I was asked again – in an interview, and at a party – So, what’s the deal with trying on a corset for research? What I wish I could answer is, to make these dresses fit properly.
In the novel, Istvan says to Rupert that “Names are for armor. Or camouflage.” One could say the same for clothing, and I tried to reflect that in the text: who wears what, fawnskin and stickpins, unbecoming silks, a lover’s eye . . . Not to mention the onstage costuming. So much of who we are is reflected in what we choose to wear, how we choose to adorn ourselves, even if that choice is for no adornment at all. Mufti, maybe?
But no, I didn’t buy the corset, more’s the pity.
Though I suppose I could go back to the corsetiere. . . .
I stumbled across this exquisite Walt Whitman poem and immediately fell in love. It could be the epigraph for the novel. (Read the full text at the link.)
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going — North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying — elbows stretching — fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless — eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.
No law less than ourselves owning. . .
That’s the thing with puppets in general, and puppet theatre in particular: either you totally like it or you don’t get it at all. This is borne out by the unscientific research I conduct whenever someone asks me what’s my latest book about, and I say Puppets, they say either When’s it coming out?! or Ewww.
Which is a response set I’m not unfamiliar with. My previous novels for adults tended to be rather polarizing: no one ever said “Gee, that was a nice read.” (Or – my favorite – “a rollicking yarn.”) People either adored the books and wanted more, or walked away in bafflement or dismay. Think of the first time you heard Terry Riley, CocoRosie, Scott Walker, the first time you tasted stinky cheese, anchovies, juniper, whatever: not so much an acquired taste but an instinctive one. If it’s for you, you’ll know it – and isn’t that a big part of the thrill? discovering a story, a voice, that matches your receptors, that gives you something delicious to ponder and chew? Neither puppets nor Under the Poppy could ever be for everyone. Only for everyone with that certain saucy taste.
Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker piece on G.K. Chesterton (whom I have not read) quotes from Chesterton’s autobiography, about the profound effect a puppet theatre had on him as a child:
The whole point is that I did like the toy theatre even when I knew it was a toy theatre. I did like the cardboard figures….The white light of wonder that shone on the whole business was not any sort of trick[.]
And Gopnik goes on to note that there is more than one way to regard that light, that “the credit we give the puppet show is the credit it deserves, that the wonder of it cannot be explained, up or down, but only experienced[.]”
One of the greatest joys of the puppet is that it’s not real, and it knows it’s not real. And yet it absolutely is, as is our own pleasure in both its artifice and its reality. The only trick is the one we allow ourselves to play on ourselves – as we do in any theatre, movies too: those flickering creatures up there aren’t really people after all, are they? – in any fictional world: strings, sticks, felt, velvet, pixels, light, shadows, nouns, verbs, it’s all set dressing, it’s costumes, it makes and unmakes and remakes the toy world before us, and places us squarely, while the light lasts, in that world, ourselves a toy.
“It” being the Under the Poppy trailer – a better-quality version is available now, on Vimeo, with some notes courtesy Al Bogdan.
