"Milk"--and bringing an historical world to life

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. I had a fabulous time celebrating with friends and family and indulging in a couple of my favorite holiday (and non-holiday) activities--shopping (the sales were amazing even if I was on more of a budget than usual) and going to the movies. I saw two wonderful movies, Doubt (as thought-provoking on film as when I saw it in the theater) and Milk. Milk was shattering, left me in tears, and to me felt much more immediate than a lot of bio-pics do. Of course it didn't hurt that I remember a lot of the events vividly. The Prop 6 campaign, and my mom saying "not that I'm worried about who teaches my daughter, but if I was worried I'd be a lot more worried about heterosexual men." One of my classmates (who must have heard it on the radio, because we didn't have tv at school and it was way before radio) bursting into my 7th grade class with the news that San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk had been assassinated. Going home and asking my parents why it had happened and "what happens now?"

But it was one particular cinematic view in Milk that really took me back in time. In the mid-to-late 70s, my mom and I often spent weekend afternoons at the Castro Theater, seeing old movies (no VCRs yet). We usually parked on the other side of Market Street and walked down the hill to the theater. There's one shot in Milk, down that hill, showing the theater marquee, that took my breath away because it looked so like what I remembered.

And that, I realized, is part of what we try to do as historical novelists--recreate the past so vividly that the reader feels she or he has stepped back into an historical era. It isn't easy. Usually we're writing about eras far beyond our memory and often in far away places. Even if we're able to visit the setting of our books, inevitably the scene has changed. The production team for Milk worked hard to recreate the San Francisco of the 70s. Two of my friends were extras in the movie. They were briefed on how to dress to fit the era and watched the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk before they shot the scenes they were in (they also talked to people who had known Harvey Milk who said Sean Penn was so like him it was uncanny). I was at a party in the Castro neighborhood the day before I saw the movie, so the difference between the way the neighborhood looked in the movie and the way it looks today was vivid. The marquee of the Castro Theater looks different, signs were changed, old storefronts and restaurants recreated.

As a novelist, I do a similar sort of "set dressing" in my head. I've spent quite a bit of time sitting in Berkeley Square, looking at the house that's my mental image for Charles and Mélanie's house and the Georgian houses next to it (pictured above), imagining the square lined with similar houses, the plane trees younger, the red telephone booth gone, phaetons and barouches and curricles in place of cars, Regency-dressed children their nurses playing in the park. I walk down London Street mentally editing out the Victoriana (and anything later), trying to blend the sights before me with period engravings of how the street in question looked in the era of my books. I go into country houses that have been redone through the centuries and try to imagine them before post-Regency embellishments.

Have you visited the locations in your books (or looked at contemporary photographs) and tried to mentally "set dress" them to the era you're writing about? Have you seen Milk? If you lived through the era, did it feel authentic? If don't remember the time and events, did you find the movie compelling? Other holiday movies you found memorable?

The Best Seductions Begin With Words and Ideas: History Hoydens Interviews Pam Rosenthal

HH: Your last novel, The Slightest Provocation, painted a less pretty picture of Regency England than we often get in romance. Does your upcoming The Edge of Impropriety continue in this vein?

PR: Edge is probably a lighter book, a comedy of manners and a satire of the ton.

My heroine, the arriviste Marina Wyatt, Lady Gorham, supplements a respectable but not luxurious widow's portion by writing silver fork novels (books about London high life: these things really were popular during the period, especially among middle-class strivers whose only chance to see Almack’s was in the pages of a novel).

My hero, Jasper Hedges, starts out shabbier, snobbier, more upper-class, and slightly appalled by Marina's commercial success. (Remember that Lord Byron, as a gentleman, didn't take money for "Childe Harold.") Jasper's a Cambridge classicist, an antiquarian, and (because I love finding ways for my brainy heroes to get their hands dirty) an erstwhile Mediterranean adventurer who digs up Roman coins on his family's estate.

While as for prettiness - well, the cover is certainly as pretty as any author could hope for. And this time the conflicts under the covers have largely to do with art and culture.
I like to call The Edge of Impropriety a novel of eros, esthetics, and empire. Jasper and Marina exchange their first glances among the beautiful sculpted bodies of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. But Jasper believes (as did Lord Byron as well) that the marbles were an illegitimate spoil of empire. So there's an imperial theme woven through the class comedy.


HH: You did a lot of research about classical art and literature for this book, didn’t you?

PR: A better way to say it might be that I took the opportunity to address my own shocking ignorance of the subject, when my husband/research partner showed me a book about the erotics of Greek and Roman art and got me hooked. So I’m a very little bit less ignorant now.

I posted about my joys of discovery on this blog and continued posting my discoveries as I researched and wrote the The Edge of Impropriety.

Because one of the joys of being a History Hoyden is having a venue for sharing the goodies. Just as one of the joys of being me is having a husband who knows what I like sometimes before I do. (And if that knows-what-she-likes business has a familiar ring, it's because I’ve used the phrase elsewhere in my books, in a different, more down-and-dirty context).


HH: You’ve managed to bring down the tone of the discussion with remarkable rapidity.

PR: Probably because I’m beginning to believe that whatever I do (and no matter how much reading and research) at heart I’m an erotic writer. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, and I certainly didn’t set out to be one. But the muse has a sense of humor and it seems to have fallen to me to pour all the lonely yearnings of a bookish adolescence into my erotic imagination.

Which means that I also get to pour the ongoing joy of discovery of other erotic traditions into my writing - most recently of poets like Sappho and Catullus, though there was also Ovid in The Slightest Provocation.


HH: So it turns out that what you write is erotica rather than, as your web site has it, “erotic historical romance.”

PR: I’m coming to think so, and to think that my historical romance-writing persona Pam Rosenthal has an awful lot in common with my evil twin Molly Weatherfield, who’s written the wild and crazy comic BDSM.

Because for me (for both me’s) no matter how graphic the writing ultimately gets, the best seductions begin with words and ideas. As in this snippet from the excerpt from Edge that’s currently on my web page:

The copper wire of [Jasper Hedges’…] spectacles had caught the light. “And what thrills [the gods…], what torments them with curiosity and desire, Lady Gorham, is the possibility of death. Mortality. The fragility of our bodies, their vulnerability to the passage of time. Human limitation is something the gods can never truly know, but they find its pathos quite beautiful. And the only way they can experience death’s pathos is through a human’s touch.”

A shiver passed through her. Followed by a flood of warmth.

I write erotica for people who find that sort of thing as hot I do and want to follow my characters upstairs after the dinner party ends.

But since it's skin rather than subtext that makes the romance industry deem something erotica rather than erotic romance, I get counted as a writer of erotic romance -- which is probably why I've been getting gorgeously dressed (or half-dressed) women on my covers instead of bare-chested men.


HH. The Edge of Impropriety will be released next week, on election day. And on your own blog, Passions and Provocations, you told your readers, "if you only have time to do one hugely, critically important thing on election day… you know what that is. And it’s not rushing out to buy The Edge of Impropriety." How seriously did you intend this?

PR: Absolutely. There's nothing like being at a pivotal point in history to bring things into perspective. I’ve felt myself overwhelmed these past weeks -- by the economy, the level of interest in the election, the intended and unintended narratives of the candidates and their campaigns, the ways in which people have begun to access and reassess their own places in this present very complicated juncture. All of which seem to me particularly complicated things for a historical romancer to address, and which I’ve been trying to puzzle out for myself.

There’s something amazing about living in a moment when the stakes are so huge and the outcome so perilously unknown. Historical romance -- and to my mind all historical fiction -- trades on some opposite approaches to this issue, and so I’m seeing online discussions (like Kathrynn’s here and Janet’s at Risky Regencies) about the ways in which we turn to romance and other escapist fictions for comfort at times like this.

About which (Gemini-like) I’m of two minds. On the one hand, I need as much comforting as the next person -- and the most comforting thing I know is the overarching romantic fantasy of a universe that wants to bring its lovers together after testing and finding them worthy (or more generally any narrative that promises and delivers on a satisfying resolution).

But on the other hand I find myself rather thrilled by the knowledge that this is not how things actually work, and that fictions and stories are our consolation for the maddeningly difficult truth -- which is that emergent human history just keeps spiraling into the unknown and unresolved. And that we have nothing but the best of ourselves to rely upon along the way.

Or at least to make us more passionate, more deeply engaged romance writers and historical novelists.

And I’d love to hear from both readers and writers about where you find yourself at this moment.