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The transcript is now available for a previous episode of the RAH! Podcast from the Arts and Humanities Faculty at Manchester Metropolitan University on Creative Encounters with Death. Read while you listen!
The transcript is now available for a previous episode of the RAH! Podcast from the Arts and Humanities Faculty at Manchester Metropolitan University on Creative Encounters with Death. Read while you listen!
Our pilot episode of the RAH! Podcast. Launch date: April 2019
This episode explores Creative Encounters with Death. In particular we explore:
Featuring:
Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.
Rah! Opening Jingle
Matt Foley: Hello, and welcome to the podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University. My name is Matt Foley and I'm lecturer in Modern and Contemporary lecture at Manchester Met. Our podcast will showcase some of the excellent work being done by our students and staff within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. We will produce a themed episode with topics ranging from history, to poetry, to architecture. This month's episode will focus on Creative Death and explore how we can begin to make sense of the most human of all experiences - dying. You can join the conversation on Twitter by hash-tagging #RAH_Podcast.
Rah! Mini Jingle
Matt: First we will hear about Merry cemetery in Romania which invites a unique experience of mourning. Next we will find out about the ‘Encountering Corpses’ project and the upcoming ‘Death and The Sacred’ symposium. We will end the episode by exploring just how death haunts the writing of Anthony Burgess. So, stay tuned.
Rah Mini Jingle
Matt: Here to tell us more about her research on Death Tourism is Rodica Arpasanu - a PhD student and human geography and associate lecturer at MMU. Her PhD research explores cultural variations of contemporary expressions and encounters with mortality and the context of death or dark tourism specifically. Her research investigates if and how modern individuals engage with and reflect upon the idea of death. Their own, or others. Hi, Rodi
Rodica Arpasanu: Hello, nice to meet you.
Matt: Thank you for coming to speak to us today. I was just wondering about how your work intersects with death studies and how you would relate it to death studies more broadly.
Rodica: My research deals mainly with death or dark tourism. But it feeds into this new-found relevance of death because everybody talks about death, right now. And I think in modern society, death is a taboo subject. And on many occasions, you meet people who have a hard time talking about loss and bereavement. And in that sense, death or dark tourism is a venue in which you can encounter mortality. It is a safe environment to have safe conversations, even though sometimes it's a bit controversial as nomenclature or terminology because it's dark and why is it dark, why not named otherwise? So in that sense dark tourism feeds into death studies broadly speaking.
Matt: And can you give us a little bit of detail then about the PhD project that you're you're working on, and I guess your contribution to this area of studying dark tourism?
Rodica: So basically my PhD explores how people from different social cultural contexts deal with the idea of death. So, for example, how they encounter how they reflect and they deem mortality being their own or others through the lens of dark tourism. So, I do this qualitative study which I interview - I have walking interviews with participants with visitors who might visit the cemetery or a former prison or a museum in that respect. And I asked themif that visit stimulates their own reflection on their own death or mortality. So and how does this visit frame their idea of death, if this helps them have a normal conversation on that. So, what I do is to explore the social, the different social context, I do research in a former prison in the Thessaloniki, Greece and also Merry cemetery. So, it's basically a cemetery which also functions as an open-air museum, which people visit because it's it's quite unique. Its very colourful, people buried there in some way talk to the living. Each Cross has an epitaph of 10 to 12 verses and the way they talk about themselves, because epitaphs are expressed the first person so it will be something like:
“I am Rodi, I belong to this family and this is my story, live better than I did” or so there is a moral context to it. But most of the times the stories are happy stories and they have humoristic undertones. So to give you an example, one of the most popular one is the story or the epitaph of the mother-in-law, which explores the stereotype you know, the mother in law who is always chatty and tells off the son-in-law. What is unique about this epitaph is that it is the son-in-law who talks about his mother-in-law. So the epitaph sounds something like this:
“Underneath this heavy cross lies my poor mother in law, three days more, she would have lived I would die and she would read.” So, she was pestering him so much that he doesn't want her to come back to life. So he, he tells you that 'you who are now walking by, do not wake her up please' because if she comes home, she will pester me some more. Unfortunately for him, she lived to be 82 years old. So again, the way that the dead is speaking about themselves is not idealised, it's not romantic, the dead are human beings, they have fault. Many times there a drunkard telling you his story and how he lost and so on.
Matt: And you think it's this personal dimension or this element of representing people in this realistic fashion is that, is that what attracts so many international visitors to the cemetery?
Rodica: I think so because I go to visit cemeteries, not because I have a morbid interest, but I think especially here in England, they are more framed as parks and everything is green, and it's peaceful. And most of the times you see the funeral stones, and you don't really pay attention, but then there is a small angel on, next to a funeral marker and that already captures your attention and you start formulating, imagining the story of that person. So in that respect in the Merry cemetery, the personal element is what attracts people and it also offers an alternative view on death is not green is not white and grey funeral stones is nothing personal. It's somebody who speaks about themselves and the way they frame it, even the locals, the dead want you to be there. I think I have a quote from Terry Pratchett who is one of my favourite authors. He says something that nobody's actually dead until the readers that come in the world die away. So every time a visitor reads the story of a dead person, somehow they come back to life. And they're happy to tell you their story and they leave you with an advice or more.
Matt: The idea of storytelling seems to be what you're exploring. Also, it seems important to your methodology. Can you say a little bit more about the, the idea of the walking interviews and how you arrived at this methodology and how you find that useful for you, for your research and for exploring these attitudes to, to death?
Rodica: Well, a walking interview is, a hybrid type of methodology because it matches or it is a hybrid between observation and interview. So what you basically do is walk with the participants through the cemetery or through a museum or whatever type of social context you want to explore and you allow them to talk naturally about what they encounter, you see that they have different reactions verbal or body reactions, which otherwise they wouldn't be able to talk about in a sitting interview. And then you are prone to ask them or why did you react in that way? Or what is funny? Because you see them smiling or why did you move away from, from that area. So it allows you to have more natural type of interview based on what type of scenery they encounter in, in their environment they explore. So many times, particularly in the Merry cemetery, or also in the prison, I find people touching things, especially in the prison. There are some scribbles on the wall. I don't know if they're real or not, but many times people seem to touch them, because they want to feel more of authenticity of the experience. In a normal interview, you cannot do this you cannot have this effect type of dimension of an experience. So a walking interview helps you with that provide different dimension of an extra
Matt: So these observations are proving really useful in some senses to get a sense of how people are connecting to both place and to ideas about death and around personalised loss.
Rodica: And also broadens the concept of mortality because it's - it's not something that you deal with mentally it’s also a physical reaction to whatever you encounter. So you cry, there’s a physical reaction you cannot explore all the time through interviews, I mean it doesn't allow you to face that reaction. So yes, it is more enriching and more natural in that respect.
Matt: And so we're dealing with obviously personal and sensitive issues. Do you think that dark tourism has an area of controversy or is there controversial elements to this field and what are the debates surrounding dark tourism more, more broadly?
Rodica: This is such a complicated discussion besides the terminology. Dark tourism, many people ask - what is so dark about dark tourism? And Merry cemetery being so colourful just proves that there might not be everything dark about dark tourism. There is also the emotional dimension which not many of the people researching this will talk about. Being in the field, being with people talking about death, it makes you as a researcher think about death. And it impacts you. I remember while reading also or while researching I was to think about my own notion of death or the loss I suffered in my family. So it is controversial in that respect, as a researcher it is enriching, but also it puts you in a sensitive position. Again, dark tourism might be controversial also because of the voyeuristic stigma attached to tourists because people, most of them saying that tourists are superficial visitors that are, they don’t really care they just want to take a picture or selfie with whatever monument and we have so many cases in the media for which they are shamed. But I think every human being has a different way of dealing with death or dealing with the site. And I'm not saying that everybody is perfect, but I think that visitors are also reflecting beings and taking a picture might be their own way of capturing a moment or being part of that experience on death.
Matt: And so these places invite a kind of, a connection even to strangers that are coming in to very personalised ways of remembering the dead, still maybe a universality there, a connection between them.
Rodica: There might be visitors who have a personal interest. So there is an element of understanding or educating yourself about, say the cost of life lost for the freedom we have today. Or there may be an option or an experience of nationhood, something about who you are as a national, as a citizen of a particular country. But thinking of the concentration camps, which is one of the darkest places to go to. It allows you as human beings to understand that things can always go wrong. If you're not always in check. Or if you don't check your potential signs of bigotry you might have inscribed within you, which is very hard to it's hard to admit that we all might discriminate at some point, but this is part of life. So in that sense, going there doesn't teach necessarily about death, and how violent it can be, but can also teach you so many things about life and how we should be and how you should be careful with the living and the political side of things and so on. It's a very beautiful field and rich with areas you can explore.
Matt: And do you think the essence of your research then is looking at these, what you may call ‘happy encounters’ with the dead or with sites of memorialization?
Rodica: I think my research is focused on alternative ways of encountering mortality because the Merry, Merry cemetery might be the happy encounter with death. But thinking of the equally in Thessaloniki, that's not merry. It's more, the narrative there is more about panel reformation because many prisoners there have been political prisoners which were fighting during the electoral dictatorship, different dif- different regiments. They fighting for what they believed and how they thought that democracy should play out in society. So every research side might have a different story is not all happy death or sad death is just alternative views of seeing death.
Matt: There's so many fascinating stories to still be told, I’m sure.
Rodica: Yes, indeed.
Matt: Thank you Rodi so much for joining us.
Rodica: Thank you so much also.
Rah! Mini Jingle
Matt: I'm joined in the studio by Ellie Beal and Craig Young. Ellie Beal lectures in Film and Literature at Manchester Met, where she specialises in theological narrative, religious ritual, and sexuality and the Gothic. Joining us is also Professor Craig Young. He's a Human Geographer with interesting intersection of Place, landscape, History, memory and the politics of identity, particularly as expressed through issues surrounding death, and encounters with a dead body. He is the lead on the Encountering Corpses project. Ellie, I'll start with you. What interests you about the subject of death studies?
Ellie Beal: Well, I guess my interest in death studies comes from primarily being a scholar of the Gothic and what I would describe as a kind of death and decline of religious language and what has become our kind of revival of that sacred language within a post-Christian contemporary society. So my interest, I guess, is in looking at the way in which sacred language, you know, language that circulates around ideas kind of virtue, morality ethic has sort of disintegrated around death, there's a rise of kind of more secular ethic. So I've got kind of an interest in a way in which those things can happen really.
Matt: And what types of conversations does that invite with the sacred in particular?
Ellie: I think it invites idea of like how our notion of the sacred in itself has changed. Do we believe or do we think there is now a secular sacred, you know, the reason why people don't use religious language around death anymore. I don't think that's necessarily directly related to a disintegration in belief, although of course, there are connections, also in the way in which people consider maybe religious language now to be, sort of, too political say, or they simply don't understand it. Other words have replaced that language, and the kind of difference that means in the way in which we kind of express death, the way in which we process it the way in which we grieve and remember, you know, an example being something like you know, the shift from language such as language of sacrifice to language of duty, say, how does that help us? Or how does that negotiate ideas around death for us?
Matt: And what about your own research in the area? Ellie, how would you articulate the particular areas that you, that you work in at the moment in terms of the projects that you're currently undertaking?
Ellie: Well, one of my main interests is religion and theology in the Gothic at large. This is something that has been of interest yet never really fully developed for quite a long time now, it's been sort of an accepted part of the Gothic is, its religious language. But I think now we're starting to rethink those ideas and starting to rethink the kind of theological origins of the Gothic and the way in which the kind of echoes or whispers of that theology still exists within the literature itself. Then that kind of turns my guess on to the sort of the other stage of my reset, which is this fascination with what we now call, or what we're starting to term post-Secularism. Basically interested in the way in which either religious thinking or religious language has - we have turned to thinking about those things, again in contemporary society. And you know how that develops in terms of kind of religion as a political cultural force, but also how it kind of manifests itself in arts and literature.
Matt: That's fascinating and thinking of the cultural imagery surrounding death. I wonder, Craig Young, if you could say a little bit about how your own research looks at death or even the figure of the corpse coming after perhaps, as a Human Geographer?
Craig Young: My initial engagement really was working with a dead body came from field work we were doing in Bucharest, in Romania, and we looked at a particular site, which was a Socialist Mausoleum, and this had been built by the Communist regime in 1963 to create a dedicated space for the selected dead, shall we say, of the regime, those people who are currently in favour or who are in a quite literal way sort of resurrected politically to come back into favour, in subsequent Communist regimes. So we were interested in how the Communist regimes had buried people in this Mausoleum, or quite literally exhumed them from other graveyards, and moved them into this space. And it became a space that the regime used to celebrate the nature of Romanian Communism. So international visitors from other Communist regimes were taken there, there were annual ceremonies and so on, which were about, part of constructing that particular brand of Romanian Communism, which was quite distinct from elsewhere in the region. And then with the Romanian revolution in 1989-1990, of course, the meaning of that space really collapsed quite quickly, and bodies were all moved out by about January 1990 but there was a fairly complex politics of those movements. So from the point of view of a Human Geographer, the kind of initial interest was to think about, whereas we often think of bodies becoming buried as static, as kind of removed from the world in that sense, these bodies were actually really quite highly mobile.
Matt: And you're also leading the really fascinating Encountering Corpses project. So how does that project engage with ideas around the afterlife of the corpse itself or, or the politics?
Craig: Where that project came from really was coming from that research in Romania and then thinking about the fact that again, within Western society at least that death was sequestered from the 18th/19th century onwards as increasingly professionalised. It was medicalized, and to a large extent maybe removed from spaces like the home, for example. But more recently in the literature, there's been arguments around the idea of de-sequestration of death, in that, I suppose Ellie rather like you're talking about, these more secular practices of growing around death and dying, and this in many ways, is part of making it more visible again within society and think of things like death cafe movements, and so on. But the actual corpse itself, it seems to me, was becoming increasingly visible because we think about visits to churches that might have the relics of Saints. So if you think of dark tourism sites, if we think of all the representations of the dead in popular culture, crime dramas, forensics. So on this made me think - okay, what is this about then, in terms of societal changes that we, we are seeing this increased visibility? So the Encountering Corpses project has actually involved quite a broad range of people from death studies, theology, human geography, politics, anthropology, dark tourism, just trying to bring that kind of range of interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on the dead body.
Matt: Ellie, you're organising and leading the symposium in March on Death and the Sacred. Can you tell us a little bit about the ideas that scholars will be exploring in this context?
Ellie: Some of the things that Craig's raised just now is some of the points of interest, I think, at the conference especially those ideas about the way in which we encounter bodies, maybe more often now death is more visible, should we say. But actually are kind of corporeal encounters with the body because it has moved out with things like the domestic space is perhaps lessened and actually our encounters with the corporeal dead body now is something that happens maybe in instances of war, but not necessarily in kind of instances of domestic contemplation as well as, kind of this idea of the body's mobility, the fact that actually, now secular space becomes sacred space in contemporary society because you can scatter ashes, you can hold rites and rituals and memorials wherever you want. So it's both more individualised, and more personal, but it also makes of secular space something sacred, and what that can kind of mean and how, how that mobility either does it make sacred space therefore something that is momentary, or the fact that you can go scatter ashes but you don’t necessarily have to return. It’s not necessarily a visible marker, so the visibility of depth is changed as well in that sense that you don't necessarily have tombstones or gravestones or churches, which sort of signify to people that that's where the end of life can happen, but more so, so can grieving and memorialising, these are all kind of points I think that will be raised more broadly that the conference is just the bringing together of people from the Manchester Gothic Centre and Manchester Met more widely with researchers from other universities and fields. They're all discussing similar ideas or different trends within the idea of death and the sacred. So we've got the talks on social media sarcophagus going on, we've also got Rhodi, who I think's featured in the first part of this segment, she'll be coming to talk about the cultural workings of the Mary cemetery. And we also have a lot of literary contributions as well. So the idea about martyrs and horror, sacred skulls and the Gothic form that's all going to be talked about. And we have some contributions from authors as well, principally from Manchester Met, and they'll be talking about the way in which death and the sacred features in their literature.
Matt: A lot of this work, it seems to me, a lot of this scholarly endeavour, is it about making death visible or the ways in which morning is made visible? Why do you think in our contemporary moment, it's important to talk about death?
Ellie: Well (laughs) it’s inevitable (more laughing).
I guess it is important to talk about death is, because it is you know, it is the one inevitability of life. When, what I find really interesting to come out of the discussion today is this kind of heightened visibility, yet this kind of disintegration of language around it. So is that something that's kind of shifting and changing? And I find that the expression of experience of death now to be something, sort of very different, that is something we encounter visibly, but we don't necessarily still talk about that much. So I think the talking about is the bit that's often missed in society. The idea of the corpse in some way, is being both made more visible and yet more abject in society so, pushed even further to the margins out of domestic spaces, you know, away from church yards. You know, something about a funeral, say, and a church that also culturally signifies that death has happened to a wider society. You don't necessarily have that anymore. Or you do but maybe in different ways through social media, so social media as an act of memorialization, I find really fascinating. So I think all these things are kind of visible but not necessarily talked about.
Matt: And one final question for you both is just where do you imagine that your respective fields will be heading in the coming years? Do you think, just speculatively speaking, there's two or three areas perhaps that you see a development in the scholarly literature that’s coming out at the moment and new focuses for the fields that you're both working in?
Ellie: For me, I think, you know, with this focus on the afterlife of religion is, I think that there will become much more research focused around where that language still exists and what value it is. Does it even express the way in which we feel about certain experiences and events anymore? Is that the reason why we don't discuss religion? Or is it the fact that to a certain degree, you know, secularism in itself an ideology and the fact that no religious language does not serve particular aspects of that ideology? So is it choice? Is it the fact there's an accessibility to it? I think there is going to be more research into where it does manifest and what concerns it manifests around. And those of course, will lead us inevitably to the big concern of death. So I think there'll be sort of increased interest in that area.
Craig: Yeah, and I think very much related to that is an intersection of death, society and technology. So we just had Encountering Corpses four, which was on the theme of digital death, and we looked at death on the internet memorialization, we looked at new technologies around Digital Autopsy tables, and synthetic humans used in training nurses, for example, which could be built into quite immersive simulation exercises around the synthetic human dying. And I think also an emerging area is very much around bodily disposal. So rightly or wrongly, in the death studies community we talk about death, dying, and disposal. But there are a number of quite innovative projects, which kind of mix technology with art with design, to think of new ways of doing the disposal end of things, some of which, for example, use the decay of the corpse and the energy that that releases can be channelled into then creating light. A lot of those things that claim to be innovative also claim to have a, like an environmentally friendly dimension, but I actually find a lot of that very questionable. And I think if you look at quite prosaic things like the pressure on land for burial. What role could these different technologies play in bodily disposal? And what are their environmental potentials really?
Matt: Dr Ellie Beal and Professor Craig Young, thank you very much for your time.
Craig: Thank you.
Ellie: Thank you.
Rah! Mini Jingle
Matt: I think you'll agree that that was all fascinating stuff. In our final segment of today's episode, we will hear from researchers from the Manchester Writing School. And just how the theme of death haunts the rating of Anthony Burgess specifically has lesser known Beard’s Roman Women, in which Burgess explores his experiences of being widowed in the mid-1960s over to Iris and Martin, who are worth Graham Foster from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.
Rah! Mini Jingle
Iris Feint: Hello, my name is Iris Feint. I'm a graduate teaching assistant and a PhD student and specifically interested in blending genres such as dystopias and historical fiction.
Martin Kratz: My name is Martin Kratz. And the reason I'm here I suppose, is because of the work I've done on one of Antony Burgess’s novels about Abba Abba, which we won't talk about today. But we are talking about books which were published around the same time.
Graham Foster: And I'm Graham Foster, I am the publication's officer for the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. I've recently edited and published a new edition of Beards Roman Women, which is one of Antony Burgess’s lesser known novels.
Iris: Thank you very much, Graham. Graham, thank you for being here today. So let's just start. The title of the series is called ‘Creative Death’. How could you relate that to Beard’s Roman Women?
Graham: Well, Beard’s Roman Women is all about death. Basically, that's the subject the core of the narrative, really, it's a retelling of the Orpheus myth, which is also all about death. The Orpheus myth is all about a man who whose wife dies of a snake bite and he goes down to Hades to rescue her from death essentially. And Burgess, with Bears’s Roman Women, takes that myth in ways that he has done before in novels such as A Vision of Battlements, very used Greek myth to tell a story set during the Second World War. Is it obvious that these novels were inspired by Ulysses, which was the Odyssey retold in a modern setting by James Joyce. But with Beard’s Roman Women, he retells the Orpheus myth set in Rome. It's all about a writer whose wife has died of cirrhosis of the liver, but he starts getting mysterious phone calls from his wife when he tries to get on with his life. So Burgess sort of sets it in Rome presents Rome as a sort of purgatory, the main character meets a friend from his past who acts kind of like a psychopomp, which is the Greek word for the guide of the souls. So for example, the ferry man over the River Styx is a psychopomp.
Martin: I'd not thought of Rome as purgatory before, but if you look at kind of a lot of the books written in that period of – it’s the 70s, isn't it? It's kind of
Graham: 75s Yeah.
Martin: It says 75 is Beard’s Roman Women, Abba Abba
Graham: 76
Martin: 76, which is about Keats's last days because he dies in Rome. So that's all about death as well.
Iris: And Puma?
Graham: Puma is 76 too, that's not really about death, but it's the sort of threat of annihilation, I suppose.
Martin: It's a bit about that.
Iris: Just a little bit.
Graham: Ultimately, death is the consequence, but, but the book I think, is about almost the preservation of life rather than the annihilation of it.
Martin: And then that all ends eventually. I’m trying to think, which is the book that kind of concludes that period. The other books that are published in that 70s, the Bonaparte book,
Graham: That’s 74 I think.
Martin: Napoleon Symphony, so that kind of kicks that off, there’s quite a lot of death, yeah.
Graham: Actually M/F is the one that I really think kicks off. He writes a series of books that are inspired in part by classical literature, and they’re kind of experimental books as well. So you've got a M/F, which is the most sort of obviously experimental book and he wrote that in 1971. He followed that with Napoleon Symphony, which is extremely experimental. It's a sort of retelling of the Prometheus myth set or structured around Beethoven's Eroica, but it tells the biography of Napoleon. So that is an insanely experimental novel. And I think Beard’s Roman Women, even though it's short, it is part of this sort of creative project.
Martin: Because also the original Beard’s Roman Women was published with photographs. Is that right?
Graham: Yeah, yeah.
Martin: So that's, again, kind of got that experiment. Like there's different genres kind of meeting or different modes. And
Graham: Yeah, and, and the new edition has the photos in it. They're all in colour this time, which they weren't in the original first edition. We work very closely with the photographer who's still with us. I actually met him the other day. He's an American guy called David Robinson. His photographs are all about Rome reflected in puddles or windows and it sort of gives a ghostly quality to the imagery in the book.
Iris: And why was the title changed from, was it Rome in the Rain originally?
Graham: Well, we haven't really got to the bottom of this Burgess’s favourite title was Rome in the Rain that was published in pretty much every other market, every other language as Rome in the Rain.
Iris: I think it’s the better title.
Graham: I don't think you will be alone in that. (Laughter) But I think the American publishers suggested Beard’s Roman Women would be a, I don't know a sexier title or something like that. I don't think Burgess really fought. I think he just sort of said, okay, whatever. But we kept it as Beard’s Roman women, because the Orwell edition which this volume is a part of is all about restoring the text to the first edition and as the first edition was called Beard’s Roman Women, we decided to keep that title.
Iris: And Martin, did you make an interesting connection between Rome and Manchester?
Martin: Well, I always thought that Rome in the Rain was another way of describing Manchester as a kind of Rome in the rain. But that's to do with the fact that Burgess is sort of, he's in Rome, but he's preoccupied, in my head at least I think this tallies with what Graham was saying about a figure from his past coming up in Beard’s Roman Women to guide him through this, is that he's very preoccupied with his childhood. Abba Abba is full of figures of the boy. And the translations he has are in Roman dialect which he tries to translate into a Manchester accent which is the accent of his youth. So maybe that does also link to death. It does seem to me that that's consistent in that period. I do think actually death does come up again and get, I mean Keats the kind of really obvious one because he's on
Graham: Yeah,
Martin: death’s door.
Graham: that's, I think thing is less about childhood and more about almost, certainly Beard’s Roman Women anyways, more about saying goodbye to a part of his life. So in 1968, Burgess’s first wife died of cirrhosis of the liver, like the character in the novel, and that was at the beginning, in the spring of 1968. And then towards the end of 1968. In about November time, he remarried and moved to Malta and he never lived in England again permanently. And I think Beard’s Roman Women, which you know, is seven years after leaving England seven years after his wife died as a way of processing a life he shared, 26 years of a life he shared with his wife in which he became the man he was. He became a writer. He wrote his first novels, he experienced the Far East in Malaysia and Brunei. And I think these were formative experiences that he couldn't quite let go of. So the friend Beard meets in their Beard’s Roman Women is part of that colonial existence. And I think it's a way of Burgess processing his feelings about that loss in a fictional form, and his marriage wasn't sort of conventionally happy. He talks about it in his autobiographies in very sort of flippant ways, but there is evidence in the Burgess foundation archives that actually it was quite a tender marriage with sort of codes of communication and humour. We found a notebook with limericks between each of Lynn who was Burgess’s wife and Burgess. They wrote each other funny limericks and it's quite a sort of private and tender thing which Burgess doesn't really give credit for now, I think Beard’s Roman Women is a way of sort of processing all of these mixed feelings of his first marriage.
Martin: What does he say? Is it in Beard’s Roman Women where he says something like every widower is a murderer.
Graham: Yeah, I mean that, that actually comes up for the first time in Time for a Tiger, his first novel. So Victor Crab in that novel has driven his car into a canal and killed his wife in an accident, I should say. But he says he feels like a murderer. It's always the, the person left behind feels like a murder.
Martin: On that note.
Iris: Thank you, Graham.
Graham: Thank you.
Iris: And thank you, Martin.
Martin: Thank you Iris.
Iris: Thank you. And you're welcome.
Rah! Mini Closing Jingle
Matt: And that brings our Creative Death Rah! podcast episode to a close. Thank you for listening. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates. You can find us at @mmu_RAH. For more information and all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the RAH! website for full links. Tune back in soon for more episodes about architecture, music, and poetry.
Rah! Closing Jingle
Matt: The Rah! podcast was produced by Lucy Simpson, edited by Ben Stott and mixed by Julian Holloway. I'm your presenter, Matt Foley.