the phone, a brown-haired woman in a raincoat came into the room, nodded to him, crossed the room, and left by the door on the far side. A few minutes later, his call over, Roger asked my mother who her friend was. When he described the woman and what she’d done, Eva told him to try the door he had just seen her open.

“And do you know what?” Roger exclaimed. “It was nailed shut.” He swerved to avoid a pheasant in the road.

On the train I wrote down the story in my notebook and resolved to write a novel about a woman who is accompanied by otherworldly companions. The title would be Eva Moves the Furniture. My difficulties with my mother’s book had, I think, the opposite source from those with my father’s. In the case of my father, I thought I could transform research into a novel. In the case of my mother, I thought the subject matter was so interesting—my dead mother! ghosts!—that it did not require research, or even a plot. Of course I hoped to learn more about Eva, but when I couldn’t, when my letters went unanswered, or came back unopened, I didn’t head to the library, even though she had worked in a London hospital for most of the Second World War. I had sworn off wars, and research. They didn’t help me to write novels.

One evening on my way to teach at Emerson College in Boston, I saw a group of people standing beside a bus stop, holding up a poster of a baby. Between one step and the next I decided to write a novel about someone who finds a baby at a bus station. Should that person be like me? No, I thought a few steps later, they should be the opposite. Before I started class I wrote down, “Banker, baby, bus station.” A few weeks later I had a residency at the MacDowell Colony with my friend Andrea Barrett. While she wrote her wonderful collection of stories Ship Fever, I worked on a novel I boldly titled Criminals. Trying to avoid some of the mistakes I had made in the most recent version of Eva, I decided that this novel would take place in a short period of time and have a vigorous plot. As I wrote, I kept a list of things I needed to learn more about:

Insider trading

Being a recent immigrant in a small Scottish town

Living on the dole

Betting shops

Psychosis

When I left the colony three weeks later, I had, with Andrea’s help, most of a first draft. I plunged happily into the necessary research without worrying about being either overwhelmed or distracted. I had learned a lesson. I no longer interviewed people or took copious notes in advance. Instead I wrote the novel as best I could; then I went looking for what I needed to know.

Criminals found an agent and then an editor. During the long wait for publication, nearly eighteen months, I turned back to Eva. I had another idea as to how I might make the novel work. I no longer remember what it was, but I do recall the moment six months later when I knew that this inspiration too had been a snare and a delusion. Eva still had, albeit it in a slightly different form, all the problems that had made agents and editors reject the previous version. I turned instead to writing a novel about a woman who loses three years of her memory and falls prey to the machinations of her former boyfriend.

In the case of The Missing World I soon discovered that I could not simply make a list of things to investigate and keep writing. Even to draft some of the scenes, I needed certain facts, certain insights. But despite the lure of neurological textbooks and Oliver Sacks’s case histories, I managed to remain focused on my four main characters and their very different relationships with memory. The bad boyfriend became a beekeeper, which led me to conversations with some of London’s many beekeepers. Another character became a roofer. I learned the nuances of flashing, the advantages of artificial slates. The key difference between working on The Missing World and my earlier floundering efforts with John Kenneth and Eva was that now I had a destination. I didn’t know every stage of the journey, but I knew where I was heading; anything that took me too far out of my way was probably a mistake. I drafted scenes as soon as I knew enough to write them; then I did whatever research was necessary to fill them in.

Shortly after The Missing World was published, I had the now-familiar thought that I knew how to fix Eva Moves the Furniture. I had given up hope of publishing the novel but I longed to finish it to my own satisfaction and recycle the seven drafts that cluttered my study. I was walking down the Charing Cross Road in London when I stopped at a secondhand bookshop. I probably looked at several other books, but all I remember is picking up the one with a dark red binding titled Faces from the Fire. When I opened it, I found an account of the legendary reconstructive surgeon Sir Archie McIndoe, who in the 1940s ran a burns unit outside London; he treated many of the pilots injured in the Battle of Britain. I bought the book for a pound and began reading it on the way home. The Second World War, I learned, was the cradle of reconstructive surgery in Britain, and McIndoe was a pioneer of new techniques for dealing with the terrible injuries of the Blitz. Some of his young patients remained, even after fifteen or twenty operations, unrecognizable to their mothers, but he and they counted it a triumph that they could go to the pub without people fainting at the sight of them. As I read the vivid account of his work, I thought I had found the perfect metaphor for the complicated relationship I imagined my mother had with her supernatural companions.

Faces from the Fire helped me to understand something about Eva that should have been obvious all along. Like every child born in Scotland in 1920, she was growing up to face the Second World War. She qualified as a nurse in 1940 or ’41, then spent the next few years working in a London hospital. I hurried back to the wonderful library at the Imperial War Museum. Happily for my novel—I wanted to set it entirely in Scotland—I discovered that Glasgow too had been bombed. I read interviews with McIndoe’s patients, autobiographies of nurses working in wartime hospitals, and accounts of the Jewish community in London and elsewhere. Britain was fighting Hitler but not, as far as most people were concerned, anti-Semitism. Research, now that I knew how to go about it, finally gave me the tools and materials I needed to finish my love song to my mother. When the eighth version was finally published (on September 11, 2001), the four words of the title were the only part of the original that survived the many drafts.

Nowadays I feel that if I didn’t write novels, I would have to pretend to do so in order to justify the odd, haphazard exploration of the world that I call “research.” How else could I rationalize visiting Iceland and the Orkney Islands, talking to roofers and neurologists, studying beekeeping and Asperger’s syndrome? Of course computers and the Internet have made these explorations easier, but there remains no substitute for the living encounter, the way a woman’s face changes as she tries to tell you what it’s like to lose her memory. Or a man’s as he describes how he took that inadvertent step into insider trading.

Mapping my evolving relationship with research has made me think, once again, about all the time and work I poured into those failed pages about my father. He was a beautiful, charming, witty young man whose life was vitally constrained by two wars, poor health, the lack of both money and ambition, and a dominating mother. But it was my vision of his life, and not the life itself, that failed. Now I wonder if, with the help of Google, I could have shaped the material into a novel. For the first time I typed his name—John Kenneth Livesey—into the search engine. Here is the first entry I found, at the website for British executions:

John Kenneth Livesey

Age: 23

Sex: male

Crime: murder

Date of Execution: 17 Dec 1952

Execution Place: Wandsworth

Method: hanging

Executioner: Albert Pierrepoint

A thrill ran through me. My father, my deeply respectable father, was connected with murder, if only in name. Here was something scandalous, something more exciting than custard. Perhaps the name wasn’t mere coincidence. My father was an only child, but his father might have had a brother: I could try to find out. Who was murdered and why? And what about the elegantly named executioner? How had he chosen his profession, and did he have a second job? For five minutes, perhaps ten, I took feverish notes. Then a blue jay scolded in the tree outside my window; somewhere an old-fashioned phone rang; I remembered the novel I am currently trying to write, which has nothing to do with my father, nothing to do with murder in the 1950s. I closed the search. But I still have the notes.

Acknowledgments:

The Hidden Machinery owes a huge debt to my colleagues, students, fellow writers, readers, and friends. And also to Emerson College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. My gratitude to these stellar institutions, and those who run them, for giving me the occasion, and the space, to pursue my ideas about reading and writing. I am also grateful to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for a fellowship which gave me the opportunity to explore homage.

Most of these essays appeared in a slightly different form in various literary magazines and anthologies. I thank the editors of the Harvard Review, the Cincinnati Review, Triquarterly Magazine, Writer’s Chronicle, Curiosity’s Cat, A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Essays on Jane Austen, The Eleventh Draft, The Writer’s Notebook, The Best Writing on Writing, and Bringing The Devil to His Knees.

I am deeply grateful to the inspired, and inspiring, late Katherine Minton for inviting me to participate in the Thalia Book Club at Symphony Space and to Jennifer Egan and Siri Hustvedt for our scintillating conversations about several of the novels I discuss in these pages.

Without Tony Perez there would be no book. I am grateful to him for giving The Hidden Machinery a home and for helping me, again and again, to shape my thoughts. My great gratitude to him, Meg Storey, Jakob Vala, Sabrina Wise, Nanci McCloskey, and all at Tin House for their generosity, their acuity, their patience, and their genius for making the back and forth of editing and publishing fun.

Thank you Gerry Bergstein for giving this book such a beautiful cover, and for illuminating discussions on homage.

Thank you Amanda Urban and Amelia Atlas for taking such good care of my work.

Merril Sylvester taught me to read Percy, The Bad Chick. Roger Sylvester taught me to read Shakespeare. Andrea Barrett has helped me, for more years than I care to count, to think about the connection between my own work and the books I love. These essays grow out of our ongoing conversation.

For me reading and friendship are happily intertwined. I am lucky to share my life and my library with Susan Brison, Eric Garnick, Kathleen Hill, and several other ardent readers. Thank you.

Excerpt from A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. Copyright © 1924 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1952 by E.M. Forster. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.