What kind of research did you do for the sake of historical accuracy?
I’ll be honest—I can get pretty carried away with the research. Telling myself that I am ready to start writing is one of the hardest parts, because there is always something that I don’t know well enough.
For The House of Velvet and Glass I read a full three years’ worth of Town Topics, a gossip and society magazine that was popular from the late nineteenth century into the first part of the twentieth, to get a sense of the fashions, jokes, scandals, automobiles, pastimes, and rumors that circulated in Boston from 1912 to 1915. I read William James’s writings on psychical research and visited the library at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York to learn more about séances and the study of parapsychology at the turn of the last century. I spent time in the National Archives reading congressional testimony from opium and laudanum addicts in connection with the passage of the Harrison Act in 1912 to learn about the nature of their addiction. I watched the only surviving footage of the civilian training camp at Plattsburgh, New York, where Harley travels before joining up with Canada. I read back issues of the Harvard Crimson and student files from the Harvard University archives to get a sense of the life of Harvard men in the 1910s. I read sources that described in great detail the methods of opium production and use, and the squalor that attended most opium dens. I studied maps of nineteenth-century Shanghai and read academic research on Shanghaianese culture, specifically the culture of prostitution in that city at that time. I perused menus from the Titanic, studied architectural renderings of the ship, and read historic newspaper articles on both the sinking of Titanic and the torpedoing of the Lusitania. I relied on numerous secondary sources about the Progressive Era, including the lives of domestic servants, the political activism of upper-middle-class women, the practices of mediums in the early twentieth century, the methods of debunking mediums that came into vogue around that time, and the rationale of American men who signed up to fight in the Great War before our official involvement. I even consulted a database of the changing popularity of names over time to make sure that Sibyl, Eulah, Helen, and Harley all had historically accurate names.
And finally, I spent some time in close observation of a small parrot.
How did the fact that the subject of the Titanic was so shaped by the popular Hollywood film affect the plan or writing of the novel?
One of the tricky things about writing historical fiction is that I am likely to find myself visiting events that are already well fixed in the popular imagination. This was true with my first book, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which looked at the Salem witch trials from a new point of view, wondering what would happen if one of the Salem witches were the real thing. With Physick Book, I knew that most of us would have a mental image of characters and events at Salem drawn largely from having read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and for that reason I chose not to write about historical figures who were dramatized in that play. With the Titanic elements of The House of Velvet and Glass, I realized that my own imagination, and that of most of my readers, would be inflected by having seen the Titanic film, or possibly by having read Walter Lord’s fascinating 1955 account of the sinking, A Night to Remember. Of course, the other challenge with writing about a historical event as well known as the Titanic is that we already know how it ends! The film had to answer that question as well—where does the drama and suspense come from when the ending is inevitable?
Because we have all already seen the film, I built most of my story around the Titanic, rather than on it. I was interested less by the sinking per se, which is already a foregone conclusion, than by the historical context in which such a ship would exist, and by the drastic ways in which the world changed after the ship was lost. The Titanic continues to be a compelling idea, for reasons far beyond the horror of a ship’s sinking into water that is colder than ice on a starry North Atlantic night.
How do you, as a writer, prepare to write on complex and sensitive subjects like drug use and the supernatural?
When plotting a novel I spend quite a lot of time thinking about the ethics of the project that I am undertaking. I want on the one hand to represent the moral universe of the historical world that I am visiting as accurately as possible, without necessarily subjecting history to unfair contemporary judgment. On the other hand, I am concerned about the ethical conclusions that could be drawn by a contemporary reader. With The House of Velvet and Glass the challenge was to represent a world that had a very different attitude about opiate use, in which it was an everyday occurrence for many different classes of people. I wanted to capture the historical attitudes toward drug use accurately, but to be honest about what we have learned in the last hundred years about the destructiveness of drug addiction.
The same holds true for my treatment of attitudes toward the supernatural. In 1915 Spiritualism was a mainstream and widespread pursuit, so mainstream that parapsychology was being studied at the university level. Just as in Physick Book I wanted to represent a world that believed that holding a witch trial was a rational thing to do, in Velvet and Glass I wanted to recapture a time when séances were listed in the newspaper alongside weekly church services. One of the real pleasures of studying history, to my mind, is being reminded that the world has not always looked the way that it looks to us today. Fiction is a wonderful way to explore the different, fascinating, sometimes baffling ways that individuals in the past assumed the world to work.
In what ways did the success of your first book make the writing of this one easier or more difficult?
You know, at first I thought that writing the second book would be easier. After all, when I started working on Physick Book I had never written a novel before. I was a graduate student, I was supposed to be working on my dissertation. I hadn’t written fiction in years. Novels are long, and take up a lot of time that could be spent on academic work, on friends and family, on hikes with the dog, on learning how to garden. Who knew if I would actually finish it? So when starting work on Velvet and Glass I at least knew for sure that writing the book was possible—after all, I had done it before. But several writer friends warned me that the second novel is always much harder than the first, and it turns out that they were right.
For one thing, I had higher expectations for myself. I’m proud of Physick Book, but there are parts of that novel that I would improve if I could, or that I wish I had been able to do differently. So the writing of Velvet and Glass was complicated in part by my constantly looking over my own shoulder, both trying to make it the best story that it could possibly be under its own auspices, but also to improve the areas of my writing that I wished could be better in Physick Book.
And much as I tried to put it out of my mind, I couldn’t escape the knowledge that I have a community of readers whose good opinion matters to me. I have been fortunate to hear from many people who found something personally resonant in Physick Book, and I wanted to give those readers another story that they would respond to and enjoy. I hope that I have been able to do that with The House of Velvet and Glass
What made you choose to center the novel on the tragic sinking of the Titanic?
The Titanic was a potent symbol even before it sank. It was designed both as a technological marvel and as the pinnacle of opulence in a staggeringly opulent (for some) age. But the fact that it did sink, and on its maiden voyage to boot, with some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people clinging to its decks, means that the largest and most spectacular ocean liner in the world can barely hold the prodigious weight of its own significance, even one hundred years later.
I started thinking about the aftershocks of the Titanic’s loss, which are tremendous, both for the families of those lost, but also for the culture at large. Titanic was the first use of the new nautical distress code “S.O.S.” Before that, the distress code was “C.Q.D.,” and the parameters had just been changed. The spread of news by wireless was a key part of the Titanic story,
both because of the ad hoc reception of Titanic’s distress signals by other ships, and because the newspaper reportage of Titanic’s loss depended so drastically on wireless reportage. Monuments to Titanic persist even when we don’t necessarily know that we are seeing them—in the name of the Harvard University library, for example.
In particular I was intrigued by the fact that the Lusitania was lost only three years later. The Titanic’s loss was still fresh in Americans’ minds when a similarly luxe ocean liner sank, also in the North Atlantic, and also despite the fact that the public had widely assumed that its speed and technological superiority would keep it safe. The outcry surrounding the Lusitania’s torpedoing referenced the Titanic at length, with serious implications for the United States’ eventual involvement with World War I. For the fictional Allston family, I was particularly drawn to the idea that the ocean could make a fortune, could take a fortune away, could completely transform a family both for good and for ill.
What are you currently working on?
I am deep in the research for a new novel, which will be in the same vein as The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and The House of Velvet and Glass. It will be obsessively researched historical fiction with a slightly fantastical twist, this time set in nineteenth-century New York City. I have been absorbed with Hudson River Valley ghost lore lately, in particular the strange paradox of the way that ghosts can simultaneously embody ideas of permanence and impermanence. My story will look at a young Dutch girl who disappears in the New York of the early nineteenth century and reappears in the late nineteenth. I’m tentatively calling it The Appearance of Annatje van Sinderen.
In addition to spending time in nineteenth-century New York, I am also working on a second installment for the story in Physick Book. I haven’t quite been able to get those characters out of my mind, and there are a few people who show up fleetingly in the first book who I would like to get to know better. I’m eager to see where the story of the Dane women will take me next.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction and the events, incidents, and characters are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 Katherine Howe
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the original print edition of this book as follows:
Howe, Katherine.
The house of velvet and glass / Katherine Howe. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4013-4091-9
1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Mediums—Fiction. 3. Boston
(Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.0947H68 2012
813’.6—dc23
2011034052
eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-4284-5
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Cover design by Laura Klynstra
Cover photograph of woman by Veronica Gradinariu/Trevillion
Cover photograph of Titanic from the Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
Cover photograph of scrying glass by Mohamad Itani/Arcangel Images
Author photograph by Laura Dandaneau
First eBook Edition
Original hardcover edition printed in the United States of America.
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Katherine Howe, The House of Velvet and Glass
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