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Transformational Journeys

Since all life is a journey it’s hardly surprising that novels about transformational journeys are as old as the hills… well, older actually. Homer’s Odyssey, which sees Odysseus journeying around the wine dark Mediterranean is, in part, planned by the Gods up on Mount Olympus.  And, like all the best transformational journeys, by the time Odysseus returns not only is he a different person but so is his long suffering wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachos.

It’s a useful format for novelists from Conrad in Heart of Darkness to Hermann Hesse in Siddartha and more recently Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, where the hero journeys around the Pacific for 227 days and not to forget John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  It works for non-fiction too. Cherry Apsley Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World is one of the most powerful books I have ever read.

Last week I read about two other, quite different journeys: Rachel Joyce’s compulsively enjoyable  account of the Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg’s deeply humane account of his real journey walking from Frankfurt, the city where his grandfather had been Rabbi until 1939, to Finchley in north London, where he is now the Rabbi. The idea was that, as his community was constructing a new building, he would bring back from the one to the other the Eternal Light, or Ner Tamid, and so the book is called Walking with the Light. As Jonathan walked along the Rhine with his faithful dog Mizpah he talked to many Germans, young and not so young, Christian, Muslim and even Jewish about matters of political, social and cultural. He intersperses these encounters along the way with extracts from ancient texts, insights into the world today, musings about Literary Germany which his grandparents never ceased to love and a funny blog written by Mizpah the dog. I’ve been reading it slowly, not gulping it down, and marked many passages for further reflection. When he sees the rock of the Lorelei, immortalised by Heine the poet whom his parents especially revered, he weeps. Could it be, he wonders, because the fate of Heine’s Lorelei somehow epitomised that of his own family and history?

Jonathan Wittenberg recognises in a passage that brought me, too, close to tears that surely all is life is a journey, his destiny to spend all his life exploring, not just geographically but between generations. ‘The light I spire to carry,’ he writes, ‘will come to rest more than anywhere else in my children’s hearts. The depth of this responsibility disturbs me and I pray that nothing I ever do may cause them hurt and that I may be given the grace to transmit the flame as wisdom and love.’

I worried when I thought Harold Fry (or his creator, Rachel Joyce?) was veering towards the pseudo religious when his journey attracts a gaggle of hangers on who threaten to take over the journey. But the way Harold gracefully gives in to his uninvited followers turned out to be part of the book’s enormous charm. This was not a book about spirituality, almost the reverse. What Joyce was celebrating (it seemed to me) were old fashioned virtues like friendship, shared history, trust, loyalty and finally the possibility of renewal while religion per se was if anything eschewed. What both walkers have in common, apart from suffering blisters and enjoying the company of dogs, is that by doing something themselves they engage the human desire to encourage others. The number of onlookers who offer food both to Jonathan and Mizpah in reality and the fictional Harold is what I so often do in clicking the ‘justgiving’ button for someone else doing the marathon when I myself should be doing (okay, so not THAT) but something similar.

In very different ways these are both ‘feel good’ books. But where The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry occasionally veers towards sentimentality, in Walking with the Light the experience of reading about so much suffering, brutality and murder within living memory inevitably gives it a dark undertow. When Jonathan Wittenberg meets a priest who tells him how he misses the possibility of a deep spiritual dialogue with the Jewish community he is puzzled how to respond. The Germans either expelled the Jews or killed them and then they complain about a missed conversation, he reflects. But at every stage of the way he reminds himself of the importance of listening, of constantly engaging in dialogue. ‘This is not to betray the present through a punitive unwillingness to allow the past to be gone,’ he insists. Nor will he give in ‘to a heartless unpreparedness to listen to the echoes of the past and read the signs of the terrors which it wrought.’

It’s a tolerance, a refusal to be baited, that seems so sadly lacking as most of us journey through life, whizzing from one airport to another, never actually stopping to see what lies beyond, no time to engage with some of the world’s seven billion and rising who do not always tell us what we’d like to hear. Perhaps there is a very simple moral to be drawn from both these books: get out and walk more. At least that’s the last word from Rabbi Wittenberg, well, actually, it’s from Mizpah the dog.

 

Walking with the Light:  from Frankfurt to Finchley by Jonathan Wittenberg  Quartet £20.00

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce Random House £12.99

A Greater Truth: Biography or Bio-fiction

Girl in White Sue Hubbard

Girl in White Sue Hubbard

I have just read a beautiful novel about a real person. In The Girl in White, the English poet Sue Hubbard has written an imagined life of the German expressionist artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker; it’s an art form with the unattractively scientific sounding handle ‘biofiction’. I already knew a little bit about Paula’s work, but from a historical perspective: after her premature death in 1907 her work was denounced by the Nazis as degenerate. What I did not know was how she was in fact just beginning to find her confidence as an artist after an intense inner struggle to balance her many roles as daughter, mother, wife – and, above all, painter. In trying to live independently and survive on her earnings in an intensely male dominated world, she was ahead of her time. This was little more than a century ago but in some ways the difficulties she faced appear medieval, in others merely variations on the same struggle many women still face today.

Does Paula’s life feel more real by telling it as fiction, with invented dialogue and use of other novelistic devices, or does it make some readers question: ‘is this what really happened?’ This is, of course, an apples and pears argument. There is room for both. A Girl in White is constructed in alternate chapters, using Paula’s story followed by that of Mathilde, Modersohn-Becker’s real life daughter apparently returning on a journey in 1933 to discover her mother. This gives Hubbard the freedom not only to comment about what it means to be an artist – ‘Sometimes I wonder if marriage is a state that’s possible between creative people” –  but also shows convincingly how the important sense of place, which inspired many of the artists she was writing about, later created a fertile ground for Nazi ideals to flourish.

Yet although I, as a biographer who deals in facts, cannot (or at least choose not to) invent dialogue, I can reveal the feelings of my subject either by quoting from diaries and letters or else by explaining that what my protagonist is doing indicates she must be feeling a particular emotion. There are myriad other ways of playing around with facts, starting with the selection of material in order to produce a volume of readable size. Non-fiction writers, just as much as novelists, need a strong narrative line, they need to find a pattern or shape in what might seem like random facts of a life or the work is in danger of becoming un-readable. At the same time I find the discipline of dates and fact checking oddly comforting, reassuring almost.

Most biographers struggle with the creative tension between a novelistic urge to tell a good story and scholarly drive to assemble facts and sources and stick to the chronology. The scholar and the storyteller are in permanent creative tension. It’s what Virginia Woolf famously called the granite and the rainbow. At one level it might appear that a novelist who can jettison the facts at will has the easier task. Nothing can block his powers or invention. Henry James may have burned his papers but that has not stopped Colm Toibin (The Master) and David Lodge (Author, Author,) brilliantly re-imagining James’s life in different ways. Not surprisingly perhaps, John Updike dismissed biographies as novels with an index.

And then there is the argument of the greater truth. The idea that even if an event didn’t happen, well it ought to have done. Is our view of Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning and even Dr Arnold of Rugby, who ‘perhaps’ had short legs, indelibly inked on our brains thanks to Lytton Strachey’s subtle interpretations in Eminent Victorians?

In trying to understand why biography has been so popular in England for the last century one reason, I believe, is in the satisfaction it offers. At its best it enables readers to grasp something of the complications not merely of interpreting facts but the frailty of the human condition. Part of the pleasure readers derive from the best biographies is that they have imaginatively entered another time, another place, another life. This is satisfying. After I finished Hubbard’s novel I looked again at the paintings of Modersohn-Becker and, of course, saw them differently. They too were her children, but brought into the world at what cost. I could imagine myself  there, in her bare Paris studio, as, starving, she fought for survival with nothing to eat for three days but a heel of stale baguette and a lump of old gruyere. In truth, she may have had more than this to eat but so what.  As I said, it’s apples and pears. Here’s a fact:  with her sudden death in 1907 the world lost a great talent. She was 31.

A perfect summer read…but where is the best reading place?

‘I’m saving it up to take away on holiday,’ is a familiar refrain to many authors. You smile gratefully when told this is the fate of the book you have recently written but wish they had said instead: “I couldn’t wait to read your new book and put everything else aside to finish it the week it came out.”

However, I must plead guilty to saying the same dread words to author friends. After all, the luxury of being able to read a whole book, start to finish in a day or two, is an exquisite holiday treat. The mind has been emptied, concentration improved but… where is the perfect place to read in summer?

Childhood memories of trying to get comfortable – and stay warm – on a British beach have left me with a permanent dislike of sitting on a sandy beach. Sand gets everywhere, in feet, clothes and books, or else dogs and children come and drip water on you until, shivering with cold, you retreat indoors. A hot Mediterranean beach is little better as the search for shade means you are constantly moving, tilting, juggling sunglasses on top of reading glasses and pulling hats down, up and around. The new breed of deck chairs, with a pillow attached at the top, looks pretty for an English country garden and is an improvement on any upright garden chair nonetheless, not the perfect position for an all-day read.

Me having found the perfect place to read

Me having found the perfect place to read

But here in Crete, strung between the shade of two sturdy carob trees, I have found the perfect answer… a stripy, linen hammock which gently swings in the breeze. No one who tries it can stay awake for more than 20 minutes, but the sleep doesn’t last much longer than that either because the wind shakes a carob or three in your lap or a herd of goats with cowbells will do the same and you continue, refreshed. Reading a book in a hammock is one of life’s great luxuries.

Reviews Mother Teresa beyond the image

Reviews
“ I cannot help thinking Mother Teresa would have a sneaking regard for Anne Sebba who has provided her with a meticulous, balanced and forthright biography. As her subtitle suggests, Sebba moves beyond the polarised images of Mother Teresa as either the embodiment of human goodness or Hell’s Angel. While appreciating her subject’s magic, Sebba is never beguiled by it.”

Peter Stanford, Sunday Telegraph

Anne Sebba is that valuable kind of biographer, the post-official kind.What is admirable about Sebba’s book is its gentle fairness- it’s readiness to enter the dilemma which was Mother Teresa by recording good and bad even-handedly. She comes to the scene with a freshness  which stops well short of naivete. Sebba is very good on the Teresa Phenomenon.

Monica Furlong, The Times Literary Supplement

“Anne Sebba gives us a book – and an excellent one too – not quite a history, not quite a biography not quite a social comment, in which she tries to understand the phenomenon of Mother Teresa. Anne Sebba, in search of understanding, has done research beyond the call of duty. Sebba herself is both shocked and moved by what she discovered. Shocked by the leprosy centre, at the waste, at the lack of organisation lack of training for carers; moved by the Mother House , the nucleus of the whole international organisation, “an inspirational sort of place.  A drab, concrete, four -storey building on a noisy street is what it appears from the outside. But inside I was aware of a palpable heartbeat… everything calm, cool and peaceful as the sari- clad women and girls rose, one by one, to take communion, forming as they did so a moving crucifix in a sort of stylised ballet.”

Fay Weldon, Mail on Sunday

“Anne Sebba, author of this latest and very modern biography of Mother Teresa…Thankfully Sebba has written a rigorously objective  book that is the product of  extensive interviews with supporters and detractors. Reflecting on their views and drawing on her own meeting with the subject and her experience of India,  Sebba conducts a fascinating debate around key issues of politics and society  which were inextricably linked to Teresa’s life. In so doing Sebba pulls few punches while never losing an underlying sympathy for her extraordinary subject.

Sebba is at her most critical from a feminist, as well as socio economic point of view, in her account of Teresa’s refusal to countenance abortion and artificial forms of contraception under any circumstances. She questions, too, the haphazard nature of the medical treatment in the homes for the dying, the children and the diseased. Throughout, Sebba gives necessary emphasis to the driving force behind Teresa’s personality and the dynamic at the heart of  her work. Mother Teresa Beyond the Image is a timely book for those of  tired of icons created by TV images.

Jimmy Burns, Financial Times

Sebba’s timely nonjudgmental book is a “must read” for  those interested in the debate between religious and secular belief, the ethics of charity and the history and culture of Calcutta as well as for readers interested simply in an extraordinary life.

Krishna Dutta, The Times Higher see front page