by Kirsty Gunn
The key difference between the practices of the great English poet and a somewhat diffident copywriter and occasional short story author might be this: that Stuart also had a role in the composition itself, adumbrating details given her by her friend, or, in some places, filling in gaps where Gordonston had neglected to provide key material or had had simply no idea that some detail or other might be necessary.
The other differentiation, naturally, is quality, volume and content of the work in hand. In order to write the complete poem, consisting of 10,550 lines and 79,810 words, Milton was reliant upon his memory to a far greater extent than either Gordonston or Stuart in imagining, fashioning and editing his mighty epic, the point of which was the poet’s not insubstantial intention to ‘justify the ways of God to man’. It is a work that has continued to influence and shape the English-speaking world unto this day and the story of the love of a middle-aged banker for a woman in West London is, of course, much less in scope in every respect. Indeed, Caroline’s Bikini might be seen as being rather more of a record of events than a piece of literature. Certainly Emily Stuart, resisting the importunacies of Evan Gordonston, in his desire to make something larger of the story – a ‘novel, even’ as he has it by the second section of the book – tends towards this view. As she reminds Gordonston on several occasions, if this project, though it could seem quite ‘full on’ at times (p. 53), ‘was ever, ever going to get finished some day, move on …’ (p. 57) there would have to be rather more ‘going on’ than was in evidence in the current version of the text they were creating together.
As it is, Caroline’s Bikini follows the current matrix in its development: ‘project’ (also, later, ‘document’) to ‘book’ to ‘novel’ to ‘essay’ (also referred to as ‘intervention’ and ‘report’). NB these terms become interchangeable as the story moves on. Indeed that word ‘story’ features, and some readers may wish to note the heading of the final section, ‘Finishing Lines’, as having some relevance in this context. In general, the ontological differences in nomenclature suggest the variations of thought as the author moves from one consideration of the project to another: a ‘document’ is not an ‘essay’, etc.
Throughout the work, however, Emily Stuart maintains her role of amanuensis, as previously noted. She holds in mind certain memories of John Milton and his daughters and returns to these, periodically, as well as the great poem itself, though her readings are not detailed in the story here. She loves the lines about how he made his poem come together which they all memorised in that Paradise Lost class she went to in first year, from the invocation to Book IX:
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumb’ring, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse …
Somewhere, in all her old university notes, Emily has a version of the following, xeroxed by a tutor, about the account left by his ‘anonymous biographer’, whom scholar Helen Darbishire identified as Milton’s nephew John Phillips: ‘And hee waking early (as is the use of temperate men) had commonly a good stock of Verses ready against his Amanuensis came; which if it happened to bee later than ordinary, hee would complain, Saying hee wanted to bee milkd.’
So ‘amanuensis’, Emily herself wrote upon that same xerox, is ‘a torch beam in the shadows that writes, and writes, creating from its beam, from words spoken, a living text on white paper’. No wonder then it is a term that occurs to her in the opening pages of Caroline’s Bikini.
General Context: Emily Stuart and Her Love of Paradise Lost
Emily Stuart was always a keen student of English Literature, first meeting the epic poem Paradise Lost when she was about sixteen, and immediately having a sense of excitement around Milton’s great literary adventure to render in English iambic pentameter the fall of man within the great heroic tradition. In addition, and more importantly, as far as the young Emily was concerned, was the fact that Milton had identified for himself a fresh and challenging literary ‘project’, to use Emily’s own description. She fell, from the very outset, she says, for the way the great poet had imagined his way into a story using sources that already existed – from the Book of Genesis through to the Iliad to the very latest in scientific thinking, and with as great a frame of reference contained within that scale as one might imagine, spectacular in imaginative and intellectual reach, as was articulated so precisely in the footnotes given in her schoolgirl edition of Paradise Lost, the version edited by John Carey and Alastair Fowler in 1971.
‘He made a world for himself,’ Stuart replied, when asked why precisely Milton interested her as a poet. ‘He imagined his way into the poet he was going to be from … way back. Then it was simply a case of educating himself, learning about the world and being fully in that world, and the time would come for him to enter into the place of his poem. And to write from that place. I love that,’ she concluded.
Readers may also want to note some interesting coincidences here: Caroline’s Bikini is set, for a large part, around the various pubs and hostelries of West London; Emily Stuart herself lives in an area on the borders of Hammersmith. John Milton lived in Hammersmith. ‘Not that that means anything at all,’ Stuart is keen to emphasise. Only that it seems ‘kind of nice’, ‘that we are neighbours, in that way’. There is, too, the other interesting feature: that Milton lived and wrote in ‘Stuart’ times. Emily Stuart quite likes that coincidence as well.
Further Notes
Emily’s anxiety about how the narrative is being interrupted by a remark from Evan:
At several points, in the pages that she has accumulated in the creation of a ‘report’ or ‘novel’, the author indicates, both to Evan and to herself, her unease with the way various interlocutions are interfering with the flow or any potential drama of the prose. This is both a feature of her writing in general, but also an element that seems to continue to surprise and sometimes bother her. ‘How can the story go on’, as she puts it, if there are these questions and doubts about the usefulness of its content to its overall sense of purpose?
Similar reflexive moments in the text:
There are countless instances in Caroline’s Bikini where both Emily Stuart and Evan Gordonston, individually or in conversations together, identify moments in their writing of the story that might influence it. The quality of various handwritten pages, the quantity of gin that has been taken, the time of year or manner of dress … These matters and more preoccupy them in ways that find themselves expressed in the four sections of Caroline’s Bikini, either directly or indirectly. In some parts of the story the printed lines themselves seem to reflect this quality of the narrative reflexivity – where Emily has to stop herself from writing any more about something that Evan has done or might say, for example, or having to set pages to one side and not refer to them, for the danger of it causing her too much emotional disquiet. It should also be noted that occasional Americanisms from Evan stall the narrative even in its late stages, see p. 243, and various remarks from both parties about the quality of syntax, language, idiom, etc., intervene and sometimes seem to derail the narrative at key points in the story. This self-awareness about the writing process as it develops is part of the intertextual quality of the story – see below, ‘The Meta-narrative of Caroline’s Bikini’.
The Meta-narrative of Caroline’s Bikini
The over-arching idea that lies behind both the making of the story of Evan Gordonston’s love for Caroline Beresford and its expression is rested on a cycle of fourteenth-century love poems, the Canzoniere by Petrarch.
To this end, the reader should bear certain remarks made by Evan Gordonston about the nature of the ‘project’ he and Emily Stuart have undertaken with a reasonable amount of reservation: i.e. this is very much a ‘story’, or, as is suggested by Stuart early on, a ‘report’. It is not, as Gordonston might have it, a ‘myth’ or narrative of that stature. Indeed, the scattered
nature of the original Canzoniere (as they were originally known, all the poems, as scattered ‘pieces’) might furnish a useful metaphor for Stuart’s narrative approach in Caroline’s Bikini. She would by no means attest to having created anything more formal than that, a sort of gathering together of information that at one point in the story she hazards may even be a kind of ‘essay, even’.
The poems of the Canzoniere are, as they inform Stuart’s own approach, both scattered and fragmentary but also unbroken in the sense that together they make up a sequence of sonnets written over a period of some forty years. In this sequence they describe the course of a love affair that is unrequited, though no less present or meaningful than a consummated romance. Of course the idea that one may make art in order to express an emotion stands behind much of the western literary tradition, as does the notion of poetry itself as being one of the most meaningful expressions of love and desire. Still, the Canzoniere, like Dante’s great project, occupies a place in our minds given over to the contemplation of the beloved as an end in itself and as such inspires many writers to create work that may also be substituted for the reality of the love affair itself.
Though prose, Caroline’s Bikini draws on this poetic tradition as an example of what I call ‘writing reality’ – a form of literature that does not seek to imitate life so much as to generate it. By writing up an account of Gordonston and Beresford, the author, with scant literary experience and success as a known stylist (there’s talk of a few short stories, and contributions to various volumes only, that have been published; for the most part Stuart is the author of pet food and insurance campaigns), is able to make real the circumstances of ‘a great love’, as she puts it. She writes it into being on the page and the work that is created is itself the physical representation of that love.
See also: ‘Courtly Love’.
Modernism and ‘Making It Real’
A key element of the project in hand is the modernist impulse to create a ‘machine of words’, as the American poet and short story writer William Carlos Williams put it. The idea of making a piece of work that requires no information outside its own frame of reference to fully exist as ‘real’, that could be said to be all-encompassing, in the way it articulates and builds a world, this is fundamental to Stuart’s understanding of Caroline’s Bikini. Her wish is to create ‘in paragraphs and sentences’, as she puts it, a story that is not so much made up, in the imagined sense of the word, as made up of real-life words and phrases and ideas.
To this end, it is hoped, the author will be able to make something that is larger than the sum of its parts, a building together of pages and concepts that together come to have meaning and emotional charge quite outside the experience or imagination of the writer herself. The Southern American writer Katherine Anne Porter is cited, in this context, with reference to her ideal of ‘increase’, i.e. that the work of literature itself, the result of that construction of words, may lead to an experience that, for the reader, enlarges and adumbrates his or her world. There is, too, inherent in the Southern writer’s ideal, the concept of mystery, that ‘increase’ may also be of a more transcendental kind.
Personal History
This section covers a range of background relating to the Stuart and Gordonston families, referred to largely on pp. 8, 9, 11, 55, 58, 59 and 64, along with some other general details about the writer’s life and achievements.
See also: ‘Personal Social History’.
Family
The Gordonston and Stuart families lived next door to each other throughout a formative period well before that described in Caroline’s Bikini. Tom and Helen Gordonston moved, with their three children, Elisabeth, Evan and Felicity, into 17 Berkshire Lane in Twickenham six months after the Stuart family had arrived at No. 15 and from the start it was clear that the two families would become close friends and neighbours.
This was in a time that seems now to belong to another age, and a different sort of city than that which we know to be London today. Twickenham then had more of a village feel than it seems to possess nowadays; families grew up and stayed there; there was no evidence of the conspicuous consumption that now marks so many of London’s residential areas; children roamed freely in the streets and parks after school, and most families had pets. The houses were large and ramshackle and comfortable, with spacious overgrown gardens featuring plum and apple trees, old oaks and sycamores. Berkshire Lane itself backed on to woods, and it was there where Evan and Emily, as children, loved to explore – making forts, hide-outs, setting adventure trails and finding ways to get lost.
From the outset the two children were friends. Margaret Stuart, her daughter remembers to this day, said to Emily, the moment the Gordonstons moved into No. 17, ‘I see they have a little boy your own age. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you and he become great friends.’
The thoughts of a parent can set the tone for a friendship – that somewhat peremptory ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised …’ that would transcend years and distance. This, despite the fact that the Gordonston family left Berkshire Lane when Evan and Emily were eleven years old, and the two were not to see each other for the entire period intervening, during which Evan pursued a high-level career in international finance that took him to Tokyo and the Far East, in addition to the American cities in which he lived during this time. Emily, all through this time, though remaining in London, didn’t ‘pursue’ any particular career at all. ‘I write pet food ads’ is her simple response still to the question, when put to her, ‘What exactly do you do?’ She is, in her own words, ‘no high flyer’.
Evan, however, despite his CV, would say the same. The two friends remain as close now as ever, as though the bond that was established at the ages of four and five years is still as vivid and direct and uncomplicated as it was from that morning, with her mother’s words still echoing, when Evan Gordonston came knocking on the Stuarts’ front door. For the international financier is ‘just Evan’ as far as the Stuarts are concerned, all of them, not just Emily, but her brother Felix and mother, Margaret, and father, Alastair.
Emily herself, though she is no longer in touch with Felicity, Evan’s younger sister, still counts her as a ‘best friend’, a phrase that in itself denotes a relationship formed in early childhood. Elisabeth, Evan’s elder sister, went out for a while with Felix, a relationship that was reignited when the latter went for a visit to San Francisco whereto the former had moved permanently as a young woman; and there was talk for a long time, of a possible marriage there.
Alastair and Margaret Stuart are academics, both historians, who retired some years ago, though Alastair Stuart continues to publish on the areas of pre-Clearance Highland history and post-industrial Scotland, and Margaret edits secondary school history textbooks at GCSE and sixth form levels, and acts in an advisory capacity at various external exam boards and school reviews committees across the UK.
Felix Stuart, Emily’s older brother, is also an historian, the author, amongst many other books, of This New Land and Kingdom, both of which went on to become the popular BBC series of the same names. He is currently Associate Professor of Modern History at Oxford and Visiting Monash Professor of Contemporary Historical Studies at the University of New South Wales.
Tom and Helen Gordonston still live in the United States, though following the election of Donald Trump, are now considering a return to the United Kingdom. Tom Gordonston, though long retired, continues to sit on the boards of a number of prominent financial institutions, and his wife Helen, a ceramicist and painter, shows regularly at the Dewitt Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. Their daughters Felicity and Elisabeth also live in America. Felicity keeps an apartment in New York City where she teaches dance and movement at primary school level, and Elisabeth lives with her boyfriend in Sonoma Country in California where they run a small wine and food business.
The Gordonston and Stuart families, despite the distance and years between their present circumstances and their past, con
tinue to be in touch with each other – Helen and Margaret in phone calls and old-fashioned letters, on the composition of which they both spend a great deal of time, including photos and clippings from magazines, and lists of ideas and plans in what becomes an A4-size envelope; Tom and Alastair by email, which they use as a medium, chiefly, to exchange chess moves and acrostic crossword puzzle clues, as well as a regular letter that Alastair sends to Tom in a sort of handmade package. The children of both families are less frequently in communication with each other, though emails are sent, messages occasionally left, and ‘random’, as Felix puts it, cards and letters arrive from the Gordonston girls addressed to both him and Emily, and for their part, the Stuart siblings have been known occasionally to write long and complex postcards, sometimes as many as ten in a series, in return.
Evan and Emily, close friends as children, were similarly only ever occasionally in touch with each other after the Gordonstons moved to the US. There were one or two long-distance phone calls at the beginning of the separation, an email or two, but on the whole, communication between the two was scarce. However, upon Evan’s return to London, the two resumed their friendship as though ‘no time at all had passed’, as Emily puts it in Caroline’s Bikini. It was as though some door opened that had been closed for a while, and there was Evan. ‘Hi,’ he said, like he’d just that minute turned up at the door of No. 15 Berkshire Lane, the address at which Emily’s parents still live. ‘Do you want to come out and play?’
NB: Cultural historians and anthropologists from Margaret Mead onwards have continued to address the compelling nature of early friendships in the forging of adult ties and societies. Important works are too numerous to cite here, but Evan and Emily’s story could happily feature in any contemporary study and hold its own.