...On 16 February 1938, Jelly d'Arányi gave the UK premiere of the Schumann Violin Concerto at the Queen's Hall, London. That event is the climax of
Ghost Variations - so for the occasion, here for a reblog is my piece for the
Women Writers, Women's Books website the other day, not so much about why I started writing that novel, but why I finished it, which was another matter altogether...
Finding
the Pearl: Why I wrote Ghost Variations
Why do you start to write a book? Perhaps
more than that, why do you finish it? There are enough books in the world
already: why do you need to add yours?
The reason I started Ghost Variations is not the same reason I finished it. I can’t
count the number of times I nearly gave up, or rewrote bleeding chunks, or
chucked them out, or how often issues outside nearly scuppered the whole thing.
Its initial impulse was several-fold. I wanted
to try writing a historical novel, as my former ones were mostly contemporary. Besides,
it seemed a good idea at the time…
When I first came across the story of Jelly
(pronounced “Yély”) d’Arányi and her discovery of the Schumann Violin Concerto
in the 1930s, it seemed impossibly far-fetched. A few years ago, researching my
third novel, Hungarian Dances, which
centred on a musical family from Budapest, I’d got hold of an out-of-print
biography of this revered Hungarian violinist and her musician sisters. I found
more than I’d expected. Namely, a chapter entitled “The Truth About the
Schumann Concerto”. I read it with increasing incredulity.
The Schumann is the least known and most
mysterious of German romantic violin concertos. It was the composer’s last orchestral
work: soon after its completion he suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide,
then spent the last two years of his life in an asylum. After his death, his
widow, Clara, decided the concerto betrayed signs of his illness and left it
unpublished. Joseph Joachim, the violinist for whom it was written, kept the
manuscript; his heirs deposited it in the Prussian State Library, embargoed for
100 years.
Then in 1933 Joachim’s great-niece – Jelly
d’Arányi – claimed to have received a message through a Ouija board ostensibly
from the spirit of Schumann, asking her to find the concerto and perform it.
Her enquiries alerted others to the fact that there was something interesting
lurking in that library. Schumann’s daughter was furious and insisted the
concerto must never be performed. Nobody could override her directive…except
people who cared nothing for niceties. The Nazis’ Department for Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda, run by Goebbels, found a use for it: having
banned music by Jewish composers, including the popular Mendelssohn Violin
Concerto, they decided to take the Schumann themselves and launch it as a
symbol: a great Aryan concerto by a great German Aryan composer.
Complicating things further, the work’s new
publishers sent a photostat to the young American virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin,
asking his opinion. He fell in love with it and wanted to give the premiere
himself. The unfortunate d’Arányi found herself in a three-way race to perform
the work, while Europe was hurtling towards war.
It seemed a good story, but it needed to be
more than that to make its telling worthwhile. And I felt that it was indeed
more than that. The confluence between the situations of the heroine, her
target and her world coalesced into a single key image: a tipping point, poised
on the cliff edge, reaching for a last chance of redemption. Jelly d’Arányi,
for whom composers including Bartók, Ravel and Vaughan Williams had created
masterpieces, could feel her glory days slipping away; the concerto was written
when Schumann was descending into madness; and when the work came to light, the
world was sliding into fascism and the vortex towards cataclysmic war and the
Holocaust.
I started the first draft in 2011. My
mother-in-law, who escaped Nazi Germany aged 13 on the Kindertransport and never
saw her parents and brother again, asked what I was writing. A historical
novel, I told her. She asked when it was set. When I said the 1930s, she
laughed. To her, that wasn’t historical at all.
Three years earlier we’d experienced a kind
of modern-day 1929: the financial crash of 2008. Structures and certainties were
crumbling. Witch-hunts were on the rise. People were frightened and insecure,
taking out their alarm on those less powerful than themselves whom they
considered had fallen out of line. After half the first draft was done, a
period of intense stress rendered me unable to write a word for six months. I’ll
spare you the gory details, and of course the outcome could have been worse, but
it has caused a long-term health issue.
I kept trying to get back to the book, but
it progressed only in fits and starts. I’d set about it without a contract as I
didn’t want deadlines or directives, but this meant no advance, nor any certainty
of publication. With my immune system apparently AWOL I then lost half of 2014 too,
this time to something that turned out to be whooping cough.
Yet to give up, to shove the manuscript
into the bottom drawer and forget about it, was unthinkable: you’re not beaten
unless you allow yourself to be. I hunkered down and got on with it as best I
could.
And one day in summer 2015, tired of the
continual hold-ups, I decided to send the draft to Unbound, a new-look publisher
that works via crowdfunding. It came highly recommended by several journalist
colleagues. Once they agree to take you on, you pitch your project to potential
readers. If you reach the crowdfunding target, they publish the book.
A few months later, having all but
forgotten about the submission, I received a message saying they would take Ghost Variations. We launched the
crowdfunding in January 2016. To my astonishment it made target in 12 days. Maybe
the story rang some bells, because it wasn’t only people I knew who were jumping
on board.
Soon I was working round the clock to chisel
the novel into publishable shape. My editor gently pointed out that I’d paid plenty
of attention to the rise of fascism in Germany, but not said much about what
was happening in England, where our heroine Jelly d’Arányi lived. Indeed, the sporadic
way in which I’d written the book had left a black hole of grand proportions,
waiting for Oswald Mosley to fill it.
I looked up 1930s Daily Mail headlines and
articles by Lord Rothermere. This was the country in which my parents-in-law
had arrived as teenaged Jewish refugees with German names and accents. Because
of that press-stirred hysteria about “floods” of such refugees, my
mother-in-law’s parents and brother were refused visas, meaning they were
trapped in Berlin, and were murdered in a concentration camp.
Meanwhile our television screens were
filled with images of boatloads of people from today’s conflict zones sinking
and drowning in the Mediterranean while our own western governments slammed the
doors shut upon them. In June Britain voted to leave the EU. Nobody absorbed in
research on the 1930s could view this as anything but a calamity of historic
proportions. Over the Atlantic, the notion of Donald Trump as potential US
president was derided, yet I’d been reading that Hitler himself was at first regarded
as a joke by many who believed that an unstable, deluded fantasist could never take
power.
When I first began Ghost Variations I had no idea it would be as relevant as it has
turned out. Its delays were frustrating. But perhaps 2016 was its moment after
all, because this year brought us our own tipping point. We’re no longer on the
cliff edge: we’ve tipped and we’re falling.
I’ve learned a lot through writing Ghost Variations, so here are my lessons
in a nutshell. First, if you want to write about the inconvenient truths of today,
sometimes it’s better not to hold up a direct mirror. Instead, refract the
light you want to shed. Shine it through a prism of a past parallel, or a
sci-fi or fantasy world. Good historical fiction doesn’t only concern the past.
Next, that question publishers and agents
always ask – “But what’s it about?” –
is slightly misphrased. It means: “What are you really trying to say?” A “good
story” isn’t enough. There has to be a pearl in your oyster, something special
for the reader to extrapolate. Writing a book takes a lot of work, and the
financial rewards are not huge even if you are successful. At some point you
might need to reassure yourself you have a good reason for doing it at all.
Your clinching point is that reason, so make sure it’s there.
I think – or hope – that Ghost Variations holds a positive message
despite the times it portrays. I hope it shows there were, and there will be,
people who see through lies, moral corruption and mortal danger and stand by
higher principles. We’ve come through times of turmoil before; and despite
huge, tragic sacrifices and horrors beyond comprehension, still people keep
trying to do the right thing. There will be heroes and heroines, there will be
life and there will be love. And maybe there is even a chance that in some
unsuspected dimension love can last forever. Maybe that’s why I wrote this book.
