Tag Archives: Oscar Wilde

A room to call my own: Paris

The truth is, people, that staying with family and friends for weeks at a time – while full of blessings, love, connection, reminiscing, giggles and wonderfulness- ­­­­doesn’t afford the same restorative and mind-clearing opportunities that, say, a walking holiday in the Tuscan hills or a week by the beach might. And only ex-pats who trot back and forth to their country of origin get it; others think we are moaning Minnies! But visiting lots of people you don’t see on a regular basis involves a deep dive into lots of lives with all their ups, downs, highs, lows and challenges. Sometimes I find myself lying awake at night reflecting on all these various lives; it can be a bit enmeshing and involving and I sometimes find it hard to detach myself.

Enough of my preamble. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed having a base I could call my own for a few days in a tiny (and I mean tiny) one-room apartment in Vincennes in Paris, an eastern suburb just outside the Paris peripherique. From the outside it didn’t look that promising and my heart sank as I climbed the wooden staircase, plaster peeling off the walls, to the dark broom cupboard where I retrieved the key from the key safe. But, once inside, it was exactly as advertised; stylish, well equipped, comfortable and cosy with very clever use of the space and storage. The only thing it lacked was a fan, which given the intense heatwave, would have made sleep easier! On the upside, the severe canicule (heatwave) meant that the Forfait Anti-Pollution ticket on public transport made travel very cheap. And it was good to see a Government-backed scheme encouraging people to leave their cars at home.

Wandering out my first evening I took in my surroundings: a crêperie, a dressmaker’s/alteration place, a spirituality centre advertising a talk on life after death, a café, a plumber’s, a nail salon, a couple of independent grocer’s, some small dogs on leashes being dragged out for walks in the blistering heat, and even the railway sidings planted up with shrubs and flowers, the tall hollyhocks reminding me of an English border. What I love about Paris is that everywhere you look there’s something interesting; whether it’s a bright red geranium on a wrought-iron balcony, the ornate buildings – decorated with here a Roman head, there a lion or a swag of flowers, the characteristic round attic windows and the flatiron buildings.

The first night I enjoyed a delectable dinner in a local brasserie, the hot mousseline de poisson (fish terrine) something I have never eaten in England or Australia but, then again, I am not a frequenter of French restaurants.

Unable to eat all three courses, I chose fruit salad for pudding and took it back to my garret for breakfast. That morning I indulged in a bit of very gentle tourism, before meeting a friend for lunch,  and visited the Musée Nissim Camondo, a small but exquisite house museum overlooking the Parc Monceau. The house, modelled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, was built in 1911 by Count de Camondo, a member of a wealthy Jewish banking family, to house his collection of eighteenth-century art and furniture and objects from the reign of Louis X1V.

Some of my favourite pieces were the Gobelin and Aubusson carpets and tapestries, a marquetry desk made of over ten different woods, a roll-top desk inlaid with porcelain plaques (one of only ten in the world), the dining room laid up with a silver service presented by Catherine the Great to her lover, and the display of Sèvres porcelain, the Buffon collection, decorated with exotic birds dating from the late 1700s. The Camondo story, though, is a tragic one, the collection, which Moïse bequeathed as a museum on his death, is all that survives of the family. His son Nissim died in action in the first World War and his daughter Beatrice and her two children died in Auschwitz.

On Saturday night I headed to a birthday barbeque my niece, Georgie, and her husband, Manu,  were hosting in their garden in the green and leafy, once communist suburb, of Fontenay-sous-Bois. We oldies – my sister, her husband and I – enjoyed chatting to the youngsters but the pièce de resistance had to the the three-tiered cake – Victoria sandwich with fresh raspberries – that my sister had brought over from London on the Eurostar! The same beloved sister that met me for breakfast at Kings Cross Station at 7 a.m. the Sunday in May I flew in from Perth.  She’s a champ.On Sunday morning we headed off to the more ethnic 20th arrondissement to the Bellevilloise, an art nouveau cultural centre, once a cooperative – hence the warehouse-y feel – founded in 1877 also housing a café and restaurant. We were there for Georgie’s 30th birthday jazz brunch and we feasted like kings on the all-you-can-eat buffet. Even though weary from the night before and full of food, I insisted that we made a detour to the nearby Père Lachaise Cemetery, resting place of so many notable people and surely a perfect place for the spiritualists’ talk on life after death?

I dragged the family around with me, determined to the last – I’m like that – it’s an annoying perfectionist streak – tofind the tomb of at least one famous person.

My sister and I in Pere Lachaise

We did eventually find Oscar Wilde’s, although it didn’t really live up to the hype!  And for some years it’s been enclosed behind protective glass to prevent Wilde fans defiling it with lipstick-mouthed kisses. Ah well, at least we ticked it off! The most fascinating thing about Père Lachaise is that when it was first built in 1804, it was considered too far from the city and not well used so the administrators decided to attract more custom by moving the remains of some famous names starting with Molière and La Fontaine. Clearly a successful marketing strategy!

Not Oscar’s but another tomb that caught my eye

As I write this I am on the train – the wonderful TGV – heading towards Provence (tall cypresses that remind me of Van Gogh landscape visible in the distance). Provence means it’s time to pause, time to hang up my tools and let my mind go fallow. No more blogs for a bit – maybe I’ll even do a digital detox!

Reflections on Writing Part 2

Following the interest in my recent post about writing, I was inspired to share further reflections and other pearls of wisdom I have gleaned over the years.

For anyone who has gone through the process of trying to get published, whether a short story, feature article or a novel, this quote will resonate.

“Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” Don Marquis (novelist, poet and columnist 1878-1937)

Getting published requires enormous perseverance and you need to develop a thick skin.  Between 2013 and 2015 I made multiple submissions to both agents and publishers of a memoir-style book I was writing. I got close, and received some useful feedback, which, with the benefit of hindsight, validated the process. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I am now glad it didn’t get published – a lot of what I wrote was a kind of self-therapy – but I do give myself a pat on the back for putting myself out there at the time.

It strikes me now that it’s a bit like internet dating; you cast your net far and wide, and into an unknown and bottomless pit, to see what interest you attract. You might find a match, you might not.  You might have a bit of a flirtation only to find it comes to nothing or you may get rejected outright.

Whether online dating or writing to get published, you need to have a strong sense of self, who you are, what your values are, what you stand for, what you bring to the world and what you want to achieve.  One of my all-time favourite quotes is Oscar Wilde’s “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.” And then, on LinkedIn today, I spotted one of those inspirational quotes which, paraphrased would be something like: don’t be afraid to be yourself, be afraid of not being yourself.  Which brings me to an unattributed quote I once wrote down – I think it comes from an article I read in one of those New Age-y publications. And it very much resonates with me:

“If you are a budding artist, or a sportsman or anyone whose heart’s desire is to create more in this incredible world, then don’t listen to the doubts or insecurities of the mind. They are just voices in your head that keep you in separation from your true nature. That is all. By shifting your focus onto the peace within you, you become a vessel to express whatever wants to flow through you.”

Expressing who we are as writers, creators, employees, friends or lovers without feeling the need to change ourselves to fit an alternative agenda takes enormous courage. Another go-to read of mine which combines tips on writing with self-empowerment is Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (what a great title!). She advises:

“Learn to trust the force of your own voice. Naturally, it will evolve a direction and a need for one, but it will come from a different place than your need to be an achiever.”

And she encourages a visceral relationship with writing: “Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. Just enter the heat of the words and sounds and coloured sensations and keep your pen moving across the page.”

But even if we do have a strong sense of self-belief, tap into our inner creative and get some flow happening, writing can be a tough gig. I love the raw honesty in this Evelyn Waugh quote (taken from How to Write a Novel.)

“If only amateurs would get it into their heads that novel-writing is a highly skilled and lugubrious trade. One does not just sit jotting down other people’s conversation. One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smouldering rubbish heap of experience, half stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables.’

Life in all its various guises, and how we experience it is indeed our raw material. The good times and the bad. It’s all material! I am reading a book about author H. G. Wells (author of War of the Worlds and The Time Machine) and his multiple affairs with young women. He was a proponent of Socialism and free love and a member of the Fabian Society and, amazingly, his second wife put up with all his amours. His book Anna Veronica published in 1909 was clearly inspired by his relationship with Amber Reeves. Rather than defuse the scandal about the affair, the book threw it into the spotlight. Amber’s husband, a lawyer,  (who gallantly married Amber when she was pregnant with H G’s child) threatened to sue Wells for libel, forcing him to sign an agreement not to see Amber for three years. Needless to say, Wells didn’t learn from the experience and repeated the same pattern with writer and feminist Rebecca West. If we are going to mine our life experiences to inform our writing, it’s a very fine line – beware defaming others –  and we have to tread carefully. Plus it can work both ways: other writers may weave us into their stories.

For Paul Auster living and writing are inseparable: “By living my life as a writer, I am living my life to the fullest. Even if I sit there crossing out sentences, tearing up pieces of paper, and I have not advanced one jot, I can still stand up from my chair and say: “Well, I’ve given it my best.”

Although I am not currently writing a book, writing is still part of my life; I write grants and proposals for work and I blog, but I also rely heavily on journalling and jotting down thoughts as a mental health exercise. It’s part of how I express myself.

“Writing practice embraces your whole life ( … ) It’s a place that you can come to wild and unbridled, mixing the dream of your grandmother’s soup with the astounding clouds outside your window.” Natalie Goldberg.

 

 

Fascinated by the Lives of Others

A few weeks ago I went to hear award-winning, London-based biographer Claire Tomalin talk at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. It was such a treat to share her world for an hour and discover how she goes about her craft.

Her first biography was of Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th century English writer, philosopher and advocate of women’s rights. There’s a strong feminist streak to Tomalin’s writing and, with Mary Woolstonecraft, she set out to find the historical truth behind women’s lives.

Her most recent biographies have been of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy but she has also written a book about Dickens’ mistress Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman, which was made into a film starring Ralph Fiennes. She described a process of falling in love with her subjects and inhabiting their worlds as she researched them. As she spoke of threading lives together, I had the image of a patchwork quilt – what a skill to be able to order all those squares into a fluent narrative.

Other people’s lives are endlessly fascinating – truth is indeed often stranger than fiction. Last week I read an obituary of Ann Barr (born 1929) who was features editor of Harpers & Queen from 1970 to 1984. She coined the term ‘Sloane Ranger’ and launched The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook and, later, The Official Sloane Ranger Diary. For those who don’t know what a Sloane Ranger is (or was) let me share the definition from the article in The Telegraph: “the country loving, upper-middle-class, well-connected tribe of posh, but not particularly rich or grand Henrys and Carolines (the men were noted for their mustard cords) who seemed to be everywhere 40 years ago.” Princess Diana was a Sloane Ranger – think Green Wellies, floral Laura Ashley skirts and blouses with frilly collars turned up.

I was captivated by this account of a self-effacing woman who was never afraid of off-beat ideas, had a pale face and red hair as a child, spent some of her childhood in Canada and then at a girls’ boarding school in Shropshire. Barr was clearly eccentric and unafraid of bucking convention. At the peak of her career she apparently dyed her hair a “startling version of its original colour and wore quirkily patterned tights and knickerbockers.” She lived in a top-floor flat near Notting Hill Gate and never married but had several romances. For the past 30 years she took up with a parrot called Turkey who accompanied her to parties. He survives her as do a host of devoted god-children.

What a life! How wonderful to have lived such a rich and creative life without needing to conform. As Oscar Wilde was quoted as saying: Be Yourself as Everyone Else is Taken. Hear, hear, I say!

This last weekend I heard broadcaster and writer Ramona Koval speaking about her memoir, Bloodhound, the story of searching for her father. Her parents were Holocaust survivors who ended up settling in Melbourne. Her mother escaped the death camps by changing identity and passing her 14-year-old self off as a 21-year-old Catholic girl, speaking Polish rather than the more familiar Yiddish – an extraordinary story in itself.

Koval always suspected that the man who raised her was not her biological father. She took 15 years to write the story of her quest which took her to rural Poland, to a nursing home in Melbourne and to a horse whisperer in Queensland. A turning point in her search came when she and her sister did a DNA test, both scraping away at the inside of their cheek for an answer! They discovered that they were half sisters and so clearly Ramona was on to something. By all accounts the book is as gripping as a thriller as the clues come together. Luckily, there were no ‘spoilers’ in the audience – I can’t wait to read it and find out what happened and if she got a definitive answer. I’ll let you know.

A few of my favourite quotes

Victor Borge once said: “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” Don’t you just love that quote? Where would we be without humour? I don’t know how I would get through life without being able to laugh at myself and see the funny side of a story or situation. When I left a job in publishing back in the 90s, my colleagues were sad to see me go as they were losing the office clown, the one who brought a bit of levity to the never-ending meetings and impossible-to-achieve deadlines.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, Oscar Wilde is the most quotable figure in the history of the English language. With 92 entries, Wilde beats other favourites such as George Bernard Shaw, Noël Coward, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker and Woody Allen. The latest edition of the dictionary was published in late October to coincide with Oscar’s 159th birthday. According to editor Gyles Brandreth the litmus test for inclusion in the dictionary is that quotes makes us laugh, are memorable and stand the test of time. Sifting through the 5000-odd quotes must have been great fun for the one-time Member of Parliament whose favourite one-liner is from Boris Johnston, the Mayor of London: “My policy on cake is still pro having it and pro eating it.” Only BJ – I had the pleasure of listening to him open the Melbourne Writers’ Festival earlier this year – would come up with such a cheeky, schoolboy-type utterance! See: https://thisquirkylife.com/2013/08/30/boriss-blockbuster/

What are your favourite humorous quotes? Some of my personal favourites are:

“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and she can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.” Dorothy Parker
This applies to anyone who has ever had a problem with maintaining personal boundaries and being over nice and accommodating. I speak from experience…

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” Oscar Wilde
A brilliant quote for the idealistic freelancer…

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“There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” Mark Twain
Who hasn’t got a disastrous falling-out-with-friends travel story? I have several!

Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
A much more elegant take on the idea that there’s ‘no failure only feedback’, and a good mantra to live by.

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” Lily Tomlin
Rats really do race! In 2003 when I was helping out on a volunteer conservation project on the Balearic island of Majorca, I went into the kitchen one morning and opened the food cupboard. Two black rats shot out and raced down the stairs. I don’t know who was more frightened, me or them!

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” George Bernard Shaw was in tune with his inner child, way before it became trendy and new-agey to do so.

I’ll close with a dog quote: “I don’t really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I’d like to come back as my daughter’s dog.” Leonard Cohen.