Glenn Haybittle - Letter To My Editor

Check out Glenn Haybittle's "Letter To My Editor" post at Errands Into The Maze Yes, that's me he's talking to. No, we don't have a difference of opinion. It's always interesting when you can provoke a clear statement of intent, which this certainly is.

Reading Glenn Haybittle's - That Time Is Past

I'm reading Glenn Haybittle's revisons of That Time is Past. Ivan, who has abandoned his wife and children to write a biography of Shelley and live in Italy with the appropriate Romantic intensity, is taking the beautiful, if distant, Isabella on a tour through the Villa Cenci, the centre of a lurid family tragedy involving incest and murder in 16th century Rome, that inspired Shelley to write a verse drama. Instead of imaginatively entering the passion and atmosphere of the place in search of what Shelley saw or thought, he's analysing his non-relationship with Isabella.

"He thought of something Shelley had written in relation to Epipsychidion: “I think one is always in love with something or the other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is eternal.”

The quote holds a core truth of the novel. Almost everyone in the book is avoiding anything like a meaninful relationship while busy imposing some ideal of their own on someone else, and finding they fall short, and the revisions are strengthening that point.

The Romantics touted strong emotion as the 'real' source of aesthetic experience, but these neo Romantics, who, as Lady Lydia points out, seem to be "at rather a loss," make a career out of completely avoiding anything that smacks of actual emotional involvement. There is much here on the modern engagement/disengagement question but it's well coated with wit and fun and a good helping of Italian light.

That Time Is Past - Snakey Sex, Take One - Glenn Haybittle

The girl entering the olive grove had a shaved head and was dressed in a ragged red ball gown from another century. She carried very attentively a woollen bag of bright colour, swollen with coins that made a heavy fidgeting noise. She stopped suddenly on noting a flicker of movement in the parched grass up ahead. There was a black snake that seemed to be having an epileptic fit. On closer inspection she realised it was two black snakes, entwined, and moving slowly, sometimes in unison, sometimes in conflict, undulating together with sudden whiplash jerkings and leaps off the ground. She saw the open fangs of the snake that seemed to be the aggressor; it made several attempts to bite into its adversary’s sleek black skin just beneath the head. Then she understood that they weren’t fighting; they were copulating. She watched spellbound, following them at a distance as, coiled and lashing together in a fluid double helix, they slithered and gyrated over the bracken and crisp dry grass. There were quiet moments when they were aligned into an almost inseparable writhing unity of wave motion, as if swimming together with their tails gently touching. Then there would be another a sudden thrashing of violent outcry when an electrical charge seemed to bolt through the length of them and toss them up into air, like a rope trick. The girl in the frock spent ten minutes watching them.

Image - snakes mating - www.riverdalefarm.com/
Copyright 1997, COBB Publishing

That Time is Past - Work in progress

“It was Hugh and he’s buried her here in the bloody garden,” he said.
They discussed this possibility for a while. Then they spotted an open upstairs window and, below, a trellis over which spumed an orgasm of wisteria.
When the back door opened and a blaze of light violated the composed shadow patterns of the garden, Felix was about six feet up the fragile wooden scaffolding while Ivan stood below, smoking. Felix, alarmed by the sudden uproarious glare of publicity, lost his footing and tumbled back down to earth.
“It’s only a game,” Ivan explained in Italian to the two watching carabinieri.

http://glennhaybittle.blogspot.com/

Photograph © Andrew Dunn, 8 May 2005.
Website: http://www.andrewdunnphoto.com/

That Time is Past - Those Romantic Young Boys

We're in the process of negotiating for a novel called That Time is Past, by Glenn Haybittle - a comedy about a group of young men hanging out in Italy and fancying themselves the incarnations of Shelley, Byron et al. Glenn says its a novel about men and their deadly romantic projections on the female image. Lady Lydia thinks "Young men seem to be at rather a loss nowadays," and the book is somehow about that. I think it's about love in an age of ennui. Whatever it's about, it's sharp, funny, and devastatingly astute.
Glenn is still revising, and over the next few months we'll be dishing up bits of the process for your consideration. When you form an opinion about what it's about, let us know.


"Are you one of the yacht people?" the man asked in a grave accusatory voice....
"Yacht people? Who are the yacht people?" said Jake, fingering the coral beads on his neck.
"You don't know Isabella?"
"I've only just arrived here."
"You're not a suspect then?" ...
"A suspect?" asked Jake.
"The police think there may be a murderer on the loose."
"I've got no blood on my hands. I've just been sitting here reading about the death of Shelley..."