Remembering Celeste Holm

It must have been 1992 when I met Celeste. A mutual friend, Carmela Ross, high in years to be undertaking such a thing, was launching a new theater company. The party, on New York’s East Side in the neighborhood of the UN, was chatty, congenial, attended by prospects well enough heeled to possibly invest in the company.

I knew no one but Carmela and was lingering by the canapés table when a voice near the front door announced loudly “I have the flu!” As if plague had been declared, the whole body of guests vacated that end of the room. It was Celeste, making a theatrical but truthful entrance. She sat demurely alone. I went to sit by her, declaring, “Well, I’ve just had a flu shot.”

This was at the time when I had a radio theater production company, Jefferson Radio Theater, lodged at Public Radio Station WJFF-FM.  Like any producer, I ransacked my mind for what “property” I might have that could be of interest to this classic star of stage and screen who was quietly sniffling beside me.

Elegantly white haired, with an oval face as perfect as a Noh mask but with an impish sparkle, Celeste even in her depleted state was impressive. And I had a role for her – though there was no way in the world my little company could afford her. But, luckily, that thought never crossed my mind. 

I had a little twenty-minute playlet called “Martha Speaks Up” a monologue of Martha Washington entertaining the officers’ wives at Valley Forge with the story of how she and George met and wooed. Martha, it struck me, was a perfect role for Celeste. And when I spoke of it, she seemed to think so too.

A few days later I delivered the play to Celeste’s Central Park West duplex, a dwelling that combined Hollywood grandeur with feminine, upper class East Coast flowery prettiness. There was of course the piano, where no doubt an array of “greats” had gathered and sung old Broadway favorites of their own creation. And there were portraits of Celeste, done by her artist mother who clearly was smitten by the beauty she had brought into the world. My favorite of the portraits showed only Celeste’s hands with a red ribbon or tassel.

A few days later Celeste called me. She loved “Martha Speaks Up,” but, rather than do it as a radio play – could I enlarge it to a television series for her? There was a producer at PBS who was looking for a “vehicle” for her and this might be perfect.

I had written “Martha” after reading James Thomas Flexner’s four-volume biography of George Washington. The thought of doing a thirteen-hour script on the first First Couple was exhilarating, inspiring. Yes, of course I would do it! 

Fortunately, I had a good friend in Virginia who was happy to have me come stay for multiple extended visits. Jean Ryland Walker was a Walker of Walkerton and her family had been in place since the 1600’s.  She knew everyone, was related to nearly everyone, could provide insights into Tidewater culture and access to private homes that were old when Martha was a child. It took me three years to write “The Washingtons” but I had a grand time doing it.

In the meantime, Celeste and I got to know each other better. Celeste performed “Martha Speaks Up” at various venues, including the Boston Historical Society, and I wrote a monologue companion piece for her so that the two plays made a performance of suitable length.

And Celeste was intent upon the prospect of the Washington series. The producer at PBS faded and died so we went searching for a new producer. The search took the form of a performance of “Martha Speaks Up” at the New York City Parks Department Armory in Central Park. Several well known producers not only were invited but showed up. 

The armory space turned out to be far from satisfactory with echoes and places where sound vanished, and the producers we were most hoping to interest told us they were looking for an “event” property – like “Titanic.” But the parks department people approached me and asked if I could write little plays like that for the various houses belonging to the New York City Historic House Trust – which is how I happened to write a monologue of Edgar Allan Poe. So the event was not without happy results.

And Celeste seemed to be nursing along a producer. I completed the script, sent it for the opinion of the leading expert on Martha and was waiting his reply when Celeste was offered a role in the lucrative television series “Promised Land.” So Martha was put on hold. Then, while shooting the first episode of PL, Celeste, required to dance with a gaggle of teenagers at the location’s high altitude in Utah in stifling summer heat, collapsed and developed congestive heart failure.

Ever the brave trouper, she not only completed the season but went on to do more seasons with PL. She attempted to bring me in as her writer but that couldn’t be worked out.

Before she’d gone off to Utah, I’d visited Celeste not only at her New York apartment but had driven her out to her little summer house in Hackettstown, New Jersey. In that rather shabby rustic setting that she greatly loved she told me somewhat of her life story, of her sons, one of whom was quite dear but was far away and the other with whom she had never gotten on well. And she told me of her husbands – Hollywood nightmare marriages, then her very happy marriage to fellow actor Wesley Addey. I never met him but clearly this was a marriage that gave her the companionship and love the other marriages had not.

Heading back to New York together, we stopped at a garden center and at the ShopRite grocery store in Chester. This is a vast, cool emporium with wide aisles providing vistas. And it was here I observed the “celebrity effect” in action. People came up to her, announcing – as if she didn’t know it – “You’re Celeste Holm!” and reaching a hand out at arm’s length to touch her shoulder, as if measuring the distance between themselves and fame.

One night, when Celeste was home in New York from Utah, I got a desperate call. She was frantic. She was considering throwing herself out the window. Wesley was dead. He had come down with a relatively minor problem and been taken to the hospital. Thinking he was in good hands, she’d left him – and in the course of a commonplace procedure he had died. She was certain that if she’d stayed the apparent mistake wouldn’t have happened, or he could have been saved. She blamed herself for his death.

I told her to sit tight and I would be right down. It’s a three hour drive from my house in rural Pennsylvania to New York City but I made it in just over two. Celeste, in a woolly robe, was sitting in the kitchen with a woman whom I took at first to be a relative – a not mentioned daughter? Diana Walker was as solicitous and able as the daughter one would have hoped Celeste had. 

 

We stayed with Celeste through the night, until a new shift came to help her through this agony of spirit. In the elevator, leaving with Diana, I found she, like me, was just a friend; she was a theater producer with her own company, The Manhattan Playhouse. She and I became good friends and some years later I gave her a puppy who was so pampered by her that she reconstructed a building she owned in order to provide him with a garden. If not Celeste’s perfect daughter, she was a determined and energetic friend.

Gradually Celeste recovered from the loss of Wesley Addey – and then she met Frank. She was coping with the congestive heart failure with medications so she was already somewhat depleted. She should not have been alone. There was a secretary/general factotum, but he was there only for working hours. Frank Basile was a godsend.

I met Frank when he came bouncing into Celeste’s kitchen grinning like a boy with a big surprise. The surprise was his early arrival – just back from Teheran where he, an opera baritone with a blossoming career, had been singing. Celeste, in wonderment, had just been telling me about this young man who appeared to have fallen in love with her and who was now living with her – when he wasn’t booked to sing somewhere, which soon became seldom.

I was skeptical. A good looking young man less than half her age? A fortune hunter? Most likely, I thought.

Frank plunked down on a chair at the kitchen table and gazed at Celeste adoringly, then proceeded to detail why he was in love with her. Her wit, her loveliness, her habit of grabbing the pole of the awning at the apartment house front door and swinging around it like a kid (which I could well believe – Celeste did things like that, delighting in puncturing the impression of an elegant grande dame.) 

I remained skeptical. Diana Walker was more so. But year after year passed and Frank was still there. From one health crisis to another he was there, becoming her devoted care giver. His career in opera, so promising before he met Celeste, faded. Whatever he could gain from this relationship, he was sacrificing his life to it – and clearly he was sacrificing his life for her. Celeste was very happy.

Where were her sons who should have been taking care of her? They were opposing Frank and doing all in their legal powers to see to it that the apparently mismatched couple would be miserable. They got control of Celeste’s finances and put the pair on an ‘allowance’ that barely covered the grand apartment’s rent, and the couple’s basic living expenses.

Celeste went on appearing, giving performances. Sometimes irritatingly, as when the New York Philharmonic, advised by the Parks Department, contacted her when trying to reach me to book my Poe show for Poe’s centennial celebration. Instead of giving them my contact information, Celeste piped up with “I’ll do it!” And indeed she did. When I called her about another Poe event, she boldly announced “I did it!” Yes, if it was a chance to be on the stage, she took it – even from me.

Frank managed gala events for her: her birthdays, at theater restaurants where all her old friends of Broadway were invited. It was at one of these that their marriage was announced. The marriage split her friends into the approving ones and the condemning ones. I was among the approvers, seeing Frank as the care giver her sons failed to be. Most important – she seemed happy.

But that happiness was impaired. Law suits followed as her sons tried to make sure Frank would get nothing – now or when she died. And Frank and Celeste fought back. Frank remained with her, devoted in his care of her to the end.

It was a shameful attack that her sons made upon her life, her freedom of choice, and the one person who was willing to give up his life for hers.

Now that he’s alone, my hope is that Frank Basile’s career can begin again. But Celeste’s friends were two generations away from the producers who build careers these days.

If Frank was a fortune hunter – he gave more than he could possible ever have gotten. If he truly loved her, then this is a strange and sad love story indeed.

book website: www.simon-de-montfort.com
personal website: www.katherineashe.com

Katherine Ashe is the author of the  four volume Montfort novelized series
http://www.amazon.com/Katherine-Ashe/e/B004OTWHNQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1398361940&sr=1-2-ent

Even adults get bullied. What to do about it?

On the blog today I have a guest post by Tahlia Newland author of You Can’t Shatter Me, a new young adult novella about bullying. Tahlia writes magical realism and contemporary fantasy for young adults & adults. Her short story A Hole in the Pavement  is free on kindle until the  7^th July.

When I wrote You Can’t Shatter Me, although I set it in a school situation with teens as the main characters, I wrote it for everyone no matter what their age and situation because even adults get bullied. One of the reasons bullying is so entrenched in our society is because it permeates all strata of life, often hidden beneath an ‘acceptable’ veneer and unrecognised for what it is.

Bullying is a persistent, deliberate attempt to hurt or humiliate someone. There are different types of bullying but they have three things in common:

• They involve deliberately hurtful behaviour
• They are repeated over time
• They involve an unfair balance of power which makes it hard for those being bullied to defend themselves.

Unfortunately, bullying is alive and flourishing on the internet. Perpetrators of cyber-bullying are called Trolls, and prolonged & shockingly systematic attacks by such people on authors are becoming far too common. Katherine Ashe, one author who has borne the brunt of this kind of behavior, says, “That fellow authors and their friends would behave in this way on the World Wide Web is worse than shameful. It’s unprofessional and infantile.”

It is also quite simply wrong. However, stopping it is not a simple matter because those who bully enjoy the drama and feeling of power it gives them. Also, they are likely to find valid-sounding reasons to justify their behavior and may even not be aware that what they are doing is actually bullying.

So what are we to do if we are the butt of bullying?

First we need to accept that we can’t control the bully’s behavior, but we can control how we let it affect us. Normally, we get angry and defensive. We lose our peace of mind. But instead of reacting with fear and hatred, we could use the situation to arouse our compassion. Having compassion in our heart calms and strengthens us, and through our changed behavior positively affects the behavior of others. Here’s the logic.

People bully because they are feeling one or more of the following.

• Afraid
• Jealous
• Envious
• Cruel
• Angry
• Insecure
• Unhappy
• Arrogant
• Weak

These are unpleasant mind states to be in. So the bully is unhappy or, at the least, ill at ease in some way. Just like us, they want to be happy, but they aren’t. Imagine how it would be to live with a mind and heart full of any of those emotions listed above? Ouch. Not a good feeling, right?

Now, try wishing that they be well and happy.  Visualise them as so well and happy that they no longer feel the need to hurt others. It takes courage to turn our attitude around like this, to wish well the person who is hurting us, but each time we do it, we become stronger and more able to stay cool, calm and collected in the face of abuse.

With this attitude we will naturally be less inclined to inflame and more likely to ease the situation. A compassionate attitude is so radical that actions imbued with it can stop bullies in their tracks.

So for online bullying I’d say

1. Don’t take it personally, even if they mean it to be. It’s just a bad role they’re playing in a cruddy story. Don’t make it yours by buying into their drama.
2. Ignore it if you can, and use the perpetrator’s suffering to arouse your compassion. Think, how awful it must be to be them, and remind yourself that their behaviour will do them more harm in the long run than it will you.
3. If you need to respond to a valid question, or correct a misunderstanding,
• don’t attack them back or use language that will inflame them. Don’t even call them Trolls in direct communications with them, instead appeal to their better nature. Even though they may seem like it, they are not Trolls by nature, just people behaving like Trolls.
• Be very respectful and kind. Leave a short, polite, non-emotive statement. Let them know that you respect their opinion and would appreciate it if they could, in turn, keep their comments respectful.
4. If it continues, it’s best that you ignore it, but if you must reply, leave another polite statement that indicates that you’re sorry they feel that way, but the manner in which they express their opinions is hostile and inappropriate.
• If they are still raising the same concerns or arguments, don’t repeat yourself, instead leave links to places where you have already addressed their concerns.
• Let them know that you do not intend to engage with them any further.
• End by wishing them well.
5. Then, say no more. Let them talk into a vacuum. If you reply to them, the whole thing will keep going. Simply don’t visit the forums where they abuse you. It will blow over eventually.

I use analogies and metaphors for the magical elements in my writing. One that helps here is that bullies are playing a game, but you don’t have to play with them. For a game to continue, it needs two sides, one to throw the ball and one to hit it back. If you don’t hit it back, they are left chasing the ball. So don’t play and tell your friends not to play either.

The next time someone hassles you, remember that they are unhappy in some way and wish them happiness. See how it changes how you feel. A heart full of love and compassion is the best protection.

These are the kind of ideas that pervade You Can’t Shatter Me. How do they sound to you?

You can find Tahlia's book at: 

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Shatter-Me-ebook/dp/B008DME8PA
Epub files for Nook, Kobo, Sony etc: http://catapult-press/shop
Files for all devices: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/174488

book website: www.simon-de-montfort.com
personal website: www.katherineashe.com

Katherine Ashe is the author of the  four volume Montfort novelized series
http://www.amazon.com/Katherine-Ashe/e/B004OTWHNQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1398361940&sr=1-2-ent

The Millennium

The millennium – a period of a thousand years in which peace, justice, the fulfillment of mankind’s hopes will be met. This idea has risen, submerged and risen again repeatedly in Western Europe and the countries effected by its cultures. 

Repeatedly the notion has brought on wars, has transformed the entire economic and social structures of countries, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but nearly always at immense cost of human life.

Where does this animating idea come from? It’s associated with Christianity, but where does Jesus outline such a violent thousand- year project? He predicts that no stone of the temple in Jerusalem will remain one upon another within the lifetime of his immediate hearers.

And he was right. Rome battered rebellious Palestine into submission within the lifetime of many of those who saw and spoke to Jesus. His prediction was not a threat but an observation that his fellow Jews were eager to take on a force that was far beyond their capacity to oppose successfully. No millennium there.

But there is in the Lord’s Prayer an invocation of something very like what those who long for the millennium may have in mind: “Thy kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” What better could one ask of life on earth?

Many references to Christian mystical events in the future are derived from the Apostle John's Book of Revelations which is highly symbolic, after the manner of ancient seers. Here is the seedbed of violent apocalypse, the nursery of the struggle for the millennium.

Much of medieval writing stored in the Vatican Library is exegesis of the Bible, and a large percentage of that focuses upon the writings of the Apostle John. Among those who wrote on the subject of the meaning of the Apocalypse was Joachim de Fiore, but his works were condemned by Pope Alexander IV as heretical.  In 2009 the Vatican seemed inclined to reaffirm that condemnation.

 But, unlike most of the writers of biblical interpretation whose work has not, or has, been condemned by the Catholic Church, Joachim’s writings have had a profound effect on mankind’s history from medieval times to today.

Mao’s revolution that transformed China, liberating it from a decrepit dynastic monopoly, drew much from the ideas of Christian missionaries who planted a radical notion of the equality of human beings and the possibility of a future in which the common people ruled.

Where the missionaries in China ceased to appeal, Karl Marx’s analyses of governments and economies took over with its offer of a way of life built upon “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  No government has claimed to achieve full national communism, but only to be working toward that ultimate goal. 

The experiments so far have been disasters. But China is evolving so rapidly now that what will be accomplished there is unknowable. And one might say that what is being achieved in China now is the result of liberation from the millennial ideal.

Both China and Russia have been engaged in apocalyptic and millennial ventures at immense human cost. Apart from presumably aiming at the "great come 'n' get it day" of millennial promise, how close they are to following in the path Joachim set out in the twelfth century is highly questionable. But lets’ look at a couple more millennial experiments: Nazism and the French Revolution.

It’s precisely because the millennial idea, lying dormant in Western ideology, is so powerful that Hitler was able to tap into it and make belief in the Third Reich such an animating prospect for the German people – a highly educated population steeped in hundreds of years of European culture. Of all the disasters brought on by millennialism, Germany achieved the most ghastly.

The French Revolution: here we have some of the most literal derivations from Joachim carried to bloodshed.

The Jacobins, infamous for the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, acquired their name from their meeting place, the refectory of the Dominican Order on the Rue Jacob in Paris. That refectory had been the center for the teaching of Joachim de Fiore’s radical theology in the 13^th century. 

The Revolution, in true millennial form, declared a new calendar, and the Jacobins inaugurated it with an apocalyptic year of fanatical bloodshed – to the point where they too became victims of their violence.

In a reach for something approximating  Joachim’s idea of a glorious millennium, like the Nazis and communists after them, the Jacobins believed they were clearing the way for a the next phase of history – a phase that was inevitable but somehow required their brutal midwifery to bring it into being.

Joachim never suggested that any action was necessary on the part of mankind for the three phases of history to march along to their fulfillment. The movement of history was God’s work. He had already accomplished two transitions, there was no reason to suppose He needed the help of finite, blundering mankind to achieve the third.

What were the three ages Joachim proposed?

The first was the Era of the Father, a period of a thousand years of tribal social order epitomized by Moses.

The second was the Era of the Son, begun at Jesus’s birth and epitomized by him. This was to be the era that saw the rise of the Church and of nations ruled by kings and it was to last until the year 1260. 

Joachim  based his calculation of the date on Revelations: 11: 3: “I will give power unto my two witnesses and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and three score days.” He was writing at the end of the eleven-hundreds and didn’t expect to see this transition himself.

The third, the Era of the Holy Spirit, was to see the disintegration of the Church, kingship and nations. A single world-order gradually was to come into being through the thousand year period which was to being in 1260. Man was not asked to make this happen, God would do it in the predicted time.

Government would be modeled after the custom in monasteries where the abbot was elected by the monks. The voters’ choices would be wise because the Holy Spirit would infuse each soul directly with divine wisdom and guidance. Well, we haven’t reached that enlightenment yet, have we.

But, interestingly, without bloodshed we have moved toward the technical possibility of a single world consciousness – through the evolution of the internet.

Teilhard de Chardin foresaw the process of divine motion in history as bringing on the noosphere – a development of world-wide knowledge infused in mankind -- and he foresaw it as a result of technology. Can one ask for a better definition of the internet?

One might say Joachim just possibly wasn’t wrong -- the fit of his view to the developments for mankind in the last thousand years may show self-fulfilling prophecy, or may not.

But if Joachim was right, and we do have a great age of a unified world at peace to look forward to, it’s not going to be achieved by class warfare and annihilations to clear the way for a way of life to be imposed upon everybody by an oligarchy or a dictator.

It will come as the past transitions have come: through a slow evolution that takes a millennium to be accomplished.

From this vantage point in the twenty-first century it looks like it may be achieved through inspiration. Through invention. And who’s to say the myriad ideas, conceived in numerous heads, that have been transforming the world we live in are not the whisperings of the Holy Spirit?

  

See:  Joachim de Fiore Expositio in Apocalypsim

And do have a look at Norman Cohen’s The Pursuit of the Millennium   http://www.amazon.com/The-Pursuit-Millennium-Revolutionary Millenarians/dp/0195004566/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340238444&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=Norman+Cohne+The+Pursuit+of+the+Millennium

book website: www.simon-de-montfort.com
personal website: www.katherineashe.com

Katherine Ashe is the author of the  four volume Montfort novelized series
http://www.amazon.com/Katherine-Ashe/e/B004OTWHNQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1398361940&sr=1-2-ent

Trolls, Harpies and Civilized Discussion

From the time two years ago when the first book of my four volume historical novel Montfort was published, it and I have been the target of a little group of on-line attackers.

How did this happen? The initial and ongoing target is not actually my books, the attackers for the most part haven’t read them. It’s the blurb for the first book. 

The blurb actually came into being in 2005, long before the books were in print. I had my doubts about using it since it wasn’t intended for book promotion, but my academic advisers loved it. 

When the blurb, and by implication the book, was attacked by this little group of trolls I asked Amazon to change the blurb. Their response, in red print, was “93% of the people who see this page buy the book.” They would only slightly amend the most targeted statement to a question. Here’s how the blurb came into being.

I had been working on Montfort since 1977, but I also wrote plays and screenplays. After seeing “The Lord of the Rings” it occurred to me that Viggo Mortensen might be a good choice to play Simon de Montfort, so I wrote to my Hollywood lawyer/agent. It had been a while since I'd written to him and my letter came back – he had moved. 

Letter in hand, I was grumbling. Our house guest, an acterss and film producer, asked what the problem was. I told her, and she immediately exclaimed, “Viggo! I know Viggo. I have a friend who wants to produce an epic trilogy with him. Would there be a part for Johnny Depp?”

My friend, be it understood, really does know nearly everybody in Hollywood. All she asked of me was that I sum up my book of 1650 manuscript pages in five or six compelling sentences. I managed to do that.

He was deeply religious and the greatest knight of his time, 
but he married a nun who was the King of England’s sister. 
Was he the Queen’s lover and father of the heir to the throne? 
King Henry III wanted him dead at any cost. 
He conquered England and founded parliament.
For 700 years it was a hanging crime to speak his name: 
Simon de Montfort.

While that summation differs from the works of most other authors, it was, in brief, the conclusions thirty years of deep research, much of it in 13^th century documents, indicated.  

We got a return email from my friend's friend asking for the scripts – three of them. I said “Who is this friend of yours for whom I’d be doing all this work?” “Oh,” she replied, and named the CEO of a major Hollywood studio.

I spent the next three years writing those three scripts – and a fourth, a single script of the whole span of the story. For, by the time I had finished the three, the CEO had left his company and was starting up his own company, with my scripts in hand.

When I decided at last that I really must stop this endless research and readjustment of my manuscript, and get Montfort into print, I consulted my academic advisers, professors of medieval history. They urged that I use the blurb. They felt strongly that the blurb was just the thing to reach beyond academia to new readership. No doubt it has.

But very soon it picked up a troll review on Amazon – someone who made a point of not having read the book but ranted over the blurb because it differed regarding Edward I’s birth from conventional modern histories and a popular novel written some years earlier.(The troll review has since been toned down.) 

Professors who specialize in the period think my views regarding Edward intriguing. I’ve never claimed that I’ve discovered an irrefutable truth.

Shortly after the troll item appeared  on Amazon I found that a search of my name turned up a lengthy attack on my book and on me in an Historical Novel Society chat thread. Here was an astonishing exercise of several established novelists behaving like bullies attacking the "new girl on the playground."

None of them had read my book, but they accused me of commercial lewdness. One of these attackers said that (I apparently) had Queen Eleanor so devoted to sex that when she wasn’t in bed with someone she was masturbating(sic!) 

There is a Queen Eleanor in my book, but this remark was so remote from anything I’ve written that it left me entirely astounded. Later in the chat it appeared that I was, perhaps deliberately, being confused with another author, one who wrote of Eleanor of Aquitaine (which I do not) and whose work these trolls evidently didn't like.

The Historical Novel Society’s own review is strong in its praise of Montfort: 

When reading through the ample “historical context” notes that follow each volume of Katherine Ashe’s utterly remarkable tetralogy of novels based on the life of 13th-century warrior-statesman Simon de Montfort, one thing becomes obvious: she could easily have produced the most authoritative English-language biography of her subject ever written.
See:   http://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/montfort/

Since the HNS chat attacks in 2010, I’ve had complaints from readers who claim they’ve been brutalized on Amazon chat sites for writing enthusiastically about my work. These attacks have been by some of  the same established authors who attacked me before, with the addition of a few new recruits.

The most recent manifestation of this bullying occurred over four days this past week on my Facebook site, with one of the old, implacable bullies and four new converts. 

Only one of the five appeared to have read my work. The crux of his complaint seemed to be that I write so persuasively I have a responsibility to be accurate. He then brought forth selections from 13th century writers and later historians that differ from my views. 

The surviving records from the time of Simon de Montfort are filled with differing and contentious views. It’s been my business for over 30 years to sort through them, taking into consideration the politics and purposes of each writer.

The aim of my books has been to use the novel form to take a fresh look at what these 13^th century sources may mean. I state clearly in each Author’s Preface that the following pages are speculation, and I provide 181 pages of  bibliography and Historical Context (footnotes) in the 1585 pages of the four volumes of Montfort, citing my sources, with page numbers, and explaining the reasons for my interpretations. 

The absurd theme of my hecklers is that I don't support what I've written -- no one else supports their historical novels as I do. My aim, as I've often stated, is to use the novel form to offer speculations where what remains of an historical record is vague, implausible, contradictory. And where other authors have freely glossed over these problems with their own fictions or interpretations.

I welcome discussion. My speculations are indeed controversial. I ask no one to "believe" what I write. Belief isn't the domain of any novel. And Montfort was very deliberately written as a novel. What I ask is: does this line of thinking make sense of the surviving material.

The Web offers tremendous opportunity for a community of  free exchange of ideas. How do we change this rude and hostile blighting of a great intellectual asset?

book website: www.simon-de-montfort.com
personal website: www.katherineashe.com

Katherine Ashe is the author of the  four volume Montfort novelized series
http://www.amazon.com/Katherine-Ashe/e/B004OTWHNQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1398361940&sr=1-2-ent