Down to the sea in ships (and wooden boats)

Every summer since starting The Stowaway, I've made a point of sailing at least once on the brig Lady Washington and seeing as many other ships as I can. But this year I not only missed the Wooden Boat Festival at Seattle's Lake Union, I was perilously close to missing a sail on the Lady as well. Luckily, the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival was a chance to remedy both.

A day that broke cool and cloudy turned blue and bright by midday. Fortunately, a boat festival is an easy place to buy a hat.

.

The festival is a showcase for over a hundred boats, large and small, motored and paddled and sailed.

And there she was--the Lady Washington.

 A perfect place from which to watch the parade of sail that ends the last day of the festival, and a chance to remind myself of those small sensory details of being aboard a ship that are part of Vivian Drew's story. (Of course, a fully-booked sail is not quiet, and not the place to hear the wind in the rigging. Cannon ball "booms" are another story.)

Our pirate nemesis! Luckily, she was not very large.

And so the summer's boat quest ended successfully, with not only a fun experience but with a few nautical observations I should have probably made before. There really is nothing like first-hand research if one can manage it.

Or you could not.

All I have to say about Talk Like a Pirate Day is this.

It's Robert Newton's fault.

I suppose that might be quite a bit.

Peter Pan and Patsy Stone

Patsy Stone and Edina Monsoon--leads of the new Absolutely Fabulous movie--may be monstrous (although I find them less so in their current incarnation). But my uncomfortable admiration of Patsy may be possible because I know actress Joanna Lumley is not only an activist for causes in the areas of human rights and animal welfare, but has also been instrumental in saving the house and garden where a young J. M. Barrie first dreamed of Peter Pan.

Barrie attended Dumfries Academy for five years, and played with the two boys who lived in the adjacent Moat Brae estate. From these games came the first inklings of the characters and plot of Peter and Wendy.

… when shades of night began to fall, certain young mathematicians shed their triangles, crept up walls and down trees, and became pirates in a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan. For our escapades in a certain Dumfries Garden, which is enchanted land to me, were certainly the genesis of that nefarious work, Peter Pan.” -- J. M. Barrie, 1924, upon being awarded the Freedom of the Burgh of Dumfries

The house was built in 1823, eventually converted to a private hospital and nursing home, abandoned by the 1990s and slated for demolition. But in 2007, the Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust was created to restore the house and gardens and convert the estate to Scotland's first National Centre for Children's Literature and Storytelling--an educational and cultural center for both local schools and anyone who loves the works of J. M. Barrie.

Dumfries is an economically challenged area, and the site was to be used for affordable housing. But the center does not abandon the goal of helping the town. It will bring tourist trade, jobs, and volunteer opportunities to Dumfries, along with skills development and literacy education.

The Discovery Garden will have a Neverland theme.

Lumley is patron of the trust, and in 2011 she launched the fundraiser which has raised £5.3 of its £5.8 target. Moat Brae will host artists in residence and hold ongoing workshops and artists in residence--programs which have already begun, even though the entire project won't be complete until 2018. One such event was an morning family presentation in March 2016 with Lumley and comedian David Walliams, who is not only popular for his work with comic Matt Lucas, but for the five children's books he's written, which have sold well over two million copies.

Another presentation was a 2015 production of scenes from Barrie's very first play, Bandelero the Bandit, which he wrote at the age of 17, and which had unexpected success when a local clergyman declared it immoral. Barrie thought the play lost, but a copy of the script was found in the U.S., and a full production will eventually be staged at Moat Brae.

Naturally, Christine de Poortere, keeper of the Peter Pan archives at Great Ormond Street Hospital, has visited Moat Brae, where she met with the children from a local school.

And a picture book--Sixteen String Jack and the Garden of Adventure--was published in 2015 about Moat Brae House and J. M. Barrie's adventures there. (When my copy arrives, you can read about it here.) It's written by Tom Pow and illustrated by Sendak Fellowship recipient Ian Andrew, and is available (along with other books about Moat Brae and J. M. Barrie) at the impressive Moat Brae website.

Progress report

I'm interrupting the usual focus of this blog for a progress report. Hook's Waltz is, after all, a blog in the service of a book, a book which has been long in its creation, and it seems appropriate to take note of its evolution as I move into (what I hope is) the final stretch.

It's an entire book now, albeit one which is not in its final form. I squeezed fifty-odd pages of notes into fifteen, at least of half of which I hope to find a place for in the final draft. (As bad as that sounds, the original "notes" document was a staggering 115 pages.) And there still a couple of spots with blue lettering--so I can't miss it--saying things like "Insert accurate nautical terminology here!" The historical aspects of The Stowaway mean that I can never learn too much.

I'm reading the manuscript out loud (to the delight or chagrin, I'm not sure which) of the feral foster cat who is my audience. I've read that writing fiction on a computer short-circuits some of the processes that handwriting facilitates. I don't know the truth of that, but I do know that repetitive stress injuries and bad handwriting (I blame grad school, because it was fine before that) mean that I will never write a book long-hand. But reading aloud seems like it may accomplish some of the same aims.

It's my preferred method of finding words I overuse (ahem), sentences that don't flow, bits that don't fit with other bits. This method is harder and creates more work than the other revisions I've done, and I can't say it's my favorite part of writing. I do, however, appreciate the results.

Before I can call The Stowaway a finished work, I want to make sure I have enough understanding celestial navigation to be able to write Vivian Drew's experience of learning it. Trigonometry was the only math class I ever enjoyed, but that was long enough ago that its tenets are no longer at my ready retrieval. I've learned how to read a sextant, but there's far more to the art and science of navigation than that.

I am also immersing myself in relevant works so that I'm living the narrative as much as I can while I complete the manuscript.

I will also make time for DVD watching, so images of faraway places are clear in my mind. (Maybe Robert Newton's Long John Silver isn't so good for research. But it was a lucky thrift-store find, and does fit with the general immersion theme.)

My beta readers are ready. I have a background in non-profit grant-writing that I plan to turn towards synopsis and query letters.

And then I run up the sail and strike out for distant shores.

The artist who dressed the pirates

You may not know the name of its artist, but there's a good chance you know this painting:

Captain Keitt, 1907, by Howard Pyle

It's one of the more popular pieces of pirate art in circulation. And if you've seen a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, you know that the influence of the artist, Howard Pyle, continues today. Historical records speak of pirates wearing finery stolen from aristocratic captives, but it was Pyle who turned the notion into the raffish fashions we still associate with the trade.

Painted 1910, the year before Pyle's death

The Mermaid is another one of Pyle's familiar works. I'm pretty sure I still have my poster of this somewhere (continuing my habit of being unrelentingly drawn to art and objects from the Edwardian era). You can find this image printed on t-shirts and mugs and magnets and any number of other items.

"The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow"
1905
(Yes, indeed he was.)

While in a collectible-book store in Port Townsend, Washington, recently, I found a copy of Pyle's Tales of Pirates and Buccaneers, a slimmed down 1994 children's edition of the original Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneer. Not long after, a thrift store yielded a 1954 reprint of his version of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, complete with colored illustrations. I took this as a hint to do a bit of research on this man who created what we think of as piratic style today.

Pyle, who was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1853, became well-known not only for his magazine and book illustrations, but for retellings of the legends of such classic characters as King Arthur and Robin Hood. He founded a free school of art in Wilmington, where many of his students, including Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth, went on to significant success as members of what is now known as the Brandywine School. Notably, 40 of his 110 students were women, including his sister Katharine Pyle, who became a popular illustrator of fairy tales.

His talents even extended to costuming, and he designed the costumes for the Broadway production "Springtime" in 1909. (Further proof of Pyle's continued relevance is shown by his presence in that blog and others.) On November 9, 1911, he died of illness in Florence, Italy, where he had traveled to further his own study of art. He left "The Mermaid" unfinished on his easel--so the painting we have today isn't necessarily the final vision he had planned for the work.

"Who are we that Heaven should make
of the old sea a fowling net?"
1909

This one was new to me and I find it particularly evocative. I see a bit of Jas. Hook and Vivian Drew in it, even if it's not set in the Edwardian era of The Stowaway, or about pirates at all. Rather, it's an illustration for The Second Chance by James Branch Cabell, published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in Oct. 1909. It features a Lord Pevensey and a Lady Ormerod, a name which caught my attention as Jan Ormerod is one of my favorite Peter Pan illustrators. We come full circle again.

Good news for collectors (sometimes)

Something I've found while researching The Stowaway is a vast and (to me, at least) surprising discrepancy in the prices of out-of-print books. Some academic volumes from the ancient days of the 1980s are so expensive I can't justify buying one for a single essay on Peter Pan. But in a much happier turn of events, books from the turn of the 19th century are often ridiculously affordable. They're sold as "used," not quite antiques, not quite archivable. And while they're not as cheap as a used Grisham novel, they're also not the price you might expect for tangible bits of history.

I continue to take advantage of the situation.

The most expensive of the books above, Volume I of The Novels, Tales and Sketches of J. M. Barrie, was $10. The others were half that or less. (Ironically, I can't read them now because I have begun channel Barrie's writing style with almost no provocation, and it begins to seep into The Stowaway, where it doesn't belong.)

 I can only conclude these books have fallen into "the Trough of No Value." Mike Johnston of The Online Photographerr has this graph in his essay on the subject:

Johnston's examples include photographic negatives, computers, and lunchboxes from the 1950s and 1960s. "One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable," he writes. "And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time." This, of course, is difficult to predict.

He also mentions that the craftsmanship of an item can determine its fall into the Trough. And this applies to books as well, of course. A perfectly-preserved first edition of a still-popular book may cost hundreds or thousands of dollars--why I don't yet have my own first edition of Peter and Wendy. But if someone like me wants a book mainly for its contents, it's worth keeping track of the Trough.

Luckily for my own collecting, I often appreciate a book all the more if it shows signs of its lifespan and evidence that it was loved. A "Merry Christmas" message from Aunt Lizzie, 1909, has value to me which it might not to a regular book collector. (This is the same impulse that has prevented me from refinishing the table I used as the background for these book photographs. A practical nostalgia?)

If you're willing to overlook some damage and signs of age, you can find a treasure trove of books from the Edwardian era. They may be offered by some unexpected sources, and that's part of the fun. I paid under $20.00 for most of these, some of which I discovered in used or antique book stores, others which I found on eBay or from ABE Books.  If they were first editions, or in better condition, they would of course be priced higher, although I think most of them would still qualify as "affordable." But I find value in their shabbiness, in evidence they were read and maybe even loved.

My copy of the 1907 The Girl's Own Annual 

So if you're interested in books of a hundred years ago, this is a good time to buy them. There's no guarantee they'll go up in price, of course, and we can't predict the desires and contexts of future societies. But from what I've observed, and from what the Trough of No Value tells us, these affordable books aren't likely to stay that way forever.

"I must go down to the sea again"

Not  Peter Pan, but relevant to The Stowaway

These books come to us without commentary, giving us a direct look into history without the overlay of our present priorities. And of course reading books from another era is one of the best ways to learn the diction and styles of writing from the past--very useful when writing about those times. But that's a subject for another day.

The haunting of Kensington Gardens

There are places in this world that seem to exist as much in fiction as they do in reality: Times Square, Hawaii, Paris. Kensington Gardens in London is another such place, providing inspiration for J. M. Barrie and other writers, and sparking a world entire for Argentinian author Rodrigo Fresán.

I circled Kensington Gardens for a while before I dared open it. Given that it's about a children's book author who kidnaps the young actor who has been hired to play his character Jim Yang, I feared it might not be friendly to my own possibly-romanticized views of Barrie and my Beatles-obsessed early adolescence. The chance of horrific violence tainting either or both also felt like a real possibility. Happily, what I found between its covers was completely different--and far stranger.

Map by Arthur Rackham for the 1906 first edition
of Barrie's The Little White Bird

Kensington Gardens, translated beautifully by Natasha Wimmer, has been described by more than one reviewer as surreal. The narrative wanders through time, a dizzying weaving of facts and images, filled with musings on creativity, death, childhood, and cultural change. The son of a socialite and a rock musician, brother of a boy who died in childhood, Peter Hook (no relation to the Joy Division/New Order bassist) sees ghosts everywhere--whether literary or actual--in his own life, in Barrie's, in the lives of the Llewellyn-Davis boys who inspired the stories of Peter Pan.

Hook is obsessed with Peter Pan and even more so with his author. "Barrie, who suffered so much for us, who died for our sins, and whose only and unpardonable crime was having written an infectious creature carrying an incurable disease," he says. He is determined to find parallels between Barrie's and his own, even when this means ascribing motivations and feelings to Barrie that may have no basis in reality. Given that the even the narrator admits he is unhinged and self-destructive, perhaps we shouldn't take his musings too seriously. Fresán suggests as much in his afterword. But Barrie and Hook are both indelibly marked by the deaths of their brothers when they are children, and perhaps the same ghosts do haunt them both.

Kensington Gardens is thoroughly researched, and I learned a few new facts about Barrie. He was ambidextrous, for one. And as I suspected, like many writers, he was changed forever by World War I and the loved ones he lost to the conflict.

From Fresán's book, I also learned about poet Humbert Wolfe. A popular British writer of the 1920s, he's not well-known now, but I've seen his poem "Autumn (Resignation") on more than one Tumblr post. A version of Kensington Gardens also existed vividly in Wolfe's imagination, and he wrote an entire book on the park in a style not unlike that of e. e. cummings, including--of course--a piece on its famous statue of Peter Pan.

Humbert Wolfe, as drawn by his friend
William Rothenstein in 1931

PETER PAN

Peter Pan
leave your dead
tunes, you faun
of gingerbread !

Over hills
you never guessed
,lonelier
than Everest,

blows an older
colder reed
the belovèd
children heed,

following
(O icy-thin !)
Pan, who was Piper
at Hamelin.

From my own visit, October 2014

Peter Pan as the Pied  Piper is not the most unreasonable comparison. More likely, perhaps, than the duality between Jim Yang and Peter Pan, despite what Peter Hook may believe.