Reading Joanne Meschery

Somewhere around the middle of yesterday afternoon my partner, Sarah, decided to cycle off to the Heath for a swim. “If it rains,” she said, pointing towards the clothes line angled across the garden, “Fetch those things in. I need them for the morning.”
Fair enough.
So as to be certain, I changed position from where I had been sitting, and because we are in the midst of a reshelving and rearrangement of books in our library, found myself adjacent to a small clutch of Maile Meloy – five all told – Moby Dick and Stanley Middleton at Eighty . In the midst of which stood a fine looking hardback by Joanne Meschery titled Home and Away.
Home and Away?
It didn’t ring any bells. The only Meschery I could remember reading – and certainly remember enjoying – was In a High Place and that didn’t seem to be there at all.
I lifted down Home and Away, which seemed to be in almost pristine condition. An American first edition, published Simon & Schuster, 1994. No note at the front to say when and where it had been purchased. No tell-tale underlined passages to suggest it had been read at all.
I opened the book at its first page of text …
My daughter Jen got moved up to varsity the day we started bombing Iraq.
Surely I would have remembered such a striking opening sentence. Surely, once read I would have continued. The jacket text – complete with praise from no less than William Kittredge, a writer I much admire – suggests an engrossing mixture of the private and the personal … the divisive political issues of the greater world – the Gulf War, abortion, gay rights, and fundamentalism – encroaching on Hedy’s increasingly fragile private one.
What’s not to like?

I have an indistinct memory of meeting Joanne Meschery once. It would have been when I was attending the Community of Writers Poetry Programme in Olympic Valley in the Sierra Nevadas, not so distant from Nevada City. Meschery’s home is relatively nearby (as distances go in those parts) in the small town of Truckee, where we sometimes went for supplies, as mentioned in a little poem I wrote at the time and which I can no longer lay my hands on. She could have been a tutor on the Community’s Fiction Programme, I suppose, or simply dropped by, being sociable.
But now what concerned me – aside from the possible onset of rain – was the whereabouts of In a High Place, unhappy at the thought of it having been packed away somewhere amongst the several boxes of books recently donated to the local Amnesty International bookshop. And thankfully, after a certain amount of clambering over and around piles of as yet unassigned books, I tracked it down in a bundle of paperbacks including Katherine Mansfield, Horace McCoy and – something of a rarity – Thomas McGuane’s screenplay for the western, The Missouri Breaks.
Panic over. Relax. The quick ring of Sarah’s bicycle bell announced her return. Those necessary items remained safely drying on the line.
“How was your swim?”
“Wonderful.”
She goes inside to take a shower and, relaxing, I reopen Home and Away.

My daughter Jen got moved up to varsity the day we started bombing Iraq. I was working swing shift at the station when the war news came through on the scanner. Norman Spoon’s voice broke against the static. ‘A few minutes ago. at about three P. M. Pacific Time,’ Norman says. ‘the United States and its allies launched air attacks on Baghdad under the code name Operation Desert Storm.’ And then Norman adds, ‘God bless America’ and ‘Do you copy?’
Read on …

Just Another Little Blues Song

Conversation over coffee this morning at Cinnamon Village somehow got round to Adam Faith … singer, actor, businessman.

Just Another Little Blues Song was my first attempt at writing for television and came about as the result of a residential Arvon Foundation course on which I met the writer Jim Hawkins, who put me in touch with the BBC producer Terry Coles who was putting together material for a series of short television films by writers new to the medium. He also let it be known that Terry, like myself, was an almost obsessive jazz fan.

What if, I thought, my story revolved around a successful jazzman whose compulsive gambling had got him into debt to the point that he was being threatened with the kind of violence that would make it impossible for him to carry on playing?

Terry, as it turned out, was more than just vaguely interested. Who do you see in the lead? he asked and, almost from nowhere, the hint of a doubt in my answer, I said ‘How about Adam Faith?’

Adam had had considerable success staring in the TV series, Budgie, in the early 70s, but had done very little television since. When I had the temerity to approach Adam’s agents directly, they laughed me out of the office. Why don’t we, Terry said, go to him directly? Adam, apparently, had a table reserved for him most afternoons at Fortnum’s (I think it was Fortnum’s) from where he conducted his various business deals by telephone.

He took a few days, no more, to read it. Right, he said, when do we start? The answer was, I think, sooner than any of us – Terry aside – might have expected. Just a matter of finding a director – John Bruce – booking a studio, casting the other characters – and lucking out here when the wonderful Gwen Taylor agreed to play Adam’s wife.

There was one speech in which – borrowing from an actual incident involving the British tenor player, Tubby Hayes – she describes her emotions on seeing Adam come on stage, unannounced, to take the empty chair in the Count Basie saxophone section, which made the hairs prickle and stand out on the back of the head. It was, Terry Coles confessed to me later, the one speech which convinced him the play was worth producing. I’ve since used it, or versions of it, on at least two other occasions if not more.

February, 1984 – the beginning of something.

Goldsmiths History Project

The Goldsmiths History project, written and compiled by Professor Tim Crook, sets out to present, in short posts, a record of the interesting events and people – staff and students – in the life of the College.

Since I count my years at Goldsmiths – 1960-63 – and the friendships I made while there – some of which have persisted to this day – as some of the most rewarding of my life, I’m honoured to be among those to be featured.

Please click here ...

“In a True Light” Connie at Lucille’s

From the street it looks nothing special: the name, Lucille’s, faded on its awning, the menu in its plastic cover in a wooden frame beside the door. Fine dining. Specialities of the day. Green plants slowly dying on a ledge inside the window. Neon signs for Bud and Miller Light. A handwritten notice, blue print careful on white card, ‘Music Tonite’.
In the right-hand room, furthest from the door, a dapper man with little hair but all of it neatly brushed in place, cuffs of his shirt rolled evenly back, sits at the piano: a quarter past nine and already she’s fifteen minutes late. Glancing over his shoulder, he catches the eye of the waitress, who shuffles to the bar and returns with a double measure of Scotch, Macallan, a glass of water alongside.
It is another ten minutes before Connie, chivvied by the management, finally emerges, walking between the tables with exaggerated care; the dress she is wearing red and silver, the silver a bright slash from breast to hip, the red the red of drying blood. Lucille’s in Albany, a hundred and fifty miles north of Manhattan, the closest she’s worked to the city in years.
There is no stage as such, only this, a space she has to fill.
The pianist feeds her the first eight bars of ‘Just One of Those Things’. Perhaps she doesn’t hear? Fails to recognise the tune? Eight bars more and then he’s into the release, the bridge. Connie, microphone between both hands, is staring at the floor. The sequence ends and another begins and, still staring at the floor, Connie starts to sing, her head slowly lifting with the words, those fabulous flights, the bells that now and then ring. By the time that they arrive, dovetailed, at the end, some part of her has remembered the how if not the why.
“‘Just Friends’,” Connie says, hand covering the microphone. “Two flats.”
Her voice isn’t strong, not the strongest in the world, but there’s a quality to it, a depth in the lower register that’s unsuspected, a way of phrasing that claims the words, so often heard, as her own.
Someone sends up an anniversary request scribbled on a napkin, and she finishes her set with ‘In My Life’, slow tempo, her voice wistful and charged with wonder. Applause stutters out of the silence and Connie bows her head, the back of her neck slick with sweat. The pianist raises his glass to her as she steps away.
She is squeezing between the last of the tables when a hand reaches out, fingers tight around her arm.
“Connie,” Delaney says in his smooth croon. “Long time no see.”

In a True Light

“In a True Light’ was always something of an oddity, a one-off novel written in the lengthy gap between the Resnick novels, which stretched from “Last Rites” in 1998 to “Cold in Hand” ten years later, and four years before the first Frank Elder novel, “Flesh and Blood”. What was I doing in all that time?

Well, one thing seems to have been doing a lot of reading about the artistic life of New York City in the 1950s – the close interweaving of poetry, art and music that would, for example, have brought Frank O’Hara and other New York poets, along with painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan, to the 5 Spot in Greenwich Village to listen to Thelonious Monk.

The more I learned about the period, the more I read about it, sought out essays, photographs, reproductions of paintings, recordings, the more I knew I wanted to write about it in a story of my own. A crime story, on one level at least. It had to be. It was what I did.

But how? I mean, how exactly?

I needed a thread to pull it together; pull it together and hold it fast.

For my central character I conceived an artist – Sloane – a painter now in middle age – who, when he was younger, had a brief but intense affair with an abstract expressionist painter, Jane Graham, whom he has not seen for years. When, seriously ill, she contacts him and asks to see him she tells him that all those years before, after their relationship had broken down, she gave birth to a daughter, Connie, from whom she has become estranged. His daughter. She asks him to find her and make some kind of peace between them before she dies.

Sloane is angry, hurt, disbelieving: but seeing Jane as she is, close to death, and remembering the intensity of their relationship all those years before, he agrees.

Believe that? Well, there’s a lot riding on the hope that you do.

Tracking down Connie is straightforward enough: she’s a singer working in small clubs in and around New York, but the information comes with a warning – Connie is locked into a highly charged relationship with a man with rumoured mob connections called Vincent Delaney. Take care.

So does it work? As a novel? For years I felt the answer was no, not wholly, without – the basic premise aside – being able to put my finger on the reason or reasons why. Bits and pieces I liked, liked quite a lot, but as a whole … ? Then, gradually, I realised that my doubts were not wholly shared. One or two people – people whose opinions I had reason to respect – really quite liked it. Rated it, in fact, quite highly.

Who am I to say they are wrong?

For those of you who don’t happen to have a copy on the shelf that you can pull down and begin to re-read, my intention is to devote the next blog post or maybe two to a chapter or so. Then, maybe, the next time you’re browsing the shelves in your nearest Oxfam or Amnesty Bookshop and you catch sight of the title … well, the money’s for charity, after all.

Sometime Other Than Now

Way back in time – well, the last century – Slow Dancer Press published a number of slim chapbooks or pamphlets under the general heading of Thin Ice., a title borrowed, with respect from the wonderful Jesse Winchester.

“If we’re treading on thin ice
Then we might as well dance.”
Jesse Winchester: ‘Do It’.

One of these collections, ‘Sometime Other Than Now‘, published in 1989 and shared between myself and Sue Dymoke, saw us using as our starting point the title tracks from a much-admired John Hiatt album, ‘Slow Turning‘.

Here’s one of mine …

SOMETIME OTHER THAN NOW

Sitting in a domestic
garden while above him
planes thread the sky

He will have made coffee
in a smooth white jug
spread soft black bread
rich with glossed black jam

Inscribed in the book
he is reading, words
about angels falling
violet to the sun

In some European hotel room –
let us call it Budapest –
she stretches back upon the sweaters
and the paperbacks whose authors
she will never remember,
silk tensing across
those places of her body …

And when the wind eases
under the sill to touch
her shoulders,
she must force herself to realise
it is not the fall of wings.

Skies Over St. Ives

The Major Oak

Image from Lost in Landmarks

Sad days in Sherwood Forest! The Major Oak pronounced “lifeless & leafless” after 1000 years, but to be “left standing as deadwood to help other wildlife on the reserve.”

One might wish to be similarly useful when one’s last leaf has fallen.

Image from Smithsonian Magazine

“Out of the Past”

I’ve mentioned previously that this year marks the 40th anniversary of my French publisher, Rivages Noir, and the various ways in which I have been able to take part of their celebrations. Interestingly, along with a number of other Rivages Noir authors, I was invited to nominate a film for the festival of film noir being held at the Paris Cinematheque during the month of June. Not merely to nominate, but also to write an introduction, ideally to be delivered in person. For various reasons I felt compelled, sadly, to turn down the offer of making an appearance, choosing instead to write a text to be translated and read by someone else before the screening, which takes place on Sunday, 17th June.

And my chosen film … ?

Out of the Past – La Griffe Du Passé – directed by Jacques Tourneur from a script by Daniel Mainwaring, based on his own novel, and featuring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas.

This is what I wrote …

Back in the early to mid-80s, I was beginning work towards a PhD at the University of Nottingham; its subject American Film and Society following the end of World War 2, with a special interest in Film Noir. After far too long in cold and half-empty repertory cinemas and bent over poorly copied pages of Hollywood Reporter and Film Daily, I had amassed several sturdy files packed with often barely readable notes. What I had not done, despite my supervisor’s waning encouragement, was to begin writing the thesis itself.
At which point, enter British publisher Viking/Penguin with an interest in publishing what turned out to be the first of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts. Delivery, nine months ahead.
What was an aspiring writer of crime fiction to do?
All those files were boxed up and lifted into the attic, from where they would eventually make their way into recycling.
Lonely Hearts was published in the UK in 1989 and in France, as Coeurs Solitaires by Rivages/Noir in 1993.
Any aspirations to enter the serious world of film studies faded into the past.
But not those shadowy films from the post-war years when American society seemed to be turning on its head. Films like Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past and Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross, in which a basically decent man is destroyed by a corrupt woman. Or, as we might say now, a woman struggling, come hell or high water, to assert her independence.
In Tourneur’s film, private eye Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum) is hired by Las Vegas gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to track down Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who has made off with $40.000 of his money. When he catches up with her, she persuades him of her innocence and, inevitably, noir being noir, he finds himself falling for her – to use an appropriate British phrase – hook, line and sinker.
Only later, when it becomes impossible not to see through her lies, does he manage to cast her off, taking on a new name and finding a new life, running a gas station in a small rural town, which is where he meets Ann (Virginia Huston) – in every sense Kathie’s opposite.
Ann seems to have successfully reclaimed Jeff from his past and, as the cliché goes, made a new man of him – the one we see wearing fishing gear and whistling, carefree, by the river. So sure that his past is behind him that he is happy to share with her his vision of their future …
“You see that cove over there? Well, I’d like to build a house right there, marry you, live in it, and never go anywhere else.”
Dream on!
It is at that moment that Jeff learns he has a visitor – Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine) – who has tracked him down with a message that Whit wants to see him – urgently, no excuses – and he agrees to go, not realising that Kathie will be there too, leaving Jeff to spend the remainder of the film trying to negotiate a path between Ann and Kathie and the values they represent.
Almost always photographed in natural light, the absence of contrast and shadow suggesting her openness and honesty, Ann is never afforded the strength to be Kathie’s equal.
In contrast, the world Kathie inhabits is one of dark shadows and bright light. When we first see her in the film – a brilliantly delayed entrance that is held back until almost the end of the first reel – and, I think, one of my favourite moments in all cinema – she walks out of the light wearing a white dress and a white hat, moving forward into a screen-like square to the right of the frame, the shape of her body accentuated and her face in shadow, as if, with the music from the Cine Pico opposite, she were stepping down from the screen and into the Café La Mar Azul to where Jeff – and we – are waiting, prepared to be captivated. Again and again and again.

“Children of the Blitz”

I recently watched, on BBC iPlayer and still available, an interesting and well-constructed documentary, directed by Jack Warrender, titled Children of the Blitz. Not about, as I’d anticipated, the children who, during WW2, were evacuated from the cities into ‘safer’ parts of the country, but those children who, like me, stayed home. Or, to be more accurate in my case, stayed home for most of the duration. More on that later …

Born in 1938 – great timing! – and living with my parents near the centre of London, I’m surprised that what memories I have of the war, are so vague. Perhaps I was just too young. I can recall sheltering, together with our neighbours from the flat above, in the space under the stairs, and I think there may have been an Anderson shelter in the garden, but if so, I have no memory of ever having used it.

My father was in the fire service throughout the Blitz – I can picture quite clearly how tall, how big he seemed in his boots, his helmet, his uniform – about as dangerous an occupation as you might find on the Home Front, and although he might have shared a little of his experiences at the time with my mother, it would have been way after my bedtime. Even after the war was over, all he would talk about when asked, was his fellow firemen, the camaraderie they shared.

The only period during which I was away from London was in the latter part of the war and occasioned by reason of health rather than safety. Around the age of four I was, apparently, showing significant signs of developing asthma, and to avoid this our GP, Dr. Kemp, informed my mother that she would have to give me daily injections … whereupon he produced the kind of hypodermic needle better associated with injecting cattle. My mother came close to fainting on the spot.

The only alternative, the good doctor said, would be for me to move out of London for this crucial period into somewhere where the air was realtively free from smoke and other contamination. So if, by any chance, we knew anyone who lived in the country and with whom I might go and stay …

Through a small network of friends, linked, for the most part, by working on the railways, we were in the habit of sharing Christmasses and other holidays at a farmhouse on the edge of the Buckinghamshire village of Stewkley, some forty or fifty miles north of London. Would Mrs Woodley – Granny Woodley as she soon became – be happy to have me as a full-time lodger – just for a year or so – and so my solo evacuation began, my mother catching the train up to Leighton Buzzard when she finished work on a Saturday evening and proceeding by bus – save for one occasion when the bus didn’t run and she walked the five miles along country roads in the blacked out dark.

Here I am at Kiln Farm with Judy, the dog …

And outside in the tin bath …

There was one moment in the documentary which brought me up short – a reference to someone being machine gunned – strafed – by a German plane on its way back home after dropping its load of bombs. Just that brief mention and I was back on the seafront in Brighton, on the day my mother and I had travelled down to visit my great aunts. A day I’ve written about in a poem called ‘Flying Home’, part of which follows …

FLYING HOME

I remember the blitzkrieg
of pans that clattered
and fell from the top
of the tall thin cupboard
in my great aunts’ flat
that summer we visited,
my mother and I, the year
before the war ended,
the year I was five;
and the bomb, loosed
by an airman lost and turning
back across the Channel,
landed close to two
wool shops and the ABC
and close enough to us to free
my aunts’ theatrical cries
and scurry from their minds
all thoughts of scones and tea,

But who was the man, who,
later that same afternoon,
appeared upon the promenade
in perfect time to push
my mother first and then myself
safely beneath the struts
of a wooden seat as a German
plane flew low enough
to strafe the beach?

from “Flying Home”, first published in “Territory”, Slow Dancer Press, 1992

Great Aunts, Pearl & Katie (or is it Katie & Pearl?)