Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric

by Buckley, Veronica

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  P.S.

  Ideas, interviews & features…

  About the author

  From Music to Mondaleschi

  Louise Tucker talks to Veronica Buckley

  Like Christina you have travelled a great deal, but unlike many New Zealanders you have ended up in Paris, not London. How did you get from one side of the world to the other?

  By chance, really. And in fact I did spend a long time in London. I went there first as a postgraduate student, and later returned to work there. It’s one of the world’s great cities, but in the end it wasn’t for me. My husband had been writing for some years, and when I began writing as well we decided to move on. You can write almost anywhere, though for biographies, of course, you need good libraries, so that meant we had to choose another major city. I suggested Barcelona – too hot for my husband. He suggested Berlin – too cold for me. Paris was a compromise, but it’s proved a good one for both of us.

  Your career trajectory is as diverse as your travels. What did you do in the music and then oil industries, and did you always, in spite of the jobs, want to be a writer?

  Music was my first job, and my last before beginning to write was in the oil industry. I worked as an orchestral ‘cellist, and also taught the ’cello. Then I was travelling, studying again, and in the early 1980s I retrained in computing, which was at that time at a breakthrough point, just beginning to move out of research and into business and education. That opened doors for me into all sorts of industries, on the software development and technical documentation side. All my jobs had a writing aspect to them, but yes, of course, I was keen to write something with more letters than numbers in it. It took a while to organize, but my husband assures me that good wines take time to settle too.

  The translations in the book are your own. Which languages do you speak and when/how did you learn them?

  I speak French and German (far from perfectly), and I read Italian, Dutch, and Swedish when I have to. I learned French and German first at school and university. Once you’ve learned a language from one particular family, it’s much easier to learn a second one – Dutch after German, for instance, or Italian after French, as was the case for me. English of course has a foot in both Germanic and Romance camps, which is an advantage for reading other languages, though reading is of course only a quarter of the story: there’s speaking and understanding, too, and lastly writing. My husband is German-Dutch and speaks both languages natively, so I’m exposed to them both, and we’ve lived in France for some years now. And this might be the place to put in a word for classics teachers everywhere – I did years of Latin, and formal English grammar, and that was really the basis of it all.

  You mention first encountering Christina when a student, but what finally inspired you to write her biography?

  It was my husband, Philipp Blom, who suggested it, and who encouraged me to start it (and to finish it). He was working on a book about collectors and collecting, and one evening he told me about a fabulous cabinet that had found its way as war loot to the court of Queen Christina. We started talking about her, and the spark was rekindled.

  Where did you start your research, and how long did it take?

  I was lucky to be able to do a lot of work at home in Paris, since the Sorbonne has one particular library which specializes in Sc
andinavian material. And most of Christina’s extant letters are held at Montpellier – they’d been part of a vast pile of loot taken from Rome by Napoleon’s army. (The lovely climate in Montpellier compensated in a way for Christina’s atrocious handwriting.) So I began formally in France, though I’d done quite a lot of the background beforehand. It took a couple of years. Quite a few historical sources, which are generally out of copyright, are available now on the internet – that is, the complete text, which you can download. This saves a great deal of time and expense.

  What did you enjoy most, the research or the writing, or were they inseparable?

  I think they’re two quite separate aspects of the work. It’s even possible for other people to do the research for you, assuming you’re happy to trust their judgement. Research means reading, learning, discovering, a bit of detective work, getting to know a language better – all of these things I love. But it also means sitting for hours in poorly lit libraries with your feet frozen almost solid, fighting with very old or very new computer systems which work perfectly for everyone else but, mysteriously, not for you. It means charming normally unyielding librarians into photocopying a final page for you three minutes before the library closes. It means getting lost on foreign buses, and lugging heavy bags around dark streets that you don’t know. It’s travel, and it’s scholarship, but generally both at their least glamorous. From all of this you’ll conclude, correctly, that I much prefer the writing.

  How long did the book take to write, and were you ever daunted by the task?

  The writing itself took nine months, and the research of course much longer. I have a photograph which was taken outside Gripsholm Castle in Sweden. It’s of a huge grey cannon, aimed towards the viewer, and away in the background there’s a little speck of colour, which in fact is me. It seemed to me, when I first saw this photograph, that it reflected almost perfectly the relation of the biographer to the work in hand: a vast amount of research, ready to explode out of control at any moment, and a tiny little person behind it, trying to keep all the pieces together and tell the story. It was constantly daunting, from start to finish, and beyond. But I think that’s inescapable. You can never work things out as well as you can imagine them, but you can’t help trying. That’s why the next thing is always so important.

  Christina was enthralled by Descartes, among others. Which writers, thinkers or books have influenced you?

  There are so many. Though I studied philosophy, I am not so keen on the speculative thinkers. I prefer those of a pragmatic and humane bent, people like Montaigne and Alexander Herzen, or Isaiah Berlin, and those who cut through humbug, like Feuerbach and Hobbes. Virginia Woolf is a wonderful analytical thinker; in fact I feel that was the greatest of her gifts. For writers, it’s harder to say, since I think that kind of influence is mostly unconscious, though the clarity of a lot of contemporary American writing has (I hope) left its mark. For books, these days popular science makes me think about things differently, and generalists’ books on politics and economics. I like these windows on other worlds.

  Christina had grand plans and noble ambitions, yet they are not always successfully realized, if at all. Did you ever find her a frustrating subject?

  I certainly did. My husband tells me he was constantly hearing sounds of exasperation emanating from my workroom: ‘But why?’ ‘Couldn’t you just – ?’ ‘For heaven’s sake!’ These were all me, remonstrating with Queen Christina. She had an endless capacity for shooting herself in the foot, and more or less no self-control whatsoever. She threw away so many wonderful things, so many chances, and when she had the Marchese Mondaleschi killed I really thought I couldn’t go any further with her. But you have to look at what’s behind it all, imagine yourself into her perspective, and then of course things become very different. I watched her change from an infuriating teenager to a dangerous loose cannon, and finally to a whimsical if impossible old aunt, and I have to admit I grew fond of her in spite of everything.

  Have you ever been tempted to write fiction? And do you think that the skills of a historical biographer, narrating the life of a figure whom you can only imagine, are similar to those used in novels?

  Yes, I would like to write fiction, and certainly some of the skills needed for the two genres are the same. In both cases, you need to be able to tell a story. But I don’t think talent in the one will necessarily guarantee talent in the other. There’s the question of dialogue, to begin with. This is something you don’t really need in biography. Then there’s the plot. A biographer needs to be able to spot a good one, but he doesn’t have to create it himself. The same applies to the characters, though both genres require psychological insight. And for the novelist to write biography – of course it all depends, but biography generally needs a different kind of prose, less colloquial, and a longer breath, if you like. And there are more constraints: you’re working within a framework of facts – more engineering, perhaps, than architecture.

  What motivates you to write?

  I think it’s a sort of need, in the same way that some people simply need to dance when there’s rock’n’roll playing. If you don’t, you feel restless and constrained. Sylvia Plath said she wrote because there was a small voice inside her which wouldn’t be still. I think that was that need, which I think you have or you don’t have, from the beginning of your life, regardless of the level of your talent. There are also E.M. Forster’s prosaic motivations, of course: you need to earn a living, and you’d like your friends to respect you. These are good reasons for writing, but I think they’re lesser motivations than responding to that need.

  Is there any book that you wish you had written?

  There are dozens. I’ve always thought Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit was a marvellous example of biography. I’m sure I wish I’d written all Jane Austen’s books, especially Mansfield Park for its perfect structure and Pride and Prejudice for its characters and general delightfulness. I wish I’d written Chekhov’s plays, full of warmth and wit and wisdom. Don DeLillo’s Underworld is a magnificent piece of contemporary writing; I wish I’d written that. I suppose I should take a leaf out of G.B. Shaw’s book and say that I wish I’d written the best book that it’s in me to write, but I also wish I’d written Shaw’s own music criticism – it’s hilarious.

  What are you writing now?

  I’m now working on a biography of Françoise de Maintenon, the second (and secret) wife of Louis XIV. In one sense, her story is almost a fairytale of rags to riches. Her father was actually a murderer, she herself was born in prison, and as a child she had to beg for food in the streets, but she ended by marrying the most powerful monarch in Europe and wielding enormous influence. The seventeenth century was France’s grand siècle. It’s a fabulous period to work on, very interesting politically and very rich in sources, especially personal memoirs: the secret journal of Louis XIV himself was discovered only recently. And Françoise’s rise from the bottom rung to the very top allows you to look at all the different levels of French society- the misfits and criminals, the working people, the life of the salons, the courtiers – a lot of reading to do!

  LIFE at a Glance

  BORN

  New Zealand, 1956

  EDUCATED

  New Zealand, London, Oxford (music, languages, philosophy, history)

  CAREER

  Music, technical documentation, writing

  FAMILY

  Married to writer Philipp Blom

  LIVES

  Paris

  FAVOURITE NOVELS

  Pride and Prejudice

  Jane Austen

  The Master and Margarita

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  Underworld

  Don DeLillo

  The Last Samurai

  Helen DeWitt

  Love in the Time of Cholera

  Gabriel Garcia Márquez

  See Under: Love

  David Grossman

  A Confederacy of Dunces

  John Kennedy
Toole

  The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

  Haruki Murakami

  Midnight’s Children

  Salman Rushdie

  Confessions of Zeno

  Italo Svevo

  A Writing Life

  When do you write?

  Every day, but not all day.

  Where do you write?

  In a sunny room with a view.

  Why do you write?

  It’s a sort of instinct.

  Pen or computer?

  Computer, but I carry a notebook about.

  Silence or music?

  Mostly silence, otherwise piano music or quartets.

  How do you start a book?

  In the middle.

  And finish?

  Wanting to start again.

  Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?

  Tea and chocolate biscuits to get me started.

  Which living writer do you most admire?

  Gabriel Garcia Márquez.