Sharon Penman Takes On Will Shakespeare

I've made a fascinating discovery about Later Bloomers. Many are driven, not just by passion, but by an obscure obsession that defines their path.

With Peter Paul Roget, it was creating elaborate lists. With Mary Somerville, it was the exotic shape of algebraic symbols.

And with Sharon Kay Penman (b. 1945), it was vindicating England's most reviled monarch -- Richard III.

A THING DEVISED BY THE ENEMY

With a name like hers, you'd wonder why Penman considered doing anything other than writing. She'd loved it from a young age but, like many of us, had difficulty deciding on both a college and a major. After a few false starts at different schools, she transferred to the University of Texas at Austin and graduated at age 24 with a major in history.

In her academic wanderings, she became fascinated with King Richard III, the House of York's last king, portrayed by Shakespeare as a nasty hunchback who murdered his young nephews and drowned his brother in a butt of malmsey (Madeira).

Penman was astonished to learn that Shakespeare took extreme poetic license with Richard III (sort of like Hollywood)...

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How Bram Stoker Handled A Soul-Sucking Boss

What do Dracula and The Devil Wears Prada have in common?

Recently I attended the opening of a gourmet chocolate kitchen. As I sampled the delicious goods, someone asked, “Are you in The Industry too?”

The amazing chocolatier, you see, has a day job. He’s a sound engineer. He’s done films you’ve heard of.

In Los Angeles, you can’t go to a gathering without being asked, “Are you in The Industry?” Meaning, of course, the entertainment industry, which permeates the city like a layer of smog.

Or fog, if you lived in 19th century London like Bram Stoker (1847-1912).

Stoker knew The Industry well. For over twenty years, he was the personal assistant (PA) to Henry Irving, a leading actor of his time and the first to be knighted.

A BRILLIANT PUBLIC SERVANT

Stoker knocked around in his 20s, attending graduate school, writing theatrical reviews, publishing a few short stories and working as a civil servant. At age 29, he wrote a textbook called The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, which became a classic in the field.

UNTIL HE MET DRACULA

The same year, however, Stoker penned a flattering review of Henry Irving’s performance of Hamlet.

Irving invited Stoker to his hotel room to talk about himself. He recited a poem for Stoker, The Dream of Eugene Aram, about a schoolteacher who batters an old man to death for a bit of gold. The performance mesmerized Stoker:

So great was the magnetism of his genius, so profound was the sense of his dominancy that I sat spellbound. Outwardly I was as of stone...The whole thing was new, re-created by a force of passion which was like a new power.

Irving and Stoker became close friends, or perhaps, master and acolyte. According to biographer Barbara Belford, the hypnotic, self-centered Irving is the man who was Dracula.

In 1878, Irving acquired the Lyceum Theatre in London. He asked Stoker to become his PA and theatre manager, a position Stoker held until 1899, when Irving sold his interest -- without telling Stoker.

What could have caused such a rift?

THE CHILLING MASTERPIECE

Two years earlier, Stoker had published Dracula, at age 50. Stoker wrote a few minor novels in his 40s, but none of them rivaled Dracula. According to Belford,

The novel's genesis was a process, which involved Stoker's education and interests, his fears and fantasies, as well as those of his Victorian colleagues. He dumped the signposts of his life into a supernatural cauldron and called it Dracula.

When Stoker asked his employer of almost 20 years what he thought of Dracula, Irving replied, “Dreadful!” He refused to star in a theatrical adaptation.

Barbara Belford speculates that Irving felt it beneath his dignity to act in a play written by an employee.

Stoker and Irving's relationship, however, appears more complicated than that. Did Irving just see an unflattering portrait of himself in the novel? Or was it something else? Certain members of The Irving Society believe that Stoker might have been privy to a very dark secret about Irving. (See "The Ripper and The Lyceum" in First Knight, their Society journal.)

After Irving sold the Lyceum, Stoker stayed on as his personal assistant for a few more years, but the two eventually drifted apart.

Henry Irving died in 1905, probably never realizing he'd turned down the role of the century.

Finally free, Bram Stoker wrote prolifically until he died in 1912 at age 65. He produced several more novels and a biography of Irving. Stoker’s widow Florence published a short story collection, Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, after his death.

In 1922, the unauthorized movie Nosferatu became the first adaptation of Stoker’s novel. Florence Stoker sued the filmmakers for copyright infringement and won.

Although ruled derivative, Nosferatu originated the idea that sunlight could kill a vampire, a concept Dracula doesn’t explore.

WHAT LATER BLOOMERS CAN LEARN FROM BRAM STOKER

• You can spend 10 months as a PA and write The Devil Wears Prada, but it takes 20 years under the thumb of an soul-sucking egotist to produce something the caliber of Dracula.
• Start doing now what you dream of doing later.

SOURCES
The Irving Society
Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula.

How James Michener Derailed My Career

As an archaeology grad student, I decided to reread one of my favorite novels, The Source, to judge its accuracy.

The story takes place in Israel, on a mound (also known as a tel) formed by millennia of habitation. As each artifact comes to light, the story flashes back to its origin. The Source depicts awful excavation standards, even for the 1960s. But the artifacts reveal some incredible human stories.

Of course, you might think. That's what archaeology does.

Not really.

In the early '90s, archaeology still aspired to be a hard science.

The "publish or perish" academic journals preferred articles steeped in the jargon of scientific method. For my masters thesis, I statistically analyzed thousands of flint waste flakes to discover signs of "sickle craft specialization as an indication of increasing social complexity." Not like you see on TV.

I eventually chose storytelling over science, and skipped the Ph.d. program. I blame James Michener (1907-1997), author of The Source.

A CHILDHOOD OUT OF DICKENS

The man who derailed my archaeology career didn’t know where or when he was born, but his best guess was around 1907. He was raised as a Quaker in Doylestown, Pennsylvania by an adoptive mother. They lived in extreme poverty and relocated often.

At Christmas, we rarely had anything. As a boy, I never had a pair of skates, never had a bicycle, never had a little wagon, never had a baseball glove, never had a pair of sneakers. I didn't have anything. And do you know, at about seven or eight, I just decided, "Well, that's the way it is. And I'm not going to beat my brains out about it."

His mother loved literature, however, and often read to Michener from Dickens, Thackeray and Balzac.

Before Michener entered Swathmore College on a full scholarship, he peddled chestnuts, traveled America on a boxcar and did carnival private detective work. During college he was employed as a night watchman.

He graduated Swathmore with honors, and taught English and History for several years. In 1941, he became a textbook editor at Macmillan Publishing.

A QUAKER GOES TO WAR

Later that same year, Japanese military forces attacked Pearl Harbor. Michener waived his Quaker principles and volunteered for service. “I had taught about Hitler, and I had taught about the Japanese war machine, and I knew that this was a battle to the death, so I enlisted.”

The U.S. Navy assigned him to the Solomon Islands as a war historian. Each night, in his Quonset hut, he recorded his impressions of life around him:

Sitting there in the darkness, illuminated only by the flickering lamplight, I visualized the aviation scenes in which I had participated, the landing beaches I'd seen, the remote outposts, the exquisite islands with bending palms, and especially the valiant people I'd known: the French planters, the Australian coast watchers, the Navy nurses, the Tonkinese laborers, the ordinary sailors and soldiers who were doing the work, and the primitive natives to whose jungle fastnesses I had traveled.

HE MADE HIS OWN RULES

Michener anonymously mailed his manuscript to Macmillan in 1947, since they had a strict policy against accepting employee submissions. He planned to return to his job after the war, but decided he was not technically their employee at the time.

Macmillan found him out, but decided to publish Tales of the South Pacific anyway. Michener was 40.

The following year, in 1948, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The book was not a huge financial success, however, until it became the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, South Pacific.

In 1949, Michener quit Macmillan to write full time.

He penned 40 books over 50 years. Many were epics with evocative settings that spanned several generations. Some required so many years of research that Michener would spend months on location or even move there to finish them -- Hawaii (1959), Iberia (1968), Poland (1983), Texas (1985), Alaska (1988), Mexico (1992).

UNTIL THE VERY END

Even at age 90, he maintained a disciplined writing schedule. He awoke at 7:00 a.m., ate a light breakfast and wrote until 1:00 pm.

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Michener underwent kidney dialysis treatment, which confined him to the environs of his clinic in Austin, Texas. "I sit in the TV room and see shows on the big ships I used to travel or areas that I used to wander, and a tear comes to my eye."

In October 1997, he chose to discontinue dialysis and died shortly thereafter of renal failure.

A close friend said,

"He felt he had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish in terms of his life's work. He did not want to suffer a long series of complications.''

WHAT LATER BLOOMERS CAN LEARN FROM JAMES MICHENER:

• Use your day job to advance your later blooming.
• If you begin at 40, you could have another good 50 years -- over half your life -- to live it.

SOURCES:

• James Michener at Wikipedia
• His New York Times Obituary
• His entry at the Academy of Achievement
• The Grand Times interview

P.D. James: From Bureaucrat to Writing Royalty

Nothing that ever happens to a novelist is ever wasted. ~P.D. James

I have a love-hate affair with crime novels. As a girl, I couldn't get enough of the Nancy Drew stories. By the age of 13, I'd read my way through the adult mystery shelves at my local library.

But as I grew older, they lost their fascination. Good mysteries are truly hard to find. There's nothing worse than a dull whodunnit.

Then, on a whim, I picked up P.D. James' Original Sin on a remainder table. Five hundred pages later, I closed it and thought, "Didn't see that coming." I was hooked.

Original Sin was the ninth in her series about poet-policeman Adam Dalgliesh, commenced in 1962. She wrote it at age 42, while still in civil service and supporting an ill husband. I developed a deep admiration for her.

In 2001, just before Original Sin was published, she said, "I have lived with him [Dalgliesh] for 40 years. And I have now decided he and I will die at the same time. I shan’t kill him off."

Too many books and too little time later, I lost track of P.D. James. I wondered if she and Detective Dalgliesh were still around. (Just where does time go? How do we come to forgot about the small things that delight us, like a suspenseful book?)

I was happy to discover that she's almost 90 and still going strong, and recently gave an interview to the Telegraph UK at a book festival in Devon.

"A WRITER NEEDS AS MUCH TRAUMA AS SHE CAN TAKE"

Phyllis Dorothy James was born in 1920 in Oxford and educated at Cambridge High School for Girls. She was just 15 when her mother was committed to a mental hospital. James has little memory of the time before this happened. She does, however, remember always wanting to be a writer, particularly a mystery writer. When she first heard of Humpty Dumpty, she asked: “Did he fall or was he pushed?”

James left school at 17 and got a job in the tax office. When she was 21, she married Connor Bantry White, a young medical student. They had two daughters.

WHEN A BELOVED COMPANION BECOMES A TOTAL STRANGER

World War II broke out, and Connor went to India and Africa with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He returned a broken man, suffering from schizophrenia. He never worked again and spent the next 20 years in and out of mental institutions.

She says, "Only those who have lived with the mental illness of someone they love can understand. Another human being who was once a beloved companion can become not only a stranger, but occasionally a malevolent stranger."

James took government jobs to support her family, first with the National Health Services and then with the Home Office.

At one point, she realized that she might never a break unless she made it: "It was sometime in the mid 1950s when I suddenly realised that there was never going to be a convenient moment to write the first book. You become a writer by writing. I had to make it happen."

Connor died in 1964, when they both were both 44. James never remarried.

EIGHTEEN YEARS TO OVERNIGHT SUCCESS

James wrote in the early mornings before setting off for her job as a hospital administrator. Although the first Dalgliesh mystery was published in 1962, fame and fortune didn't come until she retired from the Home Office 18 years later, with Innocent Blood, her eighth novel.

She has no regrets about keeping that steady paycheck coming in: "I had done more reading, I had done more thinking, I had done more living. It has been extremely useful being in the mainstream of working life." She administered five psychiatric clinics for the NHS and worked in criminal law for the Home Office.

Until age 87, she had few health problems. Then she broke her hip, and while recovering, had a heart attack in her dentist's chair. "I was extraordinarily lucky with health. I really didn't feel particularly old... We don't grow gradually into old age. Throughout our lives, we're on a plateau and then suddenly, whoosh! We're five years older, and then we're on a plateau again."

James incorporated her recovery experience into the latest Dalgliesh mystery, The Private Patient, which takes place in a remote plastic surgery clinic.

Other settings from her novels include a secluded Cornish island, a decrepit medieval tower turned asylum, and a private museum with a wing dedicated to grisley killings between World Wars I and II. (Only in England!)

CRIME FICTION'S GRAND DAME BECOMES OFFICIAL

P.D. James has five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. She looks like everyone's granny, except for that "arsenic and old lace" gleam in her eyes.

In 1983, she was made an OBE (officer of the Order of the British Empire) and in 1991, a life peer (Baroness James of Holland Park).

Baroness James regards the 21st century a challenge when it comes to finding motives for her antagonists. "Dear old Agatha Christie had A murder B because A was having an affair and thought B would tell. Now, of course, people write about their affairs in the Sunday papers."

WHAT LATER BLOOMER'S CAN LEARN FROM P.D. JAMES

• Nothing that ever happens to a novelist (or anyone else for that matter) is ever wasted.
• You absolutely can take care of your people and pursue your creative dream. It may be hard and it may take longer, but just keep at it.

SOURCES

PD James 'frightened' by pace of technological change. The Telegraph: 11 July 2010
PD James: Heroine with a taste for life. The Independent: 29 August 2008
'A writer needs as much trauma as she can take'. The Sunday Times: 17 August 2008
A Mind to Murder. The Telegraph: 05 March 2001
'We regard murder with fascination'. The Guardian: 04 March 2001
The Salon Interview. Salon.com: 02/26/98
Amazon's P.D. James Page

On Blogging, Books and Dug The Dog

Last Christmas, my husband gave me Pixar's animated feature UP. "You remind me of Ellie," he said. "And I want us to grow old together." I almost started crying.

But I secretly feel like Dug the golden retriever, uber-geek among alpha dogs. He tells grouchy Carl, "My name is Dug. I have just met you and I love you."

Dug talks incessantly, except when distracted. And he's easily distracted: "My master made me this collar. He is a good and smart master and he made me this collar so that I may talk – SQUIRREL!!"

Dug stares transfixed at a tree. But it's a false alarm.

1.

Recently I went down like a ton of bricks  –  a chronic pain syndrome that renders me useless from time to time.

After several days, I dragged myself to the computer and checked my email. Then I just sat there. Twitter? Facebook? One of the 40-some blogs I follow? (How do people follow hundreds?)

The screen blurred. My fingers twitched. I felt unfocused and distracted and hadn't even opened a web browser.

I'd put it down to illness, except this wasn't the first time. And it's become more pronounced recently, since I started blogging and following so many blogs. I felt like Dug, when Russell the Boy Scout adjusted his collar:

Hey would you-
(click)
-cuerdo con tigo-
(click)
I use that collar-
(click)
-watashi wa hanashi ma-
(click)
-to talk with, I would be happy if you stopped.

Inspired by Jennifer Louden, I decided to take a digital sabbatical. My conditions of enoughness:

• Abstain from Facebook, Twitter and blogs
• Answer personal email only, once each evening
• Do something creative that doesn't involve a computer or a skillet 

The universe said YES! As my pain subsided, I got the mother of all bladder infections. It lasted over a week. (On my list of liquids to avoid, I now rank unsweetened cranberry juice just above antifreeze.)

But at least it gave me time to reread Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" in the bathroom.

2.

Yup, the bathroom library still holds that 2008 issue of The Atlantic. I reread it now and then for reassurance, though I seldom get past paragraph two:

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain . . . I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. . . Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.

"Excuse me, Igor. Is that one mine?"

This time it didn't work. I didn't need to empathize. I needed to know why my brain feels like a shelf specimen in the lab of Young Frankenstein. . . .

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Eugenia West Blooms Again!

I love Eugenia Lovett West's tale because she's a late bloomer twice over, at ages 56 and 84.

West graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1944, then immediately got hitched to her sweetheart, a dashing fighter pilot. They had four children, which kept her busy for a decade or three.

West did some local newspaper work during that time, but “got tired of covering the new sewage plant.”

WEST PUBLISHED HER FIRST NOVEL IN 1979 AT AGE 56

That book, a historical gothic entitled The Ancestors Cry Out, sounds fascinating:

“In 1880 a young woman has mysterious reasons for visiting a sugar plantation on a lush Caribbean island, the site of a violent and bloody slave rebellion in 1831” (description from Augustine Funnel Books).

West then spent almost 30 years “switching genres until I found the one that was right for me.” She finally fell for mystery.