Violet Hours

By Elizabeth Cowley Tyler

Violet Hours is a literary potpourri containing Watershed, a novel fragment, Aftermath, a disquisition, The Ventriloquist, a polemic, Indian Passage and Mother’s Day, two short stories, a travel article, and Anna, a play.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984544124

Elizabeth Cowley Tyler

Elizabeth Cowley Tyler lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Elmira College and a Master of Arts in French from Middlebury College. She has lived and studied in London and Paris and has traveled extensively in France, Italy, England, Germany, and Russia. Prior published works includes a series of mystery novels: The Madeleine Murders, Murder at the Maison de Balzac, and Murder at Les Halles, featuring Inspector Henri Corbet of the Paris Police. Her literary novels include Pro Patri Mori, a Great War novel, Dark Angel, In Search of Chopin, a biographical novel. Hôtel Chopin, Tavistock Square, Vanishing Point, Italian Hours and Violet Hours are her most recent works.

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Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Cowley Tyler.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018909055

ISBN:               Hardcover                 978-1-9845-4413-1

                         Softcover                   978-1-9845-4414-8

                         eBook                        978-1-9845-4412-4

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 08/13/2018

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A LITERARY POTPOURRI

1   Watershed

2   Aftermath

3   The Ventriloquist

4   Indian Passage

5   Mother’s Day

6   History And Heritage in the Making

7   Anna A Play

"And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

THE WASTELAND

T. S. ELIOT

WATERSHED

I am Henry James Waters, H.J. Waters for short, and I have long been a believer in artistic prescience and in the idea that history is often built with the bricks of unintended consequences. These beliefs have only been affirmed and deepened by my exposure to the papers of two of my distant relatives, Ian Waters and Peter Steinman.

Not unlike the unexpected discovery of the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrator at the Salem Custom House, I found my Great, Great Uncle Peter’s journal on a visit to Paris last year and the manuscript of an unpublished biography of Thomas Cromwell, written by my Great, Great Uncle Ian, along with a sketchy journal and some unfinished detective fiction when I reconnected with some of my distant relatives in London last Christmas. These papers have inspired the work that is to follow, and I will share with you my experience as I explore them.

But first a little background on me. I’ve told you that I’m H.J. Waters, or simply H.J., and have been known as such since my youth. My mother, who was a great fan of Henry James, also had a sense of humor, and, thus my name. My father, still alive and working as an MP, doesn’t care a fig for the kind of (his words) sentimental, feeling-oriented claptrap I write.

So, you see, I have decided not to write a novel using the material I’ve unearthed on my distant relatives, but rather to share my journey through their leavings and offer a couple of fictionalized version of what their lives might have been like.

I no longer conduct my seminars in the 18th and 19th Century novels at the University of London, something which I did for quite a few years after taking my doctorate in the subject at Magdalen College, Oxford. I have written some critical pieces on Dickens which have been well received, but academic writing never was my passion. The inheritance I received from my mother has made it possible for me to write my modest books and not worry about whether I make a living from them.

How did I come across this store of wonderful material by and about my long-dead relatives? I’ll get to that, but, first, let me begin at the end and tell you how each one died.

Great, Great Uncle Peter Steinman—I think I’ll simply call him Uncle Peter, skipping the great, great, since by now you know that he lived two generations before me—had a heart attack at Le Grand Vefour in Paris just before the Allies arrived to liberate that long-held city. He was working as a translator for the Wehrmacht and, unbeknownst to them, also for the Resistance. Needless to say, he wasn’t shy about sharing information he gained from the Occupiers with the Resistance. A dangerous position, you might say, and you would be right. But my Uncle Peter was not only an accomplished literary scholar and linguist, he was also a brave man.

It seems very unfortunate that he did not live to see Paris liberated by the Allies and to see, as a generous gift to the French government, De Gaulle ride down the Champs Elysees in that motorcade.

My Uncle Peter was actually enjoying a rather highly anticipated luncheon of braised rabbit and a gratin of potatoes at Le Grand Vefour with members of the German high command. Hitler, always a madman, had been getting even madder with orders to Von Choltitz to leave no monument standing in the monument-rich City of Paris, to leave it a pile of rubble. If he were going to lose the war, and at that point, he must have known he was going to, then certainly no occupied city should be left to recover from the devastation he would cause.

Uncle Ian was doing his duty as a member of the fire brigade in London near Westminster Abbey in 1941 when he was hit during a bombing that devastated that whole section of the city. He was still reeling from the impact of an earlier bombing of the Tavistock Square area where he lived and mourning the loss of his literary idol, Virginia Woolf, who had walked into the river and drowned herself in March of that year.

Now, I’ll try to chart the progress of my uncles along the roads that led to these ends, but first a bit about how I came to have these papers in the first place. I’ll start with Uncle Peter and my visit to Paris. Shortly after my mother’s death when I was going through her voluminous papers, I discovered a letter from a landlord in Paris, actually the son of the owner of the building on rue St. Jacques where my Uncle Peter had lived for all his years in Paris.

The landlord was selling the building to retire to the south of France, and since Uncle Peter had apparently given the name of my grandfather, my mother’s father, Herman Steinman, as a reference when he rented the apartment way back in the ’20s, Monsieur Reveau (the son of the landlord), contacted my mother who still lived in my grandfather’s house in London, with the news that there was a large trunk of papers in the cave (French for basement) of the building, and he wondered if someone in the family might want to claim them.

Uncle Peter had been mytholgized in the family over the years, and I had heard stories of his bravery and strong anti-war stance during the Great War as well as the Second World War. Of course, I wanted to claim the papers. The date on the letter was recent enough that the option to do so might still hold, and I lost no time in going to Paris.

I had not been in Paris other than for the odd weekend since my term of study at the Sorbonne in 19th Century French Literature when I was an undergraduate at Oxford and when I was doing research for a section of my doctoral thesis which dealt with a comparison of Balzac and Dickens. I had lived on rue des Ecoles, not too far from Uncle Peter’s residence on rue St. Jacques. This time, I booked into Hotel des Grandes Hommes, an elegant, small hotel across from the Pantheon, home of the tombs of Hugo and Zola.

Monsieur Reveau was delighted to take me down into the cave, a dark, dank underground room with earthen walls and an odor of must and dust. Uncle Peter’s papers were in a large, black leather trunk of some heft. We opened it with a sharp-toothed saw because the key had long ago disappeared. The seal of the lining of the trunk was so tight that when the lid sprang open, the great sheaf of papers and notebooks contained therein looked as though they’d been put there yesterday.

I didn’t contain my joy at the discovery, and Monsieur Reveau seemed very happy for me. "Vous avez de la chance, he said to me in French, you’re lucky."

And indeed I was. I decided to stay on for a week or so to reacquaint myself with this elegant city of literature and art and to get to know my Uncle Peter through his papers, but more of that later.

Now, I must tell you how I came upon my Uncle Ian’s unpublished biography of Cromwell, his journal and his unfinished detective novel. Since my mother’s death, my father has been making more of an effort to behave like a caring parent and seems to have become more interested in family than I had ever known him to be while Mother was alive. He began to invite cousins, uncles and relatives even more distant to visit him in London and would always make sure that he had invited me to dine during their visits.

I must say this experience did not prove to be too unpleasant. As a matter of fact, I have quite liked getting to know long lost relatives who live in different parts of England. It was at just such a gathering that the plans were made for what was left of the Waters family to celebrate Christmas week in London at Father’s. Christmas had always been