Rupert Thomson joins us to talk about his new novel Secrecy (Other Press), a smart thriller set in 1690s Florence. We also talk about how to keep from hitting the reader over the head with research, how to learn archaic Italian curses, and more!
"There is a kind of comfort in having a part of yourself that will never be known, can never be known, by others."The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 22 - Wax, Rhapsodic
"When I first started out, what I liked was the unlikely image, the unlikely metaphor. What I like now is finding that simple sentence that captures something you haven't thought of before."
[music] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show through the iTunes Store, and you can find past episodes, sit on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, or in our new, easier to remember site, VMSPod.com. You can find us on Twitter @VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Our guest this time around is Rupert Thompson, author of the new novel Secrecy, which was just published in the US by Other Press. Secrecy is a really enjoyable novel about art, love, and wax, and sex, and murder, and secrets. It's set mainly in 1690s Florence, and follows a portion of the life of this great wax sculptor, Gattano Zumbo, or Zumbo, as he becomes known in the book. Anyway, the opportunity for the podcast came up kind of suddenly, and I felt kind of bad, because while I did have time to read Secrecy, I didn't have a chance to read any of Rupert's other nine books, which are held in pretty lofty estimation back in the UK. I'll fill you in on that at the end of the episode. Now, given how much I enjoyed Secrecy, I am planning to rectify the situation this summer and get to a few more of his other books. Although that may not be so advisable to move, since it seems that Rupert jumps from genre to genre with each new work, but I'll give his earlier stuff a shot and report back to you. Now, when it comes to Secrecy, there's a weird thing I learned in the last week or two. Last week, I told you about this four-day seminar I had just attended at my grad school alma mater, St. John's College, down in Annapolis, Maryland. I interviewed one of the college's tutors during the trip, but I also pitched another one on doing a session. She wouldn't commit, and I didn't want to harass her about it. She's a younger tutor, so I'd never spoken to her before this weekend. But after I made my pitch, and she sent me sort of bagged off because she thinks she's not particularly interesting, although a lot of people think that and it turns out they're wrong, she sat down with me a few times during meals to just shoot the breeze. And the funny thing is, I found myself not asking her anything specific. It's funny because I found I didn't want to learn too much about her before putting a couple of mics down and starting the recorder. It's like I wanted her to have secrets to herself, at least, you know, until they come out over the flow of a podcast, rather than, you know, just having a post-seminar conversation over lunch and finding out all about her life and, well, making her kind of uninteresting and the off chance we actually get around to recording. In a way, in my past and future podcast, Ron Rosenbaum taught me this. When we met to record a few years ago, I started to make small talk during setup, and he basically just told me to shut up and save it for the interview. He's done enough interviews over the years that he knew people will say all the great stuff before they're actually rolling, so it's best to keep pre-interview conversation to a minimum. And it was more messed up in this case because the tutor wasn't actually committing to record, you know, and still, I didn't want to know too much about her past or her books or her path to get to St. John's, any of that stuff, all the stuff that I want to save for recording itself, which may never happen. I wanted her to keep her secrets, in other words. Now, this weekend, I'm at the owner of a bookstore here in New Jersey. I'd invited him on the show a year or so ago through an employee at his store. I left my card in a little introduction, but this was the first time we actually met face-to-face, and he remembered my name and started talking to me about getting together this summer to actually do an episode. And the thing was, he was actually kind of valuable and talkative. It was a Sunday afternoon, and my wife and I were the only patrons in the store at that point, but I found myself thinking, "Boy, I wish we could just save this stuff for the recording." Anyway, that's my little semi-lesson about secrecy. When I interview people, I want them to have secrets, and I want them to come out at the right time. Now, the characters in Rupert Thompson's new book have some pretty important secrets. They're matters of life and death, really, but they still yearn to share them. It's a really interesting tension that he creates among the characters and the secrets that they hold. Give secrecy a read, and let me know what you think of it. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Rupert Thompson. [MUSIC] So where did secrecy come from? I was living in a large, cold, 300-year-old farmhouse in Tuscany, and someone brought someone else around to dinner. Right at the beginning of the millennium, it was, early 2000, January 2000. And this woman began to describe a museum that she'd been to recently, and it sounded really fascinating because it's the Museum of Zoology and Natural History in Florence. The first 24 rooms, as the title of the museum would suggest, are all stuffed animals, extraordinary things. The 17th century hippopotamus with the feet of a dog and basilisk and a jar. You name it. But that wasn't what I was interested in. I went through those first 24 rooms. And then after that, there were these four rooms right at the end where there are anatomical waxes. So by that, I mean, for instance, there's one whole wall that's taken up with fetuses. A fetus from a seed, the size of seed to the fully grown fetus, nine months old, all recorded and captured and exhibited it on one wall. What struck me that day, though, was not so much those as this one room that I walked into, in the room where three hip-high glass cases, each one contained a naked, life-sized woman made out of wax. And they had real human hair. They had these beautiful eyes of colored Venetian glass. Their heads were resting on satin pillows. They were exquisite. And yet, I couldn't figure out what they were for. They seemed to walk this kind of fine line between the medical and the erotic without really falling on either side of that line. So I went away with those women in my head, if you like. That's where secrecy began, with those exquisite and enigmatic women. And it was at least a year before I came across Guy Tano, Julia Zumbo, who's the wax artist at the heart of the novel I've written. How did the process of learning about wax modeling and what the history was back in Florence and that era and what you're writing about affect how you looked at your own writing and art? Did you have any sort of cross-pollination in the sense of what that artistic process was like and what your own writing is? Well, if I can back up a bit, I mean, the way I wrote this book is going to sound strange to you because I wrote the first two drafts, knowing nothing at all about Florence, nothing about the wax process, nothing about the 17th century. I simply launched in and wrote flat out headlong without really knowing where I was going. And I always find that incredibly exciting at the beginning of a book. It's as if you're writing into your own ignorance. And the English poet was once asked, is it true that you can only write what you know? And he said, yes, but you don't know what you know until you write it. And so what I'm doing in the first draft of a novel in particularly in this case, actually, because I was aware of how much research I was going to have to do, there was a huge amount involved, what I did at the beginning was write knowing nothing because I figured that what I really had to get at was the psychological truth of the story. And really, as far as that's concerned, background, details, texture, structure, chronology, all that can be, all that can come later. What I was interested in it is if you like what the story was. And then by writing that story, by trying to get at that psychological truth, I would then find out what it was I needed to know. And then, of course, I had the nightmare job of, you know, it's little wonder that I put this book off for about six or seven years because I just knew how much was going to be involved. And I also knew that it's a very obscure era in history as well. You know, when people think about Florence, they always think about the Renaissance. And I've even seen this book described as a Renaissance novel. You know, it's not, this is happening 200 years later. And in the 1690s, Florence is, you know, the glory days of the Renaissance have really long gone. And this is a kind of repressive, poverty-stricken, melancholy, quite dangerous city. You know, that's not that much fun to live in. You know, everything is forbidden. All forms of pleasure are forbidden. But you know, like the prohibition in the U.S., that means that all forms of pleasure had driven underground and become more interesting, become more addictive. Everything was forbidden, but anything was possible, I think. I do say that somewhere, I think, yeah. So this is a long way of getting to your question, which is the wax process. That was yet another area. I'm writing about someone who made these extraordinary objects out of wax. And I learned very quickly that there were huge gaps in his life. Not only huge gaps in his life, but also huge gaps in the knowledge about the creation of wax objects at that time. I went to the V&A in London, Victoria and Albert Museum. I found an expert in 18th century wax. I went to a couple of museums in Florence and got behind the scenes of those museums and found technicians that I could talk to. A lot of the research was rapidly, you know, it started out being in English rapidly then became, had to be conducted in Italian because, again, it was such an obscure subject. You know, I'm not just an obscure era in history, but an obscure, you know, the artist himself is obscure. Leonardo da Vinci's waxes are kept in art museums. Zumbo's waxes are kept in, you know, the museum is the oldest in natural history. So there's a kind of curiosity element to the man himself, you know, like the cabinet of curiosities. As far as the writing and the wax process together, how they fed off each other, I'm not sure because there were a couple of parallels. I mean the fact that Zumbo is, in the novel, is commissioned to create a life-size woman out of wax secretly. And he, like a writer of fiction, has to do research in order to be able to do that. He can't just, you know, out of his imagination create a life-size woman out of wax, he has to find an anatomist that he can work with so that he can either get body parts or an entire dead body, you know, because he very quickly realizes that everything he's made up to that point, he's been able to mold or sculpt out of clay and then cast the clay and make the wax, pour the wax into the mold, where the life-size woman, he's not going to be able to do that and he's not going to be able to get, it's not going to feel realistic unless he uses a real body. So you know, he has an immense problem at the beginning, as I had of where, how is he going to get in touch with, how is he going to research this successfully? And you know, this is something you come across all the time when you're writing fiction, especially with a novel like this, you come up against, I've never had writers block, but I do get researchers block, you know, where I think how on earth am I going to find this out, I needed, for instance, to Zumbo having secured, having got hold of a beautiful dead woman, exactly the right moment, he has a few hours in which to work with her in the middle of the night to cast her body, he realizes that he has to dismember the body in order to be able to cast it, he can't cast the whole thing at once, it's too unwieldy, so he's going to have to do the limbs separately from the torso, et cetera. You know, I got to that bit in the book first couple of times round and I thought, I know nothing about dismemberment. I'm sure you've watched shallow growth before. Yeah, well, no, but I mean, you know, what happens when you, what happens when you cut into the human body, what do you see, what's it look like, I had no idea and it's not something that you can really make up. It then took me on and off about six weeks to find a man who was a histopathologist, i.e. a pathologist, he dealt with the dead rather than the living and found him finally in St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington and this man was extraordinary, he had exactly the deed, he had exactly the knowledge that I was after, you know, you're kind of jumping up and down on the spot at that point because you can't believe your luck, but, and he it was, you know, who told me, for instance, that when you, that the fat inside the human thigh is this bright, gorgeous, orangey, yellow, there's a very striking image in the book. And you know, as soon as you, you get that kind of detail, you know you're onto something and you know it's going to come alive for the reader, you know, Flannery O'Connor always said, "Fiction operates through the senses," and I think this is a novel that operates through the senses. You know, this is a novel stuffed with smells and tastes and colors and textures, and I think that's one of the ways I got at the period, if you like, you know, rather than hitting the reader over the head with all the research, you know, showing how clever I was and how much I'd found out, I did find everything out, but then I removed it all from the book, and I, I try and leave as little as possible in there in order to create the world that the reader walks into. It was just the first historical novel you've done. I've written one before. My third novel was called Aaron Fire, and that was centered around an engineer, well, centered around Gustav Eiffel, who didn't only build the Eiffel Tower, as I found out. He also built these metal churches, pre-fabricated metal churches, and I found this out because I was living in Los Angeles, and I drove down into Baja, California, this extraordinary peninsula, a finger of land, you know, a thousand miles long, zigzag, you zigzag slowly back and forth between the, between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez, and on the Sea of Cortez side, there's this tiny mining town called Santa Rosalia, and when I drove into it, the first thing I saw was this metal church, and I walked up to the church and on the, on the side of the church, there's a metal plaque that says "designed and built by Gustav Eiffel." That's what I thought, what the, a lot of novels begin with questions, so that was a novel set in the 1800s, centered around Gustav Eiffel's, an engineer who'd gone out to assemble the church on his behalf, so Eiffel himself is not in it, but, but you know, I'm not a great, I'm not a great reader of historical novels unless, I'm never quite sure what a historical novel is, I mean, where, where do they begin, you know, I mean, where does that genre, how far back in time do you have to go for a novel to become a historical novel, because generally when we, we talk about novels about the Second World War, you know, they're not, they're not generally called historical novels, but perhaps when you go back to the First World War, they might be, you know, so it's kind of artificial, it's a bit of an artificial category I find, I mean, I, I still don't really think of this as a historical novel, I mean, I think of it as a 21st century novel, masquerading as a 17th century novel, you know. Which brings me to the question of anachronistic terminology in the book, you have a few, just individual words that are not from that era that crop up, was that a sort of conscious play on your part, to, to. Well I certainly wasn't going to go the other route and have these and vows, you know. So, so, um, what I was, what I thought, I was very, very, um, I was determined to be accurate in, in, in all the historical ways, and we can talk a bit about that because there were some extraordinary things that the, the research threw up at a late stage that completely threw me, that didn't fit with the book at all, and yet I felt I had to accommodate them, you know, because otherwise I was kind of cheating the reader, since the book is set so precisely in time. Um, but I want, and to that extent the language was important too, so you'll find some medieval Italian swearing in there, for instance, um, you know, I, I, I didn't use modern Italian swearing, I found a, again after quite a lot of work, I found a book written in the 18th century called the, what was it called the, the cursing Italian? It was called The Physiology of Hate. Ah, very good. Brilliant title, and in there was a chapter on cursing, and that's, and I got the curses out of there, you know, so there's some, there's only like four or five scattered through the book, but I wanted that kind of authenticity. Um, the one, one of the words you might be referring to in the book is paranoid, I, I thought several times before I used that word, because obviously there was no concept of paranoia at that time, and yet I think what drew me to that character in the first place, Zumba himself, was a knowledge that that's probably what he was, and I, and in the sense that I, I just thought I could get away with that, I mean I didn't feel as if I had to be bound in terms of the actual, you know, when I'm talking about dialogue, it has to, it has to feel, you know, I wouldn't be able to use modern swearing, but you're talking about it in the text of the book itself. Yeah, it's just a little one, so the liminality, homosexual, things like that just didn't exist at that point, but are perfectly fitting in the spirit of what you're writing. Yeah, so, um, not to point out any mistakes by any means, and they're, in a song, somebody took out a cell phone in the middle of the, you know, the novel or something. Um, look, were you, um, were you okay with writing what's, um, colloquially, colloquially known as a page turner, in, in these terms, uh, writing a book that is so, so plot driven and, and so, you know, quick to, not quick to read, but one that will sort of compel a reader. There's a couple of things there, um, you see, I always, I feel like I've always written page turners, and I've, I feel like all my books have this kind of grip that once the reader is in, they're in and they're, they're going to find it quite hard to put it down, and in that sense, I've always thought of myself as mainstream, although, you know, not many people necessarily agree with me. It's always been my dream to be mainstream. Um, it's, what do you fit in in the, uh, the literary scene? Um, when you see yourself, or who do you see your, your comparables? I've, I've been compared to so many people, and it's an amazing list. Um, I've been compared to everyone from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Charles Dickens, Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Elmore Leonard, Angela Carter, Paul Orster. You know, there, it's a great list of writers, but, you know, they're so various, but in the end, I'm going to think, well, why don't you just say, I am who I am? You know, it's like your, your people have tried to fit me into a box or compare me to people for so long. And I've now been kind of writing for 25 years or something. And you sort of think, well, why can't I just be Rupert Thompson? You know, that's what it is. And that's the kind of book it is. And it's not really, it might have elements of genre or it might have elements of that you might recognize in other writers, but in the end, it's not like, if you feel really like anything, a through line for your own work, or do you, do you find it? Oh, I feel the books. Again, you know, critics tend to say that I write a different book every time. And, uh, if I tell you that, that the book I've just finished, or just about to finish, is sort of set in 2013 and, you know, ends up in the far north of the world and is about a girl, a 19 year old girl who disappears from her life. That's going to sound like a very different book again, to secrecy. Especially because on Twitter, I think you mentioned it as a Frankenstein for our time. It is a, it's a, yeah, I am describing it that way. It's like, um, it's like a child of Mary Shelley's novel. It's, it's related. And, um, because it deals with, well, for two reasons, one, it deals with a child of science, a girl who's been artificially created. And secondly, it, it deals with the, the way in which the created, the child seeks the love of the parent, which I think actually is what Frankenstein is about in the end. Um, if you read that, it's amazing how many people haven't read Frankenstein. I've just read it for the second time and it's so poignant, you know, the, the, the creature as it's called, the monster is, that's all he wants is to be acknowledged and loved by the man who created him, you know, and, and that man is not going to do that because he's horrified at his own creation. So, so yeah, that novel is, is going to seem, is going to seem very different to secrecy, but I, and I try not to look back too much, but, but if I do, if I'm forced to by people like you, um, I'd see huge connections between the books, they really strike me as a family, you know, and, you know, all kinds of writers you can read will say this, you know, I've gone to grass. I think I've read saying this fairly recently, you know, that, that, um, it's not really about the single book from the point of view of the writer. It's more about the life's work and every, every new book you attempt is, is another attempt to get closer to something perfect, you know, you know, you're going to, you're not going to succeed. But, but if maybe this time I'll get closer, you know, and in sense, you know, you're, as a writer, I think I'm probably addressing, um, similar themes, the same things again and again, but, but, but in very different ways, perhaps that's what people are fooled by. Zumbo himself being a character who's also looking for that, that parental approval in various ways. Sorry, again, Zumbo himself is a character who's looking for that, that parental approval in some respects. Well, the, the secret, as soon as I had a title like secrecy, I thought, um, there are going to be, have to be levels to this book. There's going to have to be a kind of archaeology to the way it's constructed. And I like that you described it as a page turner because two days. So, you know, that's brilliant. I mean, I love that because also I, but, but you have, you know, but also built into that page turner layers and layers of meaning. So I think when you read it fast, you sort of sense them there, like fish at the bottom of a pond, you know, you can't see them through the water, but you sort of know they're there. There's these, it's a book that I think, for that reason, rewards, rewards another reading, you know, I mean, it, it has secrets in it that are on the surface that are there to be, uh, divined immediately. And it has some secrets that are slightly more buried that emerge during the book that are, that are spilled by the, the characters themselves. And then there's a kind of secret at the very heart of the book, um, that is hinted at throughout, which is to do with Zumba's birth to do with his origins, which is what you were just kind of referring to there, the man seeking the love of his parents. Well, who are his parents, really? You know, where, who is he actually? And, the love story in the book, there's this extraordinary poignant, thwarted, star-crossed lovers love story, takes its root in, in that, in that very fact, because the two lovers are drawn together, because they sense secrets in each other of, of equal power. There's a sentence in the book I really like. It was the parts of ourselves that we'd kept from others that drew us together. And those are the kind of sentences I'm always looking for when I'm writing. I used to, when I first started out, what delighted me would be, you know, the, the unlikely image, the unexpected image, the metaphor. And I sort of still have those, not quite as many as I used to, but, um, what I, what I love now is, is finding that simple sentence that captures something, you know, from an angle you hadn't thought of before, or, um, almost monosyllabic words, you know, but, but have a huge, but words that add up to have a kind of resonance, you know. Interesting. What do you see as the comforts of secrecy? The comforts and the threats. Yeah. Throughout the book, its, its secrecy is both, well, a cause for, for fear and, and also a source of comfort for some of the characters, I think. What was your, your evolving take on, on the very thought of secret, or the very theme of secrecy throughout the book? Yeah. There's a paragraph later on in the book, isn't there, where I sort of go through the different types of secrecy that exist? And, um, you know, I think as, as most people listening would, would think, uh, the, the way you start off thinking about secrecy is, I have something I can't possibly tell anyone. You know, uh, I must guard this with my life. But then, and, and actually there is a kind of comfort in that, having a part of yourself that will never be known, that can't be known by others. But there's also, um, in the world I'm writing about, uh, secrecy was a kind of natural state of affairs as well, because when you're writing about, when you're talking about Florence in the 60s, 90s, um, you're talking about just pre-enlightenment. So this was a time when knowledge was not shared, knowledge itself was secret. You know, it's a little probably, at that time in Europe, there were probably only kind of 200, 300 people who, uh, shared that knowledge, who were in touch with each other. I sort of hint at this in the book where Zumbo, Zumbo is writing to, um, can't remember his name, even if I could, I couldn't pronounce it because it's Dutch. Um, he's called Leaven Hook, and he's the man who invented the microscope. And so I have, um, I have Zumbo in con, in, in correspondence with Leaven Hook in the Holland, because Zumbo, of course, is creating work of immense detail, like a miniaturist. So, of course, he's fascinated by someone who has, who's invented the microscope. Um, it's even actually believed that Zumbo worked with kind of magnifying glasses of a kind, because the work is so detailed, um, the figures that he made mostly were, were, um, small enough to, you know, they dressed on the palm of your hand. If I then tell you that on the open eye of one of those tiny figures, he would sometimes place a little worm. You know, you mentioned how plain it was. You know, you wouldn't even see it, you would hardly see it with the naked eye. So there's even secrecy actually built into Zumbo's work itself. You know, there's, there's an impression you get when you first look at it, and then you can go in close, and you get a completely different, um, landscape, if you like. You know, one of the, the notions that struck me during the book was the sense, the artist, the artist not understanding his own depths at first, and beginning to get a grasp of what you refer to as liminality in, in, in the book, that sense of, of multiple valences for what he's doing, um, during an era in which that may not have been, you know, what artists, the difference, I guess, is between artists and artists and, uh, in a sense, is that, well, and actually he's, he's, uh, he's, uh, he's almost on the border between the two because he, there's a sense in which he is an artisan as well. You know, if you, if you think about that time, again, um, if you look about where his art is coming from, he, he seems to be partly related to the Spanish Baroque, you know, so those extraordinary figures of Jesus that were, that were made sculptures of Jesus with the blood pouring from the wounds, very graphic, very powerful. Um, but equally you could say that he's coming from, um, votive art, if you know what I mean by that, you know, the, the fact that people in those days used to have, all surrounding the churches, there would be wax workshops, like in the Duomo, and round, all around, there's a street called Via de Serfi in Florence, and it was full of wax workshops just north of the Duomo, and reason being that, um, if you ill, so say you had, I don't know, rheumatism in your arm, in your hand, you would, you would go along to one of these workshops and you would have your hand made out of wax, and then the, the wax hand would be placed in the church, so that God knew what part of you was suffering and could possibly do something about it. The sort of sense that, you know, I loved it in the book where, you know, the fact that, where, where Zumbo realizes when he's making this entire woman out of wax, he suddenly realizes that because she's possibly been murdered, because she's suffered, because she is a being who is, she's a victim, if you like, he's kind of making a piece of votive art from not, but not from a limb, from a whole body, you know, that the whole, that the woman he's making is actually a piece of votive art, almost to be offered up to God, you know, so that you can see how this woman suffered, you know, so this kind of unexpected compassion he suddenly sees in what he's doing, that he never imagined would be there, and that feeds into the whole, you know, the whole thing about art and artists and the how they work. You see, I thought this was a metaphor for writers killing their subjects, but, you know, well, I hadn't thought about that. I hadn't thought about that. That might, that might stand up. But, you know, I'm, I'm with the French artist Louise Bourgeois, who, who said, you know, I trust man conscious, completely man conscious is my friend. She also said, you know, I never know what I've done until I've finished, and I look back and see what it is. I feel that with every book I do, and the Zumbos, to some extent, in the same boat here, you know, because he, he has been asked to do something he's never done before. Part of that excites him, of course, that prospect kind of excites him, but there's fear with that as well. You know, there's kind of, can I do it? Will it be, will it, will I be capable, or is it too much for me? And, and I think, you know, I, I think all the, all the writers and the writers that I love reading, there's always a bit of a sense in, in their books that they've this kind of bravery, you know, there's going to ask you feel a sense of a challenge that you're trying to somehow. There should be. I mean, I, I feel like if, I used to worry, because in the middle of every book, I'd have a few days of panic, where I'd think, just a few. That's great. Yeah, three or four. I, I'd, I'd, I'd think I, what I've taken on is, is not only ludicrous, and, you know, ridiculous, and absurd. It's, it's also impossible, and I can't do it. And I should never have started in the first place. And, and then the panic starts because I think, but I've already spent 18 months on this. And so, and, but, and I've now learned, that used to worry me, but then I've now learned to think that if I don't feel that there's a problem, you know, I should be feeling that. I should be feeling as if it's beyond me. And then you feel like it's worth doing. Because you, you, you have to feel your, I think you have to feel your stretching yourself in everything you attempt. I was thinking, again, while I was researching, I noticed that you're, you recently interviewed James Salter, the nearly 90 year old writer here in the US. And I'd read his most recent book very recently and was struck by the sense of achievement and accomplishment from somebody who has had a writing career that's lasted 50 years. And, and yeah, I wondered how much that, you know, plays, and what you may have learned from, you know, the, the process of talking to him or, or in a movie about your own, actually, that was a great advertisement for Twitter. Because I only, I only just started doing Twitter. Yeah. And I was very ambivalent about the whole thing. I thought, do I really want to do this? I mean, create a persona and, you know, just don't feed the trolls. Try and be witty. And then only through Twitter, I found out that James Salter had a new book coming. This was last year in the spring. And I happened to have met the publicity woman that he had in the UK, at Picador UK. So I kind of sent her a direct message. I quickly followed her, sent her a direct message and, and said, can I have a copy? You know, she said, sure, you know, sent one straight back. I read it. And then, and then when I, when I'd read it, I suddenly thought, actually, I've always, I've always wanted to meet him. Because light years is probably, light his isn't, you know, 1975 novel is probably in my top 10, or certainly in the top 20 books, novels for me. And to me, it was amazing because I, I contacted the publicity woman and she said, actually, he just happens to have two hours free on Wednesday morning before he flies to Dublin, and I can give you that. And I was amazed because I'm not a journalist, and I'm not an interviewer normally. And actually, the whole thing was just an excuse to meet him. I, you know, I didn't even really want to write the piece. I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, I've done that plenty. So we had this, and it was just, it was magical from the word go because I met him in the Langham Hotel, just opposite the BBC in London. And I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel and waiting, and I saw him walk across the lobby towards me. And as you said, you know, he's 87, he was 87 then. And, you know, I knew a lot about him. I knew he'd been a fighter pilot in Korea, and strange thing was, I saw him walk towards me, even in the old man that he was, I could see a little of the swagger of the fighter pilot. There was something about the way he walked, the little roll of the shoulders, or something about the movement of his legs that I could just suddenly see saw to rage 20 something on a runway in Korea walking towards his jet fighter. You know, it's amazing moment. So actually, I'd begin the interview with that, the profile, it's a profile, not an interview, I begin the profile with that. And it was just a, it was a sort of charmed hour and a half or two hours that I spent with him. But, and I am good, I have written the piece and it will, it will be in a magazine later this year, in the summer. But no, that's kind of something I don't generally do. But actually, when I force myself to do it, I really enjoy it. I mean, I, especially if it's with sort of someone I admire. Do you have other literary idols of that living I know it's tough because writers never liked to cop. No, well, the most of my idols are dead. I think I would, well, actually, Dennis Johnson, I'd like to interview. I've, I've blurred one of his novels, so he should like me. You know, it tends to be the people who are your, your favorite writers. Who were your, who were your idols? For your big influence. You mean live idols? No, you know, just, just writers who you found. Oh, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a quite a strange list. I mean, I, I, there are a lot of Americans in there. So, you know, if I say, well, we've mentioned Salter, but also, and we've mentioned Dennis Johnson. So who else is there? Jane Ann Phillips, I've always adored Mary Gates Kill, I think it's an extraordinary writer. I'm supposed to get her sometime next year. Oh, good. She's also, we also have something in common because we both worked at the Strand bookstore. I mean, yeah, really. Yeah, she did, she did too before me, I think. Mary Gates Kill, and then, you know, going, going further back in time, Flannery O'Connor is my literary godmother, definitely. And Faulkner, obviously, is there too. And then across the border, and there are people like Andachi and Alice Monroe, and, and then, and really, then I jumped to Europe, you know, and, and really it's people like people that actually aren't that, I think a lot of readers aren't that familiar with. If I say Patrick Modiano, you probably might, you might not know who I mean. No idea who that is. But a very, probably a French novelist now in his 60s, 70s who he writes about the occupation. So he always, all his fiction is set. In that mysterious few years when the Nazis occupied France and people disappeared, people changed their identities. There was a black market. His books are about identity and disappearance a lot. Then there's people like Pervese in Italy and Murakami in Japan, although I don't like all of that. But the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I think, is an amazing book. Um, who else? Oh, and Isaac Denison, who, who wrote Out of Africa, but she also wrote these extraordinary short stories, sort of kind of part fairy tale, part myth, part enigma. You know, they've, they've, I read them again and again, and I can never get to the bottom of them. There's one volume called Gothic Tales. There's another called Winter's Tales. And on my side of the water, there aren't, there aren't that many, actually. Gene Reese is a, is a huge favorite of mine. So not just white, like I said, see, but, um, voyage in the dark. She's someone who, if you read, you can't believe that she was writing a hundred years ago, almost. Um, you know, the style is so modern, the sentences and the sensibility. And there are a few writers, you know, um, sort of more or less my contemporaries who I'm interested in as well. And they tend to be women in, in the UK. Um, people like, and then write Al Kennedy, Nicola Barker, I'm going to be missing people out, but that's okay. That's a big thing to all of them and they'll be, you know, I made at you. So, now when I was researching it, I'd seen a little mention of how when you were a teenager, you basically biked, uh, to doors it to, to visit Thomas Hardy's location. So, any other literary pilgrimages? Do you still find that sort of, the, the place matters when it comes to a particular author? So other people you've, you've gone out to see, I've gone to Henry Miller's place in Big Sur and, and, um, well, yeah. And also the Oxnard beaches for the, uh, the Hernandez brothers. But other than that, I haven't done a whole lot of, uh, I haven't, I haven't done a lot of writers. I have done William Faulkner. I've been to the house in Roanoke called Roanoke and just outside in Oxford, Mississippi. Um, I'm, I'm about to go and, uh, in the next couple of months, I'm going to go to Jean Janae's grave, which I think is outside, uh, is in Morocco. I'd like to see that. Um, and, and the other one I really have to do is the, the woman I've already mentioned, Isaac Dinesen. I still don't know how to pronounce her name, but I think that's good to me. Yeah. I'd like to, she's outside Copenhagen somewhere. But, um, do you find a particular allure to, to that at all? Either the places or the, the graves, you know, do those things matter particularly for you as a writer? No, not really. I don't think so. Um, I just wanted to give it me. The Faulkner house, I, I, I, there has to be sort of, there probably has to be something extra. The Faulkner house, I was always intrigued by when I read about it because of the, the way he'd written on the walls. You know, I wanted to see that somehow with my own eyes and, and it is worth seeing. Um, and, and there is that feeling of, um, sort of touching the spirit, you know, being close to the spirit of a writer that's been really important for you. So there's a little bit of that, but then you could probably say you get that even from the pages of a book. Not quite perhaps in the same way, but, um, no. I mean, my, my travels are much more to do with, less to do with, you know, homages or pilgrimage than to do with, putting myself in new, new situations. And, and, uh, I love that Diane Arbus quote, my favorite thing is to go somewhere I've never been. I mean, I take that literally as well as figuratively, you know, she, she was obviously talking about her photographs and where, where her work, where she took, where she went with her work. But I'm literally speaking, I, I love, I, that's important to me as well. What was the, um, the piece of historical research that came up late that, uh, Oh, um, several, several pieces came up late, but, but the one I was thinking of just earlier on was ice. I, I researched this, this book is framed, um, by this extraordinary, eccentric French aristocratic, French, French aristocrat called Margaret Louise, you know, who was Louis the 14th niece. And, uh, for a long time, for, for about eight, seven or eight drafts of the book, she was only there as an absence. She was, she wasn't, she was talked about in the book a lot, especially by her ex-husband, the Grand Duke, you know, because he was, he's still in love with her throughout the book. Despite the fact she's been gone for 15 years, you know, he had still adores her. Um, but I, she was so extraordinary. The more I read about her, I thought I have to, this is a gift. This woman is a gift. I have to use her in a bigger way in the book, but I couldn't find out a way of doing it. And then there was this amazing moment where reading something that wasn't to do with her, thinking about Zumbow, because Zumbow, uh, died in Paris in the court of Louis the 14th. And he was only in Paris for about a year, 1700 to 1701. I suddenly realized that in 1701, Zumbow and Margaret Louise, this French aristocrat, were 12 miles apart, because she'd, she'd been sent back from Tuscany and disgrace, having failed at her marriage, and she'd been put in a convent, 12 miles east of Paris, a place called Samon Day, and where she behaved really badly. She would, uh... Would you describe wonderfully? Oh, God. I can't remember. Is it in the, is it in the book, where she chases the mother superior down the, she chases the mother superior through the convent with her hatchet in one hand and a pistol in the other. And also, she used to kind of, she would not give up gambling. So at night, she used to put rouge on her cheeks and a blonde wig on, and she'd climb over the walls and go to Versailles and, and gamble. And anyway, so then she was, uh, slightly chastened, aged in her 50s. But the moment I realized that they were 12 miles apart, I thought Zumba can go and visit her. He can tell her the whole story, you know, that is the story of the book, which, which concerns her really personally. You know, it's a story that after she's listened to it, will change her life. You know, and I, I love this idea of the fact that, uh, there's a story within the story, and, and, and they play off each other and have an effect on each other. Um, so that was a Eureka moment when I discovered, because that gave me the frame of the book. That meant I could begin with Margaret Louise and end with her, and I could have Zumba arrive and tell the whole book to her. Um, and I love those, I love those framed, I love the frame novel anyway. You know, you've got, you've got lots of famous frame novels all the way through the history of literature, you know, right from the de Cameron and, um, the Arabian nights, you know, a thousand or one nights, that's, that's basically a framed novel and right through to things like Heart of Darkness, and even Frankenstein is a framed novel. Um, and the great gas beam to some extent where you've got, you know, Nick Carraway is sort of telling the story. It's a kind of frame. Um, so I, then I saw, you know, that secrecy would fit into that tradition. Um, but no, uh, the other, the other extraordinary thing that happened later on in the book was that, um, and this was a negative rather than the positive start out with, was that I, I discovered that, um, I found a document in an article, in an obscure Italian article, there was a photograph of this document, and it proved that Zumba's mother had been living with him in Florence while, while he was in Florence. Yeah. Now I had, I'd written eight drafts of the book by then or nine drafts, and there was no mention of the mother in Florence. He'd left her behind years ago in Sicily, which is where he's from. Yeah, wonderful job of integrating that. Well, if that came up so late, it came up really late and it gave, I mean, this is, you've, you've picked up already on what I'm going to say because at first I thought, oh my God, I mean, this is going to ruin everything. How do I, you know, he lives alone. Faustina, his lover comes to visit him in the house late at night. You can only do that because, right, there's no one there to see. And, uh, if the mother's there, you know, what's going to happen? Yeah. But then I saw how it actually placing the mother in the house, having her arrive and, uh, means he has to change his life. And it also means that he, he is exposed. He begins to sense this secret because she starts to talk because she's kind of got dementia. She's repeating things. She's saying things. And, um, yeah. Well, do our final question? Yeah. Who are you reading? Who am I reading right now? Yeah. Um, I've got three things. Uh, I've got this extraordinary writer called Agata Christophe, Hungarian novelist. She wrote something called the notebook. I haven't started that yet. I'm on Clare Massoud, the woman upstairs, and I've got Ann Carson Reddock because I think Ann Carson's extraordinary. Um, someone actually, one of my heroes who I got to meet in Toronto at the festival last year, I got, I got myself introduced to her. So, um, have you read autobiography of Red? No, no, I haven't read any of Carson's stuff because I'm, I'm as well read as I try to come off. They're enormous, enormous gaps in my life. You can't do everything. Yeah. I really appreciate the time. Rupert Thompson, thank you so much for coming on the Virtual Memory Show. It's been a pleasure, Kayla. Thank you. And that was Rupert Thompson. His new novel, Secrecy, was published by other press. He's the author of eight other novels and a memoir. And when I said they're held in pretty lofty estimation, I really meant that David Bowie put one of Rupert's books, the insult on his list of 100 must read books. And that's not must read of the century. I think that's of all time. So that's pretty good estimation. That's a nice place to be for him. Now Rupert's kind of old school, so he doesn't have a website of his own, but he is on Twitter at Rupert Thompson one, just the number one. It's Thompson T H O M S O N. There's no P in there, but just look him up online and you'll find all sorts of neat stuff that he's written. Also, visit other press O T H E R P R E S S dot com and check out some of the great stuff that they publish. Rupert's the third other author I've interviewed, along with Lin Allman and George Prochnick. Other seems to be a pretty good press and I'm hoping to score an interview with their publisher Judith Gervitch at some point. Anyway, thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with a great cartoonist Seth, which we recorded during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival back in May. Till then, please hit up our websites VMS pod.com or chimera obscura.com/vm to make a donation to this ad-free podcast. I've gone without a paycheck since February 28 at this point and it would be nice to see a little bit come in to help offset some of the costs of going into the city to do these interviews periodically. You can also find past episodes of the show on our sites and get on our email list that way. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at groth@chimera obscura.com or VMS pod on Twitter or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. And please go to the iTunes store, look up the virtual memory show and leave a review and rating. The more of you who do that, the better the chances that I'll get featured when people search for ill-informed literary interview shows. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]