This week’s story, “The Queen of Bad Influences,” opens in 1913, in the English county of Gloucestershire, and is about a young woman called Constance who has recently left an all-girls’ school and is making her first foray into adulthood. What drew you to this time and place?
As our sense of norms and national unity have disintegrated, I’ve become more fascinated with those historical cultures in which both were strong, if not so strong as to often seem oppressive. Prewar Edwardian England feels to me an exemplar of that sort of world: one in which almost everyone seemed to agree that, for better or worse, all kinds of things were simply not done, or allowed. I’ve always been interested, as a literary subject, in the way that we become complicit in our own muzzling, and I’m moved by the precocious self-censorship that schoolgirls and boys somehow learn.
You mentioned in an earlier conversation that you were partly inspired by a memoir, “This Was My World,” by Margaret Haig Thomas, the Viscountess Rhondda, which was published in 1933. She was the daughter of a wealthy Welsh industrialist and politician, and became a significant public figure herself. When did you first come across the book? How much does Margaret’s life inform the life of your fictional character Constance?
Once I imagine I might start writing about something, I do all sorts of reading around in that world, usually in primary documents, partially to discover the extent to which the sensibilities I encounter resonate with my own emotional concerns. Margaret’s life became an inspiration for many aspects of my protagonist’s, especially when it came to the notion of a paralyzing shyness that someone of sufficient inner resources might overcome to succeed as a social being. My character is not nearly as exalted in British society, but is indebted to Margaret as well for a number of smaller vignettes, such as the anecdote of her mother reassuring her during a play that a young woman kissing a man to whom she was not engaged never happens in real life; or the belief in the preconditions of happiness being courage, selflessness, and discipline; or the anecdote of the boy begging her to have champagne; or the remark of Florence Nightingale’s that women dreamed until they no longer had the strength to do so; or the quote of St. Teresa of Avila’s. My Constance also, like Margaret, worked for her father, and goes down with him on the Lusitania, only to both be spared.
One Saturday afternoon, after Constance has left her father’s office for the day, she meets a young woman named Minna, who is employed as a legal secretary. The two soon become firm friends—for Constance, this is her first real experience of friendship. Did you always know that Minna would enter the story?
I always knew that Minna would be the figure important enough to Constance to test her ability to open up and be emotionally honest, to test her emotional courage. Most of the rest about Minna I discovered as the story went along.
The two women accompany Constance’s father on a business trip to New York. It’s 1915, and they travel back on a fast liner. The Great War barely makes itself felt in the earlier scenes of Constance and Minna’s encounters in the months before this trip, but, off the southern coast of Ireland, a German torpedo is to tear their world asunder. The story plunges Constance—and the reader—into the water first, and only after this do we learn that she’d been aboard the Lusitania. Why did you want to introduce the sinking first?
I sometimes find one of the hardest things to keep in mind when working on a research-heavy story is that all the wonderful details you collect can’t make it into the final design. I had gathered all sorts of arresting stuff about the experience of the Great War for young women on the home front, and realized that it all had to be sacrificed to the story’s pace and focus. And I also realized that my plan for the story, which involved what I imagined would be a dread-inducing slow buildup to the sinking (as in: Oh, no! They’ve booked passage on what passenger liner?) was not only a little cheesy but insufficiently surprising when it came to reader expectations. So why not evoke the abruptness with which the Lusitania’s actual passengers felt that their plans had been brutally disrupted?
The Viscountess Rhondda was, as you say, also aboard the Lusitania, and describes her experience in “This Was My World.” Can you remember the first time you learned about the loss of the Lusitania? Have you read many testimonies by survivors?
As my family will wearily testify, I’ve long been mesmerized by the subject of catastrophe—two of the first books I cherished as a child were “All About Volcanoes” and “All About Earthquakes”—so I found my way to subjects like the Titanic and Lusitania pretty quickly. I think I saw “A Night to Remember” when I was eleven or twelve, and read my first book on the Lusitania around then. So I’d read many survivor testimonies well before researching this story, including those in Diana Preston’s “Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy,” which is probably the most comprehensive book on the subject, and was hugely helpful to the story’s construction.
The second half of the story switches back and forth between Constance’s experiences after the Lusitania goes down and scenes of Constance and Minna in Gloucestershire and on the ship. Their relationship is suffused with a desire for a romantic closeness, but the moment of connection never quite comes. Why did you make this choice?
I’ve long been interested—I suppose most literature is—in that gap between who we imagine we are at our best and who we so often turn out to be when we fail ourselves and others. I think I hoped that the effect of the structural choices I made would be to make all the more moving the reader’s sense of how unexpectedly the world can intervene to let us know that we’re out of time when it comes to that damage we might imagine we were always about to repair.
This is the title story of your forthcoming collection, “The Queen of Bad Influences and Other Stories,” which Knopf will publish next year. In your novels and stories, you’ve often entwined the real and the fictional. Will readers get to visit many different eras in the book?
One might even think from the new collection that I’m seeking to get out of the world in which I currently find myself. It turns out, though, that my ongoing obsessions always reassert themselves one way or the other, whether my stories are engaging protagonists like an Anzac officer at Gallipoli, a sixteenth-century Spanish mercenary, Adolf Eichmann, or Edward Hyde, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”; or events like the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, the Johnstown Flood, the largest wildfire in American history, or the battle of Franklin in the Civil War; or even a directly autobiographical account of a traumatic period in my family’s life when I was a boy. I always seem to come back to all those ways in which we both manage to negotiate, and are called to account by, the world’s tendency to serve up to us disasters large and small. ♦
