Writers are always being asked where the idea for a particular book came from. With my first two novels I can pretty much pinpoint the exact moment I had the idea, and the path it followed from inspiration to fully-worked-out plot. With The Various Flavours of Coffee it’s a bit different. In fact, it probably all goes back to a red velvet smoking jacket I wore when I was sixteen.
I remember that jacket well. At the time I fancied myself a bit of a punk – skinny bright-red Pepe jeans, orange hair, earring (the clip-on kind: I was always rather a lukewarm anarchist) and of course my favourite leopard-skin T-shirt. Then I inherited some clothes from a deceased great-uncle. Amongst the mouldy suits and bits of wartime uniform – in 1977, even punks for some reason coveted blue RAF greatcoats – there was a remarkable garment, an even mouldier smoking jacket made out of crushed red velvet. It looked like something my great-uncle had inherited from one of his own deceased forebears.
I put it on. To my amazement, it kind of fitted. And it looked – well, rather good. There was an inner pocket into which one could imagine slipping a thin silver tray of oval Turkish cigarettes, as well as a long thin pocket which was probably for a pen but which I fancied might have been designed to accommodate a silver cigarette holder. In such a jacket one could imagine tossing epigrams into the conversation with a certain practised, weary melancholy. One could imagine discussing Art, and Beauty, and the nature of Sorrow . . . In short, one turned pretty much instantly into a watered-down Oscar Wilde. A few Aubrey Beardsley prints, a copy of The Portrait of Dorian Grey to replace my battered copy of Sartre’s Words, some Turkish cigarettes, and suddenly I had a completely new personality to play with. I was pretty much insufferable for the next six months . . . actually, looking back, I was pretty insufferable for most of the next six years, although the precise nature of my insufferability may have shifted around a bit.
The point is that, for a short while at least, I had felt the heady allure of Aestheticism. Most writers go through a bit of an aesthetic phase; thankfully, most soon grow out of it. But I always wondered what it must have been like for the people who were actually there – if the lure of epigrams and poses were hard for me to resist a hundred years later, how much harder must it have been for those who were around Wilde, Beardsley and co at the time? And somewhere in my mind I tucked away the idea of a young aesthete who is forced to grow up – who, in E. M. Forster’s delectable phrase, learns to drink the Wine of Life from the Teacup of Experience.
Books aren’t usually one idea. Just like human conception, usually it’s the collision of two fertile ideas that results in some kind of magic taking place – an organism that splits, subdivides, replicates and grows, the outline of various features slowly becoming clearer as the story takes shape . . . So it was with The Various Flavours of Coffee. I was thinking about Love – as one does, or at least as a novelist who likes to write big passionate stories with a modern relevance does: Love is the universal subject that, when you get it right, everyone wants to read about. And it occurred to me to write about the relationship between an aesthete and someone who was the very opposite: a political idealist, say, a suffragette: someone who believes passionately in changing the world rather than in just commenting sardonically on it.
It was round about that time I read somewhere about people who ‘cup’, or taste, coffee, in much the same way that wine experts taste wine. Different coffees, I read, show different characteristics on the palate, and a coffee connoisseur can distinguish between the bright, acidic coffees of central Africa and the earthy, chocolaty coffees of South America with a single sniff, just as a master of wine can identify claret or burgundy from smelling a cork. I have always loved placing my characters in the midst of some sensual, foodie world, and the coffee business seemed like just such an opportunity. Somehow these thoughts came together – and, as they grew, they took human shape: the figure of a young man, a would-be poet, in the year 1900 . . . and his opposite number, the daughter of a coffee merchant. And then one of the figures I had created slipped on a red velvet smoking jacket and tossed an epigram into the conversation with a certain weary, practised melancholy, and I realised that he was actually rather familiar . . .
Posted 18/11/2008 10:44:31 by Anthony Capella with 0 comments.
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