Chuck Rosenthal is the author of the new novel Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest. His many other books include the novel Loop's Progress. He lives in Topanga Canyon, California.
Q: What inspired you to write Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest, and how did you create your character Beatriz?
A: When I taught at Imperial College in London for four months in 2011, I was recovering from radiation treatment. When I awoke in the middle of the night, a bit nervous and scared, I’d sit at a huge bay window overlooking the street, and watch the double decker busses cruise past. I’d drink a glass of port and read William Blake, possibly the essential Romantic poet. Wild and fantastic.
When I got home to Topanga Canyon, California, I began reading John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge. I reread Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I thought about Goethe’s famous romance The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Could I write something so moving about these poets who were now enchanting me? I would need a character both passionate and innocent, complex and curious, intelligent, stubborn, afraid and brave, who would travel to them and through them.
My daughter, Marlena, dropped out of high school at age 16. Beatriz is not modeled on my daughter, yet Beatriz was inspired by her. Then there was Beatrice, Dante’s muse. Though it is Mary Shelley who guides my character, Beatriz, Beatriz serves as muse to my readers as she discovers the wonders and sorrows of the Romantic poets.
Q: The novel’s title is part of a poem by Keats--can you say more about its significance for you?
A: I was trying to read all of Keats. I might have. On the last page of the volume I own (p. 389), I encountered an untitled sonnet with the italicized note, Written on a Blank Page in Shakespeare’s Poems, facing “A Lover’s Complaint.” The poem before it is a short one addressed to his lover, Fanny Brawne.
Awake for ever in a Sweet Unrest is the third from last line in the last poem, now commonly referred to by the opening words “Bright star.” I immediately wrote down “Awake For Ever” and used it as my working title.
By the time Beatriz first encountered Keats, I went back to the top of my first page and added “in a Sweet Unrest.” Usually I find my title after I’ve finished the book. Not this time. It was that hard and that easy. It’s gorgeous.
Q: Did you need to do any research to write the book, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I did a ton of research for this novel. Long biographies of each poet and Mary Shelley. Chasing down Mary’s father, the philosopher William Godwin, her stepsister Clair Clairton, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the essayist William Hazlitt, friend and publisher Leigh Hunt, and John Polidori, the man who wrote the first vampire novel, The Vampyre.
The research took about five years. This little book took a long time to write, as well. I kept the poems and biographies at my feet as I wrote. The first draft was written in longhand with a pencil that filled two journals.
Surprises: That Shelley could walk across France with a couple teenage girls; that Keats was a boxer and a gambler; that Byron was a great swimmer.
Q: The writer Robert M. Eversz said of the book, “If you’ve ever wandered into a book and found the characters as real as anyone you might meet in ‘real’ life, then a grand literary adventure awaits in Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: Robert Eversz is right. The fine line between finding oneself lost in a book and traveling in time is expressed several times in the story. Are these characters ghosts? Are they haunting Beatriz or is she haunting them?
When Beatriz tries to explain her “job” to her parents she asks them, “Do you ever find yourself falling into a book?” Her father says, “Seldom.” Her mother says, “Yes.” Henry James says of The Turn of the Screw, “Ghosts don’t have to exist to be real.” This little book is a great adventure. Something is at stake for everyone in every scene from page to page.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m researching George Sand, a cross dresser, who wrote 80 novels. She slept with Chopin for nine years until his death (I’ve got recordings of all his work); she then was a companion of Flaubert, whom I’ve read all of, for eight years until she died. She had many other lovers all the while, both male and female.
But I’m looking for the action and magic, so I’m reading Ludovico Aristo’s epic, Orlando Furioso (1516), which Sand loved for its strong women, warriors, enchantresses, horsewomen, and lovers.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’ve always been very athletic, but my greatest love turned out to be training and riding horses, which I did every day for 25 years. I’ve published two novels about horses.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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