Tag: The Dark Trilogy

Some would argue that no genre is more fictitious than a biography

Post author By Chris
Post date November 5, 2022
1 Comment on Some would argue that no genre is more fictitious than a biography

So said Carlos Ruiz Zafon – it is the lead quotation at the beginning of Book I. In an interview recently published in Poetry Wales, the poet Tim Relf says: “I don’t believe any of us are reliable narrators of events, even to ourselves. My latest collection Same Difference returns to that idea in various forms: how our life is what the novelist Julian Barnes refers to as ‘the story we have told ourselves’.”

I have tried, in The Dark Trilogy, to blend the story that I have told myself about myself, about my life, with an older history that might have been mine. Once. I have dived into the depths of one of my poems and surfaced with far more than I had dreamt was in the lines. ‘Retrospective’ – the poem in Mostly Welsh (Y Lolfa, 2019) that became ‘Dark Ashes’ – was avowedly autobiographical of a part of my life but I never wrote a second, older, life into those lines. Or so I thought! In taking on the role of my own editor and critic in Books I and III of The Trilogy, I allowed the possibility of there being more behind the 326 lines of the poem than I had been conscious of. A second story. A second – older – life. So there are two biographies in Book I. And at least one of them – the one to which Book II adds – is true.

But memory is a curious thing! As some past event is recounted for the first time a small fact – the colour of a dress or the positioning of a piece of furniture in a grandparent’s house – might be added, perhaps hesitantly, doubtingly, in error… but in the very act of speaking about the event that erroneous image is cemented into the memory – fixed to the extent that on subsequent retellings the blue dress is there, in the picture, as your mother stood in front of her parent’s sideboard. And now there is no question in your mind that you are describing things as they really were! An autobiography is the curated sum of our imagined memories.

In The Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett wrote “You don’t put yourself into what you write; you find yourself there.”

Tags Alan Bennett, Austin Macauley, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Chris Armstrong, Mostly Welsh, The Dark Trilogy, Tim Relf

Fiction

The Dark Trilogy: Agon

So, a beginning. The agon, that conflict of my personae, that conflict of my characters. Today the wind has been blowing from the west and the rain, which has kept me from the little garden surrounding my cottage for the past week, continues on and off: then it was sunny… As I drove slowly along the country roads towards home, through the leafy shades, between the high hedges and patches of sunlight, past hamlets and villages, my mind ran back to the many times I had passed this way before. Times almost half a century ago when …

Tags Austin Macauley, Chris Armstrong, The Dark Trilogy

Fiction

Enough said!

Can’t really fault their advice so I thought I would pass it on!

Tags Austin Macauley, Chris Armstrong, The Dark Trilogy

Fiction Poetry

Innocent

If you read about me on the back cover of The Dark Trilogy, you will discover that once – for some ten years or so – I sailed the seas:

Sailor and librarian, navigator and researcher, teacher and trainer, and—always—a traveller: Chris Armstrong has had three careers, working as a merchant seaman…

Book II of the Trilogy explores my first faltering years at sea: young, innocent, at sea in more ways than one, working on a ship where it seemed that everyone knew so much more than I did! I once wrote a poem about joining my first ship:

Innocence

The London mist wets the docks and the decks
of my first ship on the day that I join;
I am alone at the rail: there are barges, a tug

of loneliness in my chest. This sea,
the sea in the docks, is dirty brown
rainbow oily, scummed with ship droppings,

a lone plank of timber floating like a lost
surfboard – I think of the sun on Gower waves.
I left home young and immediately

uncompanioned by strangers, was lost
to all they knew, drowning in the isolation
of my new-learned bewilderment

wondering if I shall ever know the pleasure
of girls’ bodies as their talk suggest they do.
Loaded, this ship is as empty as my soul

Book II of The Trilogy – a play for voices – begins:

Imagine: This is how it begins… It is early Spring, it is afternoon: dismal dock drizzle hazes everything beneath each yellow damp lampglow and dulls the docker din and the winch whine as cargo is loaded. A smell that is a mixture of the salt sea, old oil, steam, old and filthy dock water, smoke from the barge tugs, sweat and stale beer is held down against the ground by the wet mist…

They have travelled by train, by underground and finally by taxi to get here: his mother and his father guiding him for the last time – guiding him through a geography he does not yet know. All of his life, they have guided him, directed him, helped him, pushed him, and now their time is at an end. Neither the boy nor they have recognised this change…

Tags Austin Macauley, innocence, leaving home, The Dark Trilogy

Fiction Poetry

Introducing Trystan Lewis, poet

Post author By Chris
Post date October 31, 2022
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In The Dark Trilogy, Trystan Lewis the poet, my fictional alter ego, has his work and his life examined through the critical lens of his scholarly friend and editor. Trystan’s scholarly childhood – lifelong – friend knows him so well! So well that in explaining the poem at the heart of the story he puts Trystan’s life and his writing under a microscope! As only he could! And he finds that there is so much to tell… as you will discover in the partly fictional autobiography that makes up the first book of the Trilogy. And in analysing the poem and setting it amongst other poems by the poet – many of which, including some unpublished works, are quoted in the book – the scholar also finds a hidden story, one that the poet did not realise he had told. So the book holds two life stories displaced by several hundred years, histories which interweave and come together in the Welsh mountains in the present day.