Reminiscing - by Rowena House

Between deadlines and family contingency planning for the covid-19 epidemic, my March blog about historical research is still languishing on the drawing board. Soz. Here instead is an article first published on March 18, 2018 on The History Girls’ blogsite just ahead of publication of my WW1 debut novel The Goose Road. It’s one that still means a lot me. Stay safe. 

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them

At the start of the centenary of the 1914-18 war I had a notion that we would by now, as a nation, have found some sort of collective closure on the individual suffering of the dead of the Great War, and be ready to move on, to toss their bones in the air as it were, and free the spirits of the fallen to join with our distant ancestors.

As a writer, I agreed with Pat Barker’s comment that World War I had “come to stand in for other wars … it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars.” Our stories might be about that particular conflict, but the larger subject was war itself.

Researching and writing my own First World War novel, The Goose Road, dented that conviction. Wherever I looked, the power of individual suffering endured and the personal stories were endlessly shocking, intimate and enthralling.

I fell under their spell time and again while listening to the first-hand accounts of veterans of the Western Front, their scratchy voices forever locked in a sound archive, or when reading a collection of letters home, or interviews granted to earlier researchers. I’d suddenly be caught unawares by a moment of humanity or courage, or dark gallows’ humour.

Occasionally an old soldier would admit to cruelty. More often they shared memories of the drudgery of the trenches, punctuated by terror. To walk those trenches – or at least one of the few fragments that remain, in Beaumont Hamel, say, zig-zagging through a meadow – is to walk in a haunted place.

Near Verdun, there’s a hill called Mort Homme. The name isn’t connected to the 1914-18 war, although the WW1 artillery battles fought there between the French and the Germans were so fierce that engineers found afterward that meters of the entire hilltop had been blown off. Local farmers still aren’t allowed to plough its soil because of the human remains.

The French memorial to the fallen of Mort Homme: “They did not pass”

When researching closer to home I found that WW1 objects as well as places had the power to take my breath away. Once I was in the Royal Artillery Museum in Woolwich Arsenal, investigating a particular week in October 1916 and a specific section of the Western Front near the occupied French town of Peronne. The archivist bought me out a trolley laden with original material from that time and that place, on top of which was a small moleskin notebook, written in pencil by an English major, the pages still stained with the mud of the Somme. I sat and stared at it for ages, feeling as if the battle itself was within touching distance.

Just before I returned for the second of four research visits to France, my mother died unexpectedly. It was a release: she’d been ill for a long time. Among the heirlooms she left to me was a forget-me-not locket with a photograph of her father, Frederick Clarke, in his WW1 uniform. A stern old lady stares out of the locket’s other frame – my great-grandmother, Selena, I believe.

The memorial, cemetery and ossuary for the Battle of Verdun

Mum also left me a heart-shaped locket, which I think must have belonged to Selena as it contained the pictures of two uniformed soldiers, her sons. One is Frederick, who served in the 10^th (Irish) Division as a medical clerk and stretcher bearer in the Dardanelles in 1916 and later in Salonika. The other is Frederick’s older brother, Thomas Clarke, a private in the 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment, killed in action on the Somme, on July 30^th, 1916.

Private Thomas Clarke, 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment

I’d never seen Thomas Clarke’s picture before I inherited this locket. Mum thought he’d died near Ypres, and as far as I know, until my husband tracked down his regiment’s military records, no one in the family knew the details of his last day. The official War Diary and Intelligence Summary of that engagement is chilling:

“29/7/16 battle position in the MALTZ HORN TRENCH.

30/7/16 BATTLE began. Zero hour 4.45 am. The Battalion reached its objective, but suffered heavy losses, and had to evacuate its position owing to no reinforcements. At 12 noon the roll call was 7 officers and 43 men.

Total casualties were: Lieutenant-Colonel G. Rollo wounded.

KILLED. [Six officers named]

WOUNDED. [One officer named.]

WOUNDED AND MISSING. [Three officers named.]

Total casualties in Other Ranks: 425, of which 76 were killed, 172 wounded, 177 missing.”

Barry Cuttell’s account of that morning in 148 Days on the Somme is more detailed: “Morning mist prevented communication by visual signals, and almost all underground cables had been damaged. The only way of relaying messages to divisional headquarters was by runner, which would be a dangerous task once the fog had lifted as the runners had to cross the open ground between Guillemont and Trone’s Wood, over which German machine guns … enjoyed an excellent field of fire.

“While waiting for zero hour, 19/King’s Liverpool were subject to High Explosives and gas (shelling) … The 19/King’s in the centre was also badly hit by enemy fire, only a few men reaching the road. A little further north, a company of the 19/King’s succeeded in getting forward towards the south-eastern entry to Guillemont.” But later that morning, “Under the impression they were cut off, the 19/King’s withdrew from the edge of Guillemont.”

Thus out of 486 soldiers of the 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment who advanced at dawn on that summer’s morning, north and east from the Maltz Horn Trench towards the German artillery and machine guns, only fifty remained standing seven hours later. The rest were wounded, dead or “missing”, that is, their bodies were either too badly mutilated for individual identification or otherwise unrecoverable from the battlefield.

The rolling fields where Thomas Clarke fell were bronzed with ripening wheat when I saw them, flanked by the once devastated trees of Trone’s Wood. My husband, a former Royal Marine, returned there on July 30^th, 2016, to pay our respects, both on the battlefield and at his graveside in the Bernafay Wood cemetery. Perhaps his locket – the brother to the forget-me-not one I inherited – is buried there with him.

Website: rowenahouse.com

Twitter @HouseRowena

                               

Book events across cultures - Clémentine Beauvais

A while ago I wrote a blog post for ABBA about the differences between school visits in France and in Britain. Today I thought I’d write one about the differences I’ve observed between book events open to the public in Britain, France and Germany. 

My experience isn’t entirely representative, of course, but I’ve now done quite a few book tours/ book events (at fairs, in bookshops, or in other contexts) in those three countries and there are some striking differences that are quite revealing, I think, of the ways in which authors, books, and reading, are positioned and thought of in those three contexts. 

I’m here mostly talking about single-author events, not round tables, which are (as far as I can tell) quite similarly run. And my experience is of children's and YA literature events, not adult.

celebrating Franco-Germanic friendship on my birthday last year...

France: The author as mysterious authority

The vast majority of public book events in France take the form of an interview, with a bookseller, journalist, moderator, chair or other literature expert asking the questions. As I mentioned in my other blog post, the author’s position in such events is one I’d characterise as a subject supposed to know, in an almost oracular position, authoritative and mysterious, full of potential answers that the interviewer’s questions may or may not unlock.

Authors in France, as far as I can tell, generally don’t have firm ideas of the main points they want to convey in an interview. They wait for questions, and they answer them. Their personas on stage tend to be pretty much reflective of their personalities. They might be cheerful and communicative, or shy and fearful, or haughty and snobbish, or dull and boring. They certainly, as far as I can tell, don’t consider the interview to be a performance, but very firmly a literary discussion. There is an expectation that the book event will be informative.

The questions are generally highly complimentary - it’s very rare to hear trick questions, or criticisms (even veiled) of the book. They tend to be very respectful of the author’s private life and very rarely intrusive; any biographical interest is generally motivated by the contents of the book or by general discussion of writing. Most of the questions are quite literature-focused.

The book event may or may not be followed by a signing. While the promotion of the book is evidently an aim of the event, it is rarely clearly foregrounded as such. It would be considered, I think, quite distasteful for an author to self-promote during the event, actively encourage listeners to buy the book, or sing the praises of their own work.

Britain: The author as show/wo/man

It is, of course, very frequent in Britain to have interview-format book events, too. But even in those - and, even more so, in other types of events where authors actually put on a show (with or without Powerpoint), it is clear that the author’s role in British book events is more proactive, more promotional, and more performance-driven than in France.

The author in Britain is here to sell their book, and the narrative they build around the book - which may lead to some quite private information to be given - is part of the publicity for the book. There is an expectation that the book event will be entertaining.

The questions are generally complimentary, as in France, but I have observed that they tend to be less specific than in France - questions are willfully quite broad, in order perhaps to serve as platforms for the author to tell the story of their book and of their writing.

I would say that doing a book event in Britain feels like much more like acting than in France, with the drive to make one’s personality considerably sunnier and funnier than in real life (this, of course, with variations to match the contents of the book).

Authors in Britain, it seems to me, have quite a clear idea before going on stage of the main messages they want to communicate about the book; its pitch; its unique selling points. Those things are, it’s worth saying, much more part of the genesis of the book and the publishing process in the first place: in Britain, you know your pitch, in part because the agents, editors and publicists have been refining it for months. In France, where pitch-driven writing is less a thing (even in children’s literature), there isn’t a huge expectation that you should be able to sum up the book quickly.

The book event is almost always followed by a signing and generally, that aspect of it is considered as perfectly natural. The author’s self-promotion and encouragement to the audience to buy the book is not seen as weird.

Germany: The author as builder and sharer of words

My first book events in Germany puzzled me utterly. I was expecting a French-style interview, the only difference being the presence of an interpreter (I don’t speak German), and the slightly odd labelling of the event as ‘Reading’ didn’t register with me as being an actual thing. This was a book fair with teenagers, there was a fee, it was an hour long - it obviously wasn’t going to be a Reading.

It was. In Germany, very many book events involve remarkably long readings from the book that the author is promoting. Not only that - from a very young age, children get accustomed to sitting in rooms listening to people reading from books. Reading, I mean, sitting down at a desk, with the book. That’s it. The first time, I thought - there is no way in heaven that those teenagers are going to listen to 15 minutes of reading out loud, with no acting, no background, no nothing. But they did.

Normally, events with young people consist of brief-ish readings - 10, 15 minutes, and in between, some questions. Still, that is a much longer amount of time than either France or Britain would normally consider feasible. For adults, I’m told, book events in Germany can consist of literally one hour of reading. There is an expectation that the book event will expand one's imagination.

In such events, the author, I think, is positioned principally as a builder and sharer of words, someone whose creation of an atmosphere, a world, a cast of characters, will fill up the whole space for considerable amounts of time. It is less about talking around the book than about entering the book - letting it speak for itself. 

In-between the reading, there may be questions, and questions in Germany tend to be more thought-provoking and more critical than in France and Britain, I’ve found. There’s less of a sense that the interviewer should always be adoring. You can get quite tough - though always kindly worded - questions on anything from your literary choices to your ideological viewpoint.

As in France, the author doesn’t put on a show for such events; I would say that their ‘usual’ personality, give or take the inevitable alterations induced by being on a stage, is generally what you see. A signing generally follows the book event, though, like France, I have a sense that it wouldn’t be considered very tasteful to advertise that fact too strongly.

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Again, those are generalities, not absolute facts, and they’re drawn from admittedly limited experience, but such experience tells us a lot about the cultural scripts that define in a given country at a given time what an author is, what kind of knowledge they’ve got, and how a book is considered in relation to the audience, the market, and its genre. Let me know in the comments what it’s like in other countries, too…

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer and literary translator. Her YA novels are Piglettes(Pushkin, 2017) and In Paris with You (trans. Sam Taylor, Faber, 2018).

School visits here and there - Clémentine Beauvais

I took part last week in a semi-academic, semi-professional conference, organised by the University of Lyon, on author visits in schools, and I thought I'd sum up my paper here.

The school visit by children's authors has never really been (as far as I know) theorised, even though there are plenty of practical texts on the matter, as well as many testimonies by authors, children and practitioners. One interesting thing about school visits from a theoretical perspective is what the norms and expectations surrounding the 'usual' author visit can tell us about perceptions of reading, book-consumption, the status of the author, or the space of the school in a given context.

My talk was about the 'typical' British school visit - a very weird format from a French perspective, just as the French format is very weird from a British perspective.

Here are the main differences between school visits normally in Britain and in France (I insist on 'normally': there are, of course, many exceptions in both countries, but there are norms in both countries, and they more or less coherently construct and frame the 'genre' of the school visit). So, normally:




I'm sure you can already see what each configuration tells us about the radically different ways in which author, reader, book and school are positioned in those two national and cultural contexts.

The author in Britain is placed in the position of an actor and a promoter: s/he generates most of the content of the visit and is in the centre of a spectacular situation in the etymological sense of the word:




Meanwhile, the author is France is very much in the position of an authority, whose secret knowledge has to be 'unlocked', for the whole hour, by the children's questions:


The reader is placed in a different situation, too, in each context.

In the British context, the reader is always also addressed as a consumer, or potential consumer, of the book, which is ready in the room somewhere to be bought; spatially as well as temporally, the school visit is oriented at least to some degree towards the book sale.

In France, conversely, the reader is always also addressed as a student of the book. Since selling anything in the school, or doing any kind of advertising is strictly forbidden in France, there is no space or time for the act of buying the book during the visit. Instead, the child reader must show that they have read and studied the book well, and the teachers' preparation in this respect is crucial.

This means, too, very different implications as to why the book is good, or what it is good for. The British school visit sets up the book as a product to be acquired for the pleasure of the child, should the child's choice be to acquire it after being convinced by the author visit.

In France, there's no such emphasis on either the child's choice, or indeed pleasure; it's the teacher whose choice it is to make the class study this book rather than another, with pedagogical considerations at stake (which doesn't mean that it's not pleasurable).

While this may seem a 'good' thing for the British school visit - and indeed, reading for pleasure is hugely valued in Britain in a way that it isn't in France - it also means that in Britain the book is very much positioned by the event of the school visit as a commercial product. And the pressure to buy it is strong for parents, which isn't unproblematic from a sociological perspective.

Finally, the space of the school is invested differently by the two types of author visit. In the British context, the author visit can be understood as partaking in the use of the school space as, on the one hand, a place of discovery, pleasure, fulfillment, creativity - values much more developed on this side of the Channel than in France. But, on the other hand, the author visit also partakes in the use of the school as a place where the values of consumerism are transmitted, in a more or less tangible manner, and cultural goods are treated as products almost like any others.

In France, the author visit is inscribed within the rather unitary use of the school as a space for learning, pedagogy and the glorification of a certain type of culture, chosen by established wardens of that culture: teachers.

I'll stop here (I'll probably write it up as an academic paper soon). It's worth mentioning that there are yet other models of school visits in the world; as another paper by French academic and author Bernard Friot showed, the German author visit generally consists of a long reading, followed by a Q&A, for instance - not a norm for either the Brits or the French.