06/12/06 - Tracy Chevalier
Binfield Library, Wednesday 6th December 2006. Tracy Chevalier in dark, autumn colours, speaks warmly as she reads from her new book, with its cover of bronzed flame pushing heat out amongst the listeners... Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright...
Tracy Chevalier grew up in Washington, DC. After graduating from Oberlin College, Ohio, she moved to London, where she still lives with her husband and son. She worked for a few years as a reference book editor before leaving office life to do an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Her novels include The Lady and the Unicorn, Falling Angels, The Virgin Blue, and the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was made into a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. Her fifth novel, Burning Bright, on the painter and poet William Blake, will be published in March 2007.
An English Major, she'd always had a regard for Vermeer, an interest in Blake and a love of Unicorns. It is no small Irony that this American author, residing in England, writes European history to make her living. Whilst many authors say, write what you know, Tracy writes about what she loves. Having quit her post in editing reference books, she signed up to a creative writing course and never looked back. She says that she’s not sure if you can teach writing, but locating yourself in the right environment helps, as does writing 9 to 5. There’s no better way to develop your skill.
Approachable and personable, Tracy allowed herself to be modelled into position for photos before being allowed to begin her talk. The mother to an eight year old boy, she speaks with a self-assured twang, at ease in addressing a crowd and reading from her own work with the full expression of her characters.
Just as her latest project – Burning Bright – delves into the contrariness of life as depicted by William Blake’s many works, Tracy herself is contrary to her subject matter. Tracy says that her previous novels have all come about through a past love of the subjects during her teenage years: Vermeer’s work, aged nineteen; Blake, during University.
Usually, she spends two years in the creation process, putting out her latest work at the point when publishers expect readership to be at its most expectant. Any longer between novels and publishers are often afraid that the readers will lose interest and go somewhere else. So, when Tracy told them that she expected Burning Bright to take her three years, they weren’t best pleased. However suggesting to them that she probably shouldn’t then sign a contract until she’d completed it (affording them the best possible choice at the time), they decided better than letting their multi-million selling author slip through their fingers.
Researching, for Tracy, is a job that she undertakes at the beginning of every project, and long before pen hits paper (she still writes long hand before hitting the edit process). She begins with the focal point of her narrative – the idea or the main character. In the case of Burning Bright, she read, and read, and read all the works she could find on William Blake (there is a lot of bad scholarly work out there), jotting down all that she felt made sense about him in a notebook she’d bought from a Blake gallery at the Tate several years ago. “This,” she told herself several years before she’d even begun to formulate a story around the poet, “will be what I’ll write my William Blake research in.” As her research continues and the story begins to take shape, drawing back from the focus of the piece to broader aspects of society and subjects, ending with an overview of politics and history of the time to make sure her characters are walking in a believable place.
Speaking of her first four books brings up two salient facts: all are written in the first person, and all began life with covers of women (often instead of their subject matter – The Lady and the Unicorn). This is part of the publishing process, giving the readers, as the publishers believe, an expectation over what is going to appear inside the novel. For the new novel, Tracy is happy to say that things are different. After three years off, and now having enough weight to discuss what she’d like for her covers (rather than the publishers choosing this for her), she had a very different style that wouldn’t be amiss amongst the more adult fantasy books – such is the curled bronze flames and the tiny black horse. Perhaps eighteenth century London is the last place we’d expect the contents to reveal, but there we go. Tracy’s American publishers preferred a more obvious approach, choosing the label of name and title and using a subtler background, whilst the Italians… chose a lady! That’s not to say it’s a bad choice, since they also changed the title from Burning Bright to L’innocenza (Innocence) – Burning Bright (being half a sentence) doesn’t translate well into other languages.
Burning Bright is (like its subject matter) contrary to its predecessors, because, unlike them, it’s in third person not first. Tracy says that she found it difficult making the transition, but sees it as a stage in her maturation as an author – though many authors begin in the third person and move to first.
Burning Bright focuses upon the contrary protagonists of Jem and Maggie, two very different children: a blonde haired, quiet boy from Dorsetshire, and a dark haired, outgoing girl from London. Tracy uses these children to investigate William Blake’s (as Jem’s new neighbour) life, views and worldly expressions. Set between Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience, Tracy has turned out a coming of age tale that maintains these motifs of contradictions to develop the story and its obvious differences. Whilst Blake was an artist, poet, printer, binder and engraver, he saw that words and pictures were linked, endeavouring to imagine that the words and pictures lived side by side on the page – as seen in his Biblical depictions. This seems all important to Tracy, whose previous works have focused upon painting (Girl with a Pearl Earring) and tapestry (Lady and the Unicorn).
Tracy endeavours to complete novels that are strong and depicted as closely as possible to reality, so that if she has got the real world right, then her readers will be more inclined to believe and invest in the fictional aspects. But, whilst she plots and plans, trying to put the successes of her previous works to the back of her mind, coincidences aren’t lost her. She decided to name her protagonist in Girl with a Pearl Earring: Griet, as a short form of Margariet; a name she’d decided would be perfect for the time. She didn’t know then that Griet, in Dutch, meant Pearl:
Reading from Burning Bright, Tracy depicted the telling of a notorious bit of gossip about William Blake that many scholars scoff as fiction. The tale is of a friend of Blake’s walking in on Blake and his wife in the garden. The couple are naked and reading to each other from John Milton’s Paradise Lost – as Adam and Eve. Whilst this anecdote can neither be proved or disproved, Tracy offers her own suggestion in her reading that there is no smoke without fire… though you’ll have to wait until early 2007 to find out for yourselves how Tracy deals with the matter.
- Richard Howse
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