Notes on a Writing Life 37
May 14 2022
Sometimes things come together in a satisfying and almost uncanny way: the publication of my novella “Elena, Leo, Rose” this coming week coincides with my birthday, and the party I am giving for close friends and family in London, where I was born. Kim Narenkivicius of the new imprint Open Boat Editions has been working with me and with Madeleine Strobel, who has provided her drawing for the cover art, to produce a beautiful little book. The novella is a hard form to publish in traditional ways, it seems. It’s not a novel, not a short story: it has its own time and pace. I love novellas, and sometimes people forget what they are because they seem just as meaty as a novel, only more condensed. Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, for example. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
So when Kim asked me if I had anything unpublished that she could design and produce for me, I sent her this story of the 1980’s, grounded in 20th-century European history. A story of love and friendship, politics and place. The production of it – allowed by the existence of Whatsapp, the internet and digital photography as we all live in different countries – has been such a pleasure, all along the way. I’d forgotten the excitement of making one’s own decisions, in concert with others – creating something together, changing our minds, having new ideas, trying this and then that, to see what is most harmonious.
So, I’m back in London to celebrate my birthday in the city of my birth. London in 1942 was being bombed to pieces by Hitler. My father was in the army. My mother took me as soon as possible out of the city to live with her mother. I look across at Ukraine today and see the same wrecked buildings, shattered lives. When I planned this party, I had no idea that Europe could see all this and feel it again, of course, and London, the city of 2022, is now whole, and totally rebuilt. But there’s an echo in the novella I think – the sense that history is always with us, and that we love, celebrate and live our lives always in a place of uncertainty, not knowing what may come next.
The lilacs are all out here today and I remember my mother saying that they were madly in flower at the time of my birth, perfuming the air even with the burning. Flowers and bombs, perfume and stink. It all goes on.
Affectionately, Ros