IT isn't any wonder that American writer Chip Martin is launching his latest novella The Paper-Pulper's Wife in Marlow - it was because of his time living in the area that he ended up embarking upon a writing career.

Chip first came to live at Cliveden in 1969 when the ancestral home of the Astors had been turned into Stanford University by the National Trust after the scandal of the Christine Keeler affair.

The Philadelphian-born writer had come to study his Bachelor's degree in history at the university.

He reminisces: "I arrived in a haze of the flower child attitude which never escaped from me during my stay here.

"At that time there were 750 acres with trees, it was before the storm of 1987 which devastated so many of them, and 750 acres belong to us - the students. We wandered in the woods in a kind of a paradise. I had some romantic and sexual experiences which caught my imagination. I was awakening to life in this great part of the world.

"That is when I became interested in literature. I read poetry in the woods."

His experiences at Cliveden coupled with being totally disillusioned with politics after riots in Chicago in 1968 made him change his ambitions in life. Instead of becoming a historian and involved in politics which he had intended to focus his career on, he decided to devote his life to English literature.

Chip returned to America and studied English in San Francisco.

Since those Flower Power days, Chip has written many books - both works of fiction and on academic subjects.

His latest book, The Paper-Pulper's Wife, is the second volume of the trilogy of novellas entitled A School of London.

The first novella is, The Journeyman of Bohemia, about a care-free painter who lives his life creating large canvases in Italy but ends up a broken man in England.

The Paper-Pulper's Wife is a much darker novella about a wealthy woman whose marriage to a cold, secretive and much older man has lost its sparkle. She is desperate to have a bit of excitement in her life.

She meets the painter in Hampshire and they have a whirlwind romance. The relationship comes to an abrupt end when the woman nearly gets crushed to death in her car during a hurricane. She wakes up to what she has been doing and breaks off the affair.

Her husband's paper-pulping business is going through difficult times and needs a 'white knight' to save it. A wealthy American comes to the rescue and the heroine embarks on her second love affair.

"The battle takes place in her consciousness," says Chip. "It is about what happens to her inwardly and outwardly."

The storyline, Chip reveals, has echoes of the marriage of Diana, the Princess of Wales and Prince Charles, but he insists that he wrote the novella long before their marriage break-up became common knowledge.

But why write a trilogy and not a larger novel?

"They are three distinct stories," he says.

The first is about a painter, the second is about an adulterous wife and the third, yet to be written, is about a woman playwright.

"Each one is a distinct entity. It has its own story, own melodrama and climax. Each one has some characters which do not end up in the other books and each one is told in a different narrative way."

The first book is written in the first person, The Paper-Pulper's wife is a narration and structured on the classic English novel, and the third book is to be written in the first person once removed.

"The colouration of each book is very different."

Chip only writes novellas and he has no intention of writing a longer novel.

"I like this form. I like the novella or short story. A long novel does not have the concentration or the unity. It is a particular art form."

However, the rest of the world of publishing is not so enthusiastic for the novella.

"Publishers want you to write books that are 40,000 to 50,000 words long," he says.

So to be able to write novellas he publishes them through his own Californian-based publishing company Starhaven.

Starhaven Publishing is a co-operative. He founded the company with a poet and two other writers.

"I can basically call my own shots," he says. "It puts me in a similar position as Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press."

Apart from writing fiction, Chip is also a lecturer and author of academic books, which he writes under the name of Stoddard Martin.

He has taught at Harvard University, the Universities of Warsaw and Lodz, in the US Navy's Program for Afloat College Education and for five years he has been a lecturer in Marlow.

He teaches English literature for the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education at the Liston Centre.

"I was doing a course at Oxford University and they wanted me to teach an extension course. Marlow came up and I grabbed it," he smiles.

"Because of my experiences in the seventies with Cliveden I have always felt connected to this part of the world."

At first he felt sceptical about teaching mature students.

"My work had been with Americans and young people. But after a while I found that these classes were like music. If you have a good group you can get it on the right note."

Other hearts might have been left in San Francisco but Chip's has been left in Marlow, so much so, it features prominently in an unpublished novel.

His says his love of Marlow will never leave him. "The dominant thing that moves me about Marlow is the natural world. I hope the train that runs from Bourne End to Marlow will never be abandoned. It runs along the river. I am refreshed whenever I look out of the window and look up at Cliveden and down to Marlow."

Chip Martin will be reading from The Paper-Pulper's Wife, published by Starhaven on Wednesday at 8pm at Marlow Library. The book can be ordered from any bookshop quoting ISBN 0-936315-09-1.

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