The House of Velvet and Glass (61 page)

Praise for
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“A witch story that will leave you spellbound . . . Once in a while, a new writer offers up a hypnotic tale of the supernatural that has the publishing world quivering with excitement. In 2005 it was Elizabeth Kostova’s
The Historian
; in 2006 it was Diane Setterfield’s
The Thirteenth Tale
. This summer,
The Physick Book
is magic.”

—
USA Today

“A terrific debut novel . . . a captivating thriller of the hidden powers of women throughout the centuries.”

—
Boston Globe

“Literary alchemy . . . powerful enough to deliver a charming summer read.”

—
Christian Science Monitor

“I thought I had found another Alice Hoffman as I began Katherine Howe’s debut novel,
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
, perhaps a little practical magic overlaying a story of romance. Yes and no. It has definite Hoffman vibes, but with a little
Da Vinci Code
, Stephen King, and academic discourse thrown in to create a charming and different mix . . . Howe is masterful.”

—
Portland Oregonian

“A devilishly delightful read.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“If you need some magic in your life . . . lose yourself in
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
.”

—
Real Simple

“This isn’t the same old hang-the-sorcerer tale. It has a bedeviling twist.”

—
New York Daily News

“Howe pairs a scholarly search for a missing book with the thrill of spine-tingling witchery.”

—
Dallas Morning News

“Compulsively readable . . . The novel is a page-turner, but the characters, not the plot, dominate.”

—
Denver Post

Reading Group Guide

Introduction

Katherine Howe’s anticipated novel
The House of Velvet and Glass
follows Sibyl Allston through Boston, Massachusetts, in 1915 as she, and Boston, struggle with the onrush of modern life. Sibyl must cope with the loss of her mother, Helen, and younger sister, Eulah, who perished in the sinking of the
Titanic
, and then face the violent consequences of her brother’s backroom gambling. The story weaves together the final 1912 evening aboard the infamous ocean liner; 1868 Shanghai, where Sibyl’s father, Lan Allston, spent time as a young man before making his fortune in shipping; and pre-war Boston, where Sibyl works to understand her place in this new world.

Desperate to find meaning in such tragedy, Sibyl often secretly visits Mrs. Dee, a celebrated medium, who attempts to make contact with the Allston women beyond the grave. In Mrs. Dee’s parlor, Sibyl learns that she too may possess the power to see beyond what is humanly possible, and begins a harrowing journey into the depths of the mind through underground opium dens as well as the august halls of Harvard. She is not alone, as Benton Derby, a psychologist with whom Sibyl shares an unresolved romantic past, has returned after many years and a tragedy of his own to help her navigate her dark inner turmoil and the search for the buoyant promise of future love.

Discussion Questions

1. What did you know about the sinking of the
Titanic
before you read this book? What were the sources of this information?

2. The story weaves between three different times and places: Boston in 1915, the
Titanic
in 1912, and Shanghai in 1868. What is the overall effect of Howe’s narrative shifts?

3. Think about Sibyl’s experience with Mrs. Dee and her scrying glass. Is there value in the deceit if it helps Sibyl feel better?

4. Consider the central image of Lan’s marine chronometer. What are the implications and connotations of this precious possession?

5. Where in the novel do you recall the images of clocks and watches? There are many. Compare and contrast their descriptions. Do they all seem to suggest a similar idea or does their meaning change with context?

6. If you could, would you want to possess the ability to see into the future of the people you love? Explain why this would be a blessing, a curse, or both.

7. What do you think about the representation and use of opiates in the story? Dangerous and unhealthy? Helpful for specific problems? A creative indulgence?

8. What is the same or different about our contemporary use of opiates in modern medicine? Consider the differences between Sibyl’s use and that of her father.

9. At the beginning of Chapter 6, Benton Derby tells Sibyl that he believes “the human mind is like a machine, assembled by circumstances in childhood, which can be tweaked with attention and care. We can change ourselves.” In what ways do you think the human mind is or is not like a machine?

10. In Chapter 17, Edwin Friend, a colleague of Benton Derby’s in Harvard’s Psychology Department, speaks of clairvoyance as “the ability of gifted individuals in a mesmeric state to see beyond the normal realm of perception”. To what extent do you think this is possible? Do you know of any real-world examples?

11. How does the idea that our own memories allow us to transcend present time to reach the past and the people we once knew fit into your thoughts about clairvoyance?

12. What is the significance of Baiji the macaw?

13. Do the characters have choice over their future? In what ways do the various characters struggle with the ethical, religious, and emotional consequences of free will?

A Conversation with Katherine Howe

The weaving of the time and place is central to how the novel flows and evolves. How did you decide when to make the shifts and how to pace the narrative?

I’m told there are some novelists who can just sit down and immediately start writing, who can hold an entire novel in their heads at one time. I am not, alas, one of those novelists. The first thing that I do, once I feel like I’ve completed almost enough background research, is make a detailed outline. I actually use a spreadsheet to do this, like a chapter map, which shows what time and place serves as the setting for each chapter, and what characters are doing and when. That way I am able to get a visual sense for the pace of the story, and I don’t lose track of where I am.

In each case the shift between one story thread and another is designed to further illustrate a particular character or point. For example, at the beginning of
The House of Velvet and Glass
we open on the
Titanic
, with Helen and Eulah going in to dinner. Then we first meet Sibyl while she is attending a séance in Boston, three years after the
Titanic
, attempting to reach Helen and Eulah. We learn about the effect that their loss has had on their family, and we begin to see some of Sibyl’s ambivalence about her changing family role. When Sibyl arrives home after the séance and prepares to speak with her father, we then travel back to Shanghai, where we meet Lan Allston as a teenage boy on his first voyage, so that we can get a deeper sense of Sibyl’s father’s character beyond what Sibyl herself is able to see. Each time shift in the narrative is designed to clarify or expand upon an idea in the previous chapter.

What kind of research did you do for the sake of historical accuracy?

I’ll be honest—I can get pretty carried away with the research. Telling myself that I am ready to start writing is one of the hardest parts, because there is always something that I don’t know well enough.

For
The House of Velvet and Glass
I read a full three years’ worth of
Town Topics,
a gossip and society magazine that was popular from the late nineteenth century into the first part of the twentieth, to get a sense of the fashions, jokes, scandals, automobiles, pastimes, and rumors that circulated in Boston from 1912 to 1915. I read William James’s writings on psychical research and visited the library at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York to learn more about séances and the study of parapsychology at the turn of the last century. I spent time in the National Archives reading congressional testimony from opium and laudanum addicts in connection with the passage of the Harrison Act in 1912 to learn about the nature of their addiction. I watched the only surviving footage of the civilian training camp at Plattsburgh, New York, where Harley travels before joining up with Canada. I read back issues of the Harvard
Crimson
and student files from the Harvard University archives to get a sense of the life of Harvard men in the 1910s. I read sources that described in great detail the methods of opium production and use, and the squalor that attended most opium dens. I studied maps of nineteenth-century Shanghai and read academic research on Shanghaianese culture, specifically the culture of prostitution in that city at that time. I perused menus from the
Titanic
, studied architectural renderings of the ship, and read historic newspaper articles on both the sinking of
Titanic
and the torpedoing of the
Lusitania
. I relied on numerous secondary sources about the Progressive Era, including the lives of domestic servants, the political activism of upper-middle-class women, the practices of mediums in the early twentieth century, the methods of debunking mediums that came into vogue around that time, and the rationale of American men who signed up to fight in the Great War before our official involvement. I even consulted a database of the changing popularity of names over time to make sure that Sibyl, Eulah, Helen, and Harley all had historically accurate names.

And finally, I spent some time in close observation of a small parrot.

How did the fact that the subject of the
Titanic
was so shaped by the popular Hollywood film affect the plan or writing of the novel?

One of the tricky things about writing historical fiction is that I am likely to find myself visiting events that are already well fixed in the popular imagination. This was true with my first book,
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,
which looked at the Salem witch trials from a new point of view, wondering what would happen if one of the Salem witches were the real thing. With
Physick Book
, I knew that most of us would have a mental image of characters and events at Salem drawn largely from having read Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible
, and for that reason I chose not to write about historical figures who were dramatized in that play. With the
Titanic
elements of
The House of Velvet and Glass,
I realized that my own imagination, and that of most of my readers, would be inflected by having seen the
Titanic
film, or possibly by having read Walter Lord’s fascinating 1955 account of the sinking,
A Night to Remember.
Of course, the other challenge with writing about a historical event as well known as the
Titanic
is that we already know how it ends! The film had to answer that question as well—where does the drama and suspense come from when the ending is inevitable?

Because we have all already seen the film, I built most of my story
around
the
Titanic
, rather than
on
it. I was interested less by the sinking per se, which is already a foregone conclusion, than by the historical context in which such a ship would exist, and by the drastic ways in which the world changed after the ship was lost. The
Titanic
continues to be a compelling idea, for reasons far beyond the horror of a ship’s sinking into water that is colder than ice on a starry North Atlantic night.

How do you, as a writer, prepare to write on complex and sensitive subjects like drug use and the supernatural?

When plotting a novel I spend quite a lot of time thinking about the ethics of the project that I am undertaking. I want on the one hand to represent the moral universe of the historical world that I am visiting as accurately as possible, without necessarily subjecting history to unfair contemporary judgment. On the other hand, I am concerned about the ethical conclusions that could be drawn by a contemporary reader. With
The House of Velvet and Glass
the challenge was to represent a world that had a very different attitude about opiate use, in which it was an everyday occurrence for many different classes of people. I wanted to capture the historical attitudes toward drug use accurately, but to be honest about what we have learned in the last hundred years about the destructiveness of drug addiction.

The same holds true for my treatment of attitudes toward the supernatural. In 1915 Spiritualism was a mainstream and widespread pursuit, so mainstream that parapsychology was being studied at the university level. Just as in
Physick Book
I wanted to represent a world that believed that holding a witch trial was a rational thing to do, in
Velvet and Glass
I wanted to recapture a time when séances were listed in the newspaper alongside weekly church services. One of the real pleasures of studying history, to my mind, is being reminded that the world has not always looked the way that it looks to us today. Fiction is a wonderful way to explore the different, fascinating, sometimes baffling ways that individuals in the past assumed the world to work.

In what ways did the success of your first book make the writing of this one easier or more difficult?

You know, at first I thought that writing the second book would be easier. After all, when I started working on
Physick Book
I had never written a novel before. I was a graduate student, I was supposed to be working on my dissertation. I hadn’t written fiction in years. Novels are long, and take up a lot of time that could be spent on academic work, on friends and family, on hikes with the dog, on learning how to garden. Who knew if I would actually finish it? So when starting work on
Velvet and Glass
I at least knew for sure that writing the book was possible—after all, I had done it before. But several writer friends warned me that the second novel is always much harder than the first, and it turns out that they were right.