The Return of the Courtesan: a guest post by Victoria Blake

The Venice of my imagination is a mysterious place.  A place of watery reflections, swirling fog and twisting canal-ways.  I have visited twice, both times in summer, and I didn’t find this Venice.  But fortunately, there are other versions of the city, more like those of my dreams.  One of these is the Venice of Victoria Blake.  Victoria’s novel: The Return of the Courtesan (published previously in hardback as Titian’s Boatman) has just been published in paperback.  The story weaves together the lives of an intriguing array of characters in 16th Century Venice, modern day New York and London.  The Venice depicted here drips with atmosphere: plague-ridden but opulent, beautiful but corrupt. Its characters are as well-drawn and evocative as the city.   I can’t recommend this book highly enough and encourage you to read it.  If you like history, art, Venice or just a good story well told, this book offers it.  So I’m very pleased to welcome Victoria Blake with a taster to whet your appetite. 

Now over to Victoria to introduce the courtesan of the title…

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In the sixteenth century, Venice was notorious for its courtesans. So notorious that when Shakespeare had Othello say to Desdemona, “ I took you for that cunning whore of Venice,” everyone, from the groundlings up, would have understood the allusion. In the early part of the century there were said to be roughly 11,000 prostitutes in a city of 100,000 people and the writers of the time were obsessed with them. Here is Tomaso Garzoni in 1585: ‘More menacing than a lightning bolt, more horrifying than an earthquake, more venomous than a snake …’ That’s an immense amount of power to hand over to a working woman! But it also clearly shows male fear of women’s ‘unbridled’ sexuality.

My courtesan Tullia Buffo is modeled on the real life courtesan Veronica Franco. She was a woman who single-handedly supported three children, a large extended family and a household of servants. She was a respected poet and member of one of the leading literary salons of the day. She was a great supporter of other women and she tried to encourage the authorities to set up a refuge for women fallen on hard times. She was a cortigiana onesta an “honoured courtesan”. Thus the source of her income was arranging to have sex for a high fee with the elite of Venice and the many kinds of people who passed through the city which included a king, Henry III of France.

The fact that she could read or write at all was in itself remarkable. In Venice in the 1580s literacy amongst women was only 10-12 percent. Her intellectual life began by being privately tutored with her brothers and then continued when she was taken up by the patrician and celebrated patron of letters, Domenico Venier, who ran a literary salon at his palace, Ca’ Venier. He not only encouraged her he also published her and by her mid twenties she was well known as a poet.

Her prominence however generated great jealously from Venier’s nephew Maffio, who in 1575 wrote a series of misogynistic verses, mocking her: ‘Your mouth is as foul as rotten mud…your breasts hang low enough to row a boat on the canal…Your eyes bulge out of your head as if a priest were exorcising you of all your sins…’

Oh, Maffio, really!

But Franco refused to be shamed or silenced. These outrageous slurs spurred her on and she came out all guns blazing, challenging him to a poetic duel. “I now challenge you to single combat: gird yourself with weapons and valour. I’ll show you how far the female sex excels your own. Arm yourself however you please and take good heed for your survival …”

What a wonderful response! This is not a woman who would have been driven off twitter by trolls.

In the aftermath of the plague of 1575-1577 she was put on trial by the Inquisition. She survived – just, but her reputation was damaged. She died at the age of 44 in a poorer part of Venice. But through her poetry and her letters she comes down to us, dignified, combative, witty and flirtatious. In an era where women in the public eye are often vilified for how they look there is a lot we can learn from Franco’s verses.   I like to think she would have been out there taking part in the Women’s March earlier this year, proudly wearing a pink pussy hat.

Although I used Franco as the basis for Tullia Buffo, the courtesan in my book, I give Buffo a much happier ending. One of the rewards of fiction is having the ability to re-write history. I wasn’t going to have Tullia die in a poor part of the city. I hope Franco would approve. And I very much hope you enjoy reading my book.

https://victoriablakewriter.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/VM_Blake @VM_Blake

https://www.facebook.com/victoriablakeauthor/

 

Thank you for your visit Victoria.  The Return of the Courtesan is easily available to buy on Amazon, including Amazon UK here and Amazon USA here and you can visit Victoria at the links above.

 

Brief delights

Summer is a season of brief delights.  Tiny beings on gossamer wings cloud the air for fleeting moments.  Meadows undulate in an abrupt dazzle of colour.  Birds swoop in from their long journeys to a frenzy of feasting and breeding.  It is a season where things appear like magic, before vanishing as though they were never there.  Where do they come from – the flies and the beetles and the butterflies?  Where do they go to when their season has ended?  They appear and then they fade, leaving behind traces on the air and the memory of wings.  Summer’s long, light days can seem tantalisingly slow, and many of us remember treacly summers of our youth that were never-ending.  But summer’s delights are ephemeral and the season rarely seems to linger in the way the dark, raw days of winter do.

In the long, slow turn of the seasons, I see the pattern of a writer’s life.  A cycle of hope and despair, of tunnelling inwards to find a nugget of wisdom and reluctantly re-emerging to display it to the world.  But if the writing life is a long game, then summer is those brief, dazzling moments of success.  It is the moment when you write ‘the end‘; the competition prize or commendation; the moment when you see your words in print; the pleasing comment or review.  For most of us it isn’t a best-selling novel or Pulitzer Prize, it is a series of brief delights, that dazzle us temporarily, before we head once more into the doubt doldrums or the hard work of putting one word after another.  Sometimes these dazzling moments seem far apart, like midwinter yearning for spring.

Summer is a season of expansiveness.  A time to use the long hours of light and warmth to replenish us for the winter ahead.  In this season, I feel the hope of sending my work out into the world.  The stories jostling for a home will find one; the manuscript waiting for an agent won’t be discarded.  That hope and what it may bring sustains me as a writer, just as the memory of summer comforts me when the light is low and the cold chatters my bones.

Of course summer’s brief delights don’t appear from nowhere, and nor do those of a writer’s life.  They are the result of months, even years, of preparation.  The larvae creeping through the mud, waiting for wings.  The seed incubating in the earth, waiting for petals.  The story percolating in the mind, waiting for its words.  Their magic is that of toil and transformation.  So it is no wonder there is delight when they finally emerge.  No wonder summer has a frivolity lacking in all the other seasons.  It is a time to bask in these transient delights.   We will bid them farewell soon enough and move towards the bittersweet dark.  And as we do, perhaps we will cast a wistful look behind us and remember the dazzle of the light.

Many thanks to James Clark for recommending this post to WordPress Discover.  James is very generous in highlighting the work of other bloggers, why not pay him a visit at https://jamesclarkthenextiteration.wordpress.com

The whisper of the sea

I have neglected the sea.  It whispers to me, always, from just beyond the piers, but I have ignored it, without consciously doing so.  I have wandered in the dappling of trees, under opulent greenery.  I have sauntered through parks and leafy lanes.  In this ambivalent summer that has veered between intense heat and thrashing rain, I have felt the urge to be enfolded in all this greenery.  Occasionally, I have walked by the river, within the stone embrace of the piers.  I have seen the sea from a distance, behind the glass of a passing train.  But for months, I have abandoned it, ignoring its insistent whisper.

I wake to the sound of a ship’s horn moaning on the river and know by its rhythm that I will be greeted by fog.  I wake to thin, drenching rain, rain that has fallen for three days.  The kind that could be rain or could be mist, but is in fact a mixture of both.  Rain that seems barely a sigh on the air, yet will leave me soaked in minutes.  But the sea calls all the same.  It will brook no further delay.

The lighthouse, dirty white against a washed out sky, is hardly more than a shimmer in the mist.  The waves are industrial; rough and grey, white spume smashing against rock.  A ship smudges the horizon.  The birds are subdued.  Herring gulls glide silently on the wind, while a gaggle of oystercatchers and eider ducks repose on rocks on the far side of the causeway.  The sand martins that nest in holes in the cliffs are absent, perhaps tucked up in their burrows.  There isn’t much of a beach; the wild winds of the last few days have left the sand strewn with a quilt of rusty kelp.

I once lived in a city whose water was packaged and tamed in canals.  A city that was too far from the sea for me to visit.  The brick and the concrete burdened me.  There wasn’t the air to breathe.  I was packaged and tamed like the water around me.  I couldn’t wait to leave.  Now I am never far from the unfettered air of the sea.  The town’s heartbeat is the cry of gulls and the blurt of horns.  Sea frets roll in and blur its edges.  This is a liminal place, a mirage of water, sky and land.  I can cloak myself in green, but the blue is never far away.

When you grow up with the sea, you can never be comfortable anywhere else.  The air will always be too thick.  You will miss the scent of salt-scoured skin.  You will miss the dust of sand beneath your fingers and the simmer of sea-blown limbs.  The sea opens you up and returns you to yourself.  How could I have forgotten this?

All my life I have talked to the sea.  The sea listens and carries my words away.  It shatters them on the rocks, scatters them in the spray.  And then it returns, carrying new words back, words tinged with salt and magic, creeping over the sand like offerings.  Summer is my hardest season.  When my soul revels in light and warmth but still longs for the delicious introversion of autumn.  I fight against the exposure of the season, but the sea offers a kind of truce, reminding me of who I am.  I have always been small here, but the sea fills me up and expands me until I am everywhere.

Cold Iron

It’s almost midnight.  Sky and sea are faded to indigo, as though there is nothing beyond.  A moon just past full wallows in the sky.  The church is the highest point on the coast.  It’s spire is a beacon on the landscape, visible from sea or land from miles distant.  A violet blush illuminates its windows from within, hinting at something taking place inside.  At this time of night on a Saturday, the coast isn’t quiet.  Revellers weave along the sea front, making their way home from a night out.  Cars pull up in the car park, their owners greeting one another before pumping away along the coast road.  Soon they will all be gone, leaving this domain to the gulls and the crows once more, but first, I have an appointment with some ghosts.

Tonight is the launch of Cold Iron, an anthology of 21st Century ghost stories, in which my story The Last Bus Home appears. The launch is part of the Iron in the Soul festival, a series of literary events taking place across the town of Cullercoats.  Cullercoats has a history as a cultural centre.  Founded in 1539 to support fishing, coal and salt mining, it is little more than a small village, perched above a crescent shaped beach surrounded by caves.   But from 1870 to 1920, it was an artists’ colony and Winslow Homer lived here for two years, painting the fishwives as they worked on the beach.

The launch takes place at St George’s Church, a large, French Gothic church built in1884 by the Duke of Northumberland in memory of his father.  Inside, the church soars on sandstone arches, with high windows.  There is a sense of height and narrowness, the curves drawing your eye up to the ceiling.  Most of the church is in darkness, but there is a purple cast to the apse and three sanctuary lamps burn red before the altar.  As we enter, the organ soars.  It is considered one of the best church organs in the country and fills the space with deep, rich notes.

I’ve always been interested in ghosts.  I like their magic and their mystery, though I don’t know whether I believe they are the spirits of departed souls.  My story is set on a bus, the last bus home of the title.  There is something lonely and eerie about an empty bus, travelling through the darkness, particularly on a rainy night.  The drone of the engine, the gentle movement, transporting you to another place.  There is something about a bus that encourages reverie.  A bus is full of anonymous people thrown together by their need to get somewhere.  You don’t know what their story is or who – or what – they are.

The readings introduce us to a variety of ghosts, all in modern settings.  In between, we drink hot chocolate and listen to the moan of the organ music.  When we emerge into the night, the revellers have gone and the coast is quiet.  The sound of the organ still vibrates, along with the gentle roar of the sea.  We have listened to their stories and now we leave the night to its ghosts.

Cold Iron is available to buy now from Amazon here or through the publisher here.

Life’s little dramas

Outside the library, a drama is unfolding.  A crow perches on an aerial, complaining loudly.  Two jackdaws watch from the roof and  a herring gull peers down from a chimney.  At intervals, the crow flies towards the building and back again, still calling; a posse of more jackdaws and gulls appear.  The sky churns with black and white bodies, circling the top of the building.  I don’t know whose drama this is.  Perhaps the crow has a nest nearby that is being threatened, perhaps the threat is from the crow himself.  I know something is going on, but I don’t understand it.

In the park, I walk into another drama.  A blackbird cries alarm relentlessly from the hedge.  On the grass, a trail of grey feathers leads to the bloody carcass of a pigeon, abandoned on the ground.  I don’t know what has had the pigeon.  I don’t know if the predator is still around and this is why the blackbird calls, or if there is another, unseen threat.

Outside the supermarket, I sit in the sun eating a sandwich on my lunch break.  Beside me on the bench, a pair of hoverflies entwine.  They stay there, seemingly motionless, until my sandwich is gone.  Suddenly, the male moves off, flying drunkenly to another part of the bench.  He lurches twice into the air and back down again, before he is able to fly away.  The female, meanwhile, calmly grooms herself.  After a while, she rises up, hovers in my face for a few seconds as if to scold me for my voyeurism, then she too is gone.

In the garden, my laundry births spiders.  On the duvet cover hung on the line this morning, a patch of spiderlings, each one a few millimetres long, huddles in a circle.  They begin to scatter as soon as they feel my touch on the fabric.  Their mother will have died in the autumn, leaving an egg sac.  I don’t know whether the sac was attached to the washing line or blew onto the duvet cover from elsewhere, but they have hatched there in the few hours the laundry was outside.  I gently transfer those that haven’t already escaped onto a garden table.  Within seconds, a thread has been launched from table to chair to the nearest plant and I watch a procession of tiny funambulists beginning their journeys into the world.

Sometimes I think that despite all our distractions humans are the loneliest species on the planet.  Lonely because we stand outside of nature.  Because we don’t know our place in the world.  A spider knows what it is born for.  It instinctively knows what to do with its life.  Whereas we, with all our choices, find it difficult to grasp the meaning of them.  Spring takes place all around us.  The trees know that they must clothe themselves in leaves.  The flowers know that they must sprout.  The birds know that they must nest.  And when spring comes, we feel the call to action too, but we don’t know what to do with it.

I can’t grasp the dramas that are taking place because I’ve lost the language for it.  I can observe, try to understand, but I can’t feel that imperative of life and death that the rest of the earth surely feels.  I will always be outside the drama because my human mind wants to label and compartmentalise.  My human mind says that laundry is no place for the birth of spiders, but to the spiders is it just a part of their world.  Yet I feel joy when I witness some of nature’s tiny dramas.  I feel lucky to have been given a glimpse of them.  I feel part of the world, not apart from it.  And I make sense of them by writing them down.  Perhaps to understand them, perhaps to feel closer to them – not as a scientist, but as someone affected by the emotion of that moment.

Writing is my connection to the earth.  Paradoxical maybe, because describing things with language can distance us from them.  But I always feel most connected when the writing is flowing – whether from the pen or brewing in my mind.  Perhaps because this creativity comes from something in the earth.  Our first stories were ways of making sense of our place in the world.  Creation myths that explained how we got here.  Stories that helped us to understand the weather and the workings of the natural world.  And who is to say the song of a bird isn’t his story, or the dance of a bee isn’t hers?  A story is more than words, it is a connection.  The best stories remind me that my life has never been lived outside the world, but always as just another little drama within the whole.

Blue

I’m waiting for the words to come.  I’ve waited since the turn of the season, for my mind to follow the industrious tide of spring.  Waited for dreams nurtured by the winter dark to emerge into the light.

Spring passes in waves.  Daffodils blaze and wither.  Cherry blossom unfurls and melts, polka-dotting the grass.  Dandelions turn to clocks.  Hawthorn blossom and cow parsley flourish.  After each, I sense a pause, when the days hold their breath and things are hidden from view, until the next wave arrives.

Spring delivers its gifts.  It passes quickly, as inevitable as the tides, but I wait in vain for the words to describe it.

I watch the two carrion crows resident in the park build their nest.  I see them pick fur from the grass and peck strands from an old hessian sack in the middle of the road.  I witness them mating on the field.  Their nest is visible in trees that are only now bursting buds, but is too high for me to see what is inside.  I hear a regular caw from the nest and watch one crow forage and chase seagulls from the park, beak only centimetres from wing.

I observe the spring rituals, feeling the season pass me by.  And still the words don’t come.

I find a tiny goldfinch nest in a small maple in the square; a soft, furry cup almost part of the tree itself.  I watch blackbirds collect worms for their young.  Listen to the chitter of blue tits and the harsh call of the chiff chaff.  I watch an oystercatcher, foraging among a posse of magpies and wonder if he has mistaken himself for one of them.  A blackbird and a magpie perch in the same tree trying to out-sing one another.  I find a dead rat, tiny pink paws curled tenderly.  A minute later a magpie swoops down and begins to feed from its corpse.  Spring is bursting but my words are fallow.  It is one of those seasons when the mundane world takes over and there is no energy left for creation.

In the hedgerows it is the white season, but in some places, it is the season of blue.  Beneath the shady trees of the cemetery, the froth of cow parsley tangles with the azure of bluebells.  It is another gift of spring, this treasure of blue.  Blue has always been a precious pigment.  It took time, effort and expense to source it.  It is a colour of joy and harmony, yet also describes sadness.  I suspect the words this season will continue to be elusive, as precious as that pigment used to be.  But I will seek them where and when I can, and though the fallow period isn’t over, I finally find some words to describe it.

Rebirth

The transition from winter to spring is always, it seems, the most capricious.  The slow dream of winter unravels into instability as the season is about to change, and if there is a time when my life is likely to be unbalanced, it is often around the spring equinox.  Spring never arrives straightforwardly.  The weather swings between sun, gales, rain and fog, with occasional freezing temperatures to remind us that winter won’t leave quietly.  It is as though the energy of the season can’t be contained and wants to spiral through all four seasons before settling on one.

And perhaps this is necessary.  It is, after all, a rebirth.  Bare branches burst violently into bud, hard ground is pierced by shoots.  Spring has to be forceful because it holds the promise of the year within it.  Spring is abandoned, unruly, visceral.  From the dazzle of colour to the crescendo of song, the world is no longer quiet and contained.  It’s no accident that gales sweep in, chasing away doubt, indecision and lethargy, because for us too it is rebirth.  We slough off our winter skins, opening up after the introspection of winter, vulnerable at being out in the light again.  It can be a painful birth.  I find myself scoured and broken wide open, just like the earth.

But if the season drags me kicking and screaming, it is within it that I find comfort.  When I can hardly bear a moment more of winter, suddenly spring is here.  The world changes, our lives change, but there is re-assurance in the re-appearance of the coltsfoot flowers in the same patch by the side of the burn; in the luscious crocuses scattered across the square.  There is joy in the abundance of daffodils and marsh marigolds, in blackthorn blossom and fresh hawthorn leaves, in alder catkins garlanding the trees.

Spring is a sensory cornucopia, too much perhaps after the monochrome of February.  But perhaps spring, unlike any other season, is meant to be a shock to the system.  No matter how many springs I have witnessed, it always lifts my spirits when it arrives.  How could it not, when my eyes are suddenly flooded with colour, my ears with song?  I revel in sweeping spring energy through the house, bestowing blessings on every room; in taking down the decorations of the dark year and placing new ones above the hearth.

The struggle into spring has been a lengthy one this year.  I’m still struggling to find that balance.  There is optimism in putting winter dreams into spring practice.  This is the best time to begin because this is when we are flooded by light and colour and activity.  I’ve been slow to start and a winter heaviness lingers.  But there is always a moment of beginning.  Each spring I seek a tiny treasure, a token to remind me of the year’s possibilities.  Today I find it, almost hidden in the cemetery’s undergrowth.  The snake’s head fritillary is a flower I’ve always wanted to see but never expected to find because of its rarity.  Amid the daffodil dazzle, I might easily have missed this solitary blossom.  But as soon as I see it, I know this is my spring treasure.  Because in this moment of rebirth, what could be more appropriate than to see, for the first time, the flower once known as the Lazarus bell?  This isn’t a treasure I’ll be taking home with me, but the memory of it will be enough to light my imagination in the months to come.