As part of my major project research I attended two talks by writers at the recent Charleston Festival 21-30 May.
The two days could barely have been more different. The first day of the festival included a reading and commentary by Geoff Dyer, amongst others. It was the most beautiful day. I was accompanied by an antiquarian bookseller friend of mine. As we drove west towards the Downs the light cast deep sculptured shadows in the folds of the landscape. The colours were rich and the sky clear. We arrived and wandered into the tent, the appointed venue for such events, pitched at the far end of the Farmhouse garden.
Dyer’s reading was from his latest book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Veranasi, in which he describes an encounter with a monkey (in Veranasi) who attempts to steal his sunglasses from a hotel terrace. The episode is deftly written and without referring to place specifically it is vividly located. Dyer admitted that he ‘wasn’t very good at making up stories’, preferring to build his narratives from real experiences. When these narratives work, they work because they seem without artifice and contrivance, although care has been taken to tell the story well. It is difficult to be sure what is ‘true’ and what isn’t, and this is a game the writer plays with us. What it’s not is autobiography. It’s story telling with a certain randomness that makes it ‘ring true’.
The evening was quintessentially Charleston: “She loved the pearly luminosity of the Sussex light, the pale gold of the stubble fields, the orange-roofed barns which stood in mysterious isolation and the silver willows whose cool grey smudges relieved the dark, August green of ash or elm.” Angelica Garnett on her mother Vanessa Bell.
The second talk was scheduled for the middle of the day a week or so later. The sky was pale grey and colourless. The Downs had simply melted into the mist. As we reached Charleston, this time accompanied by my video artist son, the rain began. Inside the tent the rain tapped insistently on the canvas as the writers talked. I’d come to hear Simon Mawer talk about his book The Glass Room. A work of fiction built around a real place, the Tugendhat House designed by Mies van der Rohe around 1928 and still standing today in the Czech Republic. Mawer’s story weaves its way around the house and those who lived in it as its role changed before, during and after World War II, bringing the story up to date. Now being turned into a museum after its chequered life, the house has parallels with Charleston, albeit a very different place in almost every respect.
The discussion was about places being frozen in time, whilst also outliving their original purpose, about the folk tales of places which change as they are handed down. Mawer referred to the House’s ‘strangeness frozen in a moment’. He also said ‘a building has to be populated’. The story, any story, builds its life around a place through its interaction with people. The havoc brought upon the House as it became involved in the political turmoil of central Europe over the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties contrasts with the relatively gentle transformation of Charleston over a similar period.
Places can become stories in themselves.
