Mr Golightly's Holiday
"Take hold tightly, let
go lightly; this is one of the great secrets of felicity
in love."
Although "Mr Golightly's
Holiday" arose out of a series of accidents, there
is in it a theme which has lived with me steadily for
many years. In writing any novel there will be a number
of subtle influences which later, when they have become
part of a digested whole, it is hard to bring clearly
to light, but there was a particular idea which has
intrigued me and which has affected the underlying themes
of this book: I owe to the critic Northrop Frye the
brilliant observation that, temperamentally, we tend
either to favour the tragic or the comic outlook. It
was his contention that Dante, Shakespeare, and the
authors behind the New Testament were, in essence, finally
comedians - hence the Divine Comedy - by which he meant
not that they were a fund of belly laughs but that ultimately
they saw life as more powerful than the forces which
conspire against it: that the canon of their works -
for all their equivocation and deep ambiguity - evolves
towards "happy" ends. Happy ends are not fashionable
nowadays but a "happy" end does not necessarily
imply Pollyanna or Panglossism - that an author believes
that all of life is agreeable, or that everything is
moving inevitably towards the best possible conclusion.
It merely implies a particular slant of vision, one
which sees the potential, deep in the core of human
affairs, for misfortune's alternative - a view which
may in fact encourage just that possibility. For while
art can never replicate life itself, it does affect
and influence it. It is arguable, therefore, that there
is a responsibility at least not to overlook the comic
as a component of the real.
In its small way, "Mr Golightly's
Holiday" is an example of this outlook, not just
in its subject matter and conclusion but in its inception.
It arose out of a period of turmoil in my life. I was,
in fact, writing a different novel when events cut the
threads of my concentration so that book was set aside
in the distractions of the personal drama I found myself
acting in. At the lowest point, when things stood around
my bed in the small hours looking worse and worse, and
I thought I may never write again, the idea of "Mr
Golightly's Holiday" stole upon me and I am convinced
that it was the wreck of my former plans which allowed
its admission.
Many people have commented that
my books often feature, apparently adverse, events which,
through the attitudes of the particular characters become
capable of larger, more fulfilling outcomes. "Mr
Golightly's Holiday" is no exception. I cannot
say I am a better or wiser person through writing this
book - but I can say the process of writing it was an
extraordinary one and that in the process all kinds
of synchronicities occurred.
For example, while I wrote the
book while living in a small village on Dartmoor, it
was not until after I had finished writing it that,
unwilling to leave a landscape I had fallen in love
with - people laugh at me for suggesting this but, to
my mind, Dartmoor and Venice, both ancient and mysterious
locations, have much in common - I rented a small and
delightful cottage which in almost very particular,
and to an uncanny degree, resembled Spring Cottage where
Mr Golightly spends his holiday. So much so that when
I learned the owners planned to bring it up to date
by getting rid of the avocado bathroom suite, I begged
them not to. There were other, stranger, coincidences
which arose after my writing had been completed, all
of which confirmed my view that the book, whatever else,
was on some kind of right lines. What those "lines"
are I leave to my readers, who are always the best judges,
to discover, though I would suggest they have something
to do with where the real and the imaginary worlds touch
and influence each other, with the confusion between
"real" and "unreal", with the way
the extraordinary lives in the very ordinary; and also
the virtues of not being "right", of knowing
one's limits, of going, in general, lightly. Going lightly
is an undervalued occupation - if I have a hope for
this book (and I'm not sure that authors any more than
parents should have "hopes" for their progeny)
this book might encourage more of it...
