David Smith -- Guest Blog
Letters to
Strabo – famous interlopers
Behind every great love is an epic
story waiting to be told.
My
fourth novel Letters to Strabo is
both a love story and a coming-of-age tale, set in the late 1970s. It takes the
form of a fictional odyssey recorded with disarming honesty by my protagonist,
an innocent young American writer called Finn Black. His adventures, both funny
and evocative, follow closely the itinerary taken by Mark Twain on his own tour
around the Mediterranean a century earlier in: The Innocents Abroad. The novel is structured around the seventeen
chapters of the ancient Greek Strabo’s great work: Geographica; a book that Twain quoted from extensively in his own tale.
In Finn’s words:
“I researched how famous travel writers made their first journeys for a series of articles. It fascinated me how they all took something worthwhile out of that first experience on the road, whether they later became writers, journalists or even philosophers. It opened my eyes to all sorts of new possibilities I wanted that life. I wanted to get going, to write and make my fortune. Find out what had really happened to my pa and maybe find a bit more of that mythical free love I’d been missing, too.”
I very much
enjoy doing the research for my novels and in this case I was able to
incorporate information about quite a few historical figures, some of them
named, some of them somewhat disguised.
As I
mentioned above Mark Twain plays quite a prominent role in the idea for the
book. My
first idea for Letters to Strabo came
from the memory of a trip I made twenty years ago to Olana, the amazing
Catskills home of the painter Frederic Edwin Church.
I
found that Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens to use his real name) made a visit to
the Church’s just a few years after this. Both Twain and the Churches had been
touring the lands described by Strabo at almost exactly the same time but had
never met.
Twain
was accompanied on his visit to Olana by his family and by Grace King, the
southern novelist. Her description of his two elder daughters, Susy and Clara “More entrancing characters I have never met
in my life” sparked me to research deeper into the story of these
remarkable young ladies. Their loves, dreams and the personal tragedies they
endured gave me the inspiration for the backstory of my heroine Eve. Further research provided me with neat links
to Ernest Hemingway and Peggy Guggenheim amongst others.
Like
Twain, Hemingway is an inspiration to our young writer. He visits the famous
bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris associated with Hemingway in an
earlier incarnation:
“I
was given a few chores, which didn’t tax me too much. Then I used an old manual
typewriter to write a long confessional to Eve about Françoise
and scribbled several postcards to family and friends. Its cowling had been
removed and the exposed fan works were dusty inside, but it worked perfectly
well. It was kept on a lopsided old desk for anyone to use, underneath a print
of Hemingway kicking a can down a dune. Apparently, hundreds before me had
typed messages with that same machine or scrawled them by hand on scraps of
paper. Many were stuck in a chaotic jumble on the walls and underside of the
staircase. There was one note I particularly liked:
“The
entire store is beautiful, but this very chair in this very nook moved me to
tears. When I return to the States, I will be able to take this inspiration and
feeling with me.”
It was signed ‘Loulou’.
Well
Loulou, I thought. We’re both tumbleweeds drifting on the winds of change,
aren’t we? I really fancied myself as a Hemmingway disciple by then.”
Peggy
Guggenheim, the famous American art collector also plays quite an important
role. We first come across her in Lisbon, where Finn encounters the story of
her Casablanca-esque escape from occupied Europe to the States. Later he visits
her in Venice which his french girlfriend Françoise. Her plot to take advantage
of the friendship that Finn and Guggenheim form is a key turning point in the
story.
“From somewhere, who
knows where, she’d apparently conceived the sickest notion that I’ve ever
heard. She outlined it to me in clipped breathless words. She’d been told in a
dream the previous night that I would be the last conquest, the last paramor of
la padronna. She’d come up with a plan. There would surely be a Pollock, a Blue
Pole, in it for me, or a Picasso for her. It was simple; it couldn’t go wrong.”
I
hope you will enjoy meeting both the historical and fictional characters in
this book, I certainly had a lot of fun working out how to weave their stories
together.
Author’s bio
David
Smith is a British author who has now published four works under the Troubador
imprint. His first novel Searching For Amber has been described as "A powerful and
notably memorable debut" with a review describing it as "masterly and
confident" and another as "Extraordinary, poetic, enchanting,
sublime". In addition to
writing, he is currently CFO of a blue chip UK public company and lives near
the South Coast in England with his wife and three teenage children.
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