As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been like to belong to Watts’s set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s.
It’s difficult to know what to make of G.F. Watts. As an artist he was, indeed is, much admired. Hope: World Icon (1885-6), a delicate rendering of a blindfolded lyre-player probably remains his best-known work, prized across the generations for its enigmatic symbolic value. It was as a Symbolist that Watts made his mark, which perhaps helps to explain his universal appeal. A school child’s first encounter with Art History often involves gazing at paintings such as van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and deciphering their meaning out of carefully placed symbols – a loyal lapdog, a mirror, the choice of colours. So Watts’s paintings, which date to over 400 years later, spoke a popular language in his day, effectively giving birth to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which counted Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais as its members.
Tennyson’s Gift closes in on the artist’s life at Freshwater Bay, where he moved after nurturing the coterie of artists and writers known as the Cosmopolitan Club and another bohemian collective close to Leighton House in London. Immersed in such salubrious circles he had met and wedded the young actress Ellen Terry, who features in Truss’s novel alongside Alfred Lord Tennyson, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and a host of other historically contemporary figures, including Lewis Carroll.
When I ask Lynne Truss, author also of the much acclaimed Eats, Shoots and Leaves, whether she thinks there is a particular demand for fiction with a factual basis at the moment she replies, “Yes, I think there is. I think if you write a funny one it’s alright. I wanted the characters in Tennyson’s Gift to be funny, but I wouldn’t want anyone to think this was what they were literally like. I was really keen to have, as you know, a series of summaries at the end of what happened to them. I found that working from real points is very freeing in some ways.” As she described in her talk, figures such as Tennyson were ripe for her humorous touch, “Tennyson was dangerously short-sighted, but walked on cliffs.”
I asked her what she thinks of Craig Brown’s new book, One on One, which charts some of the unlikeliest, but true encounters between people in history, “I can see how you can get started on something like that. When researching you find there are strange coincidences and wonderful over-lappings of one period with another.”
It was coincidence, indeed, that unnerved Truss in the process of penning Tennyson’s Gift.
‘When I started to research people for Tennyson’s Gift I kept coming across references to Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater and I thought, oh I won’t let that bother me, and then I discovered that it was a play she’d written for home entertainment in the ‘20s and then revised again in the ‘30s and had one performance of at home with people playing Mrs Cameron, Tennyson, G.F. Watts and Ellen Terry and so on, and I was a bit worried, so I thought, “What should I do?” So I borrowed it from the London Library and I didn’t read it. I used to hold it at arm’s length and just squint in occasionally. And I remember noticing a line in which there was a description of Watts from Ellen Terry with her saying that Watt’s was “England’s Titian”. She says, “Titian, Titian, Titian Titian” and the others say, “Oh I do hope you haven’t caught cold” and so I thought “That’s okay, I don’t have to worry about this”, but of course when I did eventually read it, which was some time after finishing the book, it made me feel such a lot better about what I had done with these people.’
Woolf and Truss clearly had different agendas for their Isle of Wight tales. Had Truss read Woolf’s play in full before finishing her book she probably would not have dared to introduce the character of Queen Victoria into its narrative; Woolf had already done so in her more lightweight set piece.
Tennyson’s Gift may not have sold as many copies as Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but its author seems to prize it of all her books. She wrote it on the Isle of Wight, and recalls leaving notes for its ending whenever she went out on the cliff tops– just in case. She told me that there had been interest in making it into a film, “There was a TV film producer interested, and he did get a script written by Julian Mitchell, and it was really good. He thought of Geoffrey Rush for Tennyson, which would be just great; that lovely girl who was in Atonement as a child [Saoirse Ronan] would be so perfect for Ellen Terry, but she’ll be too old soon,” she added, coming alive with continued excitement at the prospect.
Truss and I share in common a history of working in London’s Senate House. “I’d like to write a novel one day about Senate House, the library where I used to work,” she told me, “because the classification system is so mad, I love the idea of classification.” How very Victorian an occupation! I’m sure G.F. Watts would approve.
Watts Gallery, Compton, near Guildford, is open Tues-Sat 11am-5pm; Sunday/Bank Hols 1-5pm.
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