Sutton Literary Festival, Part One

Born in London to an English mother and a Jamaican father, Karen McCarthy Woolf is a poet, teaches on the MA on Creative Writing at Goldsmiths and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her ground-breaking debut collection, An Aviary of Small Birds, was shortlisted for both the Forward Best First Collection Prize and the Fenton/Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prize as well as being a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Guardian/Observer Book of the Month. Her collection, Seasonal Disturbances, published in 2017, was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. With credits to her name too long to list, Top Doll is her debut novel.

It was clear from the outset that the audience was in for a treat. Karen McCarthy Woolf described Top Doll as an unreliable memoir told in poetry. It is a work of fiction born of intrigue about obsession. Inspiration struck when McCarthy Woolf read the obituary of the reclusive eccentric Huguette Clark, posted on-line by fellow author Bernardine Evaristo (whose novel Mr Loverman has been adapted by the BBC and is currently being aired).

When Huguette died in 2011 at the age of 104, she left a fortune worth more than $300m, paintings by Degas and Renoir, a Stradivarius violin, and an extraordinary collection of antique dolls, among them antique French antique dolls and automata and Japanese porcelain dolls, but also Barbies and Smurfs. Who was this extraordinary woman who lived through an entire century of American history yet shunned the outside world? The gaps in what we know or can hope to unearth are a gift to any writer.

The daughter of U.S. Sen. magnate W.A. Clark (said to be as wealthy as Rockefeller), Huguette’s remarkable childhood was spent in a house so vast it had its own railway to bring wood for its many fireplaces. W.A. Clark’s story alone is worthy of a clutch of biographies. Born in a log cabin, his is truly a rags to riches story. He amassed his fortune mining copper in Montana in Arizona after the Civil War. Huguette was the second child of a secret second marriage, born when her father was sixty-seven.

Much of Huguette’s life remains a mystery. A bad marriage to William MacDonald Gower, an employee of the Clark family, ended in divorce on the grounds of desertion. She then withdrew to her 42-room Fifth Avenue apartment, hidden from the harsh unforgiving glare of publicity.

Although she spent her final two decades in a Manhattan hospital, registered under a false name, and despite maintaining a number of mansions, this apartment became her sanctuary. There, for the most part, she remained. Beside her maid, her accountant and her solicitor (who were later the subject of a criminal investigate over the mishandling of her fortune), Huguette spoke to few, preferring the companionship of her dolls.

For a brief period Huguette became a reluctant celebrity when the story of her unoccupied mansions captured the public’s imagination.

Serendipity plays an essential role in the birth and subsequent trajectory direction of many works of literature. Top Doll was no exception. In 2020 McCarthy Woolf was in LA researching an entirely different book when she learned that Huguette’s doll collection was going to be auctioned in Santa Barbara. She immediately rented a car and drove there. Her budget didn’t stretch to a French antique, but she came away with a Japanese doll. The novel was clearly meant to be, but how to tell the story?

Since Huguette Clark’s death, two biographies have been published, one of which (Empty Mansions) will be the foundation for a Hollywood film. McCarthy Woolf adopted an entirely different approach. Having developed her own fascination with Huguette’s dolls – and her maternal relationship with them – she decided to tell Huguette’s story in the voices of multiple doll characters. (How else?)

The influence of poetry in Top Doll is evident. Dolly speaks Franglais in sonnets, Miss Ting speaks in Jamaican patois, while the Barbies speak in abecedarian, each line beginning with a consecutive letter of the alphabet. Of the dolls, McCarthy Woolf’s favourite is the General (not General Custer, for those of you who were wondering). It was a piece in his voice that she chose for her first of two readings, bringing him to life as only a poet can, and allowing us to share his voice, as it spoke to her.

This was exactly the kind of author talk that readers hope for. The discovery of a new (to me) author, one who breathes life into her words and is generous about sharing her personal journey. Not to mention, the acquisition of a signed book!

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