Following the uncanny dictation I took when writing Chicken Water in 2009, I woke up in 2015 with another title rattling around in my head. Rather, I heard a name. The name of a woman. Happy Lafrance.
Once again I sat down and waited to see what would happen when my fingers hit the keys.
Unlike Chicken Water, which felt like an ongoing 'download' directly from 'upstairs', the experience this time helped me gain a little more insight into the actual creative process of writing.
It may feel at times like dictation from some other-worldly source. Ideas spring up from nowhere. You find yourself writing on subjects you know nothing about, only to find verification later on ... It can feel almost supernatural, especially if you are like me and are always ready to find mystery where there is none ...
But this time, unlike my experience with Chicken Water, I did become aware of at least some conscious, perhaps (or perhaps not) insignificant, influences.
This time the narrator was Jan, a diner/deli owner living in New York. Jan's life was forever changed when "the tall and talkative" Happy arrived at the back door of the diner, offering her services, on the day after 9/11.
It happened that, at the time I started on this story, I was sharing and enjoying the music of Mary Chapin Carpenter with Sam, my son. Sam had picked up, in his acute way, the words and guitar chords of 'Down at The Twist and Shout', a fiddle-infused celebration of the bayou and its culture. Happy, it seemed, hailed from this warm, hurricane-rocked gumbo-land. Her father, moreover, wrote songs and played in the cajun band, Arcadia. Ever heard of them? I haven't.
I had also recently visited Prague where, astonishingly enough, my 82 year old father was spending a year, living in a rather hip apartment and studying the Czech language at the university. My sister and I decided to visit him during his birthday week in April.
After a few days Laura had to go home and so left Pa and I to it. He sent me off one morning to visit The Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art whilst he attended a lecture.
My eyes prickled with tears as I walked slowly around the collection of raw World War II and Communist-era paintings. The soul-rape of a country; it tore at my heart. Art, whilst always filling me with rapture since my very early teens, had never actually hurt my heart like that!
Later that afternoon, Pa and I met up and visited the church where the Nazis had attempted, with the help of the city's fire brigade, to flush out the British-trained Czech assassins of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the Holocaust's architects. They'd taken refuge in the church's crypt but their presence had been betrayed by a fearful associate. Sooner than drown or be captured, the two took their own lives.
This was all too much for my father and I. Numb and dumb, we crossed the road to the bar happily situated to receive those such as us; those who'd been stunned into painful silence by the courage, cowardice and cruelty we'd seen symbolised there. By bullet-pitted stone walls above one narrow semi-basement window of a Christian sanctuary.
So my story was inevitably (I suppose) coloured by the emotions evoked during that brief but intense stay. Jan, it turned out, was the elder son and heir of a Jewish grocer and his wife who, having survived the war, had disembarked at Staten Island following a prescient decision to leave Czechoslovakia just before the Communist takeover in 1948.
Back to Happy. Jan was enchanted by her and he and 'the boys' in the kitchen accepted her whole-heartedly into the deli 'family'. And her presence wrought a kind of magic in the place! Things in the diner (and beyond) just seemed to get better, more peaceful!
So Jan felt understandably bereft when, some months after her arrival, and determined to explore her family roots, Happy departed on an indefinite trip to Europe. Not long after her departure, Jan received a letter. Happy had landed up in French Cathar country and she needed Jan to help her find a woman named Francesca of Stow. Said Francesca lived in or near Salem, Massachusetts. Try the Yellow Pages, she said. Or go up there and find her!
At this point, I baulked! This was too clicheed, too obvious! Salem and all its doings had been done to death long since! And, after all, this was not a novel about witch-hunts or persecution, was it? It was more, I thought, a journey into the nature of peace, a necessary coda to that era of scarlet-soaked screams.
Apropos of something, I looked up 'Salem'. Picture my incredulity when I saw that the name derived from the word shalom, the Hebrew for 'peace'.
There was, apparently, no escape for Jan, the reluctant traveller and homeboy. I told him that he would just have to take the bit between his teeth, get on the iron horse and hoof it upstate.
And then, although I was convinced that Jan was destined to marry the rather bohemian Happy at some point, I had him fall headlong in love with a Chanel-clad woman he bumped into on the Salem-bound train. She was blonde, she had lips like peony petals and her name was Clara. I expect the choice of name was inspired by Paul Morel's squeeze in Sons and Lovers. She had seemed the epitome of lustrous womanhood to the old Laurentian teenage me.
This Clara, chic and slightly sardonic, ran a bookstore in Salem and was, to boot, the editor of a Salem journal, a publication notorious for challenging absolutely everything that might smack of convention or corruption ... the justice and education systems, Big Food, the pharmaceutical industry ....
To cut an unfinished story short ... one of Clara's more blunt and outspoken writers found himself in jail accused of murder. The murderee was an annoyingly woke newly-minted teacher. But, as Jan said, even that didn't justify murder!
Seeking to be serious for a moment, I hereby admit that I was disturbed to find myself writing a book about murder. After all, Clara and Jan themselves had had, the night before the murder, an unpleasant run-in with said teacher and fellow dinner guest, Carl, the pharmacist at Salem General. Carl certainly wasn't keen on independent thinkers nor homeopathy nor 'anti-vaxxers' ...
Conflict, persecution even, had started rearing its un-pretty head! And so I stepped away from the keys. I had to think this through!
And so, in post-pandemic 2022, my story remains in the digital drawer, awaiting some kind of conclusion!
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