Afterimage (28 page)

H
ELEN
H
UMPHREYS
was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, in 1961. She moved with her parents to Toronto in 1964 and spent her childhood in Scarborough. She now lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Humphreys always wanted to be a writer, and decided not to go to university in favour of learning on her own and working at a series of odd jobs to pay the rent. She preferred jobs like pumping gas, where she worked alone, because during the slow times she was able to read. She had a few poems published in literary magazines while still in her teens, and in her early twenties she took the two-year Book Editing and Design Program at Centennial College. For the next decade she worked parttime, overseeing production on two academic journals published out of the University of Toronto, and continued to write poetry. Her first book of poems,
Gods and Other Mortals
(1986), was published by Brick Books when she was twenty-five.

Gods and Other Mortals
was followed by
Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios
(1990),
The Perils of Geography
(1995), and
Anthem
(1999), which won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 2000 and was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award.

After happening upon an idea that wouldn’t fit into poetry, Humphreys decided to move into fiction. The novel form was most suited to the layered narrative of what she envisioned: a tale, set during the Depression, of two young women trying to break
the world in-flight endurance record of twenty-five days. The result was the novel
Leaving Earth
(1997), which won the City of Toronto Book Award and received international acclaim.
Afterimage
(2000) was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Lost Garden
(2002) was a national bestseller and a CBC Canada Reads pick for 2003. Each of these novels was named a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year.
Wild Dogs
(2004), which won the 2005 Lambda Prize for Fiction, was produced as a play by the Canadian Stage Company in 2008 and has also been optioned for a film. Humphreys followed these books with a work of creative non-fiction,
The Frozen Thames
(2007), a number one bestseller.
Coventry
(2008), her fifth novel, also a number one bestseller, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction and the CBA Libris Author of the Year Award. It was also chosen by
The Globe and Mail
as a Best Book of the Year. Humphreys’ work has been published internationally and has been translated into many languages.

After happening upon an idea that wouldn’t fit into poetry, Humphreys decided to move into fiction.

The question of the unusual nature of the relationship was always at the heart of the story of Isabelle and her Irish maid, Annie.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs were the primary inspiration behind
Afterimage.
What was it about them that captured your imagination?

Cameron’s photographs are quite famous, and so I had seen individual images in the past, but the first time I saw an exhibition was in 1998, and it included a series of her maid, Mary Hillier. I started to cast around, trying to find out more about Hillier, but because she was a maid there was little available on her life. There was, however, a lot of information about Cameron, and so I started there—but the question of the unusual nature of the relationship was always at the heart of the story of Isabelle and her Irish maid, Annie.

All the photographs in the novel were based on Cameron’s actual photographs. In all my historical novels I try to be faithful to one particular thing, and in
Afterimage
it was the real-life photographs and the photographic process that Cameron used to create them.

In your novel, what is the relationship between Isabelle’s photography and her husband Eldon’s cartography?

One is an art form that is in its death throes (cartography), and one is an art form that is just beginning (photography). I liked the
idea of the tension that opposition could create within a household.

Isabelle’s confidence in her artistic vision wavers when others don’t take her seriously. Was this also true of the real-life photographer Cameron?

Cameron was an anomaly at the time. There weren’t women photographers when she took it up. In fact, photography itself was in its infancy as an art form and a profession, and perhaps this is why she was accepted within it. Territory hadn’t been properly staked out yet. Everything was still very experimental. So Cameron was able to take up photography relatively late in life, at the age of forty-eight, and become a success. Where Cameron didn’t find inclusion, and in
Afterimage
where Isabelle Dashell also has trouble, is within the world of the male allegorical painters, such as Watts. They didn’t take photography, regardless of the gender of the photographer, seriously as an art form.

How did you tackle the research for
Afterimage,
which delves into everything from Ireland’s Great Hunger to Arctic exploration?

There was a massive amount of research required. But what I did initially, to maintain some order with it, was to break the book down into subjects—early photography, Cameron’s photography, life in Victorian England, the Irish potato famine, Franklin’s doomed trip to find the Northwest Passage, the history of map-making. There was a lot to learn and it took the better part of two years.

“Everything was still very experimental. So Cameron was able to take up photography relatively late in life, at the age of forty-eight, and become a success.”

“I think Eldon has never been very comfortable in his own skin.

Several of the characters in
Afterimage
long to be someone other than themselves, most intriguingly Eldon, who in one passage says that he wishes he were Annie’s equal. Why?

Annie has no wish to be anyone other than herself. Her struggle is in finding out what that self comprises. I think Eldon has never been very comfortable in his own skin. He was a sickly child, and his physical weakness has kept him from the adventurous life that he desired. He feels a real kinship with Annie but also feels that their respective societal positions prevent their closeness. He is not a man who is tied to his societal position, and I think he would relinquish it if he could. He would change his circumstances if it would allow him to make a better connection with someone. This is where he differs from Isabelle and is really a much more sympathetic character. She has no wish to change but, rather, requires change from others.

In the beginning, Annie seems a pawn in the hands of her masters. At what point and how are the roles reversed?

Yes, initially they use her for their own purposes. But they underestimate her intelligence and her willingness to learn. And so, while they’re using her, she’s educating herself, to the point, at the end of the book, where she feels confident making decisions for herself and rebelling against their idea of who she is. By playing with identity, trying on
the roles both Isabelle and Eldon give to her, Annie is actually able to discover an identity of her own and act from the newfound power of that place.

With which of the novel’s three main characters do you feel the most connection?

I feel connected to all three of them, but I suppose that I probably am most like Isabelle Dashell in that I am driven, as she is driven, to create. It doesn’t feel like a choice, more of a compulsion, and I think that is how it is for her. All of her best energies get put into the making of her photographs, and the vision she has for her work drives all of her decisions. When I was a young writer, this was very much how it was for me.

Do you take photographs yourself, and if so, do you see any parallels between photography and writing?

I used to do quite a lot of photography and did my own developing. I was a bit obsessed with construction sites at one time, and I remember taking a lot of photographs of scaffolding. I liked the contrast in photography between the capturing of an image and the rather lengthy process of developing that image. And I liked that the taking of the photograph was all about light, and the developing of the image was done in the dark. Of course all that has changed now with digital photography and printers. But there was something very satisfying about watching an image slowly reveal itself in the developing fluid. I suppose in that way it was like
writing, although to be honest, it never felt to me like writing at all.

“I suppose that I probably am most like Isabelle Dashell in that I am driven, as she is driven, to create.”

“I love art in all its forms, and I take a lot of inspiration from it.

Do you find that other art forms often influence your writing in the way that Cameron’s photographs did
Afterimage?

I am constantly influenced by other art forms. Art cross-pollinates. I love visual art and spend time in galleries whenever I’m in New York or London or other big cities. I listen to music, sometimes even while I write. I see a lot of films and go to the theatre when I can. I love art in all its forms, and I take a lot of inspiration from it.

Most of your books are set in the past. What fascinates you about history, and what do you believe good historical fiction can offer to the modern reader?

I love to learn about another world, to discover things with which I’m not familiar. And I believe that historical fiction, done well, can give the reader a glimpse into that other world. There are threads that join our contemporary society to other eras, and the more we can learn about the past, the more we will understand our own world.

The novel began with the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron.

There was an exhibition in the late 1990s of Cameron photographs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and in the show were several photographs of Cameron’s maid, Mary Hillier, dressed as the Madonna. The text that accompanied the photographs explained that Mary Hillier was expected by Cameron to remain in costume as the Madonna not just when she was being photographed but while she carried out her maidly duties in the Camerons’ Victorian household, and even when she went to the village. I remember thinking, when I read that, how strange that would be for a young girl—to be living as a housemaid while role-playing the mother of Christ.

At first what I wanted was to base my characters on the real mistress and maid, but when I tried to research Mary Hillier I found, not surprisingly, very litde. The histories of servants are seldom preserved, recorded history being largely the privilege of the upper classes. I found out that Mary Hillier was fourteen when she came to the Cameron household and twenty-eight when she left (when the household was dispersed because the Camerons moved to Ceylon). She married at thirty, had eight children, and lived to the age of eighty-nine—which was, for the time, very old.

“I remember thinking, when I read that, how strange that would be for a young girl—to be living as a housemaid while role-playing the mother of Christ.

The best one can hope for in historical fiction is to choose one thing to be faithful to and chase that down through the path of the book.

About Cameron there was, of course, considerably more information, and I realized soon after I started my research that, while I could work with a fictionalized version of the real Cameron, I would have to invent entirely the character of the maid. I had little to go on, in terms of their relationship, but I decided that Cameron and Mary Hillier were close, because Mary Hillier had named a daughter after Cameron, and because, in her writings about Mary, Cameron says: “The very unusual attributes of her character and complexion of her mind … deserve mention in due time, and are the wonder of those whose life is blended with ours as intimate friends of the house.”

History is impossible to get right. There is no way to return to the past and recapture it. The best one can hope for in historical fiction is to choose one thing to be faithful to and chase that down through the path of the book. In
Afterimage
I was faithful to the photographs and the photographic process of Julia Margaret Cameron. I used some aspects of her character—her imperiousness, her wild devotion to her artistic pursuits (the real Cameron once had her servants paint the roses in the garden white so that they would stand out better when she photographed them)—but it was the photographs with which I concerned myself. My novel is divided into sections, each section titled after a photograph taken by Cameron.

I decided not to use Victorian speech in
Afterimage
because I thought that untangling the vernacular would slow down the narrative,
making the reader work too hard to follow what was going on. I also believe that the early photographers, like Cameron, were the beginning of our image-obsessed age and thus belong to our time more than they belonged to theirs, so I kept the speech and the perspective modern. This was also why I chose to concentrate on the photographs, because they are more understandable to us than some other aspects of life in 1865, the year in which my book is set.

I was lucky, in my research, to find someone who still used a box camera and glass plate negatives, so I was able to handle and examine that equipment. All of that helped me to imagine, as fully as I could, the experience of taking those photographs.

Cameron was not a careful film developer. Her negatives were often scratched, and there were bits of dust stuck to the photographs. Sometimes the negative was too washed out and the subject too blurry and indistinct, or the glass plate was actually broken and the cracks in the glass show up as cracks in the print. Now, these things make the photographs seem oddly modern, but at the time they were made, they were seen as seriously flawed because of this carelessness. Yet what I like about Cameron’s photographs is just this: the hurried quality of the developing, juxtaposed with the lengthy exposures and the long poses that the subjects were forced to adopt. This tension, I think, makes the pieces evocative.