Tennyson
(Hardcover)
by Lesley M. M. Blume

Lesley M. M. Blume is an author, journalist, and columnist. She lives in New York City with her husband.

Her first two books, Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters and The Rising Star of Rusty Nail, have been given starred reviews by Booklist and the School Library Journal, among many other honors.

Tennyson is her third book.

The Author on Researching and Writing Tennyson

At first glance, I’m an unlikely candidate to write a Southern gothic novel. Like my character Cornelia (Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters; Knopf, 2006), I am a New York City girl. I live in this urban bubble, where everyone rushes and speaks quickly and is very impatient. Everything here is about living now – now! – and it’s not at all like the languorous South.

And yet, Tennyson, which takes place in Louisiana’s plantation country, is more personal to me than either of my first two books – even though both Cornelia and Rusty Nail drew heavily on my own personal history.

Tennyson was originally inspired by two books of photography: firstly, Sally Mann’s collection of photos titled Immediate Family, which chronicles the lives of three gorgeous, feral children growing up in the Virginia countryside. Many of these images are haunting and provocative, and I was particularly fascinated by the two young wild sisters, who gave rise to the characters Tennyson and Hattie in my mind.

The second book was called Ghosts Along the Mississippi. Out of print and hard to find, Ghosts features highly-stylized black-and-white images of grand, ruined plantation houses lining the southern Mississippi river. A particularly imposing one, Belle Grove (once a palace ruling over the river road, now an empty lot), gave me the idea for Aigredoux, the decaying ancestral plantation house in Tennyson.

But my travels to this part of the world haven’t only taken place through books and photos of the now-dead past. My dearest, oldest friend grew up in a seaside mansion in Pass Christian, Mississippi, just up the road from Beauvoir, the last home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Over the years, I spent many hours on the front porch of my friend’s house, lazily drowsing in a white slatted swing and listening to the gentle lapping of the Gulf waves. This house, which became a spiritual home to me, would be savagely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

On this note, I originally wanted Tennyson to be titled All Things Will Change, which is from a line from an Alfred Lord Tennyson poem featured in the book. To me, this title would have been an appropriate homage to the fact that homes and lives seem to be particularly prone to destruction in the South. Hurricanes and war and even the drenched air all conspire to break everything down, and have colored all of this region’s legacies. Tennyson is very much a study of this quicksand culture.

The idea for the book just occurred to me one day last summer; within an hour of coming up with the premise, many of the characters and the whole arc of the plot were in place. Just two weeks later, I flew down to Louisiana. As usual, my mother was my travel and research sidekick. She drove over from her Florida home and picked me up at the New Orleans airport, which at the time was still dank and devoid of visitors, the loudspeaker jazz echoing eerily in the empty halls. A year after Katrina, the city was still reeling.

But an hour up the road, we were quietly stunned to find ourselves in a completely different world, one that bore very little resemblance to the tattered modern metropolis behind us. I’d imagined that the fabled plantations would be elusive, hidden – but there they were, sometimes bold as day, standing along the river.

No one else was crazy enough to be there in the cruel dead heat of August. As my character Tennyson observes when she takes a similar drive up the river road with her father, it seemed that my mother and I “were the only people alive in this strange hot world of ripe sugarcane and purple river and listless thunder.”

During the days, we would tour these incredible houses and at night, we’d sleep in them. We’d soak up their often-bloody histories and scare ourselves by reading ghost stories about them. On our last night, we stayed in Nottoway, sometimes called the White Castle. We had the house to ourselves, all sixty-five rooms. Not even the staff stayed there. At dusk, a thunderstorm came across the river and my mother and I wandered from room to room: a dining room table set for twenty; wasps nests nestled behind shutters; dusty century-old canopy beds where the self-appointed kings and queens of the South once slept. At one point, I looked out a parlor window and found myself eye-to-eye with a peacock, our only companion on the plantation. We later learned that his name was Napoleon, and his hobby was to stand indignantly at the front door and demand to be let in.

I’d been so suspicious of this world when I first arrived: repelled by it on a certain level, and I always reminded myself that these magnificent, crumbling temples were built on the misery of tens of thousands of human chattel.

But when our trip came to an end, I discovered that I didn’t want to go back to the endlessly busy now! now! now! of New York City. I wanted to stay in this place where time follows different rules. As my character Emery says in Tennyson,

“That’s what the Mississippi does. It tempts you in, and then it catches you. It loves you and doesn’t want to let you go. So it pulls you down to the bottom and keeps you there.”

In any case, I’m so grateful that I got to experience this world, and document it in my own way.

Because all things will change, and someday soon it may all be gone.

- Lesley M. M. Blume
New York City
October 2007