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To those who don’t actually do it, writing fiction can seem like a lark—a prolonged escape from the bonds of reality to live in a world of one’s own creation among people over whom one exercises absolute control.
How heady would that be?
Sheila Kohler, whose 10th book of fiction, “Becoming Jane Eyre,” is just out from Penguin Books, and who will be at Canio’s in Sag Harbor on January 30, has a very different way of looking at her vocation. In a recent phone conversation, during which she spoke about her new book and about the role writing has played in her life, Ms. Kohler made it clear that she not only does considerable preliminary research for her novels, but that much of her fiction has been powerfully influenced by a tragic reality in her past.
Born in South Africa in 1941, the younger of two girls, Ms. Kohler left her native land and its system of apartheid when she was 17 to live in Europe, where she continued her undergraduate and graduate education, married, and gave birth to three daughters. (She eventually relocated to the U.S., remarried and currently divides her time between New York and Amagansett.) The tragedy that so altered her outlook on life and profoundly affected her writing was her sister’s death at the age of 39—a death that Ms. Kohler could never accept as accidental.
“Her husband was driving the car and there was a long history of battering,” Ms. Kohler explained.
That tragedy and the terrible questions it raised were in one way or another the territory Ms. Kohler explored as she began writing novels with “lost girls” at their center, novels like “Crossways” and “Cracks,” which was made into a movie.
“Each time,” she said, “I was turning around this private tragedy.”
More recently, with “Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness,” Ms. Kohler has moved on to write an historical novel based on the real life of a noblewoman at the time of the French Revolution who travels to America and becomes a dairy farmer.
Like “Becoming Jane Eyre,” the book is fiction but adheres to the facts of Madame de la Tour du Pin’s life.
The wonderful thing about writing this kind of fiction, Ms. Kohler asserted, “is that you can’t falsify the facts,” but “flights of fancy” are permissible
Ms. Kohler said she thoroughly enjoyed the research for that book, despite the fact that her heroine’s life covered “a huge span of complicated French history.”
“Bluebird” was her start on “a voyage,” she said, “going outside of myself to write about inspiring lives.”
For a writer especially, the lives of the three Bronte sisters would have to rank high in that category.
“They were brave women who led lives with so little joy in them,” said Ms. Kohler.
To put herself inside the head of Charlotte Bronte as she was writing “Jane Eyre,” Ms. Kohler studied a vast amount of material on the lives of Charlotte, her sisters and even their father.
The basic facts relating to the family are well established: Obliged to cope with the early loss of their mother, the three sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne Bronte, are further burdened by worries over their dissolute brother, and in the case of Charlotte and Anne, by ill-fated love affairs and humiliations suffered as governesses in households where they are treated like low-level servants. And yet, letters and other accounts leave no doubt about their extraordinary dedication as writers. With no encouragement except from each other, no one to give them a boost either emotionally or financially, they persevere and remain remarkably confident in the superiority of their writing skills.
Ms. Kohler, who, like many others, had been a fan of the classic tale of passion on the Yorkshire moors ever since “Jane Eyre” was first read to her as a child, said that her return to the book and its author as a subject of her own writing was sparked by a sentence in her friend Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Charlotte Bronte. It places Charlotte in the quiet darkness of a sickroom where she is tending to her clergyman father as he lies still and silent, recovering from cataract surgery. What happened as the dutiful daughter sat with her father in that darkened room, wrote Charlotte’s biographer, “remains in shadow.”
“I wanted to find out,” said Ms. Kohler. “That is what got me going.”
More particularly, she wondered how Charlotte had made the leap from her first novel, “The Professor,” a book Ms. Kohler described as “not very engaging,” to “Jane Eyre,” with all its passion and fire.
Ms. Kohler said that in her creative writing classes at Princeton and Bennington, she is constantly engaging her students in just such questions concerning what makes good writing.
“In my mind,” she said, “it was the experience of sitting at her father’s bedside.” With her father, an authority figure, reduced to silent and blind dependence, Charlotte experiences a new sense of control.
“She was in control, basically, of her father’s eyes and his voice and that sense of power gave her the courage to write in a voice closer to her own,” said Ms. Kohler. Charlotte enters the persona of her dauntless alter ego, Jane Eyre, and breaks free of the restraints that fettered proper young womanhood of her time.
That is one insight, among many, into the mysteries of the creative process that Ms. Kohler delivers to readers, who learn what may have led the author of “Jane Eyre” to choose that name for her heroine, how a writer recasts real events as fiction and disguises real people to be reborn as fictional characters.
Written in short chapters, in the present tense, “Becoming Jane Eyre” also takes different points of view, allowing Ms. Kohler to present the sisters’ views of each other, their father’s baffled reaction to his daughters’ continual “scratching” away at their pads, and the inevitable professional jealousies among the sisters, which never quite trump their bonds of love and respect.
Sheila Kohler will read from “Becoming Jane Eyre” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday, January 30, at 6 p.m. For more information, call 725-4926, or e-mail info@caniosbooks.com.
on Jan 26, 2010