The Mace & Crown, Thursday, October 11, 1984

Garret grasps spirit of Elizabethan period

Thomas Carlyle wrote, we are all ghosts upon the earth, homeless and forlorn, each tarrying but a moment's breath, to die and be lost in time. Those who have gone before are ghosts of memory, who haunt the exiled years. To save these phantoms - to make them live in time - is the artist's task. Historical novelist George Garrett, spoke at ODU's Literary Festival last week, and explained his work as an attempt to capture the past.       While writing The Succession, a recent novel about the decline of Elizabethan England and the ascent of James II to the throne, Garrett "heard voices" of people long dead yet, somehow, alive in the great unbroken memory of history.       "I became aware of shadowy presences," he said, "as substantial as any shadow."       To imitate the half-heard whispers of ghosts, Garrett wrote his novel in fragmentary glimpses of Renaissance Britain.       "Because the Elizabethan world is so remote from us in time and space, I needed a 'momentary sense' of glimpsing the age in images," Garrett said. "I wanted the book to be like a memory of my own."       Garrett's novel moves back and forth, like time's slow pendulum, from the "past" of Elizabeth's reign to the "present" of James' monarchy. Characters in the novel remember their youth in Elizabeth's court and lament the relentless loss of days. Their stories, grey, broken, form a pattern or recollections that gives a complete picture of the age.       But memories in Garrett's novel are clouded by death. The characters are seen in past and present; once young, they grow old and die. Elizabeth herself, the center of the novel, is seen just at the beginning and end: all other times she is a story, a memory retold by some speaker.       Garrett works long on his books, moulding them from time. He spent a decade writing The Succession, working mostly in a boathouse in Maine. "The book grew," he said; "I didn't expect it to last that long."       Garrett's task was to recreate a world which no longer exists. To make his novel authentic, he did extensive research in the history of that age. But after compiling so many facts, Garrett realized the only way to bring the past to life was to take "the imaginative risk" of art.       "Research alone couldn't capture the Elizabethan world. The people in the book would not come alive until I released the research and began to work more freely, without referring to my notes," he said. Later, researchers read the manuscript to check Garrett's historical accuracy.       The author also found "The excitement of imagining Elizabeth was more enjoyable than bare research."       While writing The Succession, Garrett was able to visit sites in Britain relating to the story: "I found the route used by the messenger to announce the succession of James."       Garrett has a special curiosity for Queen Elizabeth. His research revealed that in 1597 the aging queen ordered mirrors from Venice to cover every inch of her bathroom. Strangely, she allowed no mirrors present during her public appearances, even though she was dressed in brocade and adorned with make-up to feign youth.       "Why," Garrett asks, "did she have mirrors in the only place where she was stripped of her appearances?" Garrett thinks Elizabeth had what he calls "Reverse Vanity: she seemed to fight the vanity forced upon her by the public," and so remind herself that she would not, as many believed, live forever.       Garrett imagines Elizabeth, naked, in the room of mirrors, as lost in "A wilderness of herself." Such images haunt Garrett's book, and other small, revealing details bring the Renaissance to life.       Time is the real hero of Garrett's novel. He asks the dead to share their memories, and for a while, they consent; but soon their tales end and they must vanish.       Perhaps Garrett heard their voices because, in that age regard for form, order, and beauty produced as Yeats said, a quiet culture. "The voices of contemporary culture are garbled," Garrett said.       Like a strange shell cast on the shore, waiting to moan its dreams into a wanderer's ear, Garrett's novel keeps within itself the take of a lost world.