Encountering the Past in “Music Against the Night”
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Thus starts the novel “The Go-Between,” by L. P. Hartley. It seems a sensible, perhaps even ingenious, statement, an effective way to connect time and space. In Euclid’s Elements, a point was defined as “that which has no part,” which seems a good way to define the meaning of “now,” too. “Now” is indivisible, like a point. There is not a single moment we can point to and think, That’s the beginning of “now”; before that is the past. Or: That’s the end of “now,” and henceforth we will enter the future.
The past, as a landscape, can be surveyed and mapped. The past, if it is a foreign country, can be visited after crossing a border. Not “now.” “Now” is neither a homeland nor a foreign country. “Now” is not even a pause or a perch; those words imply that there is a future. But the future—any individual’s future or any collective future—is not to be taken for granted. To me, the future is a hypothesis, and, in science, a hypothesis is an educated guess.
And to educate ourselves about the future, we only really have the past; we don’t even have this now, as we cannot define it satisfactorily.
I first met the composer John Field in Leo Tolstoy’s autobiography. In the first volume, “Childhood,” Tolstoy reminisces about a moment in a drawing room:
Tolstoy’s mother died around the time he was turning two. Did he fabricate the memory of listening to his mother on the piano? Critics and readers have every right to question the accuracy of this memory, but a child that young is capable of remembering, even if he does not yet have the ability to put the experiences into words. The blue world on the paper and the dream-shapes of the music might well be one of those timeless memories of a child.
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In the summer of 1974, a friend of my father’s visited us in Beijing. I was twenty months old. The friend was an avid photographer. At this time, most Chinese people would go to a studio to have their pictures taken, and a camera carried around a man’s neck was a rarity. The friend and my father took my older sister and me out for a walk, and, at a nearby schoolyard, the man hung the camera on an exercise bar. My father held me, with my sister standing next to him. The man adjusted a few things and ran in strides, just in time to be in the photograph.
I remember watching the man running, and I remember feeling utterly bewildered. That memory, which must have pre-dated my ability to narrate and to question, was not shared with anyone until I was in my twenties, when I saw the image, with the date written on the back. In the photo, my sister, my father, and his friend were looking bright and cheerful; I was staring with a deep frown. I described to my father what I recalled of that day. He said it was unlikely that anyone on the school grounds would have known how to maneuver a camera, so, yes, his friend must have set a timer and run into the frame.
In January, 1976, the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, a beloved political figure, died. Afterward, people across China came together to mourn him. Our district held one event called a “ten-thousand-people gathering.” I was three years and two months old and, alongside two other girls around my age, was taught a poem at nursery school and then taken to an audition. One of us would be chosen to recite the poem onstage—a kitsch performance, no doubt, so that an auditorium of adults would be moved to tears.
The nursery-school teacher told us that we would perform the poem in tears rather than crying in earnest. I repeated the poem perfectly but could not summon any tears. Another girl cried non-stop—possibly from fear and nervousness rather than sorrow. The third girl achieved the desired effect: she recited the poem in tears but with composure, and she was chosen for the role.
I remember feeling defeated by my lack of tears. I also remember the teacher’s admonishment, as she told me that not shedding any tears was a serious matter, evidence of the wrong political attitude.
Am I defending that child Leo’s memory with my childhood memory? Possibly.
When I was reading Tolstoy’s memoir, a pressing question arose: Who was this Field, who had taught Mamma to play the piano?
Field turned out to be John Field, an Irish virtuoso who lived his adult life in Moscow. He invented the nocturne, which was later taken up by Chopin, whose early nocturnes were heavily influenced by Field’s. To the wider world, Field is an obscure name. “John Field, an Englishman, wasn’t he? Some sort of musician?” my late friend Edmund White, who was one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve met, said to me once.
I was intrigued enough to look for more information, and found a biography, “The Life and Music of John Field 1782-1837, Creator of the Nocturne,” by Patrick Piggott. From it, I learned that Field was born in Dublin, a musical prodigy, and that his ambitious elders hoped that he would become the next Mozart. The Field family relocated to London, and John studied with the Italian virtuoso Muzio Clementi. In 1802, Clementi, a prominent music publisher and manufacturer of pianofortes, took a trip to Moscow, accompanied by Field. The Irishman settled there, becoming a leading virtuoso in Russia and a sales representative for Clementi pianofortes.
Field did not become the next Mozart. His later years were plagued by illness, drunkenness, disappointment, and debt. When he died in Moscow, at the age of fifty-four, there was a public subscription to raise money to erect a stone next to his grave. The inscription read, in awkward English, “John Field / Born in Ireland / in 1782 / Dead in Moscow / in 1837.”
John Field’s life could easily be seen as a quintessential narrative of a working artist, full of conflicts, strivings, entanglements, good luck, bad decisions, and a near-tragic ending. That alone might be enough for a novel, but I wasn’t sure. Curiosity doesn’t always mean commitment. A commitment has to be able to withstand scrutiny.
In the biography, Field’s wife, Adelaide Percheron, was mentioned in only a few pages. Percheron, born and raised in Pondicherry, French India, was an orphan, nicknamed Percherette. She travelled from Pondicherry to Moscow, where she became Field’s student, then his mistress, and eventually his wife. “How this young woman came to be living in Moscow in 1807 is not clear,” Piggott wrote. She aspired to be a virtuoso like her husband, but the marriage fell apart, and her ambition was dashed.
There were two catching details about Percherette in the biography. She was considered a flirtatious young woman—“a hat on a walking-stick would be enough to make her start her little tricks”—and Field, during his last visit to London, in 1832, shocked a roomful of English ladies with his remark that “he had only married his wife because she never paid for her lessons” and “to get some return for his trouble.”
If the first encounter with John Field in Tolstoy’s words was intriguing enough, it was Percherette’s trajectory that kept me puzzling: How did an orphan from French India traverse the globe, making her way from Pondicherry to Moscow? Who was Percherette?
Percherette, born in 1790, lived around the same time as the heroines of Jane Austen’s novels. The boundary of life is clearly marked for Austen’s protagonists, in geography as well as in status. Mostly residing in the rural or semi-rural environment of southern England, they may travel as far as Bath or London for the season, or take a seaside trip to Lyme Regis. If the girls are lucky, they end up in a marriage; luckier still, married to young men “in possession of good fortune.” The less fortunate ones become governesses or companions for older women. Nevertheless, their male relatives and their suitors have travelled far. Sir Thomas Bertram, of “Mansfield Park,” must sort out a management problem on the family’s plantation, in Antigua. Colonel Brandon, of “Sense and Sensibility,” has joined the Army and gone to the East Indies after a heartbreak. In “Persuasion,” Frederick Wentworth enters the Royal Navy and returns with enough wealth to qualify as a desirable bachelor. Where and how is that fortune made? The question is more easily answered by Percherette than by even the most attentive Austen characters.
What did Percherette think of her fictional contemporaries, those who lived in the Austen novels, dreaming of love? Those girls in the hothouses maintained by fathers and uncles certainly would not spare a single thought for Percherette. The orphan Percherette—her late father was a French Navy officer and her late mother, I imagine, a local woman—did not have much suspense written in her lot. One doesn’t need a biography to spell out that her only sensible future was to settle for a decent marriage in Pondicherry. Yet she defied her lot and, for the love of music, married an Irish virtuoso in Russia.
Natasha Rostova, of “War and Peace,” was another literary heroine in Percherette’s lifetime. Natasha was born in 1792. Field is mentioned in “War and Peace,” when Natasha’s mother, feeling bored with a headache, summons the family musician to play Field’s nocturnes.
To Natasha, Pondicherry is possibly no more than a dot on a map. Yet she would have had plenty of opportunities to encounter Percherette after the latter’s arrival in Moscow. Though there is no mention in “War and Peace” of Natasha’s piano teacher, she is likely taught by Field, just as Tolstoy’s mother was. The Italian singing teacher, with whom Natasha has been momentarily infatuated, would certainly be a figure moving in the same Moscow circles as Field and his wife.
The odds of Percherette appearing in the literature from her lifetime are slim. She travelled farther and knew more of the world than the Jane Austen girls, than Princess Marya and Natasha, than Dorothea Brooke, of “Middlemarch,” and Emma Bovary, of “Madame Bovary.” All the same, she was an outsider and an outlier. One wants to know her stories, but more than that one wants to know her essence.
I set my heart on a long project about John and Percherette—works in a trilogy that will likely be called historical novels, and in one sense that would be right. John Field and Adelaide Percheron are as historical as Napoleon or Nelson. But, still, the notion of what constitutes “the past” and what constitutes “now” remained in my mind.
A word about Muzio Clementi, one of my favorite characters so far in the project. Clementi manufactured square pianos, which are different from modern pianos. Jane Austen owned a Clementi pianoforte, and her less wealthy characters—the Bennets, for instance—would likely be playing a Clementi pianoforte; Georgiana Darcy, on the other hand, would be playing a grand pianoforte, possibly one manufactured by Broadwood.
Recently, while rereading Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” I was delighted to run into a description of a square piano in a drawing room that a youthful Elizabeth-Jane Newson enters. “She looked thoughtfully round the room—at the little square piano with brass inlayings, at the window-curtains, at the lamp, at the fair and dark kings and queens on the card-table . . . ” I experienced an exhilaration when I saw the proof of Clementi’s commercial success. Let Emma Bovary daydream about dressing up in a velvet dress and playing an Érard grand piano for a Parisian audience. In Casterbridge, an agricultural town, it’s Clementi’s square piano that brings a whiff of society and civilization into a poor girl’s imagination.
What factors determine that a novel shall be called a historical novel? In 2009, I published “The Vagrants,” set in 1979 in China; one of the characters is a boy, and he is seven years old, the same age I was in 1979. That novel is often considered a historical novel by readers and critics, which is slightly baffling to me. If a novel is set in America in 1996 and if that novel is published in 2026, it can hardly be called a historical novel.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Perhaps one reason that “The Vagrants” is called historical is that the events in the novel happened in a foreign country: there, dictatorship was not contested and laws were bent to suit the wishes of those who ruled, people suffered injustice of all kinds, and freedom was never a guarantee. But are things done so differently these days in America? Perhaps a novel set in the twenty-twenties of America will be called historical in another decade or so.
When one works on a project that may be called historical, one is inevitably asked about the research. Here are characters living in an era of many wars—in Asia, in America, and, particularly, in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. But, the truth is, neither John nor Percherette would frame their lives in that way. They started, simply, as two extraordinary children. To write about them would mean to live in two lives, with their beginnings in Dublin and in Pondicherry, oceans apart, and to live, from day to day, as the children they were, to be frustrated and humiliated by the world, to be managed and chided and beaten by the adults, to have their entire lives planned out for them; and to grow up with them, falling in love, falling out of love, making decisions wise and unwise, and all the time with music being the only constant in a finicky life.
Research is important, but only when one also lives in the characters’ lives long enough to want to know how a child took a walk along the oceanfront in Pondicherry or in the alleys in Dublin; what route one was to travel from Pondicherry to France, or from England to Moscow. Geographical knowledge and historical events can be learned by research, but when a teen-age girl, having lived in India all her life, arrives in France and realizes that the seasons were no longer words read in a book but sensory details felt by her body—one has to live in a character to feel that oddness of experiencing the four seasons for the first time. Seasons would have an entirely different meaning for Jane Austen’s girls.
A most definitive approach to research was to learn to play the piano. I auditioned, with zero musical skills but with a book proposal, and a pianist took me up as a student. I’m not yet good enough to play Chopin’s nocturnes or Field’s nocturnes, but Clementi’s compositions have entered my piano education. It feels important to be able to think about John and Percherette getting started, just as I was, on the keyboard. The pianofortes they played were the predecessors to my piano, which our younger son, James, had played as a child for some years. One day, while I was struggling with a piece, I asked him for help. He was home for the winter break, having just finished the first semester of his freshman year at university. He sat down and looked at the music and started to play. I marvelled. He had not touched the piano since the death of his older brother, Vincent.
Field was a musical prodigy, and he inherited the ambitions of his elders, and added to them his own ambitions; Percherette was not only a musical prodigy but also a prodigy at living a life with aspirations. What makes ambitions different from aspirations? Both words, according to Merriam-Webster, mean “a strong desire for advancement.” But there is a subtle difference. Ambition “applies to the desire for personal advancement or preferment and may suggest equally a praiseworthy or an inordinate desire,” whereas aspiration “implies a striving after something higher than oneself.”
I started the novel about John and Percherette in January, 2023. In February, 2024, James died, not long after he had demonstrated a piece on the piano for me. By then, I had three-quarters of the novel written.
After Vincent died, I told myself, “Life is hard, but I am harder”—a line I gave to a character in a novel called “Must I Go.” In that book, Lilia lost her daughter to suicide—a fact that I had already written when Vincent died. Lilia’s loss and mine happened when we were the same age. That coincidence does not mean that Lilia’s story is mine, or that the novel is autobiographical. But it is possible for us to share a thought. To write is to always aspire to the meeting of two people, not in time or space but in a meeting of their essence.
A few days after James died, I told myself, “Life is hard, but I am better.” Better how, and better than whom?—but there was no way to answer the question. Instead, I went on writing, until one day, toward the end of the novel, Percherette, having regained her real name, Adelaide, because she was no longer perching with anyone, answered my question after losing her only son:
Against finality, yes, and against oblivion. I think that is my aspiration—not to write historical novels or autobiographical novels but to write to carry the past, and to bring its figures as close to the present as possible. ♦
This is drawn from the “Why I Write” series.