If I were to die in the next few minutes, the things I hope I would be remembered for are that: 1.) my grandson thinks I am Supernana and that my stated purpose on earth is to wield a mean light-saber; 2.) that fed my children, even when in the midst of creating an earth-shattering plot twist; 3.) that even though it took a thousand rewrites, I succeeded in finally producing The Last Waltz: A Novel of Love and War.
The journey to the latter accomplishment is a microcosm of my adult life. The bare facts, the research, and the consuming need to tell the story of Austria between 1913 and 1938, had their birth in the Austrian Alps, 50 miles from Vienna at the Semmering Pass, where I dwelt in a hotel only partially restored from damage incurred by the Russian occupation. I lived with 79 other Stanford students, far away from urban Austrian life (except on our 3-day weekends) concentrating on the study of German language, Austrian art and architecture, Austrian music, Austrian history, and Austrian politics. Surprisingly, I knew very little about these things, as do most average Americans. I didn’t even know that seventy years earlier, Austria had been the center of European art, science, medicine, and music. In spite of or maybe because of this, large forces were at work to drag it out of its glittering past as the Waltz capital of the world into a new century where international socialism would enfranchise every man and there would be no poor. This made Austria’s aristocracy, stranded between past and future, extremely nervous and quite neurotic. Austrian historian, Frederic Morton has called this period a time of “Nervous Splendor.”
So I learned this when I was twenty. It became part of me, more so than the rest of my education because I had seen the art, listened to the Vienna Philharmonic, heard the stories of the survivors from that time, and most of all because I had visited Auschwitz. A personal quest was born to figure out the dynamics of a world where such an unimaginable horror could happen.
During a very hated job as an international banker while putting my husband through Law School, I had an hour and a half bus commute to and from Los Angeles through the slums of East L.A. This is when I personalized all the forces of that Austrian age into the characters of my novel: the debutante turned democrat, Amalia Faulhaber, the German Lieutenant with the soul of a violinist, Eberhard von Waldburg, the naïve but charismatic socialist, Uncle Lorenz, the proud aristocratic grandmother, Eugenia von Hohenburg Reichart, the passionately nationalistic Pole, Doktor Andrzej Zaleski, and the outwardly misogynistic Baron von Schoenenberg. In a single bus ride, I outlined the plot that was to be built upon and developed as I learned to write during my three children’s growing up years.
The time came when they were all grown up, and I realized I knew next to nothing about the kind of suffering that would occur during a World War in the trenches, the loss of an empire, the loss of status, and nearly all physical possessions. At best, my novel was only a superficial rendering. So I set it aside and wrote light fiction—my Alex and Briggie genealogical mysteries—for nearly fifteen years. Then I suffered a serious medical condition that resulted in my inability to write and eventually sapped all my hard-won skill.
Ten years later, I miraculously recovered, and slowly rediscovered myself as a writer. But there was a change. My soul and awareness of suffering had deepened. I now understood what it took to be a survivor.
I also remembered that my writing idol, Tolstoy, had not written his epics from the point of view of one person, and certainly would not do so from the point of view of a nineteen year old debutante. And so I went into the heads of all my major characters, which finally gave the depth to my work that I had been seeking for so long.
My years of development as a writer, to this particular juncture, owe all to the learning process of writing The Last Waltz. I can only hope that my next book: Pieces of Paris (Fall, 2010) will continue that process.
