Hampstead Authors' Society No. 69 Issue 11 March 2008
SpringHASWalk
and HASReading by Jessica Duchen
Jessica Duchen Portrait ©Zsuzsanna Ardó
Hungarian Dances by Jessica Duchen (Hodder & Stoughton, 2008) Karina is a first-generation Brit; her parents are refugees from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. When she begins to explore the long-buried secrets of her family background and Gypsy ancestry, her discoveries will change her life forever. Love and loss, displacement and continuity mingle in the intertwining stories of Karina and her grandmother, a famous violinist, spanning eighty years. Hungarian Dances is a love story, a mystery and a tale of extraordinary personal transformation.
Jessica Duchen was born in London and is a music journalist for The Independent. Hungarian Dances (Hodder & Stoughton) is her third novel, following wide acclaim for Rites of Spring and Alicia’s Gift. She is also the author of two biographies and three stage works, plus Inside London (Lund Humphries) with photographer Dorothy Bohm. A Walk Through the End of Time will be performed in the Lake District Summer Music Festival on 17 August.
Time 2:00 for 2:15 p.m. Walk starts from Watertone’s Hampstead. |
Engaging the Sky Above
HASTalk by Doug Daniels
Time: 8p.m. The talk will be on the FIRST of these three nights with a clear sky for us to admire and engage. |
Cosmopolitan India in Ancient Times
HASTalk by Benoy K Behl
|
Time: 6:30p.m. |
Since earliest historic times, the kings and the people of India presented a unique and fascinating culture. We find from the 3rd century BC onwards, a fluid spiritual tradition in which members of the same family freely worshipped and patronized the stupas and temples of the Buddhist, Jaina and Hindu faiths.
Benoy K Behl is an art historian, filmmaker and photographer, known for his pioneering work in documenting Asian art and cultural heritage. He has made 26 documentaries on The Paintings of India and 26 documentaries on The Sculptures of India.
Towards the source… and the paprikás sauce
When people tell me, ‘I want to write, but…’ (select excuse as applicable) I often say that the only way to write is to write. Sit down and get on with it. Awe-struck meditation on the mysteries of the creative process doesn’t turn a dream into a draft. Writing, like anything else, is about hard work, and if you don’t do it, it won’t be done.
Having so said, I’ve reached a point – a certain age and my third novel – where taking stock isn’t such a bad idea. Dealing with the solitude of fiction-writing compared to journalism, I find it encouraging to realise, through looking at how I function best, that nothing really happens in isolation. Everything on the page, whether autobiographical or not (and my writing mostly isn’t) originates in impressions arising from interaction with people, places and concepts. Collaboration isn’t a word you’d normally associate with the writing of a novel, but to my own surprise, it’s turned out to be vital.
Back in 1999, the photographer Dorothy Bohm, whom I’ve known since my childhood, asked me to write a text for her book Inside London. The photos, typically for Dorothy, were cutting edge – full of motion, fantasy and imagination, some almost transforming reality into abstract art. She didn’t want a piece of travel journalism to accompany them; she was after something more inventive. I’d never tried anything like this before. I visited her to view the photos on a light box and scribbled down responses as the afternoon went by, so that the words would be spurred directly by the images. At home, I set about using my notes as raw material for a reasonably sensible piece about my home city.
Of course I’d do it differently now; I find the style too wordy, the focus too time-specific. But the process was exciting, and may have set more in motion than I knew. It’s been a similar collaboration – unusually enough, with a violinist, the French virtuoso Philippe Graffin – that has triggered parts of my creative self that I didn’t know existed. I interviewed Philippe for a music magazine five years ago; we talked for three hours and haven’t stopped talking since. He’s persuaded me to write in genres I’d never tried successfully before: an original script for a narrated concert about Ivan Turgenev; a short story to accompany a CD of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante; a one-act play A Walk Through the End of Time to introduce Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which was first performed last year during Philippe’s festival ‘Consonances’, in a converted Nazi submarine base in Saint Nazaire, France. It has a UK premiere this summer.
I applied an approach similar to that for Inside London to the short story and the play. I listened to the music day and night, writing down the brain chatter it set off; then whittled the words away, trying to extract the essence and make it user-friendly. It’s not necessarily how I would write a novel…or is it?
Several years ago, Philippe asked me to edit his booklet notes for his CD ‘In the Shade of Forests’ – a recital of pieces by Enescu, Ravel and Debussy influenced by Gypsy sounds, Hungarian performers or both. The photograph on the front shows a small Roma girl peering out of a wagon on a muddy road, almost 100 years ago. The music, and Philippe’s mesmerising playing, got under my skin. I had been listening to it immediately before beginning to write Hungarian Dances. Now I’ve noticed that some of the rhythms in the words on the first page match some in the first piece on the disc, the unaccompanied opening of Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance. And it was only when I was two-thirds of the way through drafting the novel that I realised where its dynamic Gypsy violinist grandmother, Mimi Rácz, had originated: she was the child on the CD cover.
In 2004 Philippe organised an invitation for me to Vilnius, where he was giving the premiere of a concerto by the Lithuanian composer Vytautas Barkauskas. Lithuania had just joined the EU; everyone wanted articles about it. Besides, my roots happen to be in Lithuania. Family legend claims that we’re descended from the Vilna Gaon, the Talmudic sage who presided over the Jewish enlightenment of the 18th century in this troubled city once known as ‘the Jerusalem of the North’. It had never occurred to me to go there. For most of my life, Lithuania had been inaccessible, beyond the Iron Curtain and not especially tempting. Suddenly it was just three hours away by cheap flight.
Over ninety per cent of Vilnius’s huge Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust; most of that heritage was destroyed in the war and, afterwards, by the Soviets. To experience the ghostliness that lingers in the courtyards and cobbles even now; to find an apology of a statue to the Vilna Gaon close to where the largest synagogue in eastern Europe once stood – now a patch of wasteland bearing a basketball net; and to see the birthplace of Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violinist of the 20th century, still unmarked (though many musicians know where it is) – this produced a painful recognition of the marginalisation at best, and victimisation at worst, of Jewish culture, which is still largely perceived there as something ‘other’. The culmination was the Holocaust Museum, a tribute run on a shoestring in a small green house, its content so upsetting that I could scarcely eat for a day after visiting it.
How does it change you to know that although some of your ancestors escaped these horrors through pluck or luck, hundreds of thousands did not? Then, to read about the Gaon’s academic approach to Talmudic study, his rejection of mysticism and embrace of education, science and objectivity (and, apparently, music)? First, you feel lucky to be alive. Next, you notice the way that attitudes pass down the generations, unawares, until you start to see them in your immediate family. And in Hungarian Dances, Rohan makes a vital remark to our heroine Karina, Mimi’s granddaughter, regarding family history: “It’s not you, it’s not your life, but it’s part of you all the same…You’re the evidence that they’ve won.”
The more I read about the Vilna Gaon, the more he sounds like my father. Dad (who died in 1996) was a research scientist with tremendous ideals both academic and humanitarian; he rejected anything mystical yet adored music, and valued education and study above everything. The Gaon must have been a huge personality who left a powerful impact upon his descendents. I believe my father’s high ideals and somewhat severe nature came directly from this, across two centuries. My great-grandparents fled the pogroms in the early years of the 20th century and migrated to South Africa, where they built businesses and families. In the 1950s, my parents left South Africa in protest against Apartheid. I was born, oddly enough, within the sound of Bow Bells.
So what am I doing writing about Hungary, its musicians and its Gypsies? A novel based on the tragedies of Lithuania would have turned into a chronicle of unmitigated misery, besides being too close to the bone for me to write coherently about it. And, aside from the fine work of Mr Barkauskas and his colleagues, plus Heifetz who left before he was ten, there’s nothing in the place’s music as irresistible as the violin’s centrality in Hungarian musical life. If music was to be vital to this novel, as my editor was encouraging, I felt it had to be via the violin, my favourite instrument.
A violinist might have led me to Lithuania, but the violin led me to Hungary. Vilnius might have had Heifetz, but Budapest had Heifetz’s mentor, Leopold Auer. Most of the greatest violin pedagogues of the 19th century were Hungarian – József Joachim, Jenő Hubay, Auer himself. And simultaneously, a different tradition was flourishing in the city’s cafes and restaurants: the enchanting sound of the Gypsy bands led by the primás, the first violin.
The Roma too faced destruction in Hitler’s concentration camps, but today they are still fighting for real recognition of their porrajmos, ‘the devouring’. Their violin playing seems to carry the sorrows of centuries of persecution – and they are still suffering, in some places more than ever. Hungary’s history, and that of its Gypsies alongside its Jews, shared all the pain I’d encountered in Vilnius.
Hungary seduced me; the language defeated me, the people entranced me, the history fascinated and appalled me. At times the pace of learning felt like breaking the sound barrier. All because of the violin. Not to mention the cimbalom, the paprikás sauces and the cold cherry soup. Unlike Rites of Spring and Alicia’s Gift, which in personal terms were about catharsis and closure, Hungarian Dances has been all about discovery and opening out; and even now that it’s in print, the adventure continues. Currently there’s a plan for Philippe to record a CD of Hungarian violin music to complement the book.
Hungarian Dances has nothing directly to do with my life, but I identify with every one of its emotional truths, especially its exploration of what it’s like to be a first-generation Brit. Perhaps the novel is a masquerade: it’s a family story, but encloses a plea for equality and understanding; it’s a love story, but really concerns how to reconcile life in England with a background where strong feelings strongly expressed are normal, and where people, if free of communist terror, often speak their minds.
‘Do you ever wish you could wake up as someone new?’ reads the “shout-line” on the forthcoming paperback’s jacket. The phrase has some minor significance in the story, but did I ever feel that way? Maybe once – but not any longer. Thanks to Hungarian Dances, perhaps I’m becoming someone new already.
© Jessica Duchen and HASNotes
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