This novel starts from an event: a six-week journey to the Amazon which the sixty-six year-old Sir Edward Elgar made late in 1923. Almost nothing is known about this trip. It is not certain why he decided to make it although impulsiveness and restlessness were characteristic of him. What he said and thought and did in those weeks are a matter for fancy. Such is a point of departure for a work of fiction, as it was for Eduard Mörike nearly 140 years ago when he began Mozart’s Journey to Prague.
The issue of truth in a novel whose central character is a man who did once live is not easily settled. Elgar was an artist whose life and music have been documented by modern biographers and scholars such as Percy M. Young, Michael Kennedy, Jerrold Northrop Moore and Diana McVeagh. Theirs have been my reference works.
My greatest debt, though, is to the music. It is much – and boringly – debated whether it is permissible to infer biographical facts from a composer’s music. Yet that morbidly sensitive Englishman who experienced every note he wrote and could describe one of his own works as ‘the passionate pilgrimage of a soul’ is somebody this listener feels he occasionally inhabits more or less without presumption. Those affinities for people we could never have met are the more pungent for their element of invention. On this basis, then, the novelist proceeds with all due recklessness. I have deliberately taken a liberty by turning the shadowy Helen Weaver, to whom Elgar was briefly engaged in his twenties, into a more substantial character capable of bearing narrative weight. In so doing I have given her a new nationality and a background quite different from that of a Worcester shoe merchant’s daughter. For the rest, I tried to be as factually correct as was interesting.
*
When I investigated the Booth Line records for this particular journey a couple of very minor discrepancies with received Elgarian scholarship did come to light. These concern the cruise ship herself, RMS Hildebrand. Firstly, the various ship’s logs and documents which are still preserved show her captain’s name was J. Maddrell, whereas Elgar biographers who mention the trip at all invariably call him ‘Mandrell’. Secondly, a story is sometimes quoted to the effect that the weather was so bad on the first part of the outward leg that the Hildebrand’s pilot could not be put off at Holyhead and had to be taken on to Madeira. This is odd because Madeira was the third port of call. The first was Oporto, the second Lisbon, both of which were major ports with a constant traffic of vessels belonging to the Booth Line and various other British companies. Madeira was seven hundred miles further on: for a Liverpool-based pilot needing immediate passage home it makes no sense. The implication is that on this particular trip the ship missed out the first two ports and went straight to Madeira. It didn’t, however. The Hildebrand’s log (which lists the dates and times of arrival and departure at every port) shows that not only did she call at Oporto and Lisbon but took exactly as long getting there as she always did – not what one might expect were the weather as bad as is always stated.
So one wonders about the source of this curious, but quite unimportant, incompatibility of accounts. It looks as though the information might originally have come from Elgar himself. He could well have mis-remembered the captain’s name, while far younger men proud of their fortitude have been known to exaggerate the storms at sea they have survived. Nobody bothers to check a returning traveller’s tales for veracity at the time, certainly not over such trivial details. Thus may a novelist sixty-four years later speculate on them affectionately.
*
To my acknowledged indebtedness to the authors named above I should like to add my sincerest thanks to David Peate of the Booth Steamship Company Ltd and Janet Smith of Liverpool City Libraries for their great courtesy and help.