Stories About Artists; Amazing Novels about Artists and Paintings: Steel, Chevalier, Smith and Hustvedt

What is it about visual artists that attracts those word artists...writers, I mean...to use them so often in their novels?

Stories about artists, both real and fully imagined, abound. 

We've all heard of Girl with the Pearl Earring, which features a real oil painting by Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, but Chevalier's The Lady and the Unicorn is also a great read; about an imagined 15thC artist, Nicolas des Innocents, who created the illustration for a richly embroidered wall tapestry, based on a real tapestry, rediscovered by French historian and archeaologist Merimee, in 1841, in Boussac castle in central France.

Then there's The Goldfinch, which, when I read the book, I imagined Donna Tartt had invented this rather wonderful little oil painting for her scintilating 2014 Pulitzer Prize novel, but is in fact a painting by Reneissance artist Carole Fabritius, which   I talk about here 

I've love all of Ali Smith's novels, but How to Be Both is perhaps as challenging read as you're likely to find. Smith plays with conventional fictional form, letting the reader in on  the poignancy of the story before the characters even start to realise. Smith examines a little of the life of  the 15th-century Italian painter Francesco del Cossa. Meanwhile, George is a teenager who has lost their mother, and tries to bring her back to life by recalling how they saw this  artist's  work.   Smith seems to investigate the symbolism of frescos: many layers, simultaneously.

curtesy of The Women's Prize

Most recently, Lucy Steed has just won the Waterstones Debut Prize for her first novel. She writes about one Edouard Tartuffe, “the Master of Light” an artist who lived in the early 20th Century,  a bit of a hermit and not a very nice man, really. He loves to paint rotting food, which gives his young housekeeper, Ettie, a bit of a headache. In 1920, Joseph Adelaide, an aspiring journalist, arrives at the remote farmhouse in the Provençal village of Saint-Auguste. He takes
comfort in art after being branded by the horror of the first world war, and wants to write an article about the famed oil painter.  Slowly, the young Englishman falls for Ettie, and tries to persuade her to escape her overbearing uncle.

If you're wondering why you haven't heard of Tartuffe, it's because Steed has created him, but he could be real, a cross between many artists of this incedury time. But her depictions of his art feel sensual and authentic and I could almost smell the paint...and the rotting peaches. 

Finally, a book I read some time ago, but have never forgotten. I must read more by this American author; Siri Hustvedt, Her 2003 novel, What I Loved sparkles with intelligence. It begins in the New York art world in the 70s, with art historian Leo Hertzberg and his friend, artist Bill Wechsler, whose artwork Leo has discovered in a SoHo gallery. Hustvedt is strong on the psychological effects of love, grief and hysteria, and her narrative voice pulls you into, and through, the story.

So now I'm looking for more exciting depictions of art and artists through a novelist's eye, although, I don't think, for now, I'm going to find more emotional maturity, than Steed, more passion than Hustvedt, more tense drama than Chevalier, or more brilliant plotting than Tartt.

The Mastery of Alan Holinghurst's Novels: Stellar Authors

Alan Hollinghurst at the 2011 Texas Book Festival,
copyright Larry D. Moore

 Alan Hollinghurst has written seven novels, has won numerous prizes, and is renown for being the author who elevated the genre of 'gay novel' to the heights of literary endeavour, being often compared to Henry James. Since winning the Booker, his novels has been heralded as a literary event worth the wait. His publisher, (Pan Macmillan) sums all this up as being about....the question of what it means to lead a life in thrall of the beautiful. 

But don't worry about all of that. Because above all things, a Hollinghurst is a cracking read.

His new novel, Our Evenings (2024) had me addicted for three all-consuming days, while I read steadily on through the almost 500 pages at breakfast, coffee, lunch, G&Ttime, dinner, throughout the evening and often, into the night. Nothing got done until the book was complete. And then, rather like the first 24 hours of a steaming affair, I lay back on my pillows and gasped, groaned, cried aloud, Oh, Alan, Alan!!! and found it difficult to sleep. 

The Guardian calls it 'his finest yet'; The novel tracks the currents of gay liberation and race relations, but with never a moment’s schematic overview...Of course, this is his best book. But then, I thought that of all of them. 

The Stranger's Child (2011), tells the story of a minor poet, Cecil Valance, who, before being killed in the First World War, writes a poem "Two Acres", which goes on to become famous.  As I read, I was searching for 'the stranger's child' within the novel, and not finding it, finally had to ask Google. It turns out to be a quote fromTennyson's "In Memoriam".

"And year by year the landscape grow / Familiar to the stranger's child." 

In 2012 interview, Hollinghurst explained how he thought 'the music of the words is absolutely wonderful, marvellously sad and consoling all at once. It fitted exactly with an idea I wanted to pursue in the book about the unknowability of the future'

This, I think may be the first of Hollinghurst's perennial themes, a gold thread in his work; the unknowability of the future. 

The Folding Star (1994) was my introduction to Hollinghurst. It's a hilariously funny book full of rampant gay sex and brilliantly executed scenes bursting with characters and dialogue. It is perhaps modelled slightly on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, exploring the theme of transient beauty. So these two themes, 'the unknowable future', and 'ephemeral nature of beauty' run constantly through his books.

The Swimming Pool Library (1988), his first book, was the second one I read, having devoured  The Folding Star and wanting more. It won two prizes and is the perfect debut novel by someone not afraid to state upfront what their obsessions will be. It centres round a chance meeting where the main character saves the life of an older gay man in a public toilet, creating  a story revealed within the story, dealing  with ageing, race and cruelty, but also about keeping secrets…hiding the truth about yourself. Holinghurst starts his career as an author as he means to go on; strongly described gay sexual encounters, and lots and lots of characters who are often together in one scene.

The Line of Beauty (2004), deservedly won the Booker Prize. The 80's obsession with cocaine, and  the emerging AIDS crisis form backdrops, while he's again exploring class and  privilege and homosexuality. I had no trouble with this title because I was already getting the idea that beauty is part of Hollinghurst's passions. The line of beauty is a double "S" curve, called an ogee, used in textiles, architecture, wrought iron work and even ship-building. You could say the ogee 'swings both ways', reinforcing the theme of transient beauty and very casual sex, while the story moves through Thatcher's London, which would have been unknowable as it was happening, in the same way as tomorrow and next year is unknowable to us know. 

Of all his writing accomplishments and prowess, I think his expertise in crowd control is the one I really admire. It's so hard, as a writer, to handle scenes in which a lot of characters are moving, and chatting, at the same time. Parties are his go-to settings, and he's simply brilliant at guiding conversations that, as they go on in real time, have subtle meanings exuding from them: 

 Have a look at that Nick,’ Pete called out, as if amiably trying to keep him occupied. ‘You know what it is.’

‘That’s a nice little piece,’ said Leo

‘It’s a very nice little piece,’ said Pete. ‘Louis Quinze.’

Nick ran his eye over the slightly cockled boulle inlay. ‘Well, it’s an encoignure,’ he said, and with a chance at charm: ‘n’est ce pas?

‘It’s what we call a corner cupboard,’ Pete said. ‘Where did you get this one, babe?’

‘Ooh...I just found him on the street,’ said Leo, gazing quite sweetly at Nick and then giving him a wink. ‘He looked a bit lost.’

‘Hardly a mark on him,’ said Pete.

‘Not yet,’ said Leo.

‘So where’s your father’s shop, Nick?’ said Pete.

‘Oh, it’s in Barwick – in Northamptonshire.’

‘Don’t they pronounce that Barrick?’

‘Only frightfully grand people.’

Pete lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply, then coughed and looked almost sick. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ he said. ‘Yes, Bar-wick. I know Barwick. It’s what you’d call a funny place, isn’t it.’ (Pg 107)

Although this has been plucked from its context, the reader can see that speech and meanings are at complete odds. As the three characters talk about antique pieces, we are given glimpses of what they can see as well as the subtext, offered in mostly body language and speech patterns. Hollinghurst doesn’t allow the dialogue to stray from the context of the scene, but it’s easy to picture what is going on during the chat. In other words, he supports his dialogue. Lengthy pieces of dialogue in prose, unsupported by narrative description and action, can lose emotional hold on the reader. 

While I was reading Our Evenings, I kept changing my mind about what sort of book this was. At first I was sure this story was a bildungsroman––a coming of age novel, that charts the growth and change of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood. Soon, I realised that this would be the story of an entire life. Then, towards the end, I wondered if it might be a metafiction––when he grows towards old age, David decides to write his memoir. His husband asks what he'll call it and he takes that quote...'Our Evenings'. By the shocking end of the novel, you realise you might be reading just that...the memoir of this life, written by the man who lived it to his best. 

But––finally––I realised that what this novel does so brilliantly is map Britain’s changing attitudes to class, race, politics and sex from 1960 to 2010.

A triumph indeed!

Gerald Manley Hopkins

You might wonder at this stage, how Our Evenings came to have its title. David Win has to learn and recite at school the sonnet by Gerard Manly Hopkins; ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves'.

    Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.

   The poem reflects what the book achieves; it leaps, it soars, from impermanence to timelessness. 

    Take a look at Alan Hollinghurst's canon, pick a book at random and enjoy... then post me a note at Kitchentable and let everyone know what you think of this masterful author. 

How to Win the Booker: THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van Der Wouden

 

In her website Yael Van Der Wouden introduces herself as A great smalltalker... available as a +1 for your cousin's wedding. Woulden also keeps a blog, Dear David: An Advice Column, in which Sir David Attenborough speaks about the natural world in answer to writers' problems. It's funny and clever in a similar way that The Safekeep is funny and clever. And yet her 2018 essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank  suggests that The Safekeep is also a darkened polemic on the Dutch position after the 2nd WW.

In her Booker interview, she explains the moment that this book came into her mind, starting with… a fascination with how the Dutch narrativise national histories; my obsession with homes and the fantasy of owning a home; wanting to explore desire as the flipside of repulsion. The way it happened was like this: I was in the car on the way back from a funeral, looking out over flat Dutch fields, and somewhere between grief and a need to escape the idea bloomed, of a house, a woman and a stranger.

A house, a youngish woman, her two siblings and a stranger. 

It is Holland in the 60's and Isabel lives alone in the family home, weighed down with duty left by her dead parents, avoiding contact with humans, hating most of the people she knows: Louis, who will be gifted the house once he marries (and he’s in no hurry to stop moving through pretty girls like his latest, Eva):  and Hendrick, who lives with Sebastian, a person Isabel particularly turns her face from in shame

.

This book did not win the Booker Prize. So maybe you won’t want your book to be––suddenly and surprisingly-–this sexy, with intense emotion and fiery physicality… Isabel could see herself from the dresser mirror: face red, mouth like a violence. 

Wouden admits––erotica is about the knife’s edge of voyeurism and participation. As a reader, you want to feel like you are present, but if you are too present then I think the text tries to envelope you, tries to comfort, and I think good erotic writing makes you a little uncomfortable.

You might not want your novel to be in the 1st person perspective of a repressed, unlikeable woman such as Isabel, without being able to show that vulnerability that hides behind such a front. And, in 1st person, how can the story reveal what happened almost 20 years previously? Two-thirds of the way through, after the central explosion of love and lust, we reach The Diary. Diaries don’t often work in modern novels, but this one, stolen by Isabel after a caustic row with her lover, reveals the darkest sides of wartime Europe.

Think about taking an extended symbol throughout the book, as Wouden does. In the opening lines, Isobel finds  broken pottery in the garden. It's a shard from the china plates her mother loved, and which she now keeps locked away. She knows one has never broken, but if that is so, how could this shard be in the garden? The answer dogs her throughout the novel, and it is not until we read the diary that we know the shocking answer. 

You might like to be in Wouden's position,however, of having her debut novel snapped up by Penguin after a bidding war. 

What did the English reviewers say about this debut? The Observer says that the author weaves this story of historical reckoning (or its avoidance) with an account of Isabel's individual and sexual awakening,

The Guardian's reviewer said The book's powerful final act provides an already weighty emotional situation with an extra layer of historical heft.

Reviewer Anne Bonnet loved it; The Safekeep is simmering and sexy, but it is also a Trojan horse of a novel. Not much is, rightly, given away in the synopsis and it is only in the last third that you realise you have been reading a very different book…

Perhaps for me, the ending wasn’t quite perfect. But that might be because whatever way the final moments of such a twisted the story might go, I’ll have wanted it to go in the other direction. Happier? Darker? I’ll let you read it and make up your own minds.

How to Win the Booker Prize: ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

photograph: epa

Orbital unfolds over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. Samantha Harvey allows us to marvel at Earth’s splendour through the thoughts, memories and work of the people on board. She allows them to pose the question: What is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

Orbital is Samantha Harvey’s fifth novel. On the 12th of November 2014, she stood amongst applause to receive the Booker trophy. Her acceptance speech began with a joke; ‘I was told we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes mine’. She dedicated her prize to everybody who ‘speaks for and not against the Earth…and the dignity of other humans, other life; and all the people who speak for and call for peace.

If you would like your novel to win the Booker, you could start by picking apart what makes a winner. Why did the judges almost unanimously decide on Orbital?

Firstly, it's original. it is the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space. It has a natty little chart that describes the voyage of the SSI over one Earth day at the front of the book. It has chapters that align with the rising of the sun every 90 minutes. 

But there are some specifics that are probably key components each time. The judges recognised this book's beauty and ambition, saying: 'It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share'.  They were 'determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share'. 

Surprisingly, it is very short. This is a novella. It is so much shorter than some winners, that you could fit four Orbitals into some of them.  The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton won in 2013, at 832 pages, compared to the 239 pages of Orbital. But judge Kit  De Waal said that Orbital is 'the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve'.

I loved this book. Its descriptions of the Earth from the ISS are stunning, lyrical and memorable, and yet sparse; we can never quite get enough of them, which is the best way to write descriptions, after all. There are only six characters, plus the people they carry in their heads. We don't get to know them very well, but rather as they all get to know each other, in that intimate, yes sporadic way we get to know our work colleagues for instance, sometimes sharing something truly important about their lives and lots of minor, day-to-day things, while probably not knowing much, say, about their family or the layout of their homes. But what we do see is what they also witness; the marvellous beauty of the Earth as they witness a sunrise every 90 minutes and follow the progression and devastation of a super tornado of life-threatening proportions as it assaults and wrecks south-east Asia. They are passing on the information, but feel powerless to help.

The odd 'other' perspective is also allowed in, so that we can travel back to the 'Big Bang' or meet the laboratory mice who are learning to fly. And then there is  Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which is with the crew as a postcard. They talk deeply about the unique illusion of reality created in this painting. “Welcome,” Shaun’s wife has written on the postcard, “to the labyrinth of mirrors that is human life.”

Having finished the book and laid it down with a satisfied sigh, I turned to the reviewers to see what they had thought. Most had read this book before it had been shortlisted, and most, like me, found it such an absorbing, educative read. 

Anne Bonner, in INEWS says...With the modern world being as it is, it is not a surprise that a story set in space is a strong Booker contender.  At times it feels a bit like you’re reading an essay meditating on human existence as opposed to a novel. You also have the sense of observing these characters as though they’re floating in a snow globe: as beautiful as it is, something is stopping you from connecting with them.

The Economist did find flaws, and I can to a degree sympathise with the line they took: A slim, slightly worthy novel in which everything and nothing happens Yes, it is a tiny bit worthy, and nothing does much happen in it. So one thing you might try,  if you follow Harvey's model of winning the Booker, is create an epic poem in prose form.  

But who knows? With another night's sleep, the judges might have made a different decision. There are always 6 shortlisted novels for the Booker Prize, and I will review each of the 2024 books in turn and continue to think about...HOW TO WIND THE BOOKER PRIZE. 

You can read more about Las Mininas here.

Writing about the Climate Crisis; Fact or Fiction?

Recently, I've been reading four different books about climate change – two nonfiction and two novels. It made me wonder, what is the best way to get your point across, when you want to talk about a subject you are passionate about?

Nathaniel Rich, who wrote Losing Earth (The Decade we Could have Stopped Climate Change) and Michael E Mann, who wrote The New Climate War (The Fight to Take back our planet), have both taken the route of  writing nonfiction to attract the readers' attention to their subject matter.  But have approached global warming at an angle, looking at one very very specific aspect. This is  an important thing to remember when writing nonfiction about a large, well-covered debate such as this. There are already a lot of books out there, and they already contain all the salient facts on the subject. Unless you have very up-to-date information to newly impart, it is essential that you decide on a 'slant' that can gain you interest in. swamped market. This is what Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola advise in their writing manual for nonfiction writers, Tell it Slant. Both are award-winning authors and using the Emily Dickinson quote,“Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant.” intend to reveal  how to develop your own distinctive and compelling creative nonfiction, showing writers how to move beyond mere facts and, instead, make the most of their own “slant” on the world. 

 Nathaniel Rich takes the 'slant' of retelling the story of the early days of realisation, the 1070s, and how that knowledge was squandered by allowing energy companies and oil firms suppressed the truth of global warming for their own profits. Rich deeply researched his book, demonstrating his arguments conclusively. But he must have known that, handled with the wrong style, this book might have been very dry. He overcomes this problem by approaching each of his stories through the characters (the protagonists and the antagonists), by setting scenes in a dramatic manner and by using a hight percent of dialogue within them. He's telling a story, which feels tense and full of jeopardy, and he reveals it steadily, using the skills of the novelist to keep every read on the page. Rich is a novelist, as well as a writer of nonfiction, and he utilises those skills well. 

 M Mann also knows exactly what 'slant' he wants to approach in his book. For him, the 'antagonists' are the fossil-fuel industry and their allies, and the story of how they deflected the blame for climate change to the  'protagonist' – that is, the little man in the street, who is instructed to "recycle, fly less, eat less meat", and are made to feel that this is 'all their faults'. Mann is a distinguished  professor of atmospheric sciences, but like Rich, knows how to use novelistic skills to pull his reader into his debate.

To counter these two fact-based books, I've been reading two iconic pieces of climate-fiction. 

Ursula Le Guin is an acclaimed writer of science fiction, who has been at the top of her field for decades. Her early book, The Word for World is Forest (1976), is a slender, but gripping account of a future  Earth, devastated by humanity. The book is set on one of many of the planets we are now mining for assets, leaving each planet in as bad a state as the Earth herself.  In this planet, called Forest,  the inhabitants strike the humans as simple, possibly ape-like. But they are wrong. These are sensitive, intelligent individuals, and they are not happy at the rape of their home. 

The late JG Ballard is also an acclaimed writer of science fiction, but particularly famous for his autobiography, Empire of the Sun. In The Drowned World, a very early novel which helped make his name,  Ballard describes a future world that is hotter than ours is now, and where the rains have fallen with such ferocity that the cities of the world are lost into deep lagoons. We follow a few of the survivors in this desperate attempts to stay alive...without killing each other. 

Very recently published, but reminiscent of The Word for World is Forest,  is the sci-fi novel in verse by Langmead is known for his sci-fi Dark Star, and like that book, this is written as a long-form poem.  It's a saga of colony ships, shattering moons and cataclysmic war in a new Eden.

Rochelle wakes from cryostasis to take up her role as engineer on the colony ark, Calypso. But she finds the ship has transformed into a forest, populated by the original crew's descendants, who revere her like a saint.

She travels the ship with the Calypso's creator, the enigmatic Sigmund, and Catherine, a bioengineered marvel who can commune with the plants, uncovering a new history of humanity forged while she slept.

She discovers a legacy of war between botanists and engineers. A war fought for the right to build a new Earth – a technological paradise, or a new Eden in bloom, untouched by mankind's past.

And Rochelle, the last to wake, holds the balance of power in her hands.

 .                

So I have to ask, which of these books would make me more determined to help reverse the global crisis? The nonfiction states their case and made me feel both angry and more ready to act. But the fiction touched my soul, and gave me the passion needed. 

Donna Tartt, Carel Fabritius, and The Goldfinch

 

Once morning in 1654, in the city of Delft in Holland, there was a "thunderclap". That was the way the people of Delft described the  explosion of a  factory containing 90,000 pounds of gunpowder. Large sections of the city were devastate, and 100 people died. 

Carole Fabritius was among them, and that may be why so few people have heard of this artist, who had been a  pupil of Rembrandt, and, before he reached his thirties, was already an  acclaimed painter of the Dutch school. He left a sadly small portfolio of work, and it's clear might have gone on to paint so much more, if he had survived the blast.

One of his most beloved works is also one of the most upsetting, from the viewpoint of an animal lover; The Goldfinch.  Just 9X13 inches, and possibly as a trompe d'oeil and perhaps a clever part of a window shutter, it is beautifully rendered. A small songbird sits on its perch, staring out at the viewer. Every feather is a perfect rendering. And the little gold chain that prevents the bird from seeking its freedom is lost in shadow, you have to peer closely to see that the goldfinch is a captive. It was sitting in Fabritius's workroom, almost next door to the factory, when the blast destroyed almost everything there, including the artist himself.

Donna Tartt launching The Goldfinch in Amsterdam
. Photograph: Bas Czerwinski/AFP/Getty Images

When I read Donna Tartt's third novel in 2014, titled The Goldfinch, I was expecting something grand, something with an explosion at the centre of it, because her previous two novels had been acclaimed and their powerful stories were still in my mind.

She certainly offered an explosion; moments after the story begins, a bomb blows out the New York's Metropolitan Museum. 14 year old Theo Decker is in one section, his mother elsewhere. She is killed by the blast.  As Theo tries to extricate himself from the wreckage, a dying man tells him to take the small, framed picture  lying in the dust. He thinks to  take to his mother for safekeeping and finds his way home; she never arrives. From then on, The Goldfinch, with its imploring theme of captive beauty, is his guilty secret, and a physical connection to his mother. It becomes something he can't bear to be rid of but something he cannot admit he possesses.

How fittingly linked these two stories are. The fiction of a boy who walked out of an explosion with the painting of an artist who died in an explosion.  The Goldfinch, painted in the year of Fabricius's death, was one of only about 12 of his paintings to have survived the tragic explosion, and  in Tartt's story, it survives again, albeit in a setting it has never traveled to; it's hung in The Haig. 

I was reminded of The Goldfinch when I read Laura Cumming's latest book

on art; Thunderclap. Although the focus of this book is Fabritius and his works, she also looks at her own approach to art, as an art critic. She says, 'We see pictures in time and place. We cannot see them otherwise. They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence…' I wonder if that is also true of fiction; certainly, a school of literature theory suggests that works can only be judged though the eyes of the reader, who brings their own emotional smörgåsbord to the interpretation.

Certainly, I began reading The Goldfinch knowing nothing about the painting, or having even heard of Carel Fabritius, but I devoured this long book; it reminded me of Dickens in its complexity and with its whirlwind of amazing characters, and its 'cause and effect' plotting – the dying man who tells Theo to take the painting is guardian to a young girl named Pippa, who was also in the museum when the bomb exploded, and is the only person who Theo feels can understand his heart, as they both lost someone dear in the explosion. Their lives will collide and separate, repeatedly, throughout the book. 

And yet, Tartt told The Telegraph, shortly after publishing the book that she hadn't even known about the Delft Thunderclap when she wrote it.  She said. 'The the first time I saw it, I connected very strongly with it. This little bird, so brave and so dignified, and then you see that terrible little chain…' She was simply looking for the right painting, that would be small enough to carry and would appeal to a child. 

The rôle of synchronicity in creating a novel can make one gasp. For, if Tartt didn't know much about Fabritius’ death when she chose the painting, why is her central character called Theo Decker? Because at the time of his death Fabritius was painting the portrait of a church deacon named Simon Decker. 

Writing is full of such coincidence, as Tartt admits: 

'It all fit together in ways I could never have imagined. When coincidences like that start happening you know the muses are at your side. ”

It's good to know that when such amazing moments occur, the writer should grasp them with both hands. 

Literary Giants of New York and the Algonquin Hotel

When  my daughter, Bex and I were in New York, we were determined to find out more about the literary side of the city, so we went to the Algonquin Hotel to meet Kevin, who knew all about writing and the Big Apple. 

The first thing we saw when we arrived at the Algonquin Hotel, was the cat in the window, snuggled up in a little bed for the world to see. This was Matilda  the Algonquin cat, who has been resident for something like 40 years. Each time a cat dies, a new cat is brought from a refuge. If it is male, it's called Hamlet. If it is female, it's called Matilda. Each puss wanders the hotel at will, but has this special basket in the front window, looking out onto the road. The hotel is located on Times Square,  with Yale, Harvard and the Yacht club headquarters nearby. The hotel façade is imposting and grand, and Matilda gives the place a more welcoming feel.

'I wonder what Algonquin means,' mused my daughter.           I laid down a dollar bet that the hotel name was of First Nations origin. But we were both puzzled – we'd done our homework and knew that the original inhabitants were called The Lenape, who had named the place Manahatta, meaning 'hilly island'.

When Kevin arrived, this was the first question we had for him, and he had the answer; the Algonquin people  lived in the Ottawa Valley for at least 8,000 years before Europeans arrived in North America. But the source of the word Algonquin is unclear. 'It is said to mean  “at the place of spearing fishes and eels from the bow of a canoe”,' he said.

Great – I'd won my bet. I tucked my dollar winnings away as Kevin led us through the hotel foyer, all Art Deco dark wood paneling and golden lighting.  He explained that the hotel had been built in 1902,  was twelve stories tall,  and shaped like an "H". Bex and I agreed that this was the hotel we'd stay at if we were ever to ship up in Manhattan again.

He walked us over to the famous literary round table, set in an alcove behind the reception area. 'This is where all the literati of New York would meet between the first and second world wars,' Keven told us. 'It was known for it's lively, witty, and sophisticated conversations.'

Dorothy Parker

The group included Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker and Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, who founded The New Yorker. Also members were the actor Peggy Wood, George Kaufman, Margaret Leech Pulitzer and Donald Ogden Stewart who won an Oscar for The Philadelphia Story, Herman J. Mankiewicz, who won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane. The rumour was that people like F Scot Fitzgerald,  Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner may have also dropped in for lunch; why not, these were wise-cracking wits who enjoyed pranks and word teasers, such Dorothy Parker's wordplay fun with: 'you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think…Brevity is the soul of lingerie…If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to…'

Above the large round table in the alcove is a painting of the club, showing many of its members. 

Keven took us for a walk around Hell's Kitchen, which is an inner-city area that was reputed to be like ‘the kitchens in Hell itself’ according to the NYPD of the prohibition era. There he pointed out where great writers of the time lived. He took us to the homes of James Thurber and Eugene O’Neil and F Scot Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. A haunt of the young James Baldwin was  his Aunt Barbara's candy shop near Fifth Avenue. She would later provide inspiration for the character of Florence in Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1952. Colson Whitehead also lives in Manhattan, where he set his masterpiece, The Colossus. This opens with the 'awful truth' about being a Native New Yorker – 'it leaves you ruined for anywhere else.' 

Most of these writers had written at times for the New Yorker, a magazine I know especially for its amazing short stories and brilliant cover illustrations. We found ourselves in the offices of The New Yorker, the New York magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction and poetry. Although it's been around since 1925, it is still the pinnacle of good journalism, and has published some of the most famous short stories, including Annie Prouix's  'Brokeback Mountain' and Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'.

This office was the opposite of the Algonquin; it was plate glass and steel, giving off an atmosphere of being ultra-modern, professional  and efficient. But Bex and I were already longing for Art Deco, and we found ourselves back at the Algonquin, ready to dine very close to (but sadly not on) the round table.