Rough Music - A musical love story

A couple of years ago, I was recovering from an operation, and found that I was rather bored with the genre I used to write in. So while I was convalescing, I started to listen to music that I’d loved in my youth, in the late 70s and 1980's. I developed an even stronger interest in country music. So I started to write some stories based in the world of music. I didn't want to write soft edged, happy ending stories. Musicians aren’t choir boys and back in the days of long tours, there was a lot of wild stuff, drinking, sex and drug taking. My next story is more of a story of a marriage, (Beds and Blue Jeans, available on Amazon) between a young couple who live together, but who aren’t Love's Young Dream. He has a small band, and plays in the Nashville bars. His girlfriend is a young mother and they don’t have much in common apart from their baby. But they find a way of living together. The latest story, “Rough Music”, does not have the traditional happy ending. It is about a band who play country and rock and who are just breaking into the big time. The lead singer finds that his marriage is falling apart, because of his long months away touring and his own infidelities and drinking. He remarries, but is the second marriage going to be more successful? I know that many people won’t like these type of stories, but I feel that writing all the time about “happy endings” and “rakes tamed by the love of a good woman” is unrealistic. I like to write about people who are real, who do stupid things and good things, who aren’t “sorted out by the end of the novel”.

Merle Haggard, country legend

Merle Haggard was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1937, and died on his 79th birthday. His family were “Okies”, farming people who had moved from Oklahoma, to California, during the Depression. At that time, the “dust bowl” destroyed farms in their home state, and reduced them to a desperate condition. They mostly had no option but to pack up and leave. They made the trip west in their cars, hoping for a new life. John Steinbeck’s novel, Grapes of Wrath, is about this terrible time in US history. Like most country singers of his generation, Merle had experienced the social problems that he wrote about in his songs… They were born in rural poverty, and isolation. Family was often all the wealth that they had, Even then, their families were not immune to the many issues that affected most people in the 20th century, such as desertion or divorce, children “going off the rails”, harsh parenting. Country music was the white working class blues; it was about the real life experiences of the singers who wrote the songs, which were often sneered at by the more fortunate or educated. As a boy, Merle loved music and played the guitar, but he was often in trouble with the law. In his teens. he ran away from home, and spent time in various juvenile detention centres. At the age of 20, he was serving time in prison, San Quentin, when Johnny Cash played a concert there. Merle resolved to straighten himself out. He was traumatised by the more appalling aspects of prison life, and wanted to get out. Cash understood brushes with the law, and had made helping prisoners one of his causes. Merle got out of prison, and eventually he won a full pardon for his crime. He got a job and began to sing. Many of his songs were drawn from childhood experiences. “Mama Tried” was about his family and how his mother had hoped to keep him from crime… “Sing me back home” also has a prison background. One of his most famous songs was “Okie From Muskogee”- a semi humorous song about the clash of the values of Middle America and the hippies of the 1960s, who “smoke marijuana” and “make a party out of loving”. He was ambivalent about the song... it was taken up by the conservatives as supporting the values of the “silent Majority”, but Merle saw it as praise for the old style ways and beliefs of his parents and grandparents, without being overly right wing. One of his other songs was Irma Jackson, about an inter-racial romance and in later life, he wrote songs against the Iraq War. Although he performed for Nixon at the White House in the 70’s he was always willing to listen to protestors against the Vietnam War….Merle’s love life was stormy. He was married 5 times, and during the 1980s he developed a coke habit, which damaged his health to a degree. But his musical career was fruitful and he loved his work. He went on performing even when he had had cancer. Sadly I never saw him perform live, but I have loved his songs and his singing... Ever since as a child, I saw him in a small role in the Waltons.

Pallisers and stories of married life

I’ve been watching “The Pallisers” on TV lately and remembering how much I loved the novels when I was a kid, even though they were long and heavy going for a young person. I like Antony Trollope, because while he is in many ways a quintessential Victorian, in his attitudes, he is also much more tolerant and more a “man of the world” than many Victorian writers. Trollope realises that people are flawed and foolish, and make mistakes, that marriage isn’t always a happy bed of roses and that love doesn’t always solve problems. He was lucky into that he was writing at a time where a novel could be about a marriage rather than the run up to it. He described marriages of various kinds, and his favourite female character was the flawed but charming Glencora Palliser, a young woman who is forced into a marriage. She marries a serious and dull young man whom she does not love.. She is in love with a “bad lot”, the gambler, Burgo Fitzgerald, and in the early years of her marriage, she wants to leave her husband and run off as Burgo's mistress. Her husband persuades her to stay and give their marriage a chance, because he loves her, although she is different from him. She is flighty, and often vulgar and wilful. Plantagenet is cool and unemotional and finds it hard to relate to people, even his wife and children. She is very human and at times, he is “something more than human,” very virtuous and serious. I have hoped to write some fiction about married life, rather than the courtship stage, and show marriages that are in trouble, marriages that are not too good and not too bad, and to try and show people as they really are. I don’t claim to be as good a writer as Trollope, but I hope that some may like my newer fictions about married life... So far, I have two stories, “Beds and Blue Jeans” and “Rough Music”. They are available on Amazon.

Beds and Blue Jeans Romance

Beds and Blue Jeans is a sort of “anti-Romance” story about a couple – Sam and Pattie, who wind up living together almost by accident. They have a baby and Sam tries to be a good father, but he is bored with his girlfriend and she seems to just about tolerate him. So he keeps on with his work of playing in a band and finds that women throw themselves at him because he is a musician. He enjoys the thrill of secret flings, and dodging being found out by his bad tempered girlfriend. But by and by, the flings are less satisfying because he wants something more from a woman, but he thinks that Pattie is too immature to provide him with any real companionship. By Nadine Sutton. Available on Amazon

Maura Laverty Irish Romance Author

Maura Laverty was born in Ireland, in County Kildare, in 1907 and was educated in a convent. Her father was a gentleman farmer. Like many middle class girls of the time, she went to Spain in the 1920s as governess to the children of a Spanish upper class family. Career opportunities for girls in Ireland were almost non existent But girls, who had some education but not much money, chose to spend a few years in Spain, to give themselves some freedom and work experience. At the time, just after Ireland had achieved independence, there was a low marriage rate. The custom was that the family farm would go to the eldest son, and the younger children would not get anything much. The eldest son usually did not marry, until he had inherited. This meant that many young Irish women felt they had no hopes of marrying. So they moved abroad, hoping it would improve their chances. The country was extremely poor and emigration became a way of life. Matters were not helped by the fact that birth control was illegal and considered immoral, and so families were large. Many went to England or to America, but many middle class girls chose Spain. This was because it was seen as a safely Catholic country, where an Irish girl could work, earn a living and not be subjected to the pagan influences of England or the US. Their families and religious advisers could recommend a safe job in Spain. Working for well to do families gave them hopes of finding a husband, but still the chances were very slim. There was an English queen on the Spanish throne at the time, and an English community living in the country, who had their own social life. Irish governesses were not usually invited to their events. Spanish aristocratic families saw the governess as very little higher in social position than their servants. So the governesses and chaperones and English teachers were a lonely set of women, who had dull and restricted social lives. They often lived their whole lives in Spain because they had no hope of returning home. They became bitter about their limited life. Maura Laverty, like Kate O’Brien, was intelligent and literate and adventurous. She did not stay long as a governess but instead became a secretary to the Princess Bibesco and worked in journalism. She found a fiancé, a Hungarian, but then realised that she wanted to marry James Laverty, an Irishman who had been her pen friend during her years in Spain. So she went back to Ireland and they married. She had children and went on writing, to support her family, as her husband was not a steady provider. She worked as a journalist, as a script writer for the TV series, Tolka Row, and as an “Agony Aunt”. She did not write as many novels as Kate O’Brien but two of her books “Never No More” (about her childhood) and “No More than Human” were well known and loved. She also wrote children’s fiction and about cookery. “No More than Human” is a favourite book of mine. Like O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle, it is set in Spain in the 20's and based on Maura Laverty’s experiences as a governess. While the Spanish were Catholics, the upper classes took a more elastic attitude to sex than the puritanical Irish Catholics of that time. Mary Lavelle and Laverty’s Delia Scully learned more about the wilder side of life and love than they might have done in Ireland. Mary Lavelle falls in love with and sleeps with her employer’s married son. Delia falls in love with a young man Rafael. She thinks he wants to marry her, but he only wants to set her up as his mistress, while he marries another girl for her money. I think that, in the social climate of Ireland at that time, it was only by setting the novels abroad, that writers could get away with writing about adultery and illicit sex (let alone homosexual love). Even then, Laverty, like Kate O’Brien and other writers, was often “banned” in her native country. I wish that Laverty had written more fiction, as she was a talented and intelligent writer and if Delia Scully is a self-portrait, she was also a charming and likable woman. She was saddened and depressed when her books were banned, especially some that had been admired by Catholic organisations in America. She died in her 50s, in 1966. Some of her books were reprinted in the 1980s, by Virago Press. Others can be found on Amazon, in old editions.

RICH MAN POOR MAN American saga by Irwin Shaw

I must confess to not knowing much about American literature. I like some of the more serious works, such as the novels of F Scott Fitzgerald, but I can’t read Hemingway, or Faulkner. I’ve struggled to appreciate other novels like Upton Sinclair or Theodore Dreiser, but I just find them too wordy and hard to “get into”. My favourite American novels tend to be from the “second rate” type of literature, a good interesting story, like Gone with the Wind. Irwin Shaw was a journalist and when he took to writing novels, he went for telling a good human interest story, rather than fine writing. Rich Man Poor Man was televised in the 1970s and was his best known novel. The TV version was immensely popular. Like many American writers, he lived in Europe much of the time, and was a liberal who disliked the McCarthyite years in his native country. The story begins in 1945 on the last day of World War Two. It focusses on two brothers, Rudolph and Tom Jordache, from a German American working class family, in a small town in upstate New York. Rudy, the elder, is intelligent and ambitious. Tom is younger, an angry teenager who loves to fight and is always at odds with the world. Rudy’s ambition is to go to college and make a fortune. His brother has no ambitions. Their sister, Gretchen, is beautiful, intelligent and artistic minded, but sensual. Their parents are unhappily married and they only unite in love for their favourite child, Rudy. Both mother and father want him to get on. They ignore Gretchen and Tom. She rebels by taking a rich lover, the town’s “wealthy WASP”, Teddy Boylan. Although she has ambitions to go into the theater, her sexually passionate nature makes her fall into bed with many men, whereas Rudy maintains a strict control over himself and works his way through College and into a position of trust in a large business. Tom's life goes from bad to worse. When his first real love affair ends badly, he becomes a sullen young man who earns his living with his fists as a boxer. He gets into trouble constantly. Rudy supports his mother, when his father commits suicide and his brother and sister leave town, and he manages to achieve his ambition of making a fortune in business. In the TV version of the book, Rudy’s character was changed somewhat, making him more selfish and cold hearted than the Rudy of the book. In the TV series, Rudy is seen as refusing to help someone he knows, who has fallen foul of the Communist Witch hunts in the 50s. Generally until later in the series, he comes across as hard and completely self-interested, while Tom is gradually made more of a hero. However, Shaw’s original Rudy is (while ambitious and hard headed) an essentially decent man who takes responsibility for his family, makes a good living and does not refuse to help his college tutor who is being hounded for supposed communist leanings. The novel covers the post war period, and outlines Rudy’s progression to a wealthy businessman and then a husband and father. He retires from business and goes into local politics. Tom gets mixed up with the mafia, during his boxing career and to escape them, becomes a merchant seaman. Even then his violent past sometimes catches up with him. Eventually he becomes a calmer happier man, and settles abroad, in the Mediterranean with his son and his new English girlfriend. Rudy’s marriage hits a bad patch and his wife’s drinking causes a tragic incident. Tom manages to avert another disaster caused by Jean, when she has been drinking, but that leads him to a final fight which ends in tragedy. It's hard to say why I like this story so much. The characters are well drawn, and there is plenty of drama and human interest. And the post war epoch, in America is interesting. Unlike some writers, Shaw was unpretentious and simple in his writing.

Rough Music a sexy non romance! just coming out

Although I’ve been ill for some weeks, I have now published “Rough Music”. It’s available for sale on 21st January. It’s not a romance; it’s about people who are a bit older than the “very romantic” age, who are 30-ish and trying to sort out problems in life, rather than looking for a perfect love affair or marriage. Jeff and Brandon are two guys, who are good friends, and work together. They are both trying to work out how far they compromise in their work lives and how they try and manage a music career, with its frequent traveling and still maintain contact with their wives and families. They want to do real music that they love, rather than concentrate on commercially successful stuff, but they also need to earn a living. This is in its way a historical story, set in the late 1970s, so attitudes are not the same on many issues as they are now, but there’s fun, sex and I hope some real life in there! You can find it on Amazon, by Nadine Sutton.