Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Andrew Key writes about Ross Hall, published by Grand Iota.

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I can pinpoint the moment the idea for Ross Hall arrived, more or less fully formed, in my skull. It was in July 2014. I was on a train headed from London to Brighton, where I was living at the time. I was with my partner, L. It was quite late at night. We were on our way home from Ghent, where we’d just spent a few days. We’d been travelling for hours, and the train was busy; pitch black outside, the over-bright carriage reflected in the windows. We’d just passed Gatwick Airport, where more miserable-looking travellers boarded our train with their enormous wheeled suitcases. They stood in the aisles with their eyes closed. We were close to the end of our journey and, as I usually do in the last half an hour of a long journey, I was beginning to feel restless, headachy, a little agitated.

I tried to focus on my book, rather than eavesdropping on the tired passengers bickering in the carriage. I was reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions for the first time, in the translation by J. M. Cohen, an old black Penguin Classics edition that I’d bought — according to a pencil mark on top corner of the first page — for £2.50 from a second-hand bookshop. I was on page 132, and I read the following paragraph:

The dawn seemed so beautiful to me one morning that I hastily dressed and hurried out into the country to see the sunrise. I relished this pleasure with all its charms; it was the week after St. John’s Day. The earth, in all its adornment, was thick with grasses and flowers; the nightingales, whose song was almost over, seemed to delight in warbling the louder; all the birds were paying their concerted farewells to Spring, and greeting the birth of a fine summer day, one of those lovely days that one sees no more at my age, and that have never been seen in the melancholy land where I am now living.

After the phrase ‘the melancholy land’ in this edition (and presumably in other editions, though I haven’t checked), there is a typographical dagger — † — directing the reader’s attention to a footnote, which reads: “Rousseau was writing at Wootton, Staffordshire.” Rousseau was writing at Wootton, Staffordshire. What was Rousseau doing writing the Confessions at Wootton, Staffordshire?

My father was born in Stoke-on-Trent, grew up in a market town called Stone, and spent the vast majority of his employed life working in Stafford. I was born and grew up in the next county over, Shropshire, and — with the narcissism of minor differences needed to differentiate oneself from one’s parents — always took a fairly dim view of Staffordshire, which was just the bleak, boring, depressing place where my dad worked and where I sometimes had to go to visit my grandmother. I knew about the Potteries, of course, and the county’s role in the Industrial Revolution, but I wasn’t interested in that then (I am now). I’d never given much thought to the idea that anything of note had happened in Staffordshire, really, but now I was learning that one of the foundational texts of modern autobiography — a book which I was finding even more bizarre and eccentric than I could have ever imagined — was composed there in the eighteenth-century by a Swiss philosopher, who, it turns out, spent a little over a year in exile there.

I didn’t know much about Rousseau in 2014. I was about to start graduate school and was trying to fill some of the larger gaps in my reading. I’m not really sure why I ended up reading Rousseau when I did. I’d just come out the other side of an immersion in W. G. Sebald and I think his work had led to me Reveries of the Solitary Walker. I didn’t finish reading The Confessions; I got distracted, as I do with most books I start, and moved onto something else. I kept a note of Wootton somewhere in the back of my mind, and tried to ignore the idea away while I tried to redirect my desire to write into a desire to be an academic.

I left England for a few years and then returned after my father died. I started thinking about Rousseau again. For reasons that now escape me, at the time I thought that I wanted to be a filmmaker, rather than a writer. In September 2017 I persuaded a few friends to spend a few days with me in the middle of nowhere in Staffordshire, just south of the Peak District, driving around the countryside and gathering footage of empty fields where Rousseau might have walked 250 years ago. The house where he’d stayed — Wootton Hall — was long demolished, but near where it once stood there’s now one of the largest theme parks in the country as well as the headquarters of a major manufacturer of construction equipment, including the testing track where the company’s employees drive backhoes and excavators around in circles for hours. We filmed around here. My friends, perhaps a little worried for my state of mind, dutifully followed my instructions to set a camera up on a tripod and leave it to record a landscape where it seemed like nothing was happening and nothing would ever happen: large clouds drifting over muddy fields bisected by tumbling drystone walls.

Unsurprisingly, the film we made, I Have Rousseau — its title taken from the words Rousseau heard Hume mutter in his sleep during a night crossing from France to England — did not have any success. I decided I probably didn’t want to be a filmmaker after all. I moved to Sheffield, which is an hour and a half away from the part of Staffordshire Rousseau had occupied. I tried to work on other ideas, hoped that making the film would have gotten Rousseau out of my system. I was fairly sick of thinking about him. I spent a lot of time taking myself off for solitary walks down along the Porter Valley and into the eastern edges of the Peak District.

Annoyingly, Jean-Jacques kept coming back; I would be reading other things and would constantly see his name appear. I found myself reading a two volume biography about him, by Jean Guéhenno, which I’d picked up somewhere. I noticed that the period in England was more or less glossed over. It took up a brief part of the second volume, and focused on the feud with David Hume in which Rousseau became embroiled, but I felt a bit short-changed. I read another biography and noticed the same haste to get the episode, one peregrination among many, over and done with. Rousseau was in England for nearly eighteen months. That’s quite a long time, and I tried to think about what it would be like to be living somewhere so remote, in a country where you couldn’t communicate with anyone, trying to delve deeper into your embarrassments and humiliations than you’d ever gone.

Rousseau repeatedly informs the reader in The Confessions that, as far as he’s concerned, he’s embarked on a project with no precedent, even though there are arguably any number of precedents. His letters are grandiose and self-pitying by turn, and at points his fantasies take on an almost architectural quality. He set himself an enormous task, and it was a difficult and tiresome process for him. In trying to understand his situation, a lot of the book I ended up writing turned out to be about my own frustrations with composition. As it did for Rousseau, the writing process involved moments of frenzied production which punctuated weeks of agonising inactivity. I read a lot, recorded many details in various notebooks, which I then lost or forgot about. Reading a lot was a way of feeling like I was working on the book when I couldn’t bring myself to write anything. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it might feel like to have a catheter fitted in the mid eighteenth century. I tried to stop worrying about historical or botanical accuracy.

In many ways, despite my intentions, Ross Hall ended up being a novel about the experience of trying to write a book which you don’t know how to write. I mostly wrote it in quick bursts of about 500 words. I tried to do one of these every day, but this rarely happened. I usually found myself hurrying to get to the end of a page in my notebook, so I could stop writing and do something, anything, else. Like Rousseau, like any writer, I had my moments of doubt, anxiety, overconfidence, trepidation, smug self-satisfaction, delusions of grandeur, pathetic whining, depressed moping, back pains, headaches, bladder complaints, boredom, irritation, exuberance, distraction, jubilation and despair. I’m writing a second novel now, and I continue to flit between all of these modes. Rousseau is still standing behind my shoulder, moping and complaining.

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