I am just starting a book about lost works of art, called Lost Stolen or Shredded, or Has Anyone Seen the Mona Lisa? a few sections of which once formed a series on Radio 4. So extending and fleshing them out shouldn't be too hard? But it is. There is something about the process of starting a new piece of work that I find paralysing. It helps me, sometimes, to begin at the beginning, though every writer knows that you only write the beginning at the end, once you know what you have done. I have provisionally drafted a couple of opening paragraphs intended to pique interest, and signal what I am (probably) going to be doing later.
In first draft, my opening reads like this:
He collected absences. For him they were as intense, haunting and real as the presences that they shadowed. And so, on this day late in August of 1911, he had intentionally arrived that little bit late to join the queue, this slight boy-man of 28 with his friend Max, heightening the anticipation. They had rushed to Paris from Milan as soon as they heard the news, and as they attended the Omnia Pathé the previous night, noted with delight the way in which the film, like the ubiquitous newspapers, advertisements, candy wrappers, and postcards, proclaimed and even gloated over the hot topic of the day.
When they eventually entered the Louvre's Salon Carré, senses heightened by the delay, they approached the spot where the Mona Lisa had been displayed for generations. The crowd – all of whom had come on the same pilgrimage – pushed forward, and the little man, jostled, could hardly see. Taking his friend by the shoulder Max pushed to the very front, and they gazed at the wall in astonishment, as other onlookers paused to deposit flowers on the floor beneath, with notes of remembrance tied in silk ribbons.
He stood in front of the wall, rapt, those obsidian eyes staring. The painting, of course, was gone. That's why he was there. It had been stolen a week before, and the Museum had only just reopened to the public. The crowd had come expressly to see where it used to be, and now wasn't. For Franz Kafka, the Mona Lisa was in the process of joining that internal collection of what he called his "invisible curiosities:" sights, monuments, and works of art that he had missed seeing.
I'm not sure how much of this will survive into my final text, or indeed, how much of it works. There is something a little audacious – and unconvincing, I fear – about animating the figures of Max Brod and Franz Kafka beyond what the bare facts will allow. Never mind, all of this will be revisited at the appropriate time.
Checking through these paragraphs what astonishes me is not that they are not yet fully realised, but how many errors have crept in. How did that happen? Well, I'm still trying to unravel it, but the major mistakes are as follows: (1) Brod and Kafka arrived in Paris from Milan on September 8, not "in late August"; (2) they did not "rush" to Paris to see the empty space. They came to Paris on the way home to Prague, after a visit to Italy, because of "fear of the cholera," and to save time and money; (3) they did not go to the cinema before visiting the Louvre, they went to the Opéra Comique; (4) the Louvre was closed for nine days, not "a week".
In fact, there is little evidence that their visit to the museum was prompted by the theft of the painting, or that they were particularly struck by seeing the spot where the Mona Lisa used to hang. If you consult Kafka's travel diaries for the period, he notes the visit to the Louvre, and a "Crowd in the Salon Carré, the excitement and the knots of people, as if the Mona Lisa had just been stolen," but makes no further comment, devoting more attention to the Venus de Milo and the Borghese Wrestler.
Reference to Max Brod's biography of Kafka, too, casts serious doubt on the notion that the Mona Lisa, or rather the loss of the Mona Lisa, had a serious imaginative impact on Kafka. Brod never mentions the visit to the Louvre at all. Nor can I find the source of the notion that Kafka collected "invisible curiosities", though I am still looking.
My story is starting to unravel, alas. I rather liked it. How did I manage to get so much wrong in such a short passage? The answer, frankly, is that I don't entirely know. My normal method of composition, particularly when it involves a degree of research, is to read a lot of books, underlining passages that may be useful, and then to trawl the internet, cutting and pasting information into a file that I can then use for reference when I get down to work.
Everything in my first-draft opening passage was acquired in this way, and then put together so that the "research" doesn't stick out, and the reader is led easily into what is, after all, a fascinating story. But when I go back to all those notes, it is unclear what came from where, much less how and when. I simply cannot reconstruct my sources, and what I had taken to be accurate turns out to be embarrassingly sloppy.
Fortunately, I know I can be slapdash, and need to check and recheck my sources. I am at my most vulnerable when I believe I know what I am talking about. So I did what I should have done in the first place, and went back to the primary material. Kafka's Travel Diaries and Brod's Franz Kafka: A Biography are more reliable, for sure, than stuff one can cut and paste from the net. I should know better, but the temptation is considerable. I am not, after all, a historian doing original research. I am much more engaged by the construction of a lively narrative than by the methodical presentation of facts.
This overreliance on unreliable or unacknowledged sources is a common problem, and an increasing one, and can have dreadful consequences. A recent example in New Zealand concerned that excellent novelist Witi Ihimaera, best known for Whale Rider, which was made into a terrific film starring Keisha Castle-Hughes in 2002. In 2009, Witi, a man of considerable imaginative power and charm, published a novel called The Trowenna Sea, an account of Maori convicts transported to Tasmania in the 1840s. He – and his many readers in New Zealand – were soon astonished, and appalled, when Jolisa Gracewood's review of the book in the Listener, accused the author of plagiarism from a number of different sources, and cited 16 damning examples.
Witi Ihimaera could only own up, in the mitigated sense to which I have been alluding. He had been sloppy, got his notes mixed up, and eventually confused material emanating from others for his own work. He was nevertheless guilty, and happy – if that is the right work – to acknowledge it: "I am deeply sorry and take full responsibility for this oversight…. The authors I have managed to contact understand how it occurred and have accepted my apologies. The passages in question will be fully acknowledged in a future edition of the book." The book was withdrawn by Penguin, and Ihimaera vowed to buy up all available copies. (The few surviving copies are now uncommon and collectible, and the book has not been reprinted).
Ihimaera was roundly, and widely, and rightly, condemned, but I felt a distinct fellow feeling with him. His plagiarism emanated from the same slackness as my initial failure to check my sources, though I located my errors before going to print, and he did not. That is, of course, a major distinction: I know how sloppy I can be, and am duly vigilant, and Witi Ihimaera (was has had a problem with plagiarism once before) apparently does not. But ours are the sorts of mistake that are too easy to make. I expect we will see more and more of this, as the seductive but not entirely trustworthy world of information on the internet expands, and our habits of research and self-scrutiny contract.
No comments:
Post a Comment