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Pompton Plains, New Jersey by Jasper Francis Cropsey, 1867

Peter Cameron was born in Pompton Plains, New Jersey in 1959 and grew up there and in London, England. He spent two years attending the progressive American School in London, where he discovered the joys of reading, and began writing stories, poems, and plays. Cameron graduated from Hamilton College in New York State in 1982 with a B.A. in English Literature.

He sold his first short story to The New Yorker in 1983, and published ten more stories in that magazine during the next few years. This exposure facilitated the publication of his first book, a collection of stories titled One Way or Another, published by Harper & Row in 1986. One Way or Another was awarded a special citation by the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Book of Fiction. In 1988 Cameron was hired by Adam Moss to write a serial novel for the just-launched magazine 7 Days. This serial, which was written and published a chapter a week, became Leap Year, a comic novel of life and love in New York City in the twilight of the 1980s. It was published in 1989 by Harper & Row, which also published a second collection of stories, Far-flung, in 1991.

Beginning in 1990, Cameron stopped writing short fiction and turned his attention toward novels. His second novel, The Weekend, was published in 1994 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which also published a third novel, Andorra, in 1997. FSG published Cameron’s fourth novel, The City of Your Final Destination, in May 2002.  A new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, was published by FSG in September of 2007.  His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

A film version of The Weekend, written and directed by Brian Skeet and starring Gena Rowlands and Brooke Shields, was released in 2000. Ovie has optioned the film rights to Andorra and plan to produce a film with a screenplay written by Cameron; Merchant Ivory Productions is preparing a film version of The City of Your Final Destination, to be directed by James Ivory from a screenplay written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Cameron counts among his strongest influences the novels of British women writers such as Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, Penelope Mortimer, and Elizabeth Taylor. He admires these writers for their elegant and accomplished use of language and their penetrating and sensitive exploration of personal life. He also admires the writing of the late William Maxwell for its natural elegance and deeply-felt humanity. Shirley Hazzard, James Salter, and Denton Welch are also revered.

After arriving in New York City in 1982, Cameron worked for a year in the subsidiary rights department of St. Martin’s Press. Upon realizing he did not want to pursue a career in publishing, he began doing administrative work for non-profit organizations. From 1983 – 1988, and from 2005 -2008 he worked for The Trust for Public Land, a land-conservation organization, and from 1990 – 1998 he worked for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a legal organization that protects and extends the civil rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS. In 1987 he taught writing at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and from 1990 – 1996 he taught in the MFA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts. From 1998 - 2005 he taught in Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program. He taught at Yale University in the fall of 2005.  In March 2005 his first play, A Thing of the Past, was read at Lincoln Center Theater by a cast including Marian Seldes and Estelle Parsons. A new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2007.

For the past twenty-five years, Cameron has lived on Tenth Street, in Greenwich Village.

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Denton Welch, Dolls' House, 1783

 

rose macaulay

Many contemporary devotees of Rose Macaulay’s fiction were, like me, undoubtedly seduced by the first sentence of her last novel, which felicitously (and now somewhat famously) combines the words “Aunt Dot,” “camel,” and “High Mass.” “’Take my camel dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” The effervescence of that opening sentence is sustained throughout all of The Towers of Trebizond, which Macaulay published in 1956, two years before her death. It’s her best and best-known novel, a hybrid compilation of her favorite themes: romance, antiquity, religion, and travel. It’s lovely, enlightening, and heartbreaking, and happily for those who find themselves charmed by Macaulay’s last book, it was preceded by twenty-two novels written over half a century. Many of these earlier novels are now, like Trebizond, being reissued by assorted publishers. They are well worth seeking out.

dangerous ages

Rose Macaulay’s writing life spanned two world wars and the dissolution of the British Empire. While a sentence of early Macaulay is as distinctly composed as her vintage work, the novels deepen and darken over decades. Her first book, Abbots Verney, was published in 1906;the author was twenty-five. She quickly established herself as a popular satirical novelist and published seventeen novels before 1930. Dangerous Ages, written in 1921, is worth noting, for its central concerns make it something more than an entertainment. Four generations of women in the Hilary family attempt to cope with the dangerous ages at which they find themselves. There is Grandma at eighty-four, contentedly awaiting the end of her life, living with her daughter, Mrs. Hilary, a vain, unoccupied sixty-year-old who finds with her children grown and her husband that she has lost “the only work she fitted for and interested in.” She turns in her despair to Freudian psychoanalysis, although she firmly believes that analysts “have only one idea, and that is a disgusting one.” Her daughter Neville, at forty, finds herself similarly discomforted by life. With her two bright and beloved children off at university and her ambitious civil-servant husband Rodney busy pursuing his career, Neville decides to return to her studies and apply to medical school, only to find her once-brilliant brain curiously atrophied. Her younger sister, Nan, an independent unmarried novelist, finds she has strung her socialist boyfriend along for too long: just when she is ready to commit, he falls in love with Neville’s daughter, Gerda, a liberated woman of twenty.

camel

Dangerous Ages succeeds best as a series of portraits, an examination of women redefining themselves in the twentieth century. Macaulay has the ability to imbue all her characters, even the ones the reader and she both know are inferior, with specific humanity. Mrs. Hilary, for example, is stupid and intolerant, yet because Macaulay has made the effort to show the reader why this woman is under-realized, she becomes oddly endearing. And it is surprising and heartening to find an accepting, understated portrait of a lesbian couple (Neville’s other sister Pam and her “devoted friend” Frances) in a commercial novel of this era. There are very few stick or stock characters in Macaulay’s work and no villains. The author’s magnanimity is as keenly felt as her intelligence.

staying with relations

The complexity of characters is given a witty turn in Staying With Relations, a larky book written in 1930. Catherine Grey, “a young female, and, like so many females, a novelist,” journeys from her native Much Potten, England to the New World to lecture on the “Creation of Character in Fiction.” She eventually ends up visiting her aunt and assorted relatives at their baroque villa deep in the Guatemalan jungles. Immediately upon arrival Catherine, diligent novelist that she is, composes a little character sketch of each of her housemates, smugly commenting to herself “How interesting people are, all so like themselves, and all different from one another. I could put them all on paper, right away…” But the action of the novel, which includes a kidnapping, an earthquake, and a chase up the Baja Peninsula, proves Catherine very wrong in her preconceptions. She ends the book realizing what Macaulay knew all along: “How can one know what people are like? …Perhaps one can never know; perhaps people are uncapturable, and slip away like water from one’s hand changing all the time.”

Staying with Relations has a silly plot but it’s not an entirely silly book. The situation and characters are all country-house-weekend, but the tropical location of this particular country house liberates Macaulay from the tight elegance that often characterizes the genre. Her writing is sensual and ripe; she is intoxicated by the exotic and her facility as a travel writer is evidenced by her description of the weather, flora, and fauna of the jungle. Yet there is underlying darkness in this sunny book: the impetus for all the action is a man’s doomed (and mutual) love for his wife’s step-cousin (a situation Macaulay well understood, having endured a long and tortuous affair with a married man). And while there is much clever repartee, there are also several very touching dialogues about the vagaries of love and religion.

they were defeated

Macaulay’s next book was a great departure from Staying With Relations. She indulged her passion for, and considerable knowledge of, seventeenth-century England by writing a historical novel. They Were Defeated, originally published in 1932, is justifiably often referred to as a tour-de-force, recreating as it does, in exquisite (and exhaustive) detail, the texture of life and language in the year 1640. It juxtaposes the political and religious unrest leading to the Civil War with the intellectual and sexual maturation of its young heroine, Julian Conybeare. It also celebrates the poets and poetry of its time, with John Milton, Robert Herrick, John Cleveland, and Abraham Cowley all figuring as characters. It’s an ambitious book that demands an ambitious reader. With most of Macaulay’s books the reader enters and is effortlessly swept forward; reading They Were Defeated is a bit like swimming upstream. But if one works, one is rewarded by feeling almost eerily immersed in another century, besides enjoying what is a miraculous recreation of the language and diction of an earlier age.

aunt dot

What this book most lacks is Macaulay’s distinctive (and often interruptive) authorial presence, which she exercises frequently and delightfully in her other novels. (An example from Staying With Relations: “Her aunt came with her to her room, to perform that hostess’s duty called seeing that she had everything she wanted, as if anyone ever had this, particularly on visits.” Of course such a voice has no place in the seventeenth-century, and is rightfully excluded, but appreciative readers of her other novels may feel a bit cheated by the generic narrator of They Were Defeated. Macaulay’s authorial voice is addictive, and when it is merged with a first-person narrator, as it is in The Towers of Trebizond, the result is extraordinarily reader-friendly.

the world my wilderness

Macaulay suffered greatly during the World War II. Her house in London was badly bombed, and both her sister and the married man she had long loved died. She suffered from illness and depression, and wrote no novels between 1940 and 1950, when, at the age of sixty-nine, she published her penultimate novel, The World My Wilderness. It is a beautiful and frightening book about the way civilizations almost imperceptibly extinguish themselves. Its (unsubtly named) heroine, Barbary, is a young English girl who comes of age participating in the French Resistance. Her indolent, sensual mother Helen had divorced her civil-servant husband, Sir Gulliver Deniston, before the war to marry a French man of dubious morals, great charm, and considerable wealth. Helen takes Barbary with her to France, removing her from England and civilization, allowing her to mature in the wilderness of occupied France. The book begins with the war’s conclusion and follows the battle Barbary’s parents wage over her: her father exercises his paternal rights and requests her to return to England to be civilized; Barbary returns unwillingly and discovers a second wilderness in the bombed-out ruins surrounding St. Paul’s Cathedral. “Here, its cliffs and chasms and caves seem to say, is your home: here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world, and here your feet are set; here you find the irremediable barbarism that comes up from the depth of the earth, and that you have known elsewhere.”

Despite the efforts of Sir Gulliver and his prototypical Sloane Ranger second wife Pamela, Barbary fails to be repatriated. She fails as a citizen of this decorous new world and in her failure one senses the larger failure of civilization. This new world, Macaulay seems to be saying, is a world without grace and perhaps without God: the ruined churches of London “gaped like lost myths, and the jungle pressed in on them.” When Barbary is asked if she is religious, she replies, “No. But I believe in Hell.”

high mass

Religion – or the lack of it – is a topic in all these novels. Macaulay’s characters are either devout or agnostic or somewhere on the sliding scale between; rarely are they apathetic. Macaulay, an Anglican with Catholic tendencies, abandoned the Church entirely as result of her love affair and returned only after that affair’s demise. Like most religious intellectuals, hers was a complicated faith. She was always trying to find her niche in that confusing hierarchy of Anglicanism, and much of this spiritual quest is chronicled in Letters to a Friend and Last Letters to Friend, two volumes of posthumously published correspondence Macaulay wrote to Father Hamilton Johnson, an American Anglican priest and distant cousin. “Protestants and Catholics,” she wrote in Staying with Relations, “always seem so like one another. I don’t know what they find to dispute about. It’s like right and wrong: there’s some difference, but one always forgets what it is.”

rose macaulay

Reading Macaulay’s books makes the world seem a large, sun-flooded, only occasionally menacing place. Like the best novelists, Rose Macaulay has an assured understanding of life; her constant travels, her evolving faith, her amazing intellect all combine to illuminate her work. A character in The World My Wilderness tells her son what she looks for in women friends, and her prescription seems to me a very apt description of Rose Macaulay: “I like them clever, curious about life, able and apt to speculate and discuss, not too solemn, funny, knowing about something, or a little about things in general, skeptical, witty, bawdy if they like, firsthand, free.”

This appreciation of Rose Macaualy was orginally published in Bostonia Magazine, edited by Keith Botsford, November/December, 1990