“I always knew I’d be famous,” the novelist Robert Plunket said. “I just always assumed I’d be dead when it happened.”
, the magazine of Florida Humanities. Plunket covers architecture for her, writing about topics that range from trailer parks to the thirteen structures Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Florida Southern College, in Lakeland. Daniel was trying to persuade him to tackle what is likely the state’s most photographed architectural wonder: Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World.
These days, however, Plunket isn’t writing exclusively about architecture. His current muse is Varina Howell Davis, the second wife of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. Plunket is working on a novel about her circle of friends, including Judah P. Benjamin, who was the Secretary of State for the Confederacy. Earlier that day, Plunket had taken me to the Gamble Mansion, in nearby Ellenton, where Benjamin hid from the Union Army at the end of the war.
Just when the country is getting all the Confederates out of the attic, Plunket is looking for them in the closet. Still, he acknowledges that this theory is controversial, not least because Benjamin had a wife. “But he didn’t live with her!” Plunket pointed out. “He was best friends with Varina Davis, and they would sit around, talking about parties. She and her little group sat, drinking tea, while the Confederacy was falling apart.
It’s appropriate that Plunket is interested in architecture, given that his own novels are so elaborately designed. Indeed, at least one of them was so elaborate that no publisher would touch it. “The Intimate Memoirs of John E. Jones” was the fictional memoir of an imaginary interior decorator who helped Wallis Simpson ensnare King Edward VIII.
As it is, though, Plunket lives pretty happily in prose. “If you come up with a subject matter and you find your characters, you feel everything in the novel deeply, and writing becomes a pleasure,” he told me. “Like what Nabokov said about aesthetic bliss. That’s why I’ve only worked on a few books. If that pleasure and importance aren’t there, I don’t even want to try.
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