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Stories Behind The Story: Harriet Constable and Her Commitment to Crafting a Narrative That Brings the Past to Life

Harriet Constable talks to Cheryl about her unconventional path to writing, her immersive research process in Venice, and the significant historical themes she explores in her work. Her latest novel,The Instrumentalist, is out now.

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Broadcast on:: 23 Oct 2024
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This is the Better Reading Podcast platform with stories behind the story, Jane's Be Better podcast, my book chat with Caroline Overington, and more. Looking for a particular podcast? Remember, you can always skip to it. Welcome to the Better Reading Podcast, stories behind the story brought to you by Belinda Audio. Listen to Belinda audio books, anywhere, everywhere. Hi, this is Cheryl Arkel from the Better Reading Podcast, stories behind the story. We talk to authors about how they came to tell us their story. Harriet Constable, welcome to Better Reading. Thank you so much for having me. So, Harriet's in London. Lucky you. I know. Well, it's a very dreary, rainy day today, so I don't know about that. It's probably much sunny away you are. Yeah, we've had great with it. So, it's autumn over there, I guess. Is that right? It happened very quickly as well. We went, you know, we merged it away for a few days to Greece, and then when we got back, it was cold and dark, and I was like, light the candles, get the blankets out, it has happened, it's awesome. It does happen really quickly. Sometimes it happens in a day. That's what happened to me when I lived there, and you get a full sense of security. Sometimes you go out in a summer frock, and then the weather turns, you know. It's enough. You always need your sunglasses, your umbrella, your sun cream. You never know what to take out here, so you have to carry so many things around with you, just to get around in the UK. Okay, so Harriet is a talented journalist. She's a filmmaker and an author. Her work has been featured in prestigious outlets like The New York Times, BBC, and The Guardian, showcasing her exceptional storytelling skills. Her latest novel, The Instrumentalist, is a historical fiction novel about a gifted musician's journey through ambition and rivalry in the classical music world. Do you know, when I first picked this book up, I thought, wow, you're very game to be writing about music. What do you mean? Well, it's not really... I feel music is more of a sensation. It's a feeling. It's something you hear for most of us. I know that that's not the same for musicians, but it is for most of us. So when you write a general fiction book and you're asking everyone to hear, that's game. Yes, I did think that would... I knew that would be one of the biggest challenges, actually, trying to bring music to life in a way that represented both the main character, Anna Maria, who was inspired by a real woman, you know, to really get at how special her relationship must have been with this music, to get at how special this music is, and the Republic of Music Venice in its most exciting period. It had to be vivid and alive, and I remember once reading that the Irish poet, John O'Donoghue, said music is what language wishes it could be. Yeah. And it can never do justice to music with just words alone. So I knew I was in for a real challenge there. Giving it colour was my solution and playing around with it in that way. Yeah, and making is here, making us listen. Yeah, I think just playing around with it so much, listening to it so deeply myself. I mean, it's been a beautiful experience for me, because I do come from a musical family, but I had never listened this deeply to this music, of course. I never spent this much time thinking about it, and the music of Bach and Mozart and Vivaldi, the greats. Yeah, that was kind of the soundtrack to my upbringing, but it was there in the background. I wasn't super conscious of it even. Playing Vivaldi's music now, every single morning before I would start to write, I would blast out the four seasons and I would sort of imagine it coming out in colours and imagine that I was Anna Maria cajoling it out, and then I would storm over to the laptop to start writing it. I wanted Anna Maria to have this determination and energy, and so I never wanted to come at the book until I'd got into the right frame of mind, I suppose, and letting the music do its thing and really exploring what the music is doing to us and just playing around with that improvising, writing to music, writing in time with music, trying to make the language feel musical with rhythm and poetry and all of these devices, but just I just let myself run with it, and I'm so glad I did because I think I didn't know what I was doing exactly, I just thought I'll give it a go, I'll try things and see which ones work, and some of them did work, just giving myself that freedom to explore certainly helped here, I think. Okay, I want to know your journey to writing the instrumentalist. Talk to me about how you got here. Talk to me about your journalism first and how that then translated from short form to long form, for instance. Well, my journalism has always focused on the thing I love the most is fascinating stories of real people or real moments or situations that we don't understand enough about. I want to get, like any journalist I want to get at the truth, I'm hungry to know more about who we are and where we came from, and it's often through a brilliant person or through brilliant people that we can start to understand that more deeply. So I've written features and I've worked on documentaries, I've always preferred longer form journalism, and in 2019, I was staying in a rental apartment in California on holiday for a couple of weeks. We're about in Palo Alto of all the places, yeah, it was not a place where I expected to discover this detail that would change the course of my life, but in one of the books that was offered up in the rental apartment on the shelf, I picked one up, I started flicking through and it landed on this line, it said, "Antonio Verbaldi taught in an orphanage in Venice for his entire career and that his students were these orphan women and girls, exclusively women and girls, and that they went on to become these remarkable musicians and without them he couldn't have composed his music. And with this combination of my journalistic background and my love of untold true stories and my musical background and curiosity, yeah, and just a hunger and curiosity, I was so surprised not to have heard about this already, and my first thought was, "Oh, I must find the novel or the film about this because what a story, I want to read all about this." And then I started researching and realized there wasn't anything out there, and then I started asking musicians about the women and girls that helped without it with his music, and they, even people who were playing Verbaldi's music every day had never heard of this backstory, and then I thought, "Oh my God, I've got something huge, what to do with it." I just clutched it for a while, gathering all the information I could, not quite knowing what it would become, but knowing it was too big to give it away for an article or something, that it would probably need to be a book, but what kind of book, how best to express it, and had you written a book before? I had never written a book before, not in 2019. During the pandemic, I started to explore then creative writing. I didn't exactly know that it would be applied to this project. It was just a way of getting through the dark, sad, quiet times, I think, of giving my mind something else to do, and I had always thought that I would write creatively, but I had imagined I would do that later in life in my 50s or 60s after a career in journalism. And with this extra time in the pandemic, I started exploring and playing around with ideas for creative writing, and then by about the end of 2020, something had clicked in my mind. I do love historical fiction. I read a lot of historical fiction, but I don't think it had occurred to me that I could write a historical fiction until all of this other work had happened, and then I thought, "I have this amazing story that I'm not quite sure what to do with it. I've done so much research." It doesn't lend itself, I don't think, to nonfiction, because as much as I can find out about Vivaldi and the time period and Venice, there's so much missing. What did these women and girls think about all of this? You know, what was it like to be them? They were orphans, they were girls in the 18th century, but they were also being given this miraculous opportunity to have a musical education, and as much as they were growing up in an orphanage, it was also a sort of conservatory of music, and they were there at the heart of this explosion of innovation in music, creating the concerto and creating these pieces that we still value so highly today. What did it feel like for them? What were their personalities? What were the complications of their mindset? Did they know that they're in something big? Did they know that? Yeah. I think they must have known that they were doing something huge because they were famous in their time. The Filier di Coro, the orphanage's orchestra, was world famous, kings and queens, and great thinkers and philosophers would travel to Venice just to hear them perform because they were that good, and they were premiering music like Judith a triumphant at the Pieta, which was a commission from the leaders of Venice to help them win the war. These were really prestigious opportunities, so they must have known how powerful they were and how powerful this opportunity was, whether they would have known how long this music would last, how still today the Four Seasons is the most famous piece of classical music in the world, and we're still using this music and our films and weddings and funerals. What I find interesting, and I'm not quite sure if it's the same in the UK, but it's certainly here in Australia, there's been a real surgeons in historical fiction from a woman's perspective, where people like you and here in Australia are writing about famous, they were famous male figures, but there was usually a female figure behind them, and they're finding these figures, and they're doing their research, and like you, they're writing fiction. That's interesting to me, even as we're talking about the instrumentalists, because they were famous, but there was still nothing around about them. As you say, everybody is playing Vivaldi, but nobody knows the backstory. We have missed out half of history, more than half, really, because we've missed out the history of marginalized people generally, and it's such an exciting time, and it's such an opportunity, because we just realize we've only kind of looked at one side of the coin. Our history is so much more nuanced, colourful, complicated, collaborative than we have synthesised it down to, and where we've arrived at is our best interpretation. It comes from a really good place of really thoughtful people doing their best to establish where we're at, but we have established our back story through quite a narrow lens, clearly, because we have missed out so many people's stories. This opportunity to start exploring those stories from a new perspective, people are so hungry for that. We really, we want to know where we come from, because it helps us understand who we are today, and it helps us imagine what we could be in the future, when you know that a collection of disabled, disfigured, orphaned girls, because they famously were missing eyes and toes and scarred from the pox. These orphaned girls in the 18th century, without them, we would not have the most famous piece of classical music in the world. It makes you think, well, if they could do that then, what an Earth could I do with my life now, with as far as we've got with all the advances? And also, what else was happening to women in that community? What else were they producing? What else? They'll probably write speech writing for their partners, though it's just, yeah, it's interesting. There's a writer here called Tom Canale, who you might have heard of, famous Australian author, who has, I think, one, oh, he wrote Shindler's List, Shindler's Ark, which you would know. And I was talking to him a few years back now, and we were talking about First Nations people. And, you know, you're talking about these, the people that hundreds of stories that have never been told. And I said to him, it's only now that we're starting to see First Nations people in history books or in historical fiction. They were always there. They were just never written about. They were written out like women. They just ignored it. They were there, not even in the background, doing critical, critical jobs or critical parts. And we only wrote about what we thought we wanted to hear about, which was, you know, men, white men. Yes. And a lot of the time why we need fiction is because so many of these stories have been erased or deleted or deliberately. Yeah, left out. Yeah. I mean, I think that leaving out is what really upsets me sometimes, because that in itself, is it a deliberate act? Or is it that's just what the editors wanted at the time? I don't know. That's one of those really important questions for us to be asking of history. And what really happened to it? And the instrumentalist, that's one of the questions it's asking. You know, what happened here? I wanted the not one of the central questions of the novel to be, could these women of girls have actually helped for about decompose the music we still value today? And so that's, that's the question that the novel is exploring. But in doing so, also, I wanted to draw attention to the fact that where we could have had 350 more years of creation and more music to love, we stifled it. There is silence. We don't have these women's compositions, or perhaps we do hidden within Vivaldi's own music. But we should have so much more creativity. There should be so much more music and innovation than there is. And noticing the silence is important, but it's only possible to explore these themes by imagining into the gaps, because the gaps are yawning, dark caverns, enormous, huge gaps in our history, where we just don't quite know what happened, because the history of women, the history of a lot of marginalised people has just been erased or silenced. When it comes to weight loss, no two people are the same. That's why Noom builds personalised plans based on your unique psychology and biology. Take Brittany, after years of unsustainable diets, Noom helped her lose 20 pounds and keep it off. 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At Blunile.com, you can find or design the ring you've always dreamed of with help from Blunile's jewelry experts who are on hand 24/7 to answer questions, and the ease and convenience of shopping online. For a limited time, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more with Code Listen at Blunile.com. That's $50 off with Code Listen at Blunile.com. Okay, so you decide to write your first novel, and you go for something complex, putting it mildly. It's not like you're just tapping away. You've got to do probably hours and hours and hours of research. Now, that is a skill in itself, writing a novel, and then doing the research, and then pulling that into a story that is now historical fiction. I'm not sure how much of your journalism would have helped that. How did you approach that task? I mean, in a practical way. Yeah, the research was the place I felt most comfortable, most steady, because that's the journalism side of things. So, once I had decided historical fiction would be the way to do this, which was around about the summer of 2021. I decided I would go to the British Library for a few days a week, every week. At the beginning of the week, I shifted my schedule to put this project first, because I am one of those people that needs to be able to obsess over something in order for it to become what I want it to become. So, I thought, "I'm in my other freelance journalism work till the end of the week, and this will become my absolute priority." And in the British Library, I started piecing together for myself a horizontal history. I wanted to understand Anna Maria's mindset, what that could have been, and I thought the only way I'm going to get at that is really to know everything about this world and her time. So, I plotted the entire history of Venice next to places like Rome and London and Paris to see just how advanced Venice was compared to those places from such an early era. Then I plotted Anna Maria's facts, the scant details I could find from her life, like the year in which she was posted through the hall in the wall to the orphanage, the hospitality dalapieta. I plotted her life next to Vivaldi's timeline next to people like Mozart and Bach, their contemporaries. In doing this, I started to construct a world for you, but also a rich understanding of this time. This was such an exciting time in Venice's history. It was so advanced by the turn of the 18th century that they had the foresight to say, "Let's have an orphanage where we teach girls music." The fact that that was possible was because it was so wealthy and advanced. It was important for them to educate orphans. That would have been a forward thought. That's a very advanced thought right in that thing from the fact that universities were established so early in the region. So, thinking was much more advanced than other places. It wasn't until the 1730s that London got a similar sort of thing, but the Pieta had existed much longer than that. All of these things helped me start to piece together the world in Anna Maria and to learn more about Vivaldi. Then, finally, in the January of 2022, I could go to Venice and I had never been, and I knew that spending time in Venice and immersing myself in that world was going to be vital to bringing it to life. So, I spent a month there. Because it was the first time, really, that you could travel there after the pandemic, I basically had the place to myself. It was completely magical it was that kind of frosty, foggy, eerie, January days and early nights where your footsteps can creep you out as you're walking through the lagoon because they're echoing around and you're thinking, am I making that noise or is someone following me? And I just let myself lean into it completely. I would pretend I was Anna Maria running through the labyrinthine streets, blasting the four seasons on my headphone, imagining I could see the colors pouring out of the windows or seeping under the doors. I would stand outside the Conservatoire of music and listening to the cacophony of sounds pouring out. I would watch the canal just stand there listening to different pieces from the period musical pieces and think this is a place that moves and transforms like music itself because I had never been to Venice before. It felt like everything I was seeing was just an offering for the book and because it hasn't changed since Anna Maria's time, I didn't really have to imagine too much. I felt like I just stepped into the set of my own story and all I had to do was follow the sort of secrets that Venice is always offering up and especially listening to the music while in the setting. It's like raising ghosts. You've gone back to that time. Magical, yeah. So you were there for a month? Staying in Venice for a month and then when I got back to London... Did you find a lot of research? Were you successful? I know you were there to have a sense of place, but did you find out more information on Anna Maria? Yes, I was finally able to get into the Pieta Museum, which was locked and closed for several weeks that I was there finally after pacing past every day. One day I went past and the Pieta building itself was open, which is now a hotel. So I went in and asked, "Please can I be shown around? I'm writing this book about this place." I stood on the deck. It's actually now a luxury hotel. So the deck was a very nice terrace of a fancy bedroom imagining that that was where Anna Maria would stand and conduct to the sounds of Venice rising up above the city. I was able to get into the Pieta Museum next door in the church, which has some documents and details about the history of the Pieta and the half things that the children were left with. The parents left them with half a coin or half a piece of embroidered fabric or something in hopes of being able to return and collect them later. All of these details are so important because I think that it's easy to reduce human beings from history to a statistic or hundreds of orphans in the orphanage. But then you think every single one of them had someone that left them there and almost every single one of them was left with half of something, which means that there were hundreds of adults, heartbroken adults who couldn't care for their children because systemically there wasn't the things in place to help them raise these kids. They were destitute, but they still had this dream and hope that they would be able to return and match their half a coin to their babies and get them back again and wanted it to be an empathetic and emotional understanding of these real humans. And I think that's what good historical fiction does. I love it when a book really helps you realize these people lived and they felt great suffering and great joy and so much love and they're just like us. But exactly like us. So you come back, you've got all the research. At what point do you say, okay, research is enough and I've got to start writing because I would think that if it was me, I'd be procrastinating at that point. A great way of not procrastinating is to only give yourself three months to write the book in between your freelance projects because you can't afford to have any longer to write it. Because I need to obsess over things and I couldn't afford to take too much time out of work, I said I'll take from January to March to try and get a first draft down. So I began writing as soon as I got to Venice. So I was kind of experiencing the setting and writing live, but I was so inspired as soon as I got there. And I had so much this whole body of research from London and from the British Library that I was able to then, I already had a kind of plan because I knew I was going to tag the plot to as much of the truth as possible and I had the truth already. So then it was more about bringing it to life in colourful, playful ways once I got to Venice. When I got back, of course, you can't really, I couldn't get a full first draft down. I could get a kind of skeleton draft down, but it's only once you start writing that you realize what you don't have. So I, about 30,000 words in realized, huh, this is really like quite a lot of this is going to rely on me having a deep understanding of how to play the violin and how to compose music, which I don't know how to do either of those things. And then I had a tiny panic. I thought, oh my goodness, I've written 30,000 words and I don't know what I'm doing and I need to learn all these other things. And then I went back to the journalism was just like, then I'll fill in the gap, I'll go and re interview more people. So when I went back to London, that was my first port of course, I went to a violin, Aluthias, a violin making shop in London, where they still make violins like they did in Annamarie's time and watched them growing these instruments out of wood and glue and guts. I guess they use a synthetic material now, but it would have been guts back in the day. And starting to understand that magic of the real world magic of these instruments where alone, those are just meaningless ingredients. But when you piece them together carefully with time and with effort, it becomes this creature that has its own soul when it's paired with the right player, that violin is singing to you in one of them. And what it can do is so remarkable, you know, it's so remarkable. And what I think is interesting too, is that they haven't changed, okay, the way that they're made might have changed over the years, but a violin looks, you know, almost the same as a violin looking 200 years ago, right? Yeah, in Annamarie's time, they were perfecting the violin. So at the turn of the 18th century, they had advanced as far as it was going to advance, they had made it the perfect form, essentially. And we basically haven't improved on it since. It's another thing that really captured me about this period, this Republic of music in Venice in this time. It was the most innovative exciting time, one of the most innovative exciting times in history of music full stop. You know, the birth of the concerto from Baroque. Baroque was quite dull music, sorry for people who love Baroque music, but the leap to the concerto, which so vivid and fast and twists and turns, people had never heard anything like that. It's only possible for Vivaldi to create music like that, because he had this test bed and breeding ground of hundreds of talented musicians. It's one thing for me to say, "I want to go to the moon." And it's another thing to have the resources to actually get there. He had the supplies, the rocket ship, the fuel, everything he needed to just test things out and try to create these huge pieces of music with so many different arts to them, so many twists and turns. Audiences were literally frightened to hear it. This is also the period in which the major and minor keys are being finalized, the piano forte is being invented. You can just imagine it as this coffin of ideas and sounds in this most vivid of musical settings to start innovating and inventing, and we haven't really improved on any of that since. I want to know then, so you've got a book. What is your path to publishing? Did you know what to do next? Yeah, so during the pandemic, I had been learning about the publishing industry and chatting to a writer's group. I'd set myself up. I'd gone on some writing courses. I'd been getting feedback on my creative writing. I'd also been sharing drafts and things like that. So I'd been working toward getting my book in a good shape. I knew I was going to do many edits before I ever shared it with an agent. I made myself a list of agents that I was going to approach, ultimately. My plan was that I would work my way up from a huge list of literary agents with the top five, obviously being numbers one to five. I thought, start maybe a bit less ambitious, and try to get a bit of feedback and see where that goes. I expected over time I would get the book to a place where it was ready. What actually ended up happening is that I shared a few chapters with a friend of a friend, now a good friend called Kieran Millwood Hargrave, who's an amazing historical fiction writer. I thought sometimes people are busy. They don't always have time to read these things. Maybe she'll read it in a few months. She read it in 15 minutes and she ignored me immediately and said, "I knew this was going to be good, but it's so good. I'm going to share it with my agent right away." Her agent was one of my top five agents on my list. That was a very daunting moment because it's playing your hand. Once it's gone out, you can't resubmit to agents. I sent it out then to my top five or six agents that day. Then basically, everything kicked off from that moment on. I had gotten the manuscript ready from about the march when I had that skeleton draft. I'd spent until October editing and getting feedback and tweaking and changing. I think it was the November or end of October that I took it out to agents. Then I signed with my brilliant agent, Madeleine Milburn, who just had such a vision and a passion for this story. Then we worked on a few revisions over Christmas, and then we took out auction in the January. What a story. Congratulations. Thank you. We're out of time, Harriet, truly. It's an amazing feat. It's a beautiful, readable, magical, musical, historical fiction book. I really, my first thought when I started reading was how are you going to pull this off, and you did it. It's brilliant. Thank you so much. That means a lot coming from you. If you'd like more information about better reading, follow us on Facebook or visit betterreading.com.au. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Belinda Audio. Belinda audio books are available on CD and MP3 from online booksellers and book shops everywhere, or you can download from Audible, Google Play or the iBook Store. We've also created our own app called Gorobox that's available from both the App Store and Google Play. 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