Identity & Character

Vizetelly’s writing was instrumental to the mood of fear, anger, and grave distress. Were their loved ones in the midst of the flames? Would one of them perish? Would Paris ever be the same?

To compensate for the all-male perspective, I found a few diaries written by female artists of the time that had been translated into English as well as a translation of some of Louise Michel’s writings. Michel was a well-known leader of the Commune. I read of French etiquette and manners, the education of women, the rights of women, famous salons led by women, and various articles concerning women of the 19th century.

Personal diaries are treasures for writers of historical fiction. They should be verified and augmented with other sources such as nonfiction, visits to museums, an understanding of the military, political, societal, religious, industrial, and technological circumstances of the time. Leveraging them judiciously into plot, dialogue, setting, narrative and other elements of the story will truly transport readers in time and place.

M.K. Tod’s most recent novel is Paris In Ruins. She also maintains an award-winning blog called A Writer of History.

BY TRISH MACENULTY

Robert Olen Butler's Historical Fiction

A phenomenal writer of wide-ranging talents, Robert Olen Butler has had—and continues to have—a long and storied career. His first novel, The Alleys of Eden, was published in 1981. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his short story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. The Pulitzer committee commented that the stories “raise the literature of the Vietnam conflict to an original and highly personal new level.” In addition to his literary novels and short fiction, he has written a series of four historical thrillers set in Paris, which he likens to Graham Greene’s “entertainments.”

At the age of 76, Butler’s career is still going strong. In September 2021, Atlantic Monthly Press released his novel Late City, and at the time of this interview, he was at work on another novel about a couple in Paris during the pandemic. I met with the acclaimed writer at his historic home in North Florida where he lives with his cats as well as a menagerie of birds and squirrels, who peacefully share the feeders outside his writing cottage, to talk about historical fiction and his research process, including the extensive research for Late City, in which a 116-year-old newsman looks back on his life in a conversation with a “wry and smart alecky” God.

Although Late City spans more than a century, World War I looms large. The main character, Sam Cunningham, joins the army when he’s a 16-year-old boy by lying about his age. He grows up quickly, but is permanently scarred by his experiences as a sharpshooter.

Butler’s thrillers are also set in World War I, and his short story “Mother in the Trenches” (Harper’s, 2003) tells the tale of a mother who goes to the front to retrieve her son during the Great War. With so many current historical novels centered around World War II, I wondered what drew him to World War I. “World War I is the seminal event that spawned the rest of the 20th century and is the cornerstone of the 21st,” Butler said. “The world went to war at a time when technology was becoming an aspect of human life. So many new technologies of war had their birth in terms of the scope and devastation that human beings have wrought upon each other and are still capable of doing.”

Butler, who served in Vietnam, believes the experience of war raises questions that literature addresses on a more personal level “We go to war under some banner by which we identify who we are, and then as we kill each other and die in each other’s arms, we find out who we are on some other drastic level.” This is a central concern for the main character of Late City, who finds he is better at killing than at comforting the dying.

Literature confronts those same questions of identity, he asserts. “It seems to me that a novel earns the right to be called literary at its deepest level by asking the great question of who the hell am I,” he said. “It is the yearning for a self, for an identity, for a place in the universe that is at the heart of great literature.”

This search, he believes, is also the draw for historical novels. “When you look at another era, the question is built into the story: who were we then? And, by implication, what does it say about who we are now?”

On a bookshelf behind Butler's desk are reference books, including a huge three-volume tome on slang, multiple thesauruses, and reference books for fashion. On his computer are numerous databases including the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Oxford Dictionary of English.

Butler notes that as writers we use research to discover the truth of historical politics, attitudes and culture; however, building that knowledge into a credible world can be difficult. “The problem is when people get information about how things were only through their rational faculties and then when they’re creating the characters, they consult their minds and will those details onto the page,” he said.

In order to avoid forcing historical facts into the story, Butler suggests recreating sensory details. “All of us who write in history are keenly conscious of rendering things in the moment through the senses. We are a sense-based medium just like the cinema,” he said. “When you read any good fiction writer, what’s created in the consciousness of the reader is a kind of cinema of the mind.”

When Butler immerses his readers in a different time period and often a different culture, the research is so seamlessly intertwined into the story, it feels as though the experience has been lived rather than learned. He said that in order to effectively build a world, we need to provide a historic narrative of the moment-to-moment sensual life. “What are the sights, sounds, smells, physical sensations that the character encounters? How are our emotions rendered in our bodies when our bodies are acclimated to a world that is quite different from this one? That’s what we’re in search of,” he said.

Butler believes the writer’s job is to inhabit the character. “When you inhabit the character, if there’s a sound or smell or sight or emotional reaction that is shaped by the culture or the architecture, you see more clearly or hear more clearly or smell more clearly,” he said. “You use what you’ve learned about the sensual world of that time and find what the character is responding to, and you put it in the story because the characters experience it not because you know it.”

This attention to his characters’ experiences creates an emotional connection with readers. And through the character’s search for “a place in the universe,” the reader comes to a deeper understanding of the human condition.