Death and the Seaside

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Nick Royle for prompting me to write the short story ‘The Harvestman’, a reworking of which became a key part of Death and the Seaside. Thanks to Nick too for the loan of his busker, and, with his Salt hat on, for his finely honed editing skills. Thanks to Salt’s Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery for their patience and for being, as ever, a real pleasure to work with. Thanks to John Oakey for magicking-up another striking and fabulous cover design. Thanks to Dan for being my other half, for not showing any signs of boredom during the many read-throughs and discussions, for sterling editing and for helping me to find the right ending. Thanks to my son Arthur, for loving stories and for not minding that I sometimes have my head in the clouds. I am also grateful to Andrew Harrison at the University of Nottingham for all his support and encouragement.

I am grateful for the following permissions, and informal blessings, to quote or reprint material:

Some parts of Bonnie’s Seatown story appeared in the short story ‘The Harvestman’, published by Nightjar Press in 2015.

‘The death of the author’, Roland Barthes, in Modern Criticism and Theory, 3rd edition, edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, page 313, published by Pearson Education Ltd, 2008, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis.

‘There is inspiration everywhere — you just need to train yourself to notice it.’ © Tania Hershman, 2015, Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

In chapter 5, I have used extracts from:

The World According to Garp © 1976 John Irving, by permission of the author and The Cooke Agency.

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch © 1978, published by Chatto & Windus.

Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, published by Peirene Press.

The Sea by John Banville, published by Picador.

Learning to Swim by Graham Swift, published by Picador. Both the quotation acknowledged within the text in chapter 5, and the line ‘dissolved, as a mirage dissolves’ in chapter 19, are borrowed from the story ‘Learning to Swim’.

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton (Copyright © Patrick Hamilton, 1941) Reprinted by permission of A.M. Heath & Co Ltd.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, published by Penguin Books.

The Outsider by Albert Camus, translated by Stuart Gilbert. This translation first published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 1946, published in Penguin Books 1961. Page 63: ‘But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back’, and page 115: ‘if you don’t die soon, you’ll die one day’. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

‘And if death had come her way it was no more than she had asked for. She had gone to meet him halfway.’ Reproduced from The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble (Copyright © Margaret Drabble 1996) by permission of United Agents LLP (www.unitedagents.co.uk) on behalf of Dame Margaret Drabble.

In chapter 11, I have used extracts from:

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century © Lauren Slater, 2004, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, published by Penguin. www.continuum-concept.org.

Social Theory and Social Structure by Robert K. Merton, published by Free Press.

Could Do Better: School Reports of the Great and the Good, edited by Catherine Hurley, published by Simon & Schuster.

Atkinson/Atkinson/Smith/Hilgard. Introduction to Psychology, 9E. © 1987 South-Western, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission. www.cengage.com/permissions

The passage about Benjamin Libet is taken from a New Scientist article, ‘The Grand Delusion’ by Graham Lawton. © 2011 Reed Business Information Ltd, England. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

In chapter 12, ‘with the salt wind from the sea’ is from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, published by Virago and reproduced with the permission of Curtis Brown.

In chapter 13, the poet heard talking on the radio is Ross Sutherland, www.rosssutherland.co.uk, who was talking on BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts.

In chapter 17, I have quoted from Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown. Published by Transworld. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

The Alan Sillitoe story mentioned in chapter 18 is ‘A Time to Keep’, and the extract is reproduced with the permission of Ruth Fainlight.

The epigraph preceding chapter 21 is from The Hotel New Hampshire © 1981 Garp Enterprises, Ltd, by permission of the author and The Cooke Agency.

I have also quoted from The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840 by Alain Corbin, translated by Jocelyn Phelps, published by Penguin; The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft; and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey. The line ‘I am the master of my fate’ is from ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley. The line ‘and underneath is everything we don’t know and are afraid of knowing’ is from D. H. Lawrence’s essay ‘New Mexico’. The short film The Death of Tom is by the artist Glenn Ligon. The ‘old silent film’ whose intertitles are quoted is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Famous Players-Lasky, 1920). Bonnie’s reference to the still life by Cézanne is a combination of D. H. Lawrence’s description in ‘Introduction to These Paintings’, Late Essays and Articles: ‘Walls twitch and slide, chairs bend or rear up a little, cloths curl like burning paper’, and the description in Janson’s History of Art: ‘Cézanne took these liberties with reality’. The reference to ‘Stan Laurel, who was always in some kind of trouble, some kind of foolish danger’ is a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s observation of the ‘terrible tragedy’ of Laurel and Hardy, who ‘are in terrible danger all the time. They could so easily be killed’. The Rough Guide volume mentioned is Women Travel. The parkour expert referred to is Daniel Ilabaca, co-founder of the World Parkour and Freerunning Federation. The lines ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea’, ‘Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonnie to me’ and ‘Last night as I lay on my pillow … Last night as I lay on my bed … Last night as I lay on my pillow … I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead’ are from the folk song ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’.