Margot Livesey on Andrea Barrett's Archangel
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(Guest post by Margot Livesey)
If I weren’t a writer, then I always thought I’d work for Oxfam and if I couldn’t work for Oxfam then I’d like to teach people to read. What could be more life-changing than the experience of letters becoming words, words becoming sentences, sentences becoming paragraphs that can fly off the page and into the world? As friends who work in theatre and music struggle to keep their art forms alive, I marvel at my banquet of words, and how I share that banquet with friends and strangers. In Yiyun Li’s memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Li describes how she made her way from the dusty streets of Beijing to the landscapes of such authors as Turgenev, John McGahern and, especially, William Trevor. Almost every aspect of Li’s early life in Beijing is foreign to me but we share McGahern’s fields and Trevor’s small towns.
In writing my own most recent novel, The Boy in The Field, I thought a lot about landscapes – the field where the boy is attacked, the town where the three teenagers who find him live – and how places frame the possibilities of our lives. The poet Ellen Bryant Voigt claims that tone controls meaning but so, I think, does place. Looking for models that might help me find my way into my novel, I reread the work of my dear friend Andrea Barrett. Here is the opening of her story “Archangel (1919).”
The first time she saw him, he was driving a sleigh. Not one of the boxy Red Cross ambulance sleighs, but a rough peasant sleigh with a frame of lashed saplings riding low between the runners. His chin rested on his chest; his hands lay loosely in his lap; the reins looped onto his knees, depriving the little pony of any instructions. The snow in the street was firmly packed, neither icy nor badly rutted, and the pony walked patiently, in a straight line, as if planning to continue past the hospital courtyard to the edge of the White Sea. A long bundle, half buried in hay, lay next to the driver – who must, Eudora realized, be sound asleep.
This paragraph, in a mere five sentences, does so much so elegantly and so effortlessly. It creates a time and a place. It makes us want to know more. “The first time she saw him” tells us there will be subsequent meetings. We experience the anonymous watcher and then we learn her name: Eudora. Perhaps best of all the paragraph creates a shimmering tone, a voice close to Eudora’s, she’s only twenty-two, but larger than hers, watching over her and taking care of us, her readers, who have never visited Archangel in 1919, or any other year.
In the opening paragraph of The Boy in the Field, I hoped to suggest a similarly wise narrator hovering in the background, ready to come close to each of my protagonists in turn.
Here is what happened one Monday in the month of September, in the last year of the last century. Matthew, Zoe and Duncan Lang were on their way home from school. Usually they took the larger bus from the larger town, where they attended secondary school, to the smaller town where they lived, but that morning their father had said he had an errand to run and would collect them. So they waited beside the school gates, and watched the buses depart. After fifteen minutes, with no sign of the familiar car, they began to walk along the road that led to their town. They each wore a version of the school uniform: a white shirt, black trousers, and a black pullover. Expecting their father to appear at any moment, they walked fast, making it a game to see how far they could get before he pulled up beside them. They left the last houses behind. Hawthorn hedges and an occasional ash tree hid the fields that bordered the road. Through one gate they saw field of cows; through another, rows of barley. The afternoon was warm and still; only a few leaves fringed with brown hinted at autumn. Gnats hung in listless clouds above the tarmac. Zoe was the one who spotted something through the hedge. She had a gift for finding things: birds’ nests, their mother’s calculator, a missing book, a secret.
You can see me trying to follow Andrea’s example, naming a date, creating a landscape, suggesting that this afternoon will not be like other afternoons. I didn’t think about the fact that my characters were teenagers, only about the passionate complexity of being seventeen, fifteen, thirteen. They’re in the thick of their lives but they’re also waiting for their lives to begin. The pony doesn’t keep walking patiently in a straight line; nor do the three Langs. On that September afternoon, they find a boy in a field; he’s been wounded and everything changes.
Margot Livesey grew up in a boys’ private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published by Penguin Canada in 1986. Since then Margot has published eight novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and Mercury. Her ninth novel, The Boy in the Field, is now out from HarperCollins in the US and by Hoddard & Stoughton in the UK. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017.
Margot has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Margot is currently teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.
Alice Sebold says, “Every novel of Margot Livesey’s is, for her readers, a joyous discovery. Her work radiates with compassion and intelligence and always, deliciously, mystery.”
Find out more at www.margotlivesey.com