An old postcard from Céreste

To celebrate the paperback publication today of The Sea Garden, I'm taking you to Céreste, a quiet village at the eastern end of the Luberon, on an intriguing trail.

This charming backwater plays a crucial part in the middle section of my novel, where we renew acquaintance with Marthe Lincel, the perfumier who first appeared in The Lantern. Just up the road, the Vaucluse ends and the signs announce the department of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. In real life, as The Sea Garden, Céreste was a Resistance stronghold during the Second World War, secret headquarters of "Captain Alexandre", the poet René Char, as I wrote here in a previous blog post.

A couple of years ago, while I was writing the novel, I found a stall selling old postcards at a market in Simiane-la-Rotonde. Naturally, I stopped to sift through the boxes marked with the names of places I knew, and pulled out this one of Céreste:

 

Now this may sound a bit crazy, but when I'm writing a book, I always look for signs that I'm on the right track. I'm sure there are plenty of people who will say that we see what we want to see, and it's all a lot of nonsense. They are probably right, but that doesn't stop me enjoying a nice moment of coincidence, synchronicity, call it what you will. But look at the name on the right: Monsieur Gabriel Brachet, Marseille. If you haven't read the book, I'm not giving anything away, but be sure to make a note of the first name. If you have read the book, I hope it gives you a pleasant frisson!

The words were written on July 23, 1931, and they're not terribly interesting - it seems to me they could well have been written to a child, as the sender urges "Gaby" to take care to fill in a form and to write with news of what he's been doing. The intriguing part is that the sender gives his own name, "Mr Et. Paul" - Etienne? - and address as the Château des Guis at St-Martin-de-Castillon.

St Martin de Castillon is another lovely, quiet village that sits opposite the ripples of the Great Luberon, a few kilometres along the road and higher in the hills than Céreste. I know it well, but I'd never heard of the Château des Guis. Of course, I bought the postcard and scoured a large scale map when I got home. I couldn't find the château. An internet search found nothing, either.

But I never like to give up...and when I was looking at the my files of photos and background info the other week, wondering what I could use for my blog, I remembered this postcard - and this time, with a bit more online detective work, I managed to find the property in St-Martin. It is a grand old residence, though it's not called a château but a "bastide", which is denotes an imposing old house, possibly once fortified.

And here it is, The Bastide Les Guis:

 

 

The Bastide Les Guis is even available to rent, and there are details and more pictures on the Janssens Immobilier site and on Made in Provence. 

The Next Big Thing

Twelfth Night and the festivities are officially at an end. Another retreat behind closed shutters, then, (here's the first) for some renewed hard work on the new book. But there’s just time to answer the questions posed by The Next Big Thing, which gives writers a chance to open up their current manuscript.

I was tagged by Vanessa Couchman, a freelance writer living in France. She also writes short stories which have been published in anthologies and is currently writing a novel set in Corsica. A member of Writers Abroad, she blogs with brio as Vanessa France at Life on La Lune. If you love south-west France, its history, architecture and daily life, you’ll be entranced.

Here goes with my answers:

What is the working title of your next book?

The Night Flight.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I happened across a poignant newspaper story about the excavation of a crashed plane in a field, and the archaeology involved to discover more about it. It was almost certainly a World War II plane – but who were the crew on this fatal flight? Some seventy years afterwards, time is running out to solve many such mysteries across Europe as the war generation passes away; the witnesses too, most of whom were children at the time.

Although I began the novel with this scene in mind, it probably won’t make it into the book. The story that evolved from this first idea took on a life of its own and placed the characters in different settings so that this scene became an awkward complication. But I reserve the right to change my mind.

What genre does your book fall under?

Romantic suspense with a strong sense of place and well-researched history.

Which actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Let's pencil in Olivier Martinez as the Resistance hero and Rosamund Pike (cool, intelligent English toughness) as the young garden designer, unnerved by the unexpected darkness of the world she has entered. And we can always find something for Dan Stevens.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

On the Mediterranean island of Porquerolles, the restoration of a garden is key to the secret lives that cast a long shadows over the present.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I am extremely lucky to be represented by Stephanie Cabot at The Gernert Company in New York and by Araminta Whitley at Lucas Alexander Whitley in London. The novel will be published by HarperCollins in the USA and Orion in the UK.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I’m not there yet but as a general rule of thumb it takes me about a year - excluding breaks for consultation with agents and editors - before the first draft is ready for submission.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

William Boyd’s Restless, Sebastian Faulks’ A Possible Life, Rachel Hore’s A Gathering Storm.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I have long been fascinated by stories of clandestine daring in World War II. Our part of Provence was a big Resistance stronghold where complicated networks operated across isolated farming communities, many in liaison with British agents and pilots, a courageous partnership that is far from forgotten today. The poet René Char wrote some of his most beautiful and heartbreaking prose-poems about the fine line between life and death in those dangerous times, and a memoire La Nuit d’Alexandre (his code name was Capitaine Alexandre).

But my novel – structured in three distinct parts – is set in wartime London and Sussex too, showing another side of the operations and other lives intersecting with these events. Secrecy was all, along with the immense difficulties involved in communications and maintaining contact.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

One of the three sections centres on a character from The Lantern, Marthe Lincel the blind sister with the gift for perfumery. What really happened to her at the perfume factory in the lavender fields of wartime Manosque, omitted from Bénédicte's narrative?


My picks for The Next Big Thing:

Essie Fox is the acclaimed author of The Somnambulist and Elijah’s Mermaid, both dark Victorian novels. Before her success as a writer she worked as an illustrator, which clearly shows in her wondrous blog, The Virtual Victorian, Essie Fox’s Facts, Fancies and Fabrications.

Helen Smith is a novelist and playwright who lives in London. She is the author of cult bestsellers Alison Wonderland, The Miracle Inspector and Being Light. She’s a shrewd observer who makes being very funny look easy. Here’s Helen's writing blog.

Ann Sharples is a writer and artist in Spain and is the author of the Violet Jelly books for readers aged 8-10. Her Wordstitcher blog is a delight, full of gorgeous photos and well-chosen words.

Karen Wojcik Berner has been a writer, editor and magazine editor for twenty-five years, and puts up fantastic posts about grammar on her Bibliophilic Blather blog. As a defiantly indie author near Chicago, she is the author of the sassy Bibliophiles series about a fictional suburban Classics Book Club.

Writing and determination

 

"Closed like a box-wood shutter," wrote the poet René Char, "An extreme and compact fortune is our mountain range, our compressing splendour." This closed wooden shutter is in Céreste, the village where Char lived when he was leader of a Resistance cell during the Second World War. Plain and simple on the surface, like Char's words, but with something intriguing about it - that dark grape colour; the deep tactile texture of sun-dried cracks in the wood: the planks are aged but solid, and hiding who knows what behind. 

 

There are any number of metaphors it can stand for but right now, for me, it's the moment when I turn in on myself to return to the writing of a new book. At the beginning I stand outside, perhaps for quite some time, wondering what exactly I will discover. Though I have a few pre-conceived ideas of what lies inside the dark and dormant house of my imagination, I won't know what surprises are in store until I concentrate on entering. To sit at a desk and immerse myself is an adventure, a safe one, though it's always possible to lose control of events. And Char's mountain range can at times be there too, in the uphill battle to shape ideas and words into viable forms.

 

This summer in Provence I did my favourite kind of research: going to the places where a novel will be set, poking into corners and wandering with endless curiosity, though some might call it nosiness. I spend a couple of mornings in Céreste, exploring the winding streets. Another day I attended a little 'conference' under the plane trees which addressed the poets of the Resistance. It was all the more fun because I knew that sooner or later I would have to sit down and crack on - but I'd do so with a full scrapbook of notes and pictures for grey winter days.

 

This week I gave a talk about how I became a writer. It was a good time to think about what I was going to say, because I realised that I could do worse than to focus on what had really made the difference between wanting to write and be published, and being published. And then take my own advice.

 

The talk was held at an appropriate venue, The Poet at Matfield quite near where I live in Kent. It's a traditional old pub, now transformed into a fine restaurant. The eponymous poet was Siegfried Sassoon - born in Matfield, across the green from the pub - decorated soldier of the First World War and best known for poetry which exposed the horrors and stupidities of war.

 

 

When you read the works of men like Sassoon and Char, the experiences their words reflect, you realise that they set out all the important, the compelling subjects: life and death, love and betrayal, honour and dishonour, truth and lies. I should have said that while I was speaking, but I didn't. I was thinking more of what they inspire in a smaller, more personal way. Because a sense of purpose and determination is more use than high-mindedness.

 

And that was what I said. If it doesn't sound too trite in juxtaposition, you have to be determined to become a writer. You have to want to do it, and follow through. It's not just putting the words on the page either, it's about being sufficiently clear-sighted to junk what's not good enough. It's about reading widely to be able to gauge what's good and bad, always with a single aim in mind.  

 

I've always been stubborn, but when it comes to writing I simply will not admit defeat. Which doesn't mean I think I'm always right - far from it. Sometimes it means admitting I've got something wrong and working like a demon to put it right, engine humming with determination to reach the happy ending of a decent published book. With this novel I'm experimenting a bit more with structure. I'm excited about it, and so far my publishers like the idea that it will be different. It may not work, but if at first you don't succeed... I'm going in.   





Rene Char: Night chimera

Congé au Vent (Wind Away)

   Camped in the hillsides near the village are fields of mimosa. During the gathering season, it may happen that, some distance away, you meet an extremely sweet-smelling girl whose arms have been busy during the day among the fragile branches. Like a lamp with a bright nimbus of perfume, she goes her way, her back to the setting sun.

   To speak to her would be sacrilege.

   The grass crushed beneath her slippers. Give her right of way. You may be lucky enough to make out on her lips the chimera of the damp of night.

René Char, from Fureur et Mystère (1948)

A native of Provence, the poet René Char (1907-1988) had the gift of capturing expansiveness in the small frame of verse. It was freedom he valued, and he invited the reader to walk in the “great spaces of the self”, uniting the universal and the deeply personal.

Originally part of the French surrealist movement, Char reflected the complexities of the “fury and mystery” of World War II in occupied France. Directness and passion are coded into the landscape of his descriptive flow. For Char was no mere wordsmith: he was a man of action and astonishing bravery, commanding a Resistance cell from Céreste in the eastern Luberon.

The short prose-poem Congé au Vent  appears in René Char, Selected Poems, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas (pub. New Directions, New York). This is a superb introduction to his work, with English translations and the original on opposite pages.

You only have to go as far as the title of Congé au Vent to get a taste of Char’s wordplay – and the delicacy of these excellent translations. Wind Away is the English title, which is perhaps too lyrical quite to capture the holiday or 'day off' sense of “congé” – I think Off in the Wind, the more literal translation, would work better for me.

But to quibble is to engage, and that was above all, what René Char intended his poetry to do.

The painting used to illustrate the poem is Long Shadows – Provence by Maryanne Jacobsen which I’ve written about here. The richness of the evening colours and the path leading on seem to catch the essence of Char’s words. If you would like to find out more about the Surrealist Movement, there is an excellent article here on Artsy.net.