Charlotte Grimshaw
Charlotte is attending a festival in Ireland. She describes her wearisome journey: used headphones with missing foam, the confiscating toy saga, the obligatory explosives search, the drunk Paul Newman look-a-like… a frustrating, modern day plague?
Updated: 1 hour 12 min ago
Charlotte Grimshaw
London was grey and mild. Walked among the squirrels in Queens Park with my sister.
It's wonderful to be back in London – how I love London when I don't live there. The next day I got the Heathrow express from Paddington and mooched about outside Terminal 1 at Heathrow, watching the security men, admiring the tremendous weaponry of the British police. Staring at them and their guns makes them stare back. The place suddenly full of eyes. Going in, my handbag was swabbed for explosives, my shoes inspected, the usual stuff. In the bookshop on the air side a tall Indian youth whose hands were shaking so much he couldn't handle his change. At the Aer Lingus gate a man whose face was so boiled and cooked with the booze and his eyes so blue that I couldn't stop looking. For all his strange colour he was handsome: Paul Newman gone to ruin. Keen, agitated eyes. He darted up, consulted the staff on the gate, who rolled their eyes – nipped into the bar and downed two glasses, rapidly. He became calm again.
Landing at Cork I smelled a familiar whiff: cows. Cork is small and pretty, rainy and mild, built along the broad, green River Lee. That evening, completely stoned with lack of sleep, I was led to my reading in the Trsikel Arts Centre, a couple of hours after I'd arrived. And the reading went well, and the interview afterwards. I carried it off, I think. No disasters, no horrors. And afterwards went to a bar with a San Fransiscan writer, two Irish poets, three Irish writers and some others – a journalist, an agent – and was plied with Irish Drink. A lot of talk about writing and writers. I very happy. Woke in the night with headache, and looked out over the town – rain, soft grey clouds. I like Cork very much. In the morning I went down to the market and had toast and coffee. Everything laid on by the Festival. There's lots on: readings for the next few days, and then the awards ceremony on Sunday. At breakfast a woman asked me: how is your country dealing with its plague of mice? Oh we're doing OK, I said. Fighting back. She said, 'And don't you have a kind of huge frog that's taking over everything?' 'The cane toad you mean?' 'Yes.' It's bad, I said. 'But there's hope.'
Fiction is fiction. You use the material around you; this may include detail that people recognise. This happens: you take some experience and use it in a story. In the process it passes through the fictional filter; it is changed into something original. You blend it with other events, alter it, shape it. As a writer you do not regard it as having any connection, any more, to the real events from which it may have been partly constructed. The detail serves its purpose in a composition that is entirely of your own invention.
This does not stop people protesting indignantly, ‘How could you write about that?’; or, ‘How could you put that spin on it – that’s not the way it happened at all’; or, ‘How could you portray me in that way?’ You may say, ‘Fiction is fiction’, ‘this character is not you’ (not any more), and try to explain the process, but people don’t necessarily comprehend it. There is the potential for misunderstanding and hurt. This is, unfortunately, too bad. I may use real events, but everything I write – the entire end product – is invented. None of it is ‘real.’ No one writes in a vacuum, real detail is the raw material. You go on saying ‘fiction is fiction’ and meaning it, and hoping people will understand.
Strange days: Two days ago I sent an email to a friend who lives far away. I sent it out of the blue; I don’t know why. It said, ‘When we last met you told me a long story and I used some of it in my book.’ A message came back, out of the ether. Happiness. It said, ‘You owe me dinner. It’s a good story.’ And he said, ‘By an amazing coincidence, I was just about to start your book when I got your message.’
Today I walked down Parnell Road. I saw a person who might recognise some detail in another of my stories. He looked straight at me and didn’t know me, I don’t think. But just half an hour later, walking through town, I saw – strange day – yet another who might spot familiar detail in another story I wrote, one based partly on a real incident. I used some detail from this incident, fixed it into my own shape. And the look this person gave me was so bad that I fancied he had read it, and seen ‘himself’ in it, and that he was angry.
‘Fiction is fiction’ I wanted to say. It was a story in which he may have thought he recognised a young woman we both knew a long time ago. Perhaps he didn’t like the way I portrayed her. I had her sly, coy, flirty, possibly dangerous. The reality was more complex – the person we both knew may have been all of those things but she was also, for various reasons, so frightened (she told me once) that she couldn’t sleep straight in her bed. She was a walking tragedy, practically screaming for help, etc etc. But I wasn’t concerned with the truth. I was making up a story. I was writing as if I was already gone. (As she is, actually. She is, in the words of the Yeats poem, ‘changed, changed utterly.’)
I would have liked to explain all this, but we passed over it in silence. I walked home and went on writing. It’s a truism; the artist must be ruthless. It doesn’t mean the artist isn’t sorry. To you out there I have offended, believe me, it was nothing personal. I’m sorry. And if you can’t forgive me my trespasses, think of me, then, as dead.
There was a nice welcome onto the Te Papa marae (although too much praying – I am allergic to being asked to thank God in any language. I swore many years ago, after a few deathly occasions, never to return to my mother-in-law’s Anglican church, and find Maori prayers as rebellion-inducing as any other.) Then the Minister’s speech and a panel discussion, followed by signings of The Six Pack Two. I enjoyed meeting the other Six Pack writers, had an interesting exchange with Dave Armstrong about Woody Allen – he warned me off buying WA’s book of short stories – and various talks with other people, all of which left me wanting more. Once out, the hermit discovers that talking to other people is good.
Fiona Kidman told me that she’d read one of the stories in my collection Opportunity and wished one character had taken revenge on the other. I was interested in this, but didn’t get the chance to hear more. ‘Perhaps I’ll write a sequel,’ I said, before we had to move on. What I should have told her, I thought afterwards, is that I have actually written a sequel to the title story, Opportunity – the one about revenge. (So, in the unlikely event that you stray into this blog, Fiona, I’m telling you now.) Some day I hope to publish Opportunity II, Beyond Revenge. Or, The Revenge Continues. Or, What Goes Around Comes Around, Again. But seriously, the story of Reid is not finished, nor are some of my other Opportunity stories. I don’t feel like leaving the characters behind. I’ve always loved Balzac’s grand idea of The Human Comedy – all those novels and stories linked together in one vast project.
After the day in Wellington I got up early and taxied in to TVNZ to appear on Breakfast (scroll down and click on NZ Book Month link on middle panel) and talk about The Six Pack with Phil Twyford. My taxi driver was a Maori woman with that brand of humour that’s so characteristically Maori and so funny. She was all floaty and surreal after driving her cab the whole night and she told me a series of stories (which I stored away) about her night and her husband and her dogs, all the while imitating people, especially her husband.
We laughed a lot and parted fondly, and I made my way towards the golden inner sanctum of Paul Henry and Pippa Wetzl. But first I was whisked into the makeup room, where two women plied me with so much slap that I ended up resembling a voodoo priestess. (Looking at my heavily shaded eyelids I was also reminded of Martin Amis’s description of Salman Rushdie angry: ‘like a falcon looking through a venetian blind’). While one makeup person painted me and the other ran a comb (ironically, without much hope) through my limp hair, they talked through the logistics of their next night out. Prosaic discussion overlaid with a kind of studied world-weariness that said: You may be a media pro or a nervous civilian – either way, we’ve been here for a hundred years, and we don’t give a ***.
I’ve only been in TVNZ a couple of times, and so found it all diverting – the languid, blasé operatives, the terrified interviewees, the strangeness of seeing screen-people, cartoon-people, rendered three dimensional. In the shining air of the studio I felt rather stunned and vague… But Phil Twyford seemed to have his wits about him. I think – hope – I managed to say how pleased I am to have won a place in the Six Pack.
Somewhere here might lie the answer to the question whether New Zealand is boring to write about. In just the past few days I’ve acquired some excellent new data. The skill is in giving it shape, meaning, impact – in turning it into fiction. Talent is required to do that successfully, and one might fail of course. But there’s no shortage of raw material. The ingredients are all there.
Charlotte Grimshaw
I’ve been getting about a bit this year. I went to the Writer’s Festival in Sydney, am about to go to Wellington as one of the winners of the Six Pack competition, and later to a Book Council event in Christchurch.
In September I go to Ireland for the International Frank O’Connor short story award, for which my book, Opportunity is short listed. My Irish contact, Patrick Cotter (a poet and, I have discovered, the author of a play called Beauty and the Stalker) has sent me an itinerary. On September 18th I will leave Auckland, fly through Sydney and Bangkok, land in London on the 19th, fly to Cork the next day, and appear for a reading that night. The reading and interview are to last at least an hour. Who will stay awake longest – the audience or I?
I will be travelling alone. I don’t like planes, but enjoy the sensation of solo air travel, with its faint atmosphere of crisis and threat. Once I flew alone into London at the very nib end of 1999. The world was anxious about the ‘Millennium Bug’, computers were going to fail, planes were going to fall from the sky. I felt I was flying into the end of the world. My sister and I watched the New Year come in over freezing Primrose Hill. We’d been told to fill the bath with water before midnight, lest water supplies should fail. We forgot. Nothing happened. London was a wasteland on the first day of the new Millennium. Dead winter. I’d never seen it so ugly or so empty. But last time I was in London, in September, it was dreamy, beautiful, benign, all dim green light under thick leaves. I will spend some days there on my way back from Cork.
At the Sydney Festival in June, when asked if New Zealand (the second most peaceful country in the world after Norway) was boring to write about, Lloyd Jones said, ‘But parts of South Auckland are just like Beirut’. I broke in: ‘That’s a bit rich’. What about the body count in Beirut last year, a thousand dead after Israeli bombardment? He dismissed my objection: ‘But you’re from Parnell!’ (Ignorant therefore, of war-torn Otara.)
Perhaps I was being pedantic about a throwaway remark that wasn’t meant to be taken literally. I thought about the various subtleties of the exchange later, when I wrote a Listener review of a novel by Nicholas Shakespeare (in which I considered the problem of writing about a place where nothing very dramatic happens) and also when I read a letter headed ‘Thought for the Day’ in the Herald. The writer of the Thought had been on holiday in France. There, everything was lovely. The people were nice, and kind to their children. Now she had come home to child abuse, swearing, uncouth politicians – all kinds of Kiwi violence. Our country, she felt, was going to the dogs. Others chimed in: NZ was a dreadful, dangerous place… And I thought: it is simply not intellectually good enough to speak in these terms, without reference to context, to the outside world.
On that bleak New Year’s Day in London I walked around the housing estate in EC1 where I once went to school. I remembered the children. They were deprived of space, light, playgrounds, safety, books. Most of all, class status. They were hopelessly poor; they lived in bleak, cramped city apartment blocks, in fouler squalor than anything that exists here. Some were capable of extraordinary violence. Many were very angry all the time. And they weren’t unusual, nor, for that matter, in world terms, the most deprived. (Think of Africa.) If the author of ‘Thought for the Day’ had stepped out of her holiday and spent some time in a housing estate on the outskirts of Paris, or any other big European city, she wouldn’t have been so charmed. She would more likely have been mugged. And come home and written a letter about how lucky we are.
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