Brian Stanford Talks Somerville

10 May 2011

Somerville

Brian Stanford makes his literary debut with his novel Somerville, which blends fiction with historical fact.

I caught up with the author to talk about the novel, his inspiration behind the book and what lies ahead with him.

* Somerville is your new novel so can you tell me a little bit about it?

Well I’m an art historian and I got very interested in the period of the Second World War and the taking of pieces of art and so on by the Nazis from Jewish people particularly, but other people as well that weren’t Jewish and selling some of it to make money to make bombs, or whatever they wanted to do at that time.

There was a big auction in Lucerne in Switzerland just before the war started where they were selling of works that they had basically stolen - they were selling for nothing nobody was buying them because no one wanted to touch them and some people bought there own works back.

The novel is based on the idea of what happened to a lot of this material that were stolen by the Nazis, some of them started to appear around the 1070’s on the auction rings and it was very strange because people who had them didn’t like the idea of putting them up for auction because people were recognizing them and wanted them back.

So there were a number of trials about these works at that time so it has been going on for a long time - in fact there are still things missing and still there are people out there looking for them.

So it’s about a historical event but it’s a semi-thriller I suppose.

* Has you academic background been an asset to you while writing the book -one review I read suggested that it was a great strength of the novel?

Well I have been teaching for a very long time and so I know quite a lot about it, and my field in art history is modern art - so it all starts just before impressionism all the way up to pop art. So I know quite a lot about that period, not because I am super smart but because it is my field, and I have always been interested in it.

There is a fantastic book that I used for it, for research, it’s called the Rape of Europa by Lynn H. Nicholas and it’s about this whole period of the stealing of works of art, primarily to star with Jewish families before it stretched to any other kind of family.

I was interested in the question ’what were the Nazis trying to do by selling off some of the things that they had confiscated? Well they were trying to make money for bombs and poisonous gasses and whatever and I wondered well how do you bargain for those kinds of things?

Of course Switzerland is known for pharmaceuticals, this is pure fiction, and because the Swiss are connected with the selling of confiscated things, the auction in Lucerne, I thought lets use pharmaceuticals and what would happen if the Nazis if the wanted to swap very valuable paintings for pharmaceuticals? Would this work?

The whole idea of it seemed to make sense that this could possibly have been done, I don’t know if it ever was. As far as I’m concerned my book is complete fiction, well not complete because there are some historical notes in there, but this part is completely fiction that there might be a rogue pharmaceutical company, the Germans needed pharmaceuticals because it was war time and they were prepared to swap painting that they had stolen from various people, including their own people.

So that was the background for it and then things started to appear in the market during the 1970’s that turned out to have been stolen during the war - there was quite a speight of this for while but then it died down again because people who had works that were stolen didn’t want to put them on the market because they could see that people were recognising them and claiming them.

It seemed, to me, like there was the possibility for a novel, kind of a slightly academic novel I suppose, and I had in this book a group of people from Cambridge who were either art historians or other things, one is a lawyer, and they have been following this trail since the war, a couple older member of the group were involved in trying to reclaim stolen properties for Jewish people.

And it comes up to the 1990’s when a faculty member at a college in Cambridge is murdered, his body floats in the River Cam in Cambridge, and he was part of the group who was researching what might have happened to stolen properties, who might have them and where were they appearing in auctions.

* Apart from your own knowledge in this area what sort of research did you do into the Nazi regime and this time period?

If you are doing art history in that period then you are dealing with the Nazis as well, I have read quite a lot about the Nazis and so on, and there use of paintings, at first they started to burn the stuff; there was this huge bonfire in Munich were some wonderful paintings were loaded on the ground and burnt, so they destroyed quite a large amount of stuff. Then they realised that this is stupid and they started selling it - that did actually happen so it’s not totally fiction.

It’s a story of a group of people, who are completely fictional as for as I’m concerned, who get embroiled in this other stuff that is factual - I don’t know if people died or were killed later on; but later on in the book I have this younger guy who is at an auction in New York and sees a painting that he knows belonged to his father, it was stolen by the Nazis, and he starts making lots of noise at the auction house.

Two days later he is killed crossing a round in New York, he is actually killed in the hospital he’s not killed in the road; he is hit by a car that didn’t stop and taken to hospital where he is killed.

And this is the first of a number of accidents, well they are not accidents but planned attacks on people who are beginning to question the ownership of things appearing in auction, and it escalates.

And it looks as if there are people who are trying to stop this group from doing what they were doing and it got quite nasty.

* The central character Adam Locke is an art history professor so how much is the character based on yourself?

On no not at all, he is much smarter than myself. It’s an ambiance than I know about and I know the inside of universities as well as outside lecturing - it’s art of me as I have been an academic for all of my working life. But I am much older than Adam Locke in the novel.

* This is your debut novel so how did you find the whole experience?

Well it’s something that I have always wanted to do and, in fact, I wrote this book, initially, nine or ten years ago but I ended up with a thousand pages, which was too long. I had people in London who were interested in publishing it if I could hack it down to half the size - at the time I tried to do that but I felt that I was wrecking what I had so I stopped.

So some years later I started again but in the States it has been in process of being published for two years so it has been a long process.

* Well you have touched on my next question really the literary world is quite cut throat with many novels falling by the wayside so how easy/or difficult a process was it getting the novel published?

It wasn’t very difficult as it was a company in the States who publish anything they think is worth publishing and you pay for it basically. I had quite a lot of contacts with publishers in Britain and I had some very nice things said about the book but they seemed to think that it was too long and too heavy for it to be really saleable in that form.

But as I started to hack around with it it seemed to lose to me, I suppose I was looking at it in too much of an academic fashion, but then I must have had a brain burst because I just attacked it one day- but it took quite a long time.

Anyone can try to have a book published, in a way, if they are prepared to pay for it and it’s a much less expensive process in Britain that in the States - the reason I used the States was because this particular company had quite a nice article written about then in Time magazine and it sounded like a good possibility, and they have done a good job.

* What do you hope people will take away from reading Somerville?

Three more book (laughs). How is that for an answer? I have a professional interest in this period of time and I’m very interested in art, I’m a painter as well, so it’s been my life.

Some people find it nicely academic, I have had some very nice things said about it, I tried not to make it too heavy I didn’t want to make a textbook or anything, of course it’s not a textbook, it’s not the truth and it’s not what really happened but it’s based upon what might have happened.

I was looking for something that might have happened so I thought ‘well if the Germans want to make money and they have these fantastic paintings they want to sell them what are they going to get in return? Do they want money for them?’ Pharmaceuticals seemed to be the obvious thing.

When the Second World War broke out northern Switzerland was quite pro German, they speak German; it’s Swiss-German but it’s German. Switzerland is a small country and it was divided because in the south Italian was spoken and in the west you have French - so there were three languages in one country.

But the north was German speaking and there were quite a few nasty occasions when the Jewish people living in northern Switzerland at that time were disturbed, let’s put it that way, by people in Switzerland.

* Finally what's next for you? Do you have more novels in the pipeline?

I do, I have five more actually written. I’m going through them very carefully having experienced this first novel but these others are in a similar kind of vein. The second one is about an institution that was a psychiatric institution in Sussex which was active at the end of the second war - my mother was in nursing, she specialised in psychiatric nursing, and she was the night sister in sole charge of this hospital in Sussex.

And this story is about somebody who was a nurse themselves who suffered enormously when a V2 rocket fell on a market in London and teams were sent out to help the wounded - and as a nurse she suffered from it and finds herself in a psychiatric clinic.