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OUT OF PRINT HISTORICAL FICTION
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The Historical Novelist's Burden of Truth THOMAS MALLON
At a time when important filmmakers and serious novelists are turning to historical subjects with unusual frequency, their audiences find themselves left to ponder and preserve the distinctions between facts and fabrications. After a decade of writing historical fiction, I'm almost inclined to say what poet Marianne Moore famously declared about poetry, "I, too, dislike it." The genre is often done badly, and its practitioners have sometimes made grandiose claims for it. In the afterword to my two most recent novels, I've preferred to strike a cautionary note: "Nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase 'historical fiction', it is important to remember which of the two words is which."
I don't believe that the genre, even when done well, rises to a higher truth than perceptively written history The literal truth, of things judicial as well as historical, is preferable to any subjective one However differently experienced by its participants, and prejudicially interpreted by their heirs, historical events happened one way and one way only. It's only their meaning that's open to interpretation.
Then why, in considering history, even apply the fictional imagination? Why not rely upon scholarly investigation, which in its rare eloquent manifestations can be quite as powerful and satisfying? Two occasions, I think, best call for the historical novelist: when the facts have been lost to time, and when a time has been lost to the facts.
My novel Henry and Clara concerns the engaged couple who accompanied the Lincolns to Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. One can find a small collection of published facts about them, often in the footnotes of Civil War histories. And my own best efforts to unearth morein pension files, alumni records, private diaries and correspondence, contemporary newspapers and diplomatic dispatches - yielded the outlines of a gripping, but by no means wholly connected, story. So I made a pact with myself: Insofar as I could discover the facts about Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, I would pretty much stick to them. In the pages between the facts, I would allow a novel to grow - by imagination, inference and extrapolation. The book that resulted cannot be called history, and yet in places it is more accurate than some of those supposedly nonfiction footnotes about my characters' lives. Clara, for example, is usually said to have been five years younger than Henry. In fact (according to two sets of census records in Albany) and in THE MAGAZINE OF THE HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY
my novel, she is three years older - not an insignificant matter when considering young lovers. If he ' s done his homework and his books are properly labeled, the historical novelist earns his imaginative elbow room, the chance to suggest, if not replicate, reality.
In a more recent book , Dewey Defeats Truman, I again wrote about a real time and place - the Republican candidate's Michigan hometown of Owosso during the months leading up to his "inevitable" 1948 victory - but I tried something quite different from what I did in Henry and Clara However authentically I attempted to reconstruct Owosso , all of the main characters in Dewey are inventions. It was as ifl ' d dropped a neutron bomb (the one that kills all the people but leaves everything else intact) on the town, and then repopulated it with my own imaginings Among several things I hoped to accomplish in this book - and it's important to remember that the historical novelist's principal obligations are to literature (telling a good story), not to history - I wanted to recreate a specific period that history , particularly the televised kind , has rendered rather poorly
We all know how the "postwar period" gets introduced in documentaries: There's the shot of the atom bomb's mushroom cloud; then the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of the sailor kissing the nurse on V -J Day; and then Levittown , TV aerials and baby carriages. But the world did not turn on quite such a dime. In 1948, the bodies of servicemen killed overseas were still being repatriated for home burial; the war continued to lay heavy on many hearts, and towns like Owosso were enjoying a last year without television
Historical fiction has the leisure to present a more finely sliced and subtly textured time than even good " social history" does. To do the job, a social historian must eventually resort to statistics and comparisons and context; a novelist , in rendering speech and behavior and even the brand names on the breakfast table , can give a more palpable picture of, to paraphrase Trollope, the way we lived then.
Accuracy counts , of course , and the best readers are the ones on alert . I have gotten letters pointing out how, in H enry and Clara, no funeral march by Sousa could have sounded at Col. E E Ellsworth's funeral in 1861, since John Philip Sousa only turned 7 that year. I'm pleased (and relieved) to respond that the Sousa in question is his father, Antonio Still , all the microfilmed newspapers, slang dictionaries and trademark registers in the library won't keep you from making mistakes. If you too often fall back on the excuse that , well, it is after all a novel , the accumulated feeling of plausibility is unlikely to hold up. The other danger is laying it on with a trowel , or what reporters call emptying one's notebook. If you put an antimacassar on what you ' ve already said is a horsehair sofa, the effect will be more pedantic than persuasive. The reader will be fatally aware of the present-day consciousness pulling the strings Titanic, now and forever playing at your local theater, has some hilariously overdone moments: The philistine fiance can ' t just sneer at his bride-to-he's newly acquired paintings; he has to
chortle that this Picasso chap will never amount to anything
When Henry and Clara came out, I made an appearance at the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago. I was the first novelist they'd hosted in some time , pleased to be asked but not surprised at the lack of a turnout. The serious readers of history who make up the shop's clientele feel toward historical novels roughly what silent-movie enthusiasts felt for the talkies: Who needs this loudmouthed stuff? Recently, however, a movement toward "counterfactual" or "what-if' history is gaining ground among academic historians. Reporting on this trend in the New York Times , William H . Honan notes the serious attention being paid to what might have happened if, for example , the Spanish Armada had emerged victorious. He quotes Niall Ferguson, author of Virtual History, on how counterfactualism can "recapture the chaotic nature of experience and see that there are no certain outcomes." I can ' t help feeling that all this is better left to novelists , for whom the "chaotic nature of experience" is , sentence by sentence , a stock in trade If historians with their interest in defending a thesis, begin trafficking in the what-if, I ' m afraid what might have been will soon get presented as what would have been.
The historical novelist must grapple with moral considerations, not just aesthetic ones. "Don't you fear the dead?" one interviewer asked me about the dark motives and conduct I ascribed to my character Henry Rathbone. I don't suppose I fear the long dead, participants in an event that is by now as much a myth as it was once an occurrence. Immediate families would be , I think , another matter. Thomas E . Dewey's son is justifiably agitated about the portrayal of his honest, crime-busting father as a corrupt prosecutor in the recent movie Hoodlum. One cannot libel the dead , but one can refrain from distortions as hurtful as they are preposterous
Why historical material should be increasingly attractive to both moviemakers (such as Steven Spielberg) and writers of literary fiction (Russell Banks and Jane Smiley join the ranks of Civil War novelists this season) is the subject of some curiosity. There are those who connect the proliferation of"period" dramas to the way nothing much has been going on in the mid- and late-'90s. But I think the cause is deeper. The cyber and fiber optic revolutions have made every person and place on the present-day globe absurdly and instantly accessible to every other person and place . We are , more than we yet realize , becoming sick of one another. The past is the only place to which we can get away , and ifl had one prediction for the millennium it would be that all ofus , including novelists, shall be spending a lot of time - more than ever before - looking backward M
ICrown editor RACHEL KAHAN talks with SARAH NESBEITI
about t h eir flourishing historical fiction program
n talking about the success of the Crown Publishing Group's latest historical fiction titles, Rachel Kahan's enthusiasm is infectious. And indeed who can blame her? As editor for a Random House imprint that is actively publishing historical novels, she has the unique task of seeking out manuscripts that recount wonderful stories from history. In December, I spoke with Rachel about the impetus for Crown's efforts, their upcoming releases, and her thoughts on historical fiction today.
For Crown, Rachel looks for colorful, cinematic novels centered on strong female characters. Women's historical fiction, she remarks, is big with reading groups, and one needs only to look at the popularity of The Red Tent and Girl with a Pearl Earring to see that the market is there.
Although Rachel doesn't edit historical novels exclusively, they make up about 50% of her business.
The catalyst for Crown was Rosalind Miles' Guenevere trilogy. Although the imprint had published historical novels in the past - such as works by notables Edward Rutherfurd and Reay Tannahill - it wasn't until 1998 that things really picked up steam Around the time that Rachel Kahan came on board, the first of Miles' Guenevere novels (Queen of the Summer Country) had just been published. The novel was a runaway hit, selling over 40,000 copies in its first month. This made the publisher realize that perhaps they were on to something.
Since then, a number of well -received historicals have appeared under the Crown label. These include Colin Falconer's When We Were Gods (Cleopatra), his Feathered Serpent (Malinali, Hernan Cortes's translator during the Mexican Conquest), and Pamela Kaufman's The Book of Eleanor (Eleanor of Aquitaine). Rachel also took the lead in bringing backlist titles from Miles and Kaufman back into print; one hopes she might do the same with Falconer's older titles, such as the long-out-of-print Harem.
Crown's spring 2003 season begins with John Faunce's Lucrezia Borgia, a biographical novel which recounts Lucrezia's compelling story in her own voice. Summer will see the release of the second novel in Rosalind Miles' Isolde trilogy, The Maid of the White Hands; also appearing will be first novelist Barbara Scrupski's Ruslan, described by Rachel as a "Russian Gone with the Wind."
Looking further ahead, in autumn Crown will release Debbie Taylor's The Fourth Queen. This novel, published by Michael Joseph (UK) in April, is a romantic adventure set in 18th-century Scotland and Morocco. And 2004 will see publication of Elsa Watson's Maid Marian, which retells the classic story of Lady Marian Fitzwalter and that mysterious outlaw Robin Hood from a woman's point of view "We've been receiving a lot of calls about movie rights for Maid Marian," Rachel remarks, also mentioning that film rights to The Book of Eleanor have been optioned by a joint English/French production companysomething entirely appropriate for the novel's subject, who had been Queen of both England and France. In order for Crown to devote a sufficient amount of time to each novel, they publish no more than one or two a season in hardcover.
Crown will be republishing several paperbacks concurrently, however, in particular a number of classics by Jean Plaidy-who had been one of Rachel Kahan's favorite authors since childhood. Via a deal with the agency that represents Plaidy's estate, Crown will be bringing at least ten of her novels back into print. The fust releases, scheduled for summer 2003, will be about two of Henry VIII's wives -Anne Boleyn (The Lady in the Tower) and Catherine Howard (The Rose without a Thorn). "The Tudors are alive and well in the bookselling world," Rachel says, pointing out that the popularity of Robin Maxwell's novels shows a real desire for fiction set in this era. Plaidy collectors will be overjoyed to hear that
the extremely rare Mary Queen of France, about Henry VIII's sister Mary, will be one of the ten chosen.
When asked about current trends in historical fiction, Rachel acknowledges that certain settings are more marketable. These include the Tudor and Stuart periods, anything Arthurian, medieval times, and the Victorian era, particularly modern recreations of Victorian novels as exemplified by Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. "We found a natural market in the Arthurian era with Rosalind Miles," she relates. "This also skews over into the fantasy genre, as with the popularity of Marion Zimmer Bradley. Also, Lord of the Rings, even though it's not Arthurian, shows how we're currently looking back to myths."
So it's not true that historical fiction's not a big deal? "Nothing's further from the truth," Rachel replies, emphasizing that she's just as interested in novels set 500 years ago as those set today. This is especially true for novels about women, such as Elizabeth the First and Cleopatra, who triumphed in an era dominated by men.
What about historical accuracy, I ask? According to Rachel Kahan, who has degrees in both English and history, accuracy is essential. As an example, she relates a story of one author who was asked to go back and do a rewrite because his facts just didn't seem right to her. As she tells it, artistic license is one thing - it's perfectly acceptable for an author to compress time, for example, and authors will need to modernize dialogue somewhatbut this can be taken only so far. Overall, she states, "Authors have a responsibility to get their history right. If they haven't done their research, it ruins their credibility."
One phenomenon that perplexes her is the so-called "non-fiction novel." These works, which comprise a strange blend of historical fact and dramatic re-enactment, were popularized by John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Frequently discussed at writer's conferences, these novels show how the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction are blurring. However, she doesn't foresee publishing any novels of this type. "If you're writing a nonfiction work, and you recreate conversations and scenes that didn't happen just to move the story forward, you can get nailed- and why market these works as nonfiction, anyway?" Rachel asks.
All submissions for Crown's historical fiction program should arrive through literary agents, but Rachel does have some advice for would-be historical novelists: "What people love are colorful, character-driven narratives about people in history. They should be entertaining, without sacrificing the historical content. There's definitely a market for historical fiction in this country, and there is also a huge market in Europe."
Although this is something that Solander readers have always known, it is encouraging to have this confirmed on the publisher's end as well.ll,)
Author's Note: More details on Crown's historical fiction program can be found at their website, The Maiden's Crown (http: // www.maidenscrown.com).
The Cavalryman
Rides Again: the historical novels of George Shipway
ALAN FISK
In October 2002, Imperial Governor, a novel about the Boudiccan revolt against the Romans in AD 61, was republished after being out of print for many years. (A review of Imperial Governor appeared in The Historical Novels Review, Issue 22, December 2002.)
For its author, George Shipway, becoming a historical novelist was a third career, which he started late, and which lasted for only a few years. In that relatively short time, though, he established himself as a noted and sometimes controversial writer. He died in 1982, but his wife still lives in the cottage in Berkshire that they fust moved into in 1949. She has given Solander invaluable help with this article.
George Shipway was born in 1908 in Allahabad, India, where his father was a publisher. In accordance with the custom of that time, George was sent to England at the age of eight to go to boarding school at Clifton.
After leaving school, he became a cadet at Sandhurst, the Army's academy for future officers. Sandhurst trained cadets for both the British Army, and the Indian Army, which was the one for which George Shipway was destined. He used to claim in later life that the only reason he had joined the Army was so that he could play polo, which he would not have been able to afford to do as a civilian!
After Sandhurst, he was commissioned in 1928 into the 13th Duke ofConnaught's Lancers, a cavalry regiment. He
returned to India, where he married while he was posted at Jullundur
In the ensuing years, the Shipways moved "all over India", as Mrs. Shipway recalls. George Shipway's service included two years away from his regiment with a force of irregulars on the frontier between Baluchistan and Iran, as well as being a staff officer in Delhi and in central India, but history was about to bring his Indian Army career to an end. At Partition, the Indian Army was divided, and the 13th Lancers was one of the regiments assigned to Pakistan.
The Shipways came "home". George Shipway had obtained a transfer to the British Army, to the 3rd Carabiniers, the Prince of Wales's Dragoon Guards, a Scottish regiment. In the end, he decided not to go through with it. His explanation was that he had never been north of Yorkshire and didn't intend to make such a dramatic change in his life, but really he seems to have had no wish to pursue an Army career anywhere but in India. He retired in 1947 with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
At this point, the Shipways happened to run into a friend whom they had known in India. She was married to another former Indian Army officer, and she and her husband were now running Cheam School in Berkshire, a school for boys aged from eight to thirteen. They suggested to George Shipway that he should become a teacher at the school, which he did.
His second career, as a schoolmaster, lasted nineteen years. His pupils included Prince Charles , who spent some time at Cheam The boys liked and respected him.
Looking at George Shipway's photograph on his 1970s book jackets, one can judge that only a very foolish, or a very brave , boy would have misbehaved in Mr. Shipway's class. The photograph shows a man who clearly knows his way about the world , with a genial expression, but who carries the bearing of one who expects to be obeyed when he gives an order.
While he was a schoolmaster, he tried his hand at writing in his spare time, encouraged by his friend John Masters , who had also been an Indian Army officer before becoming an author. George Shipway eventually began work on what would become Imperial Governor.
Mrs. Shipway describes him as a man who lived much within himself. He combined the qualities of the soldier with those of a scholar. When he was a boy, his family had thought of sending him to a grander school, Winchester, and Mrs. Shipway believes that if his life had taken that tum he might well have become a university don rather than a soldier.
George Shipway loved the countryside, and Mrs Shipway still treasures a book in which he had collected dried specimens of more than 200 species of wild flower.
Imperial Governor was published in 1968 . It takes the form of a memoir of the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus, who , when Governor of Britain, suppressed Boudicca's rebellion.
At 60 , George Shipway was an unusually late starter as a published novelist, but he found success at once. Imperial Governor was widely praised.
His next novel , Knight in Anarchy, followed a year later, in 1969. It relates the adventures of Humphrey Visdelou in the chaos of the struggle for the English crown between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda in the mid-twelfth century. It is built around Humphrey's perverse and helpless devotion to the service of the cruel but charismatic Geoffrey de Mandeville.
Knight in Anarchy is perhaps the quintessential George Shipway novel , full of violence, dirt, fear, and danger, while at the same time being scholarly and a wellconstructed story. The story never flags, right up to the fascinating punchline at the very end of the Author ' s Note that concludes it: "I live on the fief that Visdelou once held".
At this point George Shipway quarrelled with his literary agent of the time . Mrs . Shipway recalls him stamping off to his study and swearing that he would never write again.
Some months later he emerged with the manuscript of The Chilian Club, a novel that would bring him considerable public notice , much of it hostile.
The Chilian Club (published in the United States as The Yellow Room) is not a historical novel (except for its Prologue), but it needs to be examined here because of its effect upon his reputation for some people.
The Chilian (short for "Chilianwala") Club in London is founded in the middle of the nineteenth century by the former CO of the 6th Hussars , a cavalry regiment that had disgraced itself in the opinion of the rest of the Army by its behaviour at the battle ofChilianwala in India in 1849 , during the Sikh Wars.
By the mid- l 970s , Britain is paralysed by strikes and left-wing political activism (an extrapolation by Shipway from the real industrial and political strife of the time) A group ofretired Army officers, members of the Chilian Club , decide to redeem the honour of the 6th Hussars by assassinating the union leaders , left-wing agitators , and even a trendy bishop, whom they believe to be destroying the country.
It turns out that the figures whom the Chilian Club select as their targets were financed by the Soviet Union , but there are more revelations, and the novel ends in a sensational and unexpected twist that takes it into science fiction.
Th e Chilian Club wasn't politically correct in 1971 , and is even less so now There were plans at the time to film it , but the unions "blacked " the project so that the film was never made
George Shipway had described The Chilian Club as " a diversion", but many who read it, or heard ofit, were not amused. He was guyed as a silly old retired curry colonel , and was called (unfairly) a Fascist, and (even more unfairly) a racist , an accusation that is absurd to anyone who has read some of his other novels , with their noble Moorish and Indian characters.
Shipway returned to less controversial ground with his next two novels, The Paladin and The Wolf Time, which tell the story of Walter Tirel , known to history as the man who was blamed for killing King William II with an arrow
in the New Forest. When Tire) is a boy undergoing a brutal training programme to become an esquire, he meets William Rufus for the first time, and is spellbound by him, although he is appalled by Rufus' homosexuality.
The Paladin and The Wolf Time contain a gallery of characters vaster and more fascinating than in any of George Shipway's other novels, and the story of Walter Tirel's twenty-year affair with the alluring but dangerous Isabel of Conches is like no other love story that you have ever read.
George Shipway returned to India, the country where he had spent twenty-eight years of his life, for a pair of novels set at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Unlike The Paladin and The Wolf Time, though, these two novels are not connected except by both being set in India within a few years of each other Free Lance follows the fortunes of two friends who have fallen into disgrace in England and taken service with the East India Company: the dashing Hugo Amaury as an army officer, and the stolid Charles Marriott as a junior merchant. Marriott stays loyal to the Company , but Amaury , whose temper nearly ruins his career, decides to strike out into the lawless interior of central India to find a life of power and wealth for himself without the help or approval of the Company.
Charles Marriott is appointed a Collector, effectively a local ruler for the Company, and Amaury accompanies him Plenty of fights and battles ensue, not least as part of the pursuit of Amaury by Caroline Wrangham, the spirited daughter of a general.
Fre e Lance is perhaps not Sbipway's most successful novel, depending heavily on a couple of convenient coincidences, but it does make a serious effort to exhibit and explain the attitudes of the East India Company ' s soldiers and merchants, and of the Indian peoples with whom they deal.
Ignorance and insensitivity towards Indians are the very theme of Strangers in the Land , which begins five years later , in 1806 A general newly arrived from England orders two small changes to the Indian soldiers' uniforms and personal appearance regulations. This act eventually leads to a savage mutiny, and equally savage reprisals. The sense throughout Strangers in the Land is of an onrushing disaster , which people of goodwill on both sides try to prevent. In the end, each side feels that it has been betrayed by those whom it trusted, and the Vellore Mutiny of I 806 is a warning that will have been forgotten fifty years later, a forgetfulness that will lead to the much greater Indian Mutiny of 1857.
Strangers in the Land is notable for the large number of Indian characters, and the understanding portrayal of their tragedy, which is important to remember in view of the reputation that The Chilian Club had earned George Shipway in some quarters
Shipway now moved back 3000 years to produce a pair of novels about the Mycenaean king Agamemnon. He bad first become interested in the period when he had been taught the Classics as a schoolboy , and he travelled widely in the Aegean to research the two novels
The first of the pair, Warrior in Bronze, tells the story of Agamemnon up to the point at which he gains the throne of Mycenae. Warrior in Bronze is full of characters from Classical mythology and drama , such as Hercules, Clytemnaistra, Castor and Pollux, and the novel gives origins for them from which the tales and legends might have grown. Sbipway also serves up his usual quota of battles, intrigues, and shocking acts of violence.
Agamemnon, who narrates his own story, is entirely unrepentant, and believes that only a harsh and ruthless man could rule in the Greece of his time When Warrior in Bronze ends, the seeds of the coming Trojan War are already sprouting.
The second novel of the Mycenaean pair, King in Splendour, tells the story of how Agamemnon brings about the war against Troy of which be bas long dreamt. His account of how it really happened varies in many respects from the story we know from Homer's Iliad. This is because, in King in Splendour, the bard who composed the Iliad is a hired hack brought to Troy by Achilles, and who is paid to compose an epic that reflects maximum credit upon Achilles, and the minimum upon Agamemnon. At the end of the novel, Agamemnon prepares to sail borne, wolfishly considering how he will execute his treacherous queen Clyternnaistra and her lover Aegisthus. He cannot know that it is Clytemnaistra who will have the last brutal triumph.
King in Splendour was George Shipway's last novel , published when he was 71. Mrs. Shipway had long urged him to retire when he reached 70, but sadly his health failed soon afterwards , and he died in 1982.
It had been an extraordinary career, lasting only eleven years. George Shipway had been first published even later than Alfred Duggan (whose first novel had come out when Duggan was 47), and his novels had been published over an even shorter period than Duggan's (eleven years, as against fourteen years).
One can also compare Shipway with his friend John Masters. Shipway's novels combine the scholarship of Duggan (who, like Shipway and Masters, had served as a soldier in combat) with the roughness of Masters. Shipway's Amaury family , members of which make appearances from the eleventh century to the twentieth, is perhaps a deliberate echo of Masters' Savage family
Duggan bad Shipway ' s erudition, but lacked his toughness, while Masters had the toughness but did not have Shipway ' s deep education.
George Shipway's most notable distinction as a historical novelist is his unflinching representation of the attitudes of the times and places of which he wrote We may be appalled by Walter Tirel ' s willingness to kill helpless peasants in order to weaken a rival lord's economic power , while at the same time Tire! is always obedient to the laws of honour. Those laws simply don ' t apply to serfs. As modem readers, we do not have to approve of his viewpoint , but that does seem to be the way a man of his time and class would have seen it.
In his Indian novels, Shipway is quite aware (even mentioning it in a foreword to Free Lance, for example) ,
that the attitudes of his British characters are now considered reprehensible, but he is not afraid to give them the outlook of their own time. He is equally faithful to the attitudes of his Indian characters, not all of which would be approved of by modern Indians.
Because George Shipway never modified his historical novels to fit modern views, they have not dated, whereas The Chilian Club is now a period piece that would require notes and explanations if it were to be published again, which is highly unlikely.
George Shipway's historical novels are strong meat indeed, and will not appeal to everyone. His in-your-face, no-apologies style leaves no room for indifference. Either you like his novels or you don't.
His undoubted strengths are the force, clarity, and imagery of his writing, and the accuracy of his backgrounds. He has a rare gift for vivid verbal pictures: a flight of arrows shot from one ship to another at sea forms "a shimmering bridge"; looking out over the length of the city wall of mediaeval London, "(the) helmets of the watch and ward twinkled like jewels on a two-mile-long diadem".
Those who like to read historical fiction will find that he is an author who can make another time and place live with a skill that few historical novelists can match. Those who write historical fiction as well can learn from an author who never forced his characters to adopt whatever attitudes were fashionable at the time or writing, instead of the attitudes of their own time.Jill
Imperial Governor is published in pb by Cassell Military.
Alan Fisk lives in London. His historical novels include The Strange Things of the World, The Summer Stars, and Forty Testoons. His website: www.geocities.com/alanfisk/
MEMBER NEWS
A new feature on the HNS website www.historicalnovelsociety.org ii'>
Have you recently sold or published a novel or short story? Has your work recently won, or been nominated for, an award? Do you have any other literary event you'd like to announce? Please let us know! Soon the Society website will have a brand new look, and with it, we'll be implementing a brand new feature: Member News. HNS would like to publicize the efforts of our greatest supporters • our members • by telling the Internet community what wonderful things are being accomplished in the world of historical fiction. Please submit blurbs to Sarah Nesbeitt (cfsln@eiu.edu) for inclusion on the HNS website. Include details of web links as applicable; we can link to Amazon, your website, your publisher's website, etc. For members without e-mail access, please contact Sarah N. or Richard Lee via regular mail (addresses on the first page of Solande17.
Getting Emotional
The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields
SCOTT McLEMEE
Walking and talking with his students at the Lyceum in Athens during the fourth century BC, Aristotle coined a term that would change intellectual life forever. Its root, pathos, was an ordinary Greek word that meant suffering. But Aristotle used its plural form, pathe, to cover a diverse set of feelingsanger, fear, bravery , and affection, for example. An average listener would have been puzzled. Not all of the pathe were painful, for one thing. Besides, it was obvious that hate, joy, and pity - to give other pathe he listed - had nothing in common.
Such a bold, category-creating move was typical of what Aristotle called "theory" (another of his egghead neologisms). After almost 2,400 years, his once-abstract idea seems utterly commonplace. Pathe did not take, but we now use the term "emotion" to cover a broad spectrum of inner states - from the sometimes violent intensity of the passions (an English expression derived frompathe) to the subtle hues of mood. Just because the concept is familiar, though, doesn't mean that thinkers have exhausted it.
On the contrary, academics are throwing themselves into the study of emotion with the rapturous intensity of a love affair. In a sense, emotion has always been at the core of the humanities: Without the passions, there would not be much history, and even les s literature. Indeed the very word "philosophy" begins withphilos (love). But, however fraught with strong feelings the primary sources may be, only in recent years have scholars begun focusing, without embarrassment, on emotion itself, producing a body of work that regularly crosses the line between the humanities and the social sciences , with occasional forays into neurophysiology.
Recent university-press catalogs offer both sweeping theories of affect and monographic studies on how particular emotions were expressed (or repressed) during specific historical periods. The proliferation of scholarship strikes even the people doing it as a new and surprising development. "Historians have wanted to distance themselves from emotion," says William V. Harris, a professor of history at Columbia University, "As in other occupations, we just want to go on doing things the way we're used to doing them."
In Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, Mr. Harris cites an incisive argument for why scholars might want to keep their distance. It comes from the influential intellectual historian R.G. Collingwood, who declared in 1935 that "irrational elements" - meaning "sensations as distinct from thought, feeling as distinct from conception" - formed "the subjectmatter of psychology not part of the historical process."
Much recent scholarship challenges the assumption that feeling can be so neatly separated from thought, and that emotion is a strictly private matter, disconnected from history and culture. Some work cites research in cognitive science suggesting that reason and emotion are closely linked in the brain. And anthropologists have long stressed the variety of ways feeling is expressed and interpreted in different societies.
The new scholarly focus on emotion may also be conditioned by social developments well outside the world of academic debate. Twenty years ago, in her widely discussed book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, analyzed how airlines systematically train flight attendants to be cheerful, no matter what happens.
Her concept of "emotional labor" applies not just to the friendly skies, but to the service sector as a whole. The market for Prozac and mood-regulating drugs continues the "commercialization of feeling" by other means. When politicians and commentators discuss current events, they now often make reference to stress, trauma, and selfesteem. In a society deeply shaped by consumerism and the mass media, the emotions have emerged as a growth industry - and not just among scholars.
Irritable Antiquity
Mr. Harris, the author of respected volumes on Roman imperialism and ancient literacy, calls Restraining Rage "much the most difficult book that I've ever done." The challenge certainly did not come from a want of material. Greek and Roman authors wrote about anger constantly. (They, in tum, followed the undisputed classical poet of their own day, Homer. After all, the first line of The Iliad is "Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles.") But a reader needs to be as encyclopedic as Aristotle himself to interpret the original documents. "I found myself sounding off on topics where people may think I don't have any expertise," says Mr. Harris.
The territorial imperative of modem specialists is a
minor issue compared with the difficulty of grasping how the ancients understood emotion. The English word "anger" has connotations overlapping reasonably well with the Latin ira (as in "irate"). But things grow more complicated in classical Greek, which possesses an extremely rich vocabulary of anger, making firm distinctions among states we treat as similar.
No free-born Greek citizen would ever confuse cholos (experienced by women, children, the poor, and the sickly) with menos (the wrath of gods or heroes). The righteous indignation of nemesan had nothing in common with the experience of orge, a sort of full-body fury, impossible to conceal from others, in which violent retribution became an almost biological necessity.
The semantic differences imply social norms distinct from our own, and suggest, in tum, that angry feelings were experienced in a different way. Nobody could experience orge toward an individual who was far more powerful. (That was common sense.) But if the host of a dinner party learned that a slave had forgotten to buy bread, there was no particular shame at unleashing his fury. "Which ofus would not [make] the walls fall down with shouts?" writes Plutarch. "That," notes Mr. Harris, "is not a question likely to have been asked by a well-broughtup person in the 19th or 20th century."
For Aristotle, the ideal was to have just the right amount of orge in your system - not so much that you were a menace to society, nor so little that you were a doormat, but enough to get suitably angry, in an effective way, on appropriate occasions, for a fitting amount of time. But for later thinkers, says Mr. Harris, anger was associated with civic strife that made urban life almost unbearable. They saw in anger not a way of asserting dignity and power but proof that you had none, like a woman or a barbarian.
The Stoics developed a sophisticated analysis of how reason and feeling interacted. Even violent orge, they argued, was not an irresistible force welling up inside a person, but an effect of judgments of the world that a wise person could learn to challenge and revise. The ideal of anger management was taken up by philosophers outside the Stoic school, including the eclectic Roman statesman and public intellectual Cicero, who wrote a treatise on the control of emotions following the death of his beloved daughter Tullia.
"The discourse in antiquity on controlling anger had several different levels," says Mr. Harris. "Partly it was a matter of what goes on in public life, and partly a matter of what goes on in the family. And there's what people do on their solitary own, trying to work out how to live with themselves." The work of Cicero and earlier thinkers "reinforc[ed] the upper order's belief in its own rationality and decency," writes Mr. Harris. "The men in power are always strengthened by a belief in their own superior rectitude."
Tough Love
The elites of antiquity were not unique in cultivating a
high opinion of their own emotional sophistication, according to William Ian Miller, a professor of law at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Contemporary academics share the same prejudices about the inner world of people socially unlike them - an "upper-class sense that the richness of one's emotional life varies directly with one's education, refinement, and wealth." Someone reading the Icelandic sagas, he says, will tend to assume that the Viking warriors, conducting themselves by strict and brutal rules of honor, had crude thoughts and even more rudimentary feelings.
"But if you grew up around tough guys," he says, "you know that some of them were thick and dumb, and some were sensitive and smart." In a series of essays and books published over the last decade (among them, Humiliation and The Anatomy of Disgust), Mr. Miller has used his study of the Icelandic sagas as a springboard for reflecting on how emotion is experienced and expressed, in both literary works and everyday social life. His scholarship implies that the Vikings understood things about emotion that few academics ever grasp.
That seems counterintuitive, for as Mr. Miller notes, people in the sagas almost never talk in any depth about what they are feeling. Words for emotional states are rare. And characters' behavior often appears downright bizarre. Talking with the man who killed her beloved husband, a woman makes coldblooded jokes about the bloody ax he holds. When a warrior hears that an enemy has just died, it seems as if he should hoist the mead-horn and celebrate with a drunken rampage. Instead, he takes to his bed for several months.
The distance between that strange world and our own is not simply a matter of the unfamiliar codes of honor from 1,000 years ago, Mr. Miller says. The saga writers defined their characters as having distinct and usually permanent dispositions: cunning, fierce, affectionate, and so forth. Any individual's temperament is, in effect, a matter of public record. When a character's behavior is at odds with his known disposition, there is a pronounced emotional charge for the saga's audience, especially when a situation hinges on rules of honor and revenge. The (seemingly) merry widow's laughter while talking with her husband's killer is a nervous outburst; once over the shock, she tricks him with "advice" that will lead to his death. A Viking becomes depressed when an old enemy passes away, for that means he will never be able to repay the insults he has suffered.
Mr. Miller's more general point is that we are accustomed to understanding emotion as an essentially personal experience - something that occurs "inside" someone and that may or may not be expressed to others. But there are cultures in which emotion is overwhelmingly a social matter, not a private one. The early use of "humiliation" referred not to an inner state but to being made humble in the presence of those higher on the social scale. Only in the 18th century, he says, did it become normal to say "I feel humiliated" rather than "I am humiliated."
As social mobility became more common, there was a
greater emphasis on using emotional language to describe the inner world of an individual as something more or less self-contained. What we gained in expressiveness about feeling, Mr. Miller implies, we lost in candor about the normal cruelty of social hierarchy. A Viking at an academic conference would be bewildered by a lot of things, but at least he would understand that life is a battlefield.
Of Weal and Woe
The idea that civilization rests on the ability to control our feelings (including what Sigmund Freud called the "renunciation of instinctual gratification") has been the "grand narrative" implicit in most scholarly accounts of emotion, according to Barbara Rosenwein, a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. Once, the story goes, people experienced the world with an almost childlike immediacy. Their emotions were strong, spontaneous, and fairly uncomplicated. But the rise of complex economies, state bureaucracies, and intellectual expertise intervened. People grew more self-conscious about what they felt, and even more so about how they expressed it.
In an essay titled "Worrying about Emotions in History" that appeared last year in the American Historical Review, Ms. Rosenwein challenges the whole paradigm. It rests, she says, on a "hydraulic" metaphor of emotions as "liquids within each person, heaving and frothing, eager to be let out." Up through roughly the Middle Ages, they gushed without restraint; then modernity built a dam. The hydraulic imagery is deeply embedded in ordinary language, where feelings "build up" until they are "released" or, possibly, "channeled" into something productive, with rationality thus serving as a kind of psychic steam engine. The model has been undermined, Ms. Rosenwein says, by both cognitive research and social constructionism.
For cognitive psychologists, rationality and emotion are both manifestations of the human organism's ability to judge "weal and woe," to determine whether a situation is likely to yield pleasure or pain, advantage or danger. If you see a man waving a gun in the street, your emotional response may include both bodily sensations (cold sweat, a pounding heart) and incipient physical action (a powerful desire to run). This is not simply a matter of perceptual stimuli directly motivating action. It draws on a concept (eminently rational) that men waving guns in public are dangerous. We can distinguish "reason" and "emotion" ex post facto, but for a cognitivist they function rather like computer programs running simultaneously on the same system, feeding each other information as they do. For social constructionists, the range of emotion is something people absorb from the culture around them. Some constructionists entirely reject the cognitivist model, which treats certain basic emotions (fear and anger, for example) as hard-wired into the human organism; they see emotion as purely social. But most emphasize how societies "bend, shape, encourage, and discourage the
expression of various emotions," writes Ms. Rosenwein, through "language, cultural practices, expectations, and moral beliefs."
Drawing on those challenges to the "hydraulic" model, Ms. Rosenwein proposes an alternative to boilerplate stories about how civilization tamed the wild emotions. People have always lived, she says, in "emotional communities" that shaped their judgments of weal and woe (the cognitive element) as well as how they understood and expressed what they felt (the cultural element). Examples of emotional communities include "families, neighborhoods, parliaments, guilds, monasteries, [and] church memberships" - in short, the range of groups and institutions, large and small, in which people live and work.
Studying the history of emotion in this way, Ms. Rosenwein writes, would mean noticing how people "continually [move] from one such community to another - from taverns to law courts, say - adjusting their emotional displays and their judgments of weal and woe (with greater or lesser success) to these different environments."
She cites 14th-century Marseille as an example. The handbooks for preachers in that era clearly defined hatred as a spiritual disorder. But for the medieval person in the street, it was obvious that hatred was a good thing, an aspect of honor, a passion "maintained and nourished by families and friends" or given up in the interest of building alliances. Hatred could even be offered as a defense in a murder trial, though not one acceptable to the royal authorities. Officials of the crown in Marseille "shuttled from one [emotional] community to the other, participating in the culture of hatreds at home, belittling the same culture when compiling records for their Angevin masters."
Emotionally Social
The framework that Ms. Rosenwein proposes for historical research on emotion bears a striking resemblance to some recent developments in sociology and political science, including the work in Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, edited by Jeff Goodwin, an associate professor of sociology at New York University; James M. Jasper, an independent scholar; and Francesca Polletta, an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University. When researchers write about animal-rights activism, Solidarity in Poland, and the Christian right, the movements all sound very much like "emotional communities."
In their introduction, the editors note that emotions have " led a shadow existence for the last three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis." Even before the rise ofrational-choice theory, though, researchers were not keen to study the social politics of emotion.
There was a strong tendency - inherited from such 19th-century thinkers as Gustave Le Bon - to treat mass
movements as manifestations of primitive and often violent feelings, led by people with antisocial tendencies, megalomania, or both. Social scientists who rejected that perspective (including some with backgrounds in activism) tended to bend the stick the other way. They saw protest movements as the form that interest-group politics took when the normal channels of access to power and public attention were blocked. Emotion was incidental, at least to the scholars following the "resource mobilization" model.
Whether they regarded social movements as irrational outbursts or as the way ordinary concerns were expressed by exceptional means, scholars had no reason to think of emotion as anything but an insignificant factor in everyday political life. But more-recent work emphasizes how emotion and organization shape each other in a variety of movements.
Randall Collins, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, identifies two closely interacting processes shaping political movementsaspects of what he calls "emotional transformation in collective rituals." (He borrows the term "collective ritual" from Emile Durkheim to describe any activity in which people assert and embody their shared identity as a group.) The first process is amplification: Whatever the emotion leading people to join a movement - fear, pity, or anger, for example - involvement tends to make them feel it more intensely by providing occasions and means for its expression. The second process is "the transmutation of the initiating emotion" into "distinctively collective emotions, the feelings of solidarity, enthusiasm, and morality which arise in group members' mutual awareness of their shared focus of attention."
It is a model that applies equally to Promise Keepers or Act Up.
Mad and Modern
That sociologists and political scientists are rediscovering emotion would not have surprised Aristotle, who thought that dangerous feelings could build up in the public, like toxins in a body. His solution? The catharsis provided by tragedy - the release of strong emotion that an audience experienced from watching action on stage. Catharsis was a medical term meaning " purge," as if feelings were forcibly excreted.
The terminology of contemporary literary theory is seldom quite so concrete, much less visceral. Discussing the emotional impact of literature was long a taboo of professional literary study - denounced as "the affective fallacy" by the mid-20th century's influential New Critics and deplored as mere "impressionism" even after the New Critics began seeming old-fashioned. Even with the emergence of reader-response criticism and other schools during the 1970s and '80s, literary scholars had few concepts about how literature and emotion connect.
"Resources weren't plentiful," says Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a professor of English at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. Critics informed by theoretical approaches to literature could talk with great
subtlety about ideology and textuality, but not about the emotional charge that accompanies reading. "People in queer studies and feminism would address it in terms of 'the body,' she says, but that, too, tended to turn into more-abstract discourse. "It was hard to find tools for grappling with it."
The search led her to the work of the late Silvan S. Tomkins, a psychoanalyst whose magnum opus, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, runs to four volumes. Ms. Sedgwick co-edited Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, with Adam Frank, then a graduate student in English at Duke University. Her latest collection of essays, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, reflects a continuing interest in his work.
Tomkins described a small set of affects (basic combinations of feeling and expression) that appear to be built into to the human nervous system . Disgust, for example, "intends to maximize the distance between the face and the object which disgusts the self... If the food about to be ingested activates disgust," wrote Tomkins, "the upper lip and nose is raised and the head is drawn away from the apparent source of the offending odor." The basic affects are already present in infancy. Babies can express excitement, fear, anger, or joy, for example, in ways that are immediately clear to caregivers.
Which, for Tomkins, is very much the point: Affect forms part of our connection with other people from the start. The flow of affective communication, however, runs both ways. If others respond to your excitement, say, with the unmistakable withdrawal that characterizes disgust, your excitement will be mixed with shame: a sort of metaaffect, complicating the experience and expression of feeling. The diverse range of emotions - varying from culture to culture - is built up from the basic affects, like chemicals deriving from slots in the periodic table.
What fascinates Ms. Sedgwick about Tomkins's work was his understanding of shame She calls it "the place [in his work] where issues about the self, and the boundaries of the self, become really acute. Shame is what happens when there is a crisis between identifying strongly with someone else, reaching out to them, on the one hand , and encountering a check on that identification, a rebuke."
For Tomkins, that crisis is definitive. Shame is, in effect, the matrix from which individual identity emerges. But it is also an experience that precedes (and exceeds) our ability to name or understand it. The experience of shame, says Ms. Sedgwick, "doesn't come ready-made with an explanation."
Scholarly interest in shame is not limited to those influenced by Ms. Sedgwick's work in queer theory. Stigma, transgression, and the uncertain nature of personal identity are recurrent themes in literature and psychology. In Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing, critics use recent studies of the dynamics of the emotion to interpret the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne , George Eliot , S0ren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Faulkner, among others. In Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky's Liars and Narrative Exposure, Deborah A. Martinsen, an adjunct assistant professor of Slavic at
Columbia, examines how "shame collapses the intersubjective boundaries between characters and thus accounts for the emotional intensity" of key moments in the Russian novelist's work.
Feeling Scholarly
Ms. Sedgwick's attention has now turned to images of happiness in Marcel Proust, a subject only apparently unrelated to such somber matters as shame. Happy people tend not to think about happiness. They just smile and go about their business The work of reflecting on what Tomkins called "positive affect" is left to people who wish they could feel it, but have trouble doing so.
"I've always had an intuition, and I think Tomkins definitely had it, that a depressive orientation actually opens one up to important things cognitively," says Ms. Sedgwick. "There are certain affective skills it makes necessary that a sanguine temperament might not."
Her speculation has interesting implications. A venerable tradition sees the life of the mind as deeply linked to melancholy - perhaps feeding, in turn, intellectual interest in the emotions. "'Tis the common tenet of the world that learning dulls and diminisheth the spirit," leaving scholars prone to moodiness, wrote Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). And academic life itself provided much to brood about, according to Burton: "How many poor scholars have lost their wits , or become dizzards, neglecting all worldly affairs and their own health to gain knowledge for which, after all their pains, in this world's esteem they are accounted ridiculous and silly fools, idiots, asses, and (as oft they are) rejected, contemned, derided , doting , and mad!" You have to laugh, to keep from crying ..5l>
RECENT SCHOLARLY BOOKS ON EMOTIONS
Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark, eds., Sc enes of Shame : Psy choanalysis, Shame, and Writing (State University of New York Press, 1998)
Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton University Press, 2002)
Paul Gilbert and Bernice Andrews, Shame : Interpersonal Behavior, Psy chopathology, and Culture (Oxford University Press , 1998)
Jeff Goodwin , James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds. , Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (University of Chicago Press, 2001)
Margaret Graver, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Chicago , 2002)
William V Harris, Restraining Rage : The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 200 I)
Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments : Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (University of California Press, 1983)
George E. Marcus, The Sentimental Citiz en : Emotion in D emocratic Politics (Penn State University Press , 2002)
George E. Marcus , W . Russell Neuman, and Michael Maclruen , Affe c tive Intelligence and Political Judgment (Chicago , 2000)
Deborah A . Martinsen , Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky 's Liars and Narrativ e E xpos ure (Ohio State University Press , 2003)
William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard , 1997)
William Ian Miller , Humiliation and Other Essay s on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Viol en ce (Cornell University Press , 1993)
Mihnea Moldoveanu and Nitin Nohria, Mast er Passions: Emotion , Narrative , and the Development of Culture (MIT , 2002)
Martha Craven Nussbaum , Upheavals of Thought: The Int ellig ence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Stephen Pattison, Shame : Theory , Therapy, Theology (Cambridge , 2002)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, P edagogy, P erformativity (Duke University Press , 2003)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds ., Shame and Its Sis te rs : A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Duke , 1995)
Robert C. Solomon, Th e Passions (Univers ity of Notre Dame Press, 1983)
Carol Zisowitz Steams and Peter N Steams , Anger: The Strugg le for Emotional Control in Ameri ca 's History (Chicago , 1986)
Peter N Steams and Jan Lewis, eds. , An Emotional History of the United States (New York University Press , 1998)
Rei Terada , Feeling in Theory : Emotion After the "D eath of th e Subj ec t " (Harvard , 2001)
Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Cons c iousn ess (Springer Publishing Company, 1962-92)
Jonathan H Turner, On th e Origins of Human Emotions: A So c iological Inquiry in the Evolution of Human Affec t (Stanford University Press, 2000)
Robyn R Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate F ee lings and Pop-Cultural Forms (Ohio State, 2003)
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Singing a Song of Swords
CLAIRE MORRIS meets JACK WHYTE
My introduction to Jack Whyte - author of the hugely successfu l pre-Arthurian series , A Dream of Eagles (titled The Camulod Chronicles in the United States and the United Kingdom) - took place at the 2002 Surrey International Writers' Conference in Surrey, British Columbia. Well wined and dined , four hundred conference-goers eagerly awaited the evening's keynote speakers: best-selling authors Jack Whyte and Diana Gabaldon. Diana arrived as scheduled, but Jack , it was announced , would be a few minutes late Apparently he had spilt some gravy on his tie. By the time Jack marched up to the podium, tie showing no hint of gravy , every eye in the room was upon him. As he prepared to deliver his interactive speech , he had to contend with laughter, and the comments surging from table to table. "Gravy? What gravy? Did we have gravy for dinner? "
But, being Jack Whyte, he dismissed the incident boisterously and with humour For , as I learned as the conference progressed , Jack Whyte is an entertainer at heart, and not afraid to speak his mind.
Originally from Scotland , Jack emigrated to Canada in 1967 After teaching high school for a short period , he turned to entertaining. Needing to exercise his creative
mind, he researched and wrote a one-man show about the life of Robert Bums, which he subsequently directed and appeared in. For ten years, he travelled across Canada with this production, educating Canadians about Scotland's favourite poet. A fitting endeavour, I thought, for someone who so obviously cares about history, educating, his roots, and poetry.
Jack is a great advocate of narrative verse, and is determined to bring this back as an art form. At a workshop he led on this intriguing topic, I learned that he has written a number of such poems; the one that is probably the best known of these appears in his first novel, The Skystone (though modified from its original Beowulfesque style, in order to render it accessible to modem readers). On his website, Jack describes his poetry as, "archaic, anachronistic, outmoded and rhyming verse shaped in the oral tradition (of the Celts) ... written for the voices of readers."
He believes that to properly construct narrative verse, a writer requires detailed knowledge of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and poetic structure, as well as a command of vocabulary. Since Jack has always had an affinity for syntax and spelling and the way the English language is put together, it seems only natural that he would become a master of this art form. At an early age, his mother impressed upon him the importance of learning the meanings of words and of using them correctly. He jokes that his idea of fun, before he reached puberty, was to break sentences down into their component parts. Readers of his novels know how carefully Jack treats language, and are enriched by his extensive vocabulary.
Jack's love of narrative verse, dating back to his formative years, was fuelled by influences that reinforced his mother's teachings. His childhood coincided with World War 11, and he remembers parties where every person in attendance would be expected to deliver a song or epic poem. Many of them, however, could not offer more than one or two pieces, but Jack, though just a child, already had a repertoire. Even then, his memory for lyrics and stories was something people thought notable.
Jack's reverence for storytelling was further cultivated in the years following World War IL His father, a noncommissioned officer in a Regiment of the 51 st Highland Division, was blinded by an anti-tank mine in 1944. During his rehabilitation, young Jack would read aloud to him. Later, when Jack's father received records from the Talking Book Library, Jack listened as actors like Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson showed how the human voice can bring stories alive.
With a background like this, it seems that Jack Whyte was destined to be a storyteller. Yet what prompted him to tell the stories set in post-Roman Britain that have enthralled so many readers? The reason he writes about the period coinciding with the decline of Roman power in Britain, through to the eventual withdrawal of the legions and beyond, is because he believes that King Arthur must have lived during this time. And yes, he does believe that Arthur really lived, and is happy to discuss this.
Jack's journey to best -selling novelist began in the late 1970s, with his interest in one particular aspect of the Arthurian legend: how did Arthur pull the sword from the stone, and how did the sword get into the stone in the first place? Believing he knew the answer, Jack determined to share it with others, and somewhere along the way he conceived Publius Varrus, the unforgettable narrator of his first two novels: The Skystone and The Singing Sword. Jack originally thought he would only write one novel about his sword-in-the-stone theory. He intended to explain the mystery surrounding the sword as he saw it, but never to write about Arthur himself. After all, this has been done countless times already. But his proposed one novel stretched into three, and now the series known as A Dream of Eagles (or The Camulod Chronicles in the US and the UK) includes five books, the last of which, The Sorcerer, is divided into two volumes. Then, because of the overwhelming interest of his readers in his characters, his storytelling abilities, and the unique and unforgettable world he has created, he decided to do what he initially had no interest in doing. He is now going beyond the sword-in-the-stone incident into Arthur's life, telling this story in a trilogy that in part parallels the original series. The first book in this trilogy, Uther, published in 2000, covers events that took place in the latter books of the Dream of Eagles series, but tells the story from Uther's point of view instead ofMerlyn's, thereby shedding light on certain incidents, including what happened to Cassandra, Merlyn's beloved. The other two books of the trilogy are underway, and will be presented from Lancelot's point of view. Jack hopes to have the second one ready for distribution by the end of 2003.
Since Jack's sword-in-the-stone explanation is so plausible and logical, and since all his novels are so gritty, and indisputably down-to-earth, it is not surprising that he dislikes having his books categorized as fantasy (or worse, science fiction), as they frequently are in bookstores, in libraries, and on the Internet. For didn't the entire series grow from his desire to explain what has always been waved away as Dark Age magic? His reaction did not surprise me, for even a brief conversation with Jack makes it clear that he knows his history and reveres it. And, as anyone who has read his novels will know, his storytelling is firmly grounded in meticulous research. He points out that the magic attributed to Merlin was magic simply because it involved concepts people could not yet grasp, much as DVD players and the World Wide Web would appear magical to people who lived a hundred years ago.
I remember when I first opened The Skystone, shortly after its publication in 1992. As a historical novel enthusiast, I was pleased to read in its introduction that Jack defines it unequivocally as a work of historical fiction. But, just to be sure, I asked him when we met if he considers himself a historical novelist. In answer, I received a most emphatic, "Yes!"
Jack's forceful exterior encloses a man who does not take his success for granted. He feels he is one of the lucky ones, a writer who was fortunate enough to have his work make it to publication and best-selling status. As a regular
presenter at the Surrey International Writers' Conference, he recently demonstrated his desire to encourage new authors by teaming with Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series, to sponsor a new prize for short fiction in the writing contest that accompanies the event, one which will be inaugurated at the October 2003 conference.
Jack has already begun research for the novels he hopes to write once he has satisfied his fans' appetite for Arthur and the founders of the colony of Camulod. The subject that he has turned his sights to is the Order of the Knights Templar, for he feels it offers scope for the novelist, perhaps another epic series.
On the third day of the 2002 Surrey International Writers' Conference, I had the privilege of sitting down with Jack Whyte. During the course of our conversation, I asked him about his views on when history begins, about his fascination with historical remains, and about his works in progress.
Some authors say their novels just happen to be set in the past, because they don't want to be associated with a genre (historical fiction).
Yeah, but how can I not be associated with it? I write about 5th-century Britain That's my definition of historical fiction.
There's a lot of debate about when history begins . What's your take on this?
For years, it was, history began with the First World War, the beginning of the 20th century. Now we're in the 21st century . A novel about the First World War is legitimately now historical fiction. To a lesser extent, a novel about the Second World War can legitimately be called historical fiction. That's pretty close, though. I mean, anything within my own lifetime cannot be historical fiction. (Laughs.) And I was born in 1940.
So how about an author who was born in the 1960s. Would the Second World War be historical fiction to them? lf they were writing about the Second World War?
Probably, probably. I think so. Yeah .
So it 's dependent on the author.
Of course. I think there's a natural reluctance - it's human fallibility - to consider anything history, or historical, that occurred during your lifetime. It kind of dates you, you know.
How did you first get interested in the time period you write about?
In high school. I had a wonderful , crazy teacher, and he insisted on teaching us Roman history from the perspective of the Roman military occupation of Britain. He took us to Hadrian's Wall, and to all the old forts.
You 're inspired by landscape, by remains?
Oh yeah. I really am. Moods and environment, you know . When I first came to Canada, the year that I taught up in Athabasca, I was making a comment one day about a battlefield, in Scotland. I said I'd been there, and I was describing it. And there was this one kid sitting at the back of my class with a sneer on his face, you know - his lip curled right up. And I said, "You got a problem?"
He said, "Yeah, what kind of bullshit is this - what are you talking about? You've been everywhere, you tell us all these places and you've been to them all. Come on!"
Now this is a kid in Athabasca, Alberta, who's never been outside his own town. And I realized, these kids had no yardstick against which to judge what I was saying. So I went from what I was talking about straight into a geography lesson. I got a map of Scotland, and then I showed them. I said, "Now look. Every English army that ever invaded Scotland had to go through this little narrow neck of land, with Edinburgh Castle on one side, Stirling Castle on the other. That's the gateway to the Highlands. The only way to the Highlands. So every famous battle in Scottish history happened there! Five hundred years apart, perhaps, but the same place!"
Because that's where all the action was. So the battle of Prestonpans, the battle of Sheriffrnuir, the battle of Bannockburn, the battle of Stirling Bridge - they all happened within a mile and a half of each other, and that's where I grew up. But they were separated by centuries. And the kids couldn't grasp that. But when I showed them the map, they sort of begrudgingly said, "Ah, okay."
So I can remember then - and I can remember as a kid - looking for what made the battlefield of Prestonpans different from the battlefield of Bannockburn: 400 years apart, 400 yards apart . I remember trying to capture the different feeling of each one .
At that time I had absolutely no thought in my head that I would ever be a writer. None That's just the kind of thing that fascinates me.
Do you think people are born storytellers?
Yes.
Do you think it has something to do with being a Celt?
Yes.
Do you think being a Celt gives you insight into the Celts of the 4th and 5th centuries?
Not necessarily, but it gives me an empathic perspective. Anything I want to know about the Celts of the 4th and 5th centuries, I have to go digging for. But, I can extrapolate from there, just knowing the persona. Because the persona has not changed. To this day , the old incredible people that you find in small towns and villages in Scotland and Ireland are the same people that were there hundreds of years ago. And that doesn't change. The mentality, the outlook, the perspectives of the people don't change radically over the centuries. Because these are very insular people. Certainly when I was a kid , they were born and
spent thei r who le lives in the same village, never went anywhere! The biggest trip some of them ever had was overseas to fight in the war.
Your character Publius Varrus. Where did he come from ?
I've got a poem that says, "Where did you come from, Publius Varrus?" He's a composite figure , of three of the most admirable men I know My father. And a little bit of me. And same with Caius Brittanicus Again , a composite of several men whom I've known in my lifetime and admired greatly . Both he and Varrus, they're very different from each other, but each of them has complete integrity , with Varrus being the epitome of the non-commissioned officer whereas Brittanicus is the commissioned officer.
You have two more novels to finish up the Uther series.
Yeah. It's a mini-series. In sequel. It's called The Golden Eagle, because the original series was A Dream of Eagles. Now, in The Golden Eagle, I'm doing what I said I would never do, which is, write the Arthur story And , it's different! Well, you heard me talk about it.
You were saying at lunch that you 're reconciled to it now.
Yes , I am Because, what's happening, what I'm writing, is not at all what I expected to be writing! Very different. So, I'm looking forward to getting it finished.
Your take on Arthur, your take on the whole story, is different than anybody's ever done
Yes Has been to this point, and it's going to stay that way.
Ifyou could give one piece of advice to aspiring historical novelists, what would it be?
Write. Just write. You've just got to keep doing it, and it gets better. It does There's only one way to write a book, and that's put your ass in a chair and write a book! Don't dream about it , don't think about it, don't talk about it, write it. Once it's on paper, then you're perfectly at liberty and you give yourself complete permission to go back and revise it till hell won't hold it. But until you get that first draft on paper, you're in never-never land. M
Jack Whyte's offic ial Web site is www.camulod.com.
Jac k W hyte's no ve ls
Th e Skystone, pb, Penguin Canada , 1993 ; he , Tor/Forge , 1996
The Sorcerer: The Fort at River 's Bend, pb , Penguin Canada , 1998; he, Tor/Forge, 1999
The Sorcerer: Metamorphosis, pb, Penguin Canada, 1998 ; he , Tor/Forge, 1999
Uther, he , Viking Canada, 2000; he , Tor/Forge , 2001
SOI.ANDER 13 Vol. 7
Celebrating Genre: the Surrey International Writers' Conference
CLAIRE MORRIS
As a writer, there is something unmatchable about attending a writers' conference. And the larger the conference, the more inspiring and invigorating it can be. Imagine sitting around tables in a ballroom with 400-500 others, sipping coffee and listening to a keynote speaker, who asks how many people in the room began writing in their childhood. You glance around , and find that nearly everyone has raised their hand. These are people who take their craft seriously. These are people who can encourage you to do likewise.
Writing is , by its very nature , an isolating occupation Often, as writers, we immerse ourselves in our works-inprogress, hesitant to share them or discuss them with anyone, least of all other writers. True, not all writers feel this way, but I would suggest that at some point in the life of every writer, whether it is a phase they are transitioning through, or a particular piece of poetry or prose that is just too close, too important, to release to the wider world, there has existed a reluctance to release details, either
verbally, or by actually showing another person those word sequences printed on a page.
I think there can be a similar reluctance to go to a place where you might rub shoulders with an author as famous as Diana Gabaldon There is the thrill of that , of course , but there is also the concomitant battle with that tiny selfdeprecating voice, telling you that you're wasting your time. You will never achieve best-selling status or have your novel/poem/short story/biography published to critical acclaim. Why spend the money?
But if you do not go, you deprive yourself of all the encouragement and knowledge you will receive in the writing workshops , keynote addresses , and less formal discussions that inevitably occur with editors , agents , authors and others in the writing community.
My main reason for attending the 2002 Surrey International Writers' Conference was that I happened to be living only a few minutes ' drive from the conference venue and, as a dedicated writer, would it not be ridiculous to sit at home when hundreds of writers and people in the writing industry were converging on a nearby hotel? When I was still living in Ottawa , I had heard many good things about this conference in Surrey , British Columbia , which then seemed an unreachable place As an active member of a local writers' group , I believed in the power of gathering with other writers. As a historical fiction enthusiast, I was pleased to learn that several prominent historical novelists would be attending the conference. What I did not expect to find in Surrey was a heightened interest in historical fiction
Perhaps it is inevitable that a conference supported by Diana Gabaldon and Jack Whyte would attract a number of writers seeking to one day publish their own historical novel. But Canada has not traditionally been a historical novelist 's ally In Canada, there is a jealous guarding of culture , and when it comes to the publishing world , this means that often only those novels that feature Canadiana end up displayed on bookstore shelves. Of course , these novels can also be historical novels , which I'll define here as any novel set in a time prior to 1960. (This doe s not necessarily reflect my own belief, but since the debate regarding history and when it begins will not be resolved anytime soon , I'm choosing this definition for the purposes of this article ) Prominent examples ofrecent "Canadian" hi s torical novels are Margaret Atwood's The Blind A ss assin (winner of the 2000 Booker Prize) , and that most wonderful novel , Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief (winner of the 2001 IMP AC Dublin Literary Award). And , from two ofmy favourite (and prize-winning) authors , Guy Vanderhaeghe ' s novels The Englishman 's Boy and Th e Last Crossing , and Jane Urquhart ' s The Stone Carv ers, The Underpainter, and Away.
It is important to note , however, that these worksalthough historical fiction by my definition- are written by authors who cannot really be considered historical novelists since they also write non-historical material. Guy Vanderhaeghe has delivered a lecture titled , "History and the Novelist ," and Jane Urquhart has explored a number of aspects of the 19th and 20th centuries in her recent novels
But would either go so far as to call themselves "quote/ unquote historical novelists," as Canadian author Sandra Gulland termed it in an article describing how she came to write her unputdownable trilogy about Josephine Bonaparte? These novelists-Gulland included- are first and foremost talented Canadian authors whose fiction is set in the past either to illuminate what has gone before or to draw parallels with today. This in some way supports the fact that fiction published in Canada prides itself on being indefinable , and above genre So to find myself in an environment where genre is not only okay , but celebrated, was intensely refreshing.
At the 2002 Surrey International Writers' Conference, four well-known historical novelists delivered workshops and keynote addresses, signed copies of their books, and offered advice to aspiring novelists. They also sat on a historical fiction panel. On the Friday afternoon , Jo Beverley , author of numerous historical romances , and Sharan Newman, author of the medieval mysteries featuring Catherine LeVendeur , joined Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series , and Jack Whyte, author of the pre-Arthurian series, A Dream of Eagles (Th e Camulod Chronicl es) , to discuss their views on writing and researching historical fiction
When asked why they wrote historical fiction , all conceded it stemmed from their own interest in history. Sharan Newman is a medieval historian , with a vast knowledge of languages and fallacies about the Middle Ages She wrote her Guinevere series after researching Guinevere and realizing that this famous queen was not portrayed favourably , particularly in medieval literature. Here in Canada, Sandra Gulland embarked on Th e Many Lives and S ecre t Sorrows of Jos ephin e B for much the same reason , exploring the idea that Josephine has been badly treated by historians
Canadian novelist and RWA Hall of Fame member Jo Beverley has a degree in history , and said that historical fiction has always appealed to her. Her attraction to the Regency era comes from the influence of Georgette Heyer but she is also fascinated by the Georgian and medieval periods as well. Jack Whyte ' s decision to write historical fiction came out of his exposure , thanks to a high-school teacher, to the Roman military occupation of Britain. For him , research is "fun and self-indulgent" ; stimulating, Gulland calls it.
And Diana Gabaldon? Holder of three university degrees and a New York Times best-selling novelist , she is warm and approachable and her sense of humour shaped her response. "It was the kilt ," she said.
Another conference event that promoted historical fiction was the "genre lunch, " held on the Saturday. Jack Whyte hosted the historical fiction table , where we discussed everything from Jack's work-in-progress to why Welsh history is such a difficult sell. Only ten people could fit around the table , and I was interested to note that we had to tum people away Was this because they were eager to share their soup and sandwiches with Jack Whyte, or was it because they wanted to discuss historical fiction
with someone who has successfully made a living at writing it?
Perhaps a little of both Jack Whyte has a magnetic personality yet he is also extremely serious about his writing and just as serious about the research that goes into it. He is also interested in encouraging not-yet-published writers. As lunch progressed, he wanted to hear about the works-in-progress of every writer about the table , who were all Canadians writing about non-Canadian history Topics ranged from 19th-century Australia to late 15thcentury Scotland to the Viking Age. And every writer there not only had their storylines fully developed, but had them firmly grounded in historical research.
In her workshop titled The Architecture of Fiction: Focus on Description, Diana Gabaldon provided a number of valuable insights into how to best present historical detail in a historical novel. She pointed out that a common mistake made by many writers of historical fiction is the compulsion to lay out all the historical details early on, and often in large paragraphs that overwhelm the reader. She advised writers to keep their eyes on the action, introducing the historical details gradually , and as needed. She also pointed out that not all details are needed . Although you , the writer , may have uncovered some fascinating historical fact, you must resist the urge to include it in your novel. Ask yourself, does the reader really need to know this in order for the story to make sense? She reminded us that in writing, nothing is ever truly lost. Yes, we may slash entire scenes because they no longer fit, but the fact that we wrote them initially has in some submerged way contributed to the final work.
Sharan Newman delivered a workshop on how to make settings more vivid for the reader (The Architecture of Fiction : Focus on Setting) As an author of historical fiction, she naturally drew from her own experience writing novels set in medieval France, although she made her audience work (and at 9 :30 on a Sunday morning!). Between our exercises , she emphasized the importance of using a place not as a backdrop, but as an integral part of your story. She reminded us that your setting must always remain in your sub-conscious as you write , because what is surrounding your characters can be used to heighten the intensity of what is happening to them , as well as setting the mood , and revealing details about them. A poignant example of what she means comes from her second-last novel , To Wear the White Cloak. In the prologue, she writes , "His ambition ended at the boundaries of his own land ."
A number of other conference workshops were of interest to writers of historical fiction , including Jo Beverley ' s Classic Storytelling Techniques , which discussed character development , and goal/conflict enhancement, and Jack Whyte's session on researching I also had the opportunity to attend two workshops which, while not directed at historical fiction writers , addressed concepts that are very important to the genre Jeffrey McGraw, Editor for HarperEntertainment, hosted an interactive seminar on theme, where he used films - some of them based on epic historical novels- to explore this
elusive topic In Gone with the Wind , for example, he identified the theme as survival, but pointed out how difficult it is to portray this through a heroine like Scarlett O ' Hara, who acts selfishly so much of the time.
One of the most enjoyable and entertaining workshops of the conference was titled Focus on Pacing In this session , Donald Maass, the highly successful New York literary agent, delved into the various issues that slow down a novel. Reminding us that "tension is story" , he warned us against main events taking place off-stage, and giving equal weight to all events. After all , isn ' t a death more monumental than drinking your morning cup of coffee?
The conierence also offered writers a chance to meet one-on-one with literary agents and editors , several of whom are interested in historical fiction . As well, there was the popular Blue Pencil Cafe, where writers can sit down with authors to discuss their works-in-progress.
For 2003, the conference promises to be bigger and better than ever before. Now in its eleventh year of operation, it will again host appearances by Diana Gabaldon (who told us in her keynote address that this is one conference she never misses) and Jack Whyte (another regular presenter). In their desire to promote the talents of unknown writers, Diana and Jack have banded together to sponsor a prize for short fiction , and to judge it as well. Jack served as the overall fiction judge for the 2002 Surrey International Writers' Conference Contest, and said he very much enjoyed the experience. It is interesting to note that at least two of the prize-winning authors in the 2002 contest are also writers of historical fiction . Will I attend the 2003 conference? Definitely. Partly for the inspiration I know it will give me , but also because I will once again be reminded that historical fiction is very much a force in the minds and lives of Canadian writers .s-.>
The 2003 Surrey International Writers' Conference will be held October 16-19 in Surrey, British Columbia. The conference website is www siwc ca
The official websites for the historical novelists mentioned in this article are:
Claire would like to thank Teresa Eckford, Sandra Gulland, Lisa Mason, Carmen Merrells and Sarah Nesbeitt for their help with this article.
Claire Morris is a writer and researcher with a public relations company in Vancouver She began reviewing for the Historical Novel Society in 1998. Several of her short stories have been published and have won awards , including The White Man , which placed fust in the 2002 Surrey International Writers' Conference Contest.
A Glorious Indulgence
Crime n o velist MANDA SC OTT
on her real l o ve : writing histo rical fiction
History is a very wonderful, very magical, very fragile thing. Those of us who indulge in the writing of historical fiction - and it is a fantastic, glorious , addictive indulgence - have a responsibility at the very least to be aware of its fragility, its magic and its wonder and to treat the past with the reverence it deserves. It has taken me a long time to realise that. I was never a historian - I did geography at school because it was common sense and could be worked out from basic principles and general knowledge, while history involved memorising facts and I was never very good at that. I read widely, and if the greats of our childhoods - James Fenimore Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliff, Dorothy Dunnett, Mary Renault - made more of an impact than anyone else, it was as much for the power of their storytelling as the settings - or I thought so at the time. When I began to write, I started with contemporary crime thrillers because, in learning the art and craft of writing , the one - the onlypiece of advice that's worth following is, 'write from what you know. ' A baby writer has enough to deal with learning the mechanics of plot , character and location and the extraordinary wealth of the English language without having to deal with the complexities of taking factual research and forming it into fiction. I knew science and medicine and was fascinated by the dynamics of death and life. I could plausibly construct Glasgow and the west of Scotland because I wasn't living there any more and they hung under a pleasantly opaque cloud of nostalgia that erased the rain and the dreary cold and the ghastly parochialism of small-town Scotland and made instead a place where at least the homophobes were in the minority. Thus I learned the first great joy of writing fiction; that I could bend reality into the shape I wanted it to be.
Thriller writing was never home. I don't read crime fiction even now, unless it ' s written by my friends and pretty circumspectly at that - what do you say to someone for whom you have absolute respect if their last book was
SO lANDER 13 Vo
unreadably bad? There are advantages, though, to writing in a genre one never reads; breaking the rules is easy if you don't know they exist. I didn't and still don't, nor do I care - and, yes, there will be a sequel to No Good Deed in the near-ish future. More than that, as a beginner, thriller writing imposes some necessities of form that are lacking in other modem literature. A coherent, lucid plot is essential, even if its path is only clear to the reader in retrospect. Because I believe utterly that one of the guiding principles of good writing is 'show don't tell' and loathe with a passion the 'tell don't show' kind of novels (for a classic example, see James Patterson ' s truly execrable historical novel, Jester) then, of necessity, my writing is character -driven and the plot threads don't so much form a framework as emerge in the weave. A succession of patient, understanding editors taught me how to draw clarity from confusion without becoming bombastic or patronising the reader or - hated fault of crime writing - giving anything away early. I don ' t want anyone to read one ofmy books and know where it's going , or even believe they're being led down a road. If you can't live with the characters, see with their eyes, hear with their ears, smell, taste, touch, feel passionate about the world around them, then the book has failed. If you can do all of those, then you are not considering the exigencies of plot, you're too busy looking at the rain running down the windscreen and experiencing whatever dreaming it brings.
This means that, for my first four novels, I never drew up a plot line. I built my core characters in my head until I knew them as people, took the one or two who really mattered and found their emotional arc, or at the very least identified the emotional edge over which I wanted to drive them, and then worked backwards to see how to get them there. Never did I embark on a contemporary novel knowing even remotely how it was going to end. If, as a writer , I'm going to give my characters freedom to live, I have to give them the freedom to make their own decisions when they reach the cliff-top and look off into space. All I have to do is hold to the integrity of their reality and write down , as faithfully as I can, what they are doing. It's far easier, I promise you, than having to chisel living people into the strait-jacket of a plot. I will argue that to the ends of time (and have done - it's a good one for crime fiction panels).
Then the world opened up and the writing of Boudica became both possible and essential. This is the book - the series, there will be four altogether - that I have been going to write since I first read The Eagle of the Ninth and Last of the Mahicans back-to-back at the age of eight - I just didn't know it then. It took me another thirty years to realise that I could take the magic afforded by the hybrid of these two and offer it as a version of reality for everyone else.
It was inspiring, it was fun , it was mind-bendingly hard - I have no historical training at all and you have no idea (maybe you do) how incredibly opinionated, on no apparent basis , some archaeologists can be. But for every opinion is a counter-opinion and if they diverge widely
enough then there's scope in between for something to live and breathe. But that something does, ultimately, have to hang around those bits of 'fact' on which we all agree: there was a Roman invasion of Britain, it probably took place some time in the autumn of AD 43, there were probably around four legions involved and some serious numbers of auxiliary cavalry- and our side lost, which is the bit that really matters. It is said that most writers are writing the books they'd really like to read. I'd modify that to say that most authors who write from the heart are writing the books they'd like to read about the people they'd like to be and the world in which they'd like to live. (That leaves the vast throngs who are writing the book they know will sell in order to fund the lifestyle of the person they'd like to be.)
The writing of Boudica, then, is not simply an exploration of the life of one woman, however intriguing, inspiring and exceptional she may have been. It's an examination of a people, a way of life, a civilisation that was old when Rome was a village on a hilltop. It's an exploration of what it might have been like to have lived in a world where the gods were real - the first gods , the ones who grew with the land - and where the people 'lived daily in their sight'. The late pre-Roman Iron Age has probably had some of the worst press of any era of British history (or even of pre-history, as one anorak insisted on calling it). Rome wrote the records and Rome was the victor, therefore it follows that the vanquished were obviously barbarian savages just ripe for a spot of Imperial civilisation. Or not.
In writing something of this scope, therefore, there were a number of new challenges. The first was by far the hardest: that of evolving living, breathing characters who nevertheless had to fit around the skeleton of a plot, however sketchy, however widely spaced the 'factual' nodes. Motivation cannot be external - ifwe believe Tacitus that Amminios fled to Gaul and petitioned Gaius/ Caligula for aid, we need to know why he would do that and why that aid was not forthcoming - and both of these men must behave true to themselves throughout the plot. Thus certain of the characters had to evolve backwards, at least in my head, rather than starting from raw imaginal clay and growing in strength and form as the plot progressed. Weaving amongst them, the truly fictional characters, both tribal and Roman, who did emerge unformed from the imagination, had to maintain the same integrity and colour as those based in fact - it should be impossible for the average reader with an averagely poor knowledge of the era to separate the 'real' people from those I made up. It should be similarly impossible for that same reader to work out which of the other structural constructs are real and which are fiction - an Eceni roundhouse must be as real as a Roman military governor's residence on the Rhine, a ceremony to mark puberty in a girl-becoming-woman must have the same veracity, although based entirely on fiction, as the relatively well-recorded passage of a recruit into the Roman auxiliary cavalry. Following on from that, simple logistics becomes an issue, particularly when modem
archaeological theory fails to address it. Ifl were trying to land 40,000 (minimum) men, horses, equipment and supplies in a vast armada of ships, where would it make sense to send them? (NB: I am not taking sides in the 'Kent vs Sussex' debate on that one. As far as I can see , with that many ships, you'd have to be entirely mad to send all of them to one place - the landing time alone would take days on end.)
Above all, this mustn't become a polemic. I may not like what Rome did to my people, but I would be failing utterly as a novelist if I failed to create balance - not all of the tribes were good, not all of Rome was bad. I don't think the Romans should have come here and I'm unutterably sad that we didn't manage to throw them out. That much is clear and I have no problem with expressing it, but no picture is black and white; very few people consider themselves or their actions genuinely to be evil , and fiction above all else allows us access to the hearts and souls of those on both sides of any conflict, be it personal or planetary. Love and war drive us all; it's just that it's not always easy to see the distinction between the two.
So - Boudica is an ongoing project - an exploration of who we were and who we could have been, possibly who we could still be. More than that, it's a coming home. Crime fiction was a fantastic nursery and I'm not at all sorry I started there, but life is infinitely more free, more exciting and more authentic in the deep past; I love it and I'm here to stay. How else can I take a day out to learn how to drive a horse behind a plough and tell myselfl'm working?M
Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle is published by Bantam in the U.K and by Delacorte in the U.S. Boudica II: Dreaming the Bull will be published in trade pb in February 2004.
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
are offering a free copy of BOUDICA: DREAMING THE EAGLE to the first five members who correctly answer the following question:
What was the name of the Roman governor at the time of Boudica's revolt?
Please send your answer on a postcard , along with your name and address, to :
Sarah Cuthbertson
7 Ticehurst Close Worth, Crawley West Sussex RHlO 7GN
Thi s competition is only open to U.K. members
The French Pimpernel
MURIEL SMITH
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilley was by birth a Norman, born 2 November 1808 at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Manche, where his family is recorded from the end of the fourteenth century. As was reckoned, before the Revolution changed all that, he was third-generation nobility, his grandfather, Vincent Barbey, an advocate, having been ennobled in 1756. By family tradition and by conviction, Barbey was a stout Royalist, a Legimist very much opposed to the Orleanist dynasty. Louis-Philippe's triumph by the Revolution of 1830 had been very much the triumph of the urban middle class and of a particularly shameless variety of capitalism. When he was toppled in 1848, Barbey rallied to Napoleon III as the lesser evil, restoration of the Legitimist heir, the Comte de Chambord , not being possible.
Barbey drew his material from his native territory and from the period just before his own birth that he knew of from the reminiscences of the previous generation who had been mixed up more or less in the Royalist resistance, the Chouannerie , during the Revolution. Normandy was a major area of the resistance and of the republican genocide, and Barbey planned a whole series of novels, most of which he never managed to write. The journalism that gave him a living absorbed most of his energies
His best-known novel, Le Chevalier des Touches, is a fictionalised version of the true story of a gang of Chouans who spring their comrade from jail, in the manner of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Barney actually met his hero in 1856, in the asylum at Caen where the poor Chevalier had lived for thirty years, his mind hopelessly clouded. The novel begins with his old friends discussing his present state and then goes back to the great days of the rescue. The story is set in the little ultra-Royalist town ofValognes. Anatole France recorded how he happened to read the book there on a gloomy winter night, and how it called up the past for him, and gave him the shivers. It was published in 1864.
Barbey had already written l'Ensorcelee , published by Alexandre Cadot in 1854. In it, he engaged frankly with the supernatural. It begins with a contemporary scene: the narrator, Barbey himself, more or less, is crossing by night a lonely heath in the Cotentin. Tainnebouy, his guide, shares the local beliefs and prejudices and when his mare suddenly goes lame, he curses that damned berger. This in Cotentin does not mean simply a shepherd, but one of a distinct race of travelling folk, not gypsies, being fairskinned Northern Europeans, but with a like reputation for occult gifts. They took casual work, driving animals to market for farmers, and you had better not offend them. Tainnebouy had refused to recommend a certain man for a cattle-driving job and believed he had been ill-wished. The
bergers play quite a part in the main story with ill-wishing and forecasting of disasters. The mare had cast a shoe but was able to go on slowly after a rest. At midnight, the pair are at the edge of the lande; they hear the hour strike and then, more distantly, the great bell of Blanchelande, sounding nine strokes for the Mass of the Abbe de la Croix-Jugan.
In 1789, Jehoel de la Croix-Jugan was Frere Ranulph of the Abbey ofBlanchelande When the community was dispersed by the Revolution, Jehoel became a fighting Chouan. In the summer of 1798, in defeat and in despair, he attempts suicide and blasts away much of his face. When the Chouan war has ended and the churches are reopened, the Abbe de la Croix-Jugan, as he is now called, appears one day for Vespers at Blanchelande, the remains of his face half hidden in a black hood, and Jeanne le Hardouey, though not bewitched, becomes utterly obsessed by him. She is a devout Catholic and a Royalist, married to a Republican purchaser of Church lands. The Abbe has come to Blanchelande, suspended from priestly functions, to live a retired life under the eye of the parish priest. He sees Jeanne simply as a tool for his underground activities , which he still carries on. They have frequent secret meetings and she accepts the terrible risk of carrying messages for him. She drowns herself when the emotional pressure becomes too great. The Abbe's priestly functions are restored after the three years of probation imposed on him His first Mass is to be the first Mass of Easter at Blanchelande. It is also his last Mass. Thomas le Hardouey, having vainly asked the bergers to ill-wish the Abbe, shoots him dead from the doorway at the moment of the Elevation. And now, at irregular intervals, the great bell sounds, and if you peer through the bullet holes in the old door, who knows what you will see?
Un pretre marie, published by Faure in 1865 , is about a priest who abandoned his calling during the Revolution and became a sacrilegious buyer of Church lands. It tells the story of his relationship with his devoutly Catholic daughter.
A set of six short stories, Les diaboliques, was brought out by Dentu in 1874. Barbey was officially accused ofan outrage on public morals and had to agree not to reprint: the first edition had already been sold out. It was unobtrusively reprinted by Lemerre in 1883. Since it fell into the public domain in 1954, there have been numerous new editions and some of the stories have been filmed or adapted for television. They are fairly horrible, but it is hard to believe that any adult could be genuinely shocked. Flaubert declared they were so bad they were funny , but he is not a disinterested witness: Barbey had said in public print that Flaubert had been steadily detracting from, not adding to, the reputation he won with Madame Bovary, which in any case was the sort of novel that anyone can write without being a novelist. Zola accused him of cowardice for backing down, but Zola was not a disinterested witness either: Barbey had been scornful about coloured photographs pretending to be frescoes, and what were mere studies of animal physiology, the sexual encounter of two vertebrates He made particular fun of
Zola over l 'Assomoir: it created a scandal when serialised and Zola wrote a preface to the book complaining of being calumniated and misunderstood over what was really his very moral work.
Edmond de Goncourt claimed responsibility for the title document humain for the new school of Naturalism which had succeeded to Romanticism and, for Barbey, Renee Maurepin was the top step of the stair leading down to Zola and the Goncourt brothers, gentlemen of letters essentially occupied in quietly stabbing Catholicism in the back. Nevertheless, Edmond Goncourt put him in the list for the future Academie des Goncourts , though, as it happened, Barbey died seven years too soon, on 23 April 1889.
Precisely thirty-seven years later, on 23 April 1926, Barbey was reinterred at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte. That same year, the firm of Bernouard began issuing Barbey's Complete Works and Jacques Petit edited the first volume Oeuvres romanesques completes for Bibilotheque de la Pleiade. Already in 1902 , Alphonse Lemerre had published, in the Nineteenth Century series, Les ouevres et !es hommes, Barbey's 1860 collection of book reviews , mostly scathing . He led an embattled life as a literary journalist, being sacked from various periodicals whose editors were afraid of legal consequences. He did in fact have troubles over his journalism , as well as all the fuss over Les diaboliques. It is notable that he stood by Baudelaire in 1857 in Baudelaire's troubles over Les fleurs du mal, and he defended Balzac against literary attack the same year.
Following the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1958, there was a surge of interest in Barbey in the 1960s. In the Pocket Classics series Libertes, Jean-Jacques Pauvert published Barbey's Les quarante medaillons de l'Academie of 1864, a scathing criticism of the Academie Fran9aise as an almshouse for failed Orleanist politicians with no reason for its further existence. Victor Hugo , the great chief of the Romantics, became a traitor to the cause by prostrating himself before the thirty-nine Academicians , of whom he despised at least thirty-seven, in order to pick up his twelve thousand francs attendance money . He was following the bad example set by his rival as a poet, Lamartine - what was that bird of paradise doing in a pondful of gloomy old herons? - and by his own example he had led astray Alfred de Vigny and Merimee. Pauvert also republished Un pretre marie in 1960, in their Nineteenth Century series. The Garnier-Flammarion pocket classics brought out Le Chevalier des Touches ( 1965) and Les diaboliques ( 1967). I do not know of any translations of Barbey's works.
He had at least one successor in Normandy, Jean de la Varende (1887-1959), who wrote a string of novels about Royalist action during and after the Revolution. L 'homme au gants de toile, first published by Bernard Grasset in 1943 and in paperback by Le Livre de Poche in 1970, besides being about getting a wanted man away to Jersey, like Le chevalier des Touches , actually includes Barbey among its characters, and two stories for his intended forthcoming Nouvelles diaboliques. fli>
Two Novels of the American Civil War
D EAN MILLER
Historical novels treating on some aspect of this important , even epochal, American conflict appear at least yearly; the market seems to be well-nigh insatiable - and best-sellerdom is not uncommon, thinking of Charles Frazier ' s Cold Mountain of a few years ago (soon to be a Major Motion Picture).
Here I want to be completely unfair: to pick out and make invidious comparisons between two novels that are , each in its own way, emblematic of the literature centered on the war. One is the all-time novelistic blockbuster (a word not known in 1936, when it was published) , Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind - which is still in print. The other is a book that appeared in 1944 (printed under wartime restrictions) , published by a good house (Scribner ' s) but which seems to have vanished almost without a trace: Joseph Stanley Pennell's idiosyncratically titled The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters The latter is less than half the size of the former , but it did not attract the cinematic attention of Cecil B. de Mille and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Those are the points of contrast between these two historical novels in grosso modo Mitchell ' s bulbous best-seller can, perhaps, stand as the romantic novel - not so much of the war , since most of the focus of the book is on the civilian South and its travails - but of something self-identified as The South As Glorious Victim. The plot is easily summarized: the heroine, named Scarlett O'Hara in what is supposed to be a good Irish Catholic landowning family in Georgia) sees the foe-eating boys of her cottonplanter class gladly (and , naturally , gallantly) go off to a war that was, of course, forced on them. Scarlett, a toothsome redheaded seventeen at this point , has her vixenish green eye on a handsome neighbor named Ashley Wilkes, but Ashley marries someone else, so Miss O'Hara gets married too (he dies, unheroically). The long casualty lists come home from the battles, and some survivors Sherman marches through Georgia , and Scarlett (having dramatically fled from a
burning Atlanta) saves Tara , the archetypal planter mansion , from Sherman's "bummer" thugs . There is an attractive rapscallion around named Rhett Butler, a Charleston blockade-runner. The war ends (a bit before the mid-point of this huge novel) and the ruffianly Yankees and the traitorous Scallawags descend on poor Georgia to enforce a victor's peace and to coddle (and , most ridiculously , to enfranchise) the freed Negro slaves Scarlett marries again - mainly to save Tara. She moves back to Atlanta and becomes a hard-nosed businesswoman The Klan appears and there is a little lynching - in defense of Southern womanhood , of courseand the Yankees and the Reconstruction government brutally retaliate. Scarlett has two children along the waydoesn ' t much like them , certainly didn ' t like the procreative act (but she still is hot for Ashley Wilkes). For her thrusting ways she becomes a hissing and a byword in polite (ex-Confederate) Atlantan society , but is stoutly defended by gentle Melanie (wife to A. Wilkes) Scarlett, who unabashedly loves money , marries R. Butler (husband No. 2 had been killed by the occupying power) who is now rolling in the stuff At the very end , the pace of the novel , which had been stately and talkative though interrupted with the occasional gaudy flare of melodrama , gets more frantic as Scarlett and Rhett have a child , the child is killed in a riding accident, poor Melanie dies in childbed, Scarlett decides she doesn't really love or want the gentlemanly if ineffectual but now available Ashley , Rhett for his part rejects her (and says, "My dear, I don ' t give a damn ") , but the heroine , a little shop-worn by now , sniffs and insists that " tomorrow is another day."
Bare, unadorned plot lines often read as more than a bit silly or stupid , of course (summarize a play by Shakespeare , or almost any opera) ; what of Mitchell's narrative and novelistic skills in general and in particular? Certainly she was willing to take her time - the book took ten years to write, after all - and to roll out a narrative that can seem ponderous though never, to give the woman credit, does her plot completely bog down , become ludicrous or come irredeemably unglued. There is an unholy amount of talk ; I knew that prolonged languid chatter was part of the Southern Way of Life , like chitlins , black-eyed peas , hookworm , and pellagra, but paragraphs and even pages of dialog do puff this book out to an inordinate degree - at least so far as our present taste is concerned Mitchell can draw a sharp character - or toss in cardboard cutout figures stiff with cliches (the supernaturally perfect O'Hara mother , a comic Frenchman who speaks bad Maurice Chevalierese, a vapid and vaporous aunt named Pittypat, a "good" and loyal if slightly murderous trashy - bearded and tobacco-chewing - white man , and so on; there is a huge cast of characters , of course) The two characters she does best with are her dramatic leads: Scarlett herself, and the rascal Captain Butler. 1
1 Ashley and Melanie Wilkes , in the first rank of the secondary characters , are , I think, identifiable as driven by loyalty, which sustain s her while it destroys him . I have no idea if Mitchell was con sciou s of this balance and duality , or not.
Scarlett is, in fact , a bitch on wheels, a cold sexual manipulator - but also a self-deluded romantic: she is a hardheaded realist (especially when it comes to her main chance) who sees no good in war , and simultaneously she is as pickled in the past as the rest of her compeers (" Tomorrow is another day " seems to look to the future , but the embedded memory of the privileged delights of the past is as inescapably heavy for her as for those around her). Rhett Butler, who must be the model for any number of truly awful imitations (and he himself owes a good deal to Sabatini's darkly devilish, handsome heroes , or possibly to Showboat ' s gambling man , Gaylord Ravenel) is rather a Trickster figure, and clearly Mitchell fell in love with her creation (though, according to a reliable source , the man she had in mind to play him in the movie was Groucho Marx) Like Scarlett, however, he is not of a piece ; as the book rumbles onward , his character is not so much developed as it is patched together out of vagrant bits and pieces. Mitchell was , after all , an amateur at writing fiction , and her ineptitude shows itself in the cliches that sprout like fungi on almost every page (the brutal Yankees with "beady little eyes", the " sooty lashes" of the heroine, and so forth and so on). The scenes of passion with a capital P are wildly and unintentionally comic, but fortunately there area 't many of these - Mitchell was, as we know , a Southern Lady . At one point the author forgets that Scarlett's point of view implicitly drives the book, and she suddenly shifts the internal monologue over to Melanie At the same time , she is capable of quick bursts of insightful humor , as when her heroine comments acidly (and accurately) on the dreadful upperclass Charleston accent.
The point of the book is to lay out, in excruciating detail, just what was " gone with the wind" And here we have to make certain judgments as to just how valuable the book, considered as a piece of historical fiction , is. Certainly, it is too long - too long by about three hundred pages. But if one sticks to it and reads all those pages , what does one get from the book? What I think the reader gets is a perfectly accurate insight into the (ultimately, dangerous) fairy tale the South told about itself, about the war, antebellum society, slavery, Reconstruction, and a few other historical currents and events. To be sure , this is what we ought to expect: Mitchell clearly was marinated in the fantasies of the Lost Cause from infancy . She didn't have to labor to research and reproduce a past; she was herself still living in that past (and evidently was perfectly happy to live there: she had no Faulknerian Angst , no anguished doubts about the deep heart of he r darkness). From this Traumenw elt well up the predictable images of " gallantry" betrayed , the "Southern boys" with their "courage and energy and brains" (no one could doubt their courage, at least) or the vacuous , rebarbative description (generated out of Scarlett ' s - which is to say Margaret'smindset) of Ashley Wilkes returned from war and captivity : " Every line of his slender body spoke of generations of brave and gallant men. " Well, maybe - but in plain fact planterdom in Georgia was only about two generations old , and in their origins the planters
themselves were a mixed, not to say a mongrel, lot. 2 But of course what we have here is a perfect match to the elaborate Southern fantasy life Mark Twain chronicled in his Life on the Mississippi - specifically the growth and proliferation of ornate pipedreams involving the Chevalier and his Lady (one ever chivalrous and brave, the other eternally beautiful, gracious, and untouchable), and the details of the parlous impact Sir Walter Scott's novels had on the planter class's (and its wishful adherents') fertile antebellum imagination. And Twain himself had once bought into some of the Confederate line of propaganda, as he readily admits.
We are brought to the central core of the narrative, where history is, I fear, perverted, and this perversion is still defended fanatically (if more covertly than at other times) throughout the American South. Behind the claim of "states' rights" was the gross fact of slavery - the buying, selling and possession of black human beings, over whom the owner exercised absolute dominion. In tune with the purposeful forgetfulness that underlay the author's attitude, her depiction of slave life is a caricature. All her blacks (field hands or house slaves, pre- or postwar) speak in a generalized minstrel-show dialect. There are , at least so far as I can recall, no mulatto or mixed-race colored people in her cast of characters (to introduce them might raise the question of how they came to be generated). The blacks (and "nigger" is used very freely in the speech of both races) smell. 3 When they are released by force into a bewildering freedom, "the better class of them, scorning freedom, [suffered] as much as their white masters", while the "brutish" field hands were "like monkeys or small children." Sometimes the author unwittingly creates a comic moment: Scarlett sees Big Sam, one of Tara's field hands, marching along with other slaves toward heavy manual labor on the defenses of Atlanta, and Big Sam is loud in song - but the song is the mournful spiritual "Go Down, Moses", a lament which (a) is very difficult to march to, and (b) contains the key line: tell Pharaoh: Let my people go But let's drop Mitchell's epic for a bit.
The plot of Pennell's The History ofRome Hanks and Kindred Matters is not as easy to miniaturize (or satirize). The book works through the memories of living men (and women) back to the separate familial strands that will culminate in the birth of the young or youngish man (as he is first introduced) named Lee. Schematically, Lee has one ancestor who was a Confederate volunteer from North Carolina, one who was Union , from Pennsylvania - and his great-grandfather Romulus Lycurgus Hanks came to
2 Mitchell identifies one character as having been raised in a Virginian environment and then transplanted to Georgia ; Virginia pretended to a "C hevalier" past with a bit more excuse for the pretense than did the Deep South
3 Scarlett, on the other hand , punishes the brandy and then gargles with cologne to hide the smell. Each to his or her own
Iowa from a Kentucky family that sent two sons to Secession and two to the Union (two of the Hanks brothers are killed in the war, one from each side). From two separate sources Lee then learns most particularly of the deadly Civil war battles where his ancestors "saw the elephant"- an old man, once a regimental surgeon to an Iowa volunteer infantry regiment, describes the horrors of Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing (and Rome Hanks' part in that tremendous bloody fight, where Grant was surprised and hammered, rallied his troops and hammered back until the enemy withdrew) while Lee's great-uncle Pinckney marches, in memory, with his North Carolina regiment to Gettysburg, where the eight hundred men who went with General Robert E. Lee's triumphant legions into Pennsylvania emerged from three days of fighting, and the gory shambles of Pickett's Charge, eighty strong. (Another ancestor, Tom Beckham, was briefly involved in the war while serving in a Pennsylvania regiment fighting in northern Virginia, and he was wounded there at Gaines Mill.)
Working through the narrative is another story, mainly told by the quondam surgeon Joe Wagnal, of the man possessing, someone said, "the eyes of Mars, to threaten and command" who led Rome Hanks' Iowa regiment, Clint Belton - a man Hanks found "under the bluff' at Shiloh, cowering away from the withering storm of Confederate bullets and cannon fire with many others from the Union regiments whose nerve had broken Belton gets his nerve back - in fact he becomes a hero of the Army of the Tennessee, a "war lover" and a highly successful selfdramatizer and self-promoter. But he could never forget that moment of pure bowel-loosening terror "under the bluff'; he tries to kill the men from his regiment who saw him there, and years later, his own political career in ruins , he tracks down his "friend" Rome Hanks in Kansas, still murderously obsessed and convinced that Hanks was secretly responsible for his downfall. Along the way, the soldier Belton and the surgeon Wagnal marry Southern sisters they discovered in an eerie, decadently luxurious Mississippi mansion: Belton's wife first engineers and then ruins his career, Wagnal's wife was his connection to one of the war's iconic individuals, the "knightly" cavalry commander J. E. B. Stuart - "Goddamn his foppish soul to hell" because, dead in the Gettysburg campaign or not, Stuart cuckolded the husband of every Southern womanin her dreams.
The story stretches out to Iowa, after the war, and then on to frontier Kansas. Rome Hanks, captured at Atlanta , comes home from the deadly Andersonville Prison in bad shape, sickly and nearly broken ("But I never died! I never died!" he cries in delirium). He heals slowly and never completely. The passions and toxins of the war are still percolating: Rome's Secesh brother Lucius comes through Iowa , on the run (for unclear reasons); the father of the two Mississippi sisters - with his aristocratic free black body-servant Rasselas - is, we learn, barbarously killed by the Klan and the mansion burnt down In the dust and high-plains heat (or mud and freezing cold in season), in the bad luck, failure, and death-of-dreams of "Fork City,
Kansas", all the forefathers and -mothers of the second Robert Lee Harrington, ostensible center of the narrative, gather. Rome Hanks has died of pneumonia; he had been reading Darwin's The Origin of Species. Have the fittest in fact survived? And what have they passed on? The culmination of all those American strands of chance and survival appears - "Born on the Fourth of July"- in 1904. If historical fiction is, most simply stated, the product of the cross-fertilization of history and the imagination Pennell, I think, managed to put together a first-rate example of the genre - that is, in every sense of the word, he knew his history and his art. The past is solidly nailed down, rather more so than the book's "present", for Lee's actual sessions with his aged informant-narrators, Joe Wagnal and Pinckney Harrington, are set in a time that has to be - but is never strictly located as - the 1920s, when there were still old men alive in America, with memories intact, who had seen and experienced what these two old soldiers had seen and experienced - and had survived. The battle scenes are as chaotic, as full of blind chance and murderous accident, stark terror and stupid bravery, psychotic behavior and selfless nobility, all along with the terrible harvest of brutally torn and mutilated bodies, with instant death, slow death, and strange black-comic moments, as any that have appeared in print. Young Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage may be seen as superior, but that book has only one lesson to teach, however complex that lesson proved to be. Pennell can concentrate a truth about these battles and their aftermath into a minor-keyed elegaic sentence: "Every cemetery in every little town in America has a minie ball in it." 4 The minie balls are still there, with the old bones, and the metal buttons from old uniforms.
Pennell has a fine hand at drawing grotesques: "Crime" is a Cockney Englishman, a slimy Crimean War veteran who attaches himself to Belton and manages to find a handy drummer-boy for his dubious pleasures; a semiliterate "nymphomaniac shrew" named Cory Burrus is the one whose unhinged suspicions bring down Belton's social-climbing wife, while Una Belton herself is an icy caricature of the woman who goes to Washington to dominate its corrupt society (is a bit of Henry Adams' novel Democracy here? Anyway, Una dies from pneumonia contracted because she wore too revealing a Worth gown in bad weather). Even Lee's Great-Uncle Pinckney Harrington is a sly grotesque: an octogenarian with a younger second wife and young children, living isolated in the hills, shunned by his relations, using a Coon Holler dialect when it pleases him - and with a strange growth behind his ear, an egg-like tumor he refuses to have removed, identified as "a secret encystation of corruption and defeat." In the middle of these bent and ugly-souled characters Romulus Lycurgus Hanks stands as
4 The "minnie-ball", a cone-tipped lead cylinder of .55 or.58 caliber, fired from a rifled muzzle-loaded Springfield or Enfield, had to have been the single most deadly casualty-producer of the conflict. I have never, fortunately, seen what a minie could do to human flesh; I can attest that its effect on wooden target posts at ranges up to five hundred yards is sufficiently terrifying. SOI.ANDER
a solid, intelligent, generous, empathetic creation, however ruined physically by Andersonville's horrors, and financially by this same generosity (he co-signed a note for Clint Belton for a huge amount of money, the note was called in, Belton never repaid him). Can young Lee grow into the sort of proven, tried-in-the-fire manhood Rome Hanks represents?
In this novel, the "negro question" or slavery itself, is hardly in view. There are no ranting Abolitionists or much mention of them on the Northern side, and in the Secession ranks blacks (in this author's narrative) simply count as indicators of status - a "poor white" owns few or none; the North Carolina regiment Pinckney Harrington and his brother joined was made up of Piedmont hillbillies, not pseudo-aristocratic planters playing at the role of gallant Knight-Cavalier. 5 In fact- on the other side - the author could have profited from a closer look at the particular attitudes toward the enemy that the Western regiments of the Army of the Tennessee (later Sherman's Army of the West) held: they were solid Union, and they powerfully disliked their opponents for the disproportionate political power the South had held before the war, and then for the "Slave state" label and what that surely meant. But in terms of historical fact, Pennell is off-base on only two matters: on the generalship of Grant, and on what he calls the amateur, "armed mob" nature of what would be Sherman's army. By long before the Battle of Atlanta these regiments had become hardened, disciplined, expert fighters. If they had not been, Sherman would not and could not have cut them loose from their supply lines and sent them marching eastward, marching to the sea. 6
Pennell's style is clear, tight, idiomatic and uncluttered. If he has a problem, it is with the compound adjectives - mostly adjectives - that he scatters inconsistently through the text: "primpmouthed", "bowedup", "nakednaveled", "newstraw" and so on. This was a narrative tic used or seen fairly widely in the interwar years; you can find some of it in Faulkner and in Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe. Putting that linguistic lapse aside, what is particularly to praise in The History ofRome Hanks ands Kindred Matters is that it is a genuine novel, if a haunted and sometimes haunting one. It must be read, and read carefully, not gulped down like the larger and easier - the self-indulgent - book I am comparing it to. Pennell puts together a narrative that is full of surprisessometimes unpleasant surprises. It is worth the reader's while to enjoy or endure these - that is, if you can find a copy of the book - while winning through to an ending that is only slightly optimistic, where the fortuitously assembled "kindred" of Pennell's title with its double meaning come together to produce the child and then the
5 There is a post-bellum scene where one of Lee's forebears, "God's Anointed" Cawdor, a religious fanatic, overawes and "puts the debbil on" a trio of freed, disrespectful blacks, referring to them as "sons of Ham". Cawdor is another grotesque.
6 Grant's generalship has recently been upgraded as that of R.E.Lee has been downgraded but, to be fair, Pennell was writing at a time when Lee's stock as a leader in battle was much higher. THE MAGAZINE OF THE HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY
man who will search out and question where he came from.
The sex is sensible - present and potent but not blatant - and the violence is sharp, frightening, and real.
It will be abundantly clear that I don't think much of Mitchell's big book, her Southern "epic". Yet she faithfully reflected and passed on a fantasy that lay under (or twined dreamy fictional flowers around) the crudest political reality. When Reconstruction was ended, the North simply withdrew from any real concern with what the South did politically, socially or racially. The freed blacks of the South fell under the bitter sway of Jim Crow, to be segregated, isolated, and disenfranchised - or they could go north, where they found work but a cold welcome. Mitchell spawned any number of imitators and parasites - one can include authors like Frank Yerby, who slyly played with the forbidden, excavating all of those salacious possibilities - naturally untouched by Mitchelldown on the Old Plantation, where white ladies whose effete husbands ignored them might dream of big, muscular-masculine, sweaty black men. And the racial attitudes Mitchell blindly reflected eventuated, most recently, in the (satirical?) novel The Wind Done Gone, whose publication brought the Margaret Mitchell Trust rushing out of its hutch spitting fire and lettuce (I stole that image from Gavin Lyall, and I've been waiting years to recycle it), while lawyers circled like vultures with briefcases. In the end Mitchell simply brought to the masses the more abstract, aesthetic, and poetical posturing of John Crowe Ransom and the rest of the Southern Agrarian School, with their wistful dreams of a cultured aristo South, all one with the fecund land , standing defiantly against the crude iron materialism of the moneygrubbing, anti-romantic , Damn-Yankee North. She also created a "heroine" who eventually had most of her own way in a tough world, and this had to appeal to those caught up in the grim realities of the Great Depression era. Perhaps she didn 't set back the quest for black civil rights in America by twenty years. Yet I have to admit that I think that the entire thought-world of this fantasized antebellum South - cast in one sentence rather than in more than eight hundred turgid pages - was betrayed by the remarks of a docent guiding tourists through Charleston's rebuilt Slave Market a few years ago. Pointing to the slave-block, the sweet old lady said (you have to imagine the accent):
"And right here is where the employers interviewed their future employees."
Perhaps she was making a joke. I don't know. _Iii;)
In the end there is plenty of history to go around, perhaps too much. And many families have their own historical fiction: my mother repeated to me the story that her own grandfather, John Merritt Garrison II, had been captured and sent to Andersonville Prison, had escaped SOLANDER 13 Vol. 7 No. I MAY 2003 25
over the Deadline and had made his way north through a hostile Rebel countryside, to the Ohio River and safety. His actual army records - excavated by another relativetell another story: my maternal great-grandfather never got closer to Andersonville than the siege of Vicksburg, where he was shot in the face while on picket duty , a bad wound. He was invalided out of the Union army and he carried the facial disfigurement and the pain for the rest of his days
Too much history: in antique shops run by feckless or unconcerned purveyors of the artifacts of the past I've seen the grave markers, iron stars topping an iron rod , which were put up over the graves of veterans who were members of an Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, the first and largest American veterans' organization. The old rusting markers were for sale. Perhaps the South takes better care of its once-honored dead; I have to be honest enough to suspect that it does.J;r;>
In the interest of full disclosure, Dean Miller has to record that he had two great-grandfathers in two Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry regiments, the 12th and the 23rd (and maternal ancestors in at least one other Wisconsin regiment), that his paternal grandfather was given, as a middle name, the last name of his father's corps commander in the Army of the West (Buell - not a great general, but Great-Grandfather Charles evidently was a loyal man), and the conflict in question was always called, in his family, the War of the Rebellion.J;r;>
Gone With The Wind is available in hardback and paperback The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters is available from online used bookstores such as abebooks.com. The Wind Done Gone is available in paperback (Mariner Books , 2002).
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Hope for the Heart and Food for the Soul: Historical Fiction in the
Life of Howard Fast
SARAH CUTHBERT SO N
Credit: Maxine Gomberg
Howard Fast probably owed his highly successful career as a writer of politically, socially, and morally committed historical fiction to a crush be had at age seventeen on an older woman whose later criticism of his first published novel stung him into finding his true metier. More on this story later, as TV news anchors are so fond of saying.
In his long life, Howard Fast wrote over eighty works of book-length fiction and non-fiction, as well as short stories, plays, journalism, screenplays and essays. His novels include both crime and science fiction, but it is for bis historical fiction that he will be best remembered. Nevertheless, in "History and Fiction", a 1944 article for the left-wing magazine New Masses, Fast rejected the term historical fiction for his novels, "as of late - that is during the 1930s - it was familiarly used to describe a massive, carelessly written, escapist tome." Yet in Current Biography (H.W. Wilson, 1943) he declared that he was "going to try a one-man reformation of the historical novel."
IfI dwell long on Howard Fast's youth, this is not only because it formed him as a novelist, but also because his young life represents the American Dream writ large. It is only later that we see how the dream - temporarilyturned into a nightmare for this gifted author who, as a young man, raised himself out of the ghetto by his writing, and lived his life with the same passionate commitment that he brought to his historical novels.
Howard Fast was born in 1914 in the slums of Lower East Side Manhattan, the third child and second son of poor Jewish immigrants. His father, Barney, arriving in New York in 1878 aged nine, was given the surname Fast from his hometown ofFastov in the Ukraine. His Lithuanian-Jewish mother, Ida, who came to America via London, died when Howard was eight, leaving Barney with a 19-year-old daughter and three young sons. He never remarried. To avoid being tied down as second mother to her three brothers, the daughter soon left borne, while the youngest son was farmed out to relatives. Barney, often depressed and either unemployed, on strike, or exhausted from working long hours at poorly-paid physical labour, was never an adequate father to Jerome and Howard, who by the time they were ten and eleven were themselves working outside schoo l hours to help make ends meet. And when that was not enough, they were reduced to scavenging and even, at one stage, stealing from grocery deliveries left on richer people's doorsteps. In many ways, they were the father to Barney's child. (In his memoir, Being Red, Fast describes his father as "a good, decent dreamer of a man who always had both feet planted firmly in midair" p.38).
Howard Fast died during the writing of this article, at the venerable age of 88. Thereby, I oHer it here as a tribute, though not an entirely uncritical one, to the memory of a much-loved author.
Eventually, with its combined earnings, the family was able to move out of the Lower East Side Jewish ghetto to a better apartment in a better neig hbourhood But it was an Irish-Italian district, and Howard came up hard against gang warfare, racism and anti-Semitism. He had not been
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raised as a practising Jew, and bewildered by accusations of"Christ-killing", it was here that he began to take an interest in his cultural and religious heritage It was here, too, in the struggle to make a decent life amid poverty, bigotry and street-fighting, that he witnessed the lynching of a thirteen-year-old black youth by a white gang . Later he turned this into a story that caused the issue of the magazine in which it was published to be banned in Boston.
Relief from gruelling poverty , hunger and brutality came during working summer vacations spent with relatives in the Catskills. These vacations were often marred by family tensions (the rural branch had worked its way out of the ghetto and looked down on the poorer one still trapped there). But as well as satisfying the city boy's yearning for wide open spaces, these summers gave Fast a lifelong love of nature and the countryside which adds atmosphere to so many of his novels.
But always he had to return to the city slums, and things got worse with the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression . The company Barney worked for folded and he rarely found employment again , though the boys carried on working.
In Being Red, Fast describes himself as a "not a quiet or contemplative kid, but one of those irritating, impossible, doubting, questioning mavericks, full of anger and invention and wild notions, accepting nothing, driving my peers to bitter arguments and driving my elders to annoyance, rage, and despair" (p.48). And significantly, in view of his circumstances, he saw himself as innocent enough to be free of hate.
He hung on to his job at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, working as a page boy for six hours after school and five on Saturdays , with overtime Here he had discovered books In what little spare time he had , he read voraciously, if indiscriminately, absorbing the world of literature and ideas: "I loved working in the library. The walls of books gave me a sense of history, of order, of meaning in this strange world" (Being Red p.41). But above all, books taught him how to think : "I had seen my father on strike; I had seen him locked out , his head bloodied on the picket line I had seen the economy of my country collapse .. .I did not have to be instructed about poverty or hunger. I had fought and been beaten innumerable times because I was Jewish; and all of it worked together to create in my mind a simple plea, that somewhere, somehow, there was in this world an explanation that made sense" (Being Red p.42).
Two of the books that most influenced him at this time were Jack London's The Iron Heel and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw. The Iron Heel presciently portrays an underground socialist struggle against fascism, while Shaw's book provided this sixteen-year-old "with a new way of thinking about poverty, inequality and injustice" (Being Red p.46). It didn't take him long to realize that the power of books and writing, along with his thorough if rigid education in the New York public schools, were the
tools he needed to understand the trap he was in and the means by which he could extricate himself from it.
Even before graduating from George Washington High School and enrolling in the National Academy to study art, Howard had made the decision to become a writer. He had already written two novels and now began to submit handwritten short stories to magazines, meeting with no success until one of the Harlem librarians told him no magazine would consider a hand-written manuscript. The family agreed to rent a typewriter and three months later Amazing Stories accepted his science fiction tale, "The Wrath of the Purple", for the handsome fee of $3 7, equivalent to a month's library pay.
Quitting the library after three years, Howard went to work at a hat-maker's for better wages It was impossible to do this physically demanding job as well as write and attend college so, the job and the writing being for their different reasons necessary to him, he chose to drop out of the Academy.
At about this time, he became more involved with communism. He abandoned Das Kapital after 200 pages but found The Communist Manifesto and Ten Days That Shook the World more to his liking. Through his elder brother Jerome , he met Sarah Kunitz, a Communist Party member who had visited the Soviet Union. She was clever and wise and seven years his senior; he fell in love with her instantly. Though fond of him, she didn't requite his ardour. She introduced him to other left-wing intellectuals , but talked him out of joining the party at such a young age (he was seventeen) Later, criticizing his first two published novels as escapist fairy tales and betrayals of his working-class background, she would be instrumental in setting him on the road to writing the politically-grounded historical fiction which is his lasting legacy.
In 1933, needing to get away from New York, he set off for the South with a friend who was also an aspiring writer. Hitching rides and sleeping rough (often moved on more or less forcibly by the local police) from Philadelphia to Miami, the two refought the Civil War with local boys and generally absorbed the nature and atmosphere of the Deep South, all of which would stand Howard in good stead when he came to write his Reconstruction novel, Freedom Road. But he also felt (like "a prolonged electric shock") that he had "journeyed through a society in disintegration" and "began to understand that society could be planned and function in another way , called socialism " (Being Red p.61).
He returned to factory work, and that same year his novel Two Valleys was published. A historical romance set in Colonial West Virginia, it was the sixth he had written He was not yet nineteen. He published two more novels , in 1934 and 1937. Then , spurred by Sarah Kunitz's scorn , he wrote a novella-length story , The Children, based on his own life as a slum boy (and featuring the above-mentioned lynching), but found it such a painful experience that he turned to researching the American Revolution, a rich vein from which he produced some of his finest work.
Soon after marrying art student Bette Cohen, be gave up factory labour to write stories for various magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post and The Ladies' Home Companion. During a trip to Valley Forge, he got the idea for his next novel, Conceived in Liberty (1939), which was written in the style of All Quiet on the Western Front, the first time the Revolutionary War had been dealt with in the realist manner. It was his breakthrough novel.
With a little money behind them, he and Bette went to Oklahoma to research the tragic story of the Cheyenne Indians who bad fought a running battle with the U.S. Anny in 1878-9 while attempting to return to the Wyoming homeland from which they had been forcibly exiled. Originally written from the viewpoint of the Cheyenne chief Little Wolf, it was rejected. Fast's former editor, Sam Sloan, advised him to rewrite it from the white perspective, having realized the impossibility of a white author getting inside the head of a Cheyenne and rendering his speech into English. Fast agreed to a rewrite and Sloan accepted the novel for the publishing house he bad recently set up. It was a popular and critical success, and signalled the end of financial insecurity for the Fasts.
The following year, Duell, Sloan and Pearce published The Unvanquished, a novel about the Continental Anny in defeat and retreat which was described by Time magazine as "the best book about World War II". It is also notable for a fine character study of George Washington.
While waiting to be drafted for World War II, Fast worked in the Office of War Information, writing scripts for Voice of America news broadcasts to occupied Europe. The retrospective irony of a communist sympathizer with party connections as mouthpiece of the U.S. government and armed forces no doubt wasn't lost on Fast, although be maintained at the time that his sympathy merely took the form of compassion for the Soviet struggle against Nazism and a refusal to condemn communism. He never was drafted, due to defective sight in one eye, but the OWI would have insisted on keeping him, even in uniform, valuing the clarity of his prose, his historical perspective and bis idealistic patriotism. Although troubled by the necessity of watching unedited battlefield footage as part of bis job, this harrowing experience was invaluable for his novels , lending a horrifying clarity and realism to the scenes of war depicted in many of them. It also helped make him a pacifist.
During his time on Voice of America, he published Citizen Tom Paine, a fictional biography of the rabblerousing 18th-century revolutionist whose writings were an inspiration for the American Revolution, and Freedom Road, the story of an ex-slave who rises to become a state senator in post-Civil War South Carolina, only to be betrayed when Reconstruction fails. These novels offer evocations of their respective periods that are both passionate and intellectually serious. As well as becoming an enduring bestseller, Freedom Road was acclaimed by such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt and W.E.B. du Bois
and won its author the Schomburg Race Relations Award for 1944.
The same year, Fast's application for a Voice of America post in North Africa was turned down. It transpired that the State Department, on FBI "advice", would have refused him a passport because of his communist sympathies and communist party connections. Angrily, be resigned from the OWI, but after much bustling, he was commissioned by Coronet magazine (on a limited passport) as a war correspondent in Burma and India. By this time, the war was almost over but Fast, ever the observant writer, found much material in this adventure that would help shape future novels. En route to the Far East, he flew low over the Negev Desert, Sinai and Palestine, collecting images that would enhance his Biblical-era novels, Moses, Prince of Egypt (1958), Agrippa's Daughter (1964), and My Glorious Brothers, the story of the Maccabees who fought to free Judaea from its Graeco-Syrian oppressors. This novel, published in 1948, was soon taken to the heart of newly-born - or reborn - Israel.
In India, Fast met the British, who always come off badly in his writing, perhaps understandably in the Revolutionary War novels, where they are usually portrayed as effete snobs, decadent, boorish and stupid. As an American and a socialist, Fast loathed colonialism and criticized the British in India for their refusal to acknowledge the humanity of their subjects. A vivid example of this was bis description of two British army officers maintaining complete indifference to the Indian servants towelling down their genitals after a shower. He uses this vignette in at least two novels, The Pledge ( 1988) and his last Revolutionary War novel, Seven Days in June (1994). Incidentally, much of The Pledge was inspired by his experiences in India, including meetings with Indian communists, and a major famine that he and others controversially accused the British of engineering in order to weaken the native population and prevent them giving support to the Japanese.
Before Fast went to India, be and Bette - after much deliberation - had joined the American Communist Party (CPUSA), having come to "the conclusion that if the antifascist struggle was the most important fact of our lives, then we owed it to our conscience to join the group that best knew bow to conduct it" (Being Red, p. 83). This, Fast points out, was at a time when the Soviet Union was an ally, having defeated a monstrous Nazi enemy at unimaginable human cost and thereby "restoring hope to mankind". Stalin's atrocities, the gulags and show trials, were ignored or rejected.
In his memoir, Fast traces the origins of the American socialist movement to the seventeenth-century English Levellers who fled to America to escape Cromwell's persecution of them for their belief in total political and economic equality. In the CPUSA, Fast met many idealistic intellectuals, most of whom kept their membership secret, but the majority of members were working-class. The party was active in fighting for
workers' rights throughout the Thirties and Forties but its membership was depleted by post-war repression.
Returning to America armed with his journalistic experiences in the Far East, Fast wrote for the Communist New Masses magazine and Daily Worker newspaper, usually without pay and at his own expense, as when the Daily Worker sent him to cover the Chicago labour strikes. To do this, he temporarily put aside The American, a novel he was writing about John Peter Altgeld, the late nineteenth-century reforming Governor of Illinois who controversially pardoned three men convicted on the flimsiest evidence of involvement in the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing which took place during a workers' protest meeting. The American was published in 1947.
By this time Fast had fallen foul of the U.S. government's growing intolerance of the Left and of Communists in particular, which resulted in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the McCarthy Senate hearings. President Truman's executive order requiring federal employees to take a loyalty oath, swearing that they were not and had never been members of the Communist Party, soon spread to state governments, schools, universities, hospitals, and eventually to the film and publishing industries. If a party member took the oath he risked a perjury conviction; refusal was effectively an admission of party membership. The penalties were dismissal from one's job, and blacklisting, which carried the very real possibility of never being able to work in one's profession again.
In 1946 Fast, already the subject of an extensive and expensive FBI investigation, received a subpoena to appear with others before HUAC to testify about his support for the Spanish Refugee Appeal. Under the auspices of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, this appeal was raising funds to finance a hospital for Spanish Republicans who had fled to France at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Fast was later recalled to answer a trumped-up charge that appeal money had been used to help the Yugoslav Communist partisan leader, Tito. He reacted angrily and with characteristic intemperance, calling the HUAC chairman, among other things, "a contemptible and disgusting little man, an enemy of not only human rights but of human decency" (Being Red p.152). Finally, in 1947, he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to disclose the names of contributors to the Spanish appeal. His three-month prison sentence was delayed by appeals until 1950.
None of this did his writing career any good. Already, President Truman's special counsel, hauled up before a congressional committee for giving copies of Citizen Tom Paine to fifty friends, had pleaded that he didn't know the book was Communist propaganda. But worse was to come. Fast's literary agent informed him that she could no longer sell his work under his real name, and a group of librarians told him that the FBI had ordered his books to be taken off public library shelves and destroyed (but they had hidden them to restore once the madness had passed). SOLANDER
Meanwhile, The American, a bestseller and Literary Guild selection, began to be vilified in the press. While praising it, the scholar and journalist H.L.Mencken had taken Fast to task for recently helping found the left-liberal, Communist-inspired Progressive Party: "These clowns will destroy you as surely as the sun rises and sets" (Being Red p.193). And My Glorious Brothers, lauded in Israel, was ignored by U.S. reviewers, and managed to attract venom from both the Left (for "Jewish nationalism") and the Right (criticized by the FBI, the Jewish Book Council of America removed all reference to the award it had given Fast for the novel). Many bookshops declined to stock it.
Ever the activist, Fast accepted an invitation to a leftwing peace meeting at Peekskill in rural New York State which was to feature a concert by Paul Robeson. When the meeting was threatened by gangs of right-wing hooligans, Fast organized a small force to hold off their attacks. This was a perfect metaphor-in-action for a major theme of his historical fiction - a brotherhood fighting oppression against the odds.
In 1950, all appeals having failed, Fast finally served his three-month sentence for contempt of Congress at a "prison without walls" in rural West Virginia. In one of his court appearances, an accuser had become so exasperated at his lengthy diatribes that he had told Fast to "go write a book." It was in Mill Point Prison that he began to do just that. The book was Spartacus, an innovative fictional rendering of the great Roman slave revolt of 73- 71 BC which Fast completed in 1951, after his release. Perhaps he wasn't entirely surprised to find that no publisher would touch the novel, or indeed anything written by him. His name had entered the blacklist. Angus Cameron, a wellrespected reader at Little, Brown, which in 1950 had published Fast's Revolutionary War story, The Proud and the Free, gave Spartacus his highest praise, but the FBI leaned menacingly on Little, Brown and on every other publisher Fast approached. Eventually the author set up his own small press to print and distribute Spartacus. His faith in the novel was vindicated by sales of more than 40,000 in the first three months after publication. When the Communist witch hunts were over, Spartacus went on to be a major bestseller, and in 1960 it was turned into a blockbuster Hollywood movie ("an intelligent epic") starring Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov. Its screenplay was written by another blacklisted writer, Dalton Trumbo.
Other self-published books followed - The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1953), based on the true story of two Italian-American anarchists executed in the 1920s for a crime they didn't commit, and two novels based on his own recent experiences of the Red Scare, Silas Timberman and The Story of Lola Gregg (both 1954). Fast's fiction wasn't published commercially again until Moses, Prince of Egypt in 1958.
1iG>
He considered exile abroad to get away from the Redbaiting. The family - he and Bette now had two small children - spent some months in Mexico, but returned to
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live quietly in New Jersey, managing on the steady flow of royalties from abroad where his novels still sold well, especially Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road and The Last Frontier. Many of his novels had huge print runs in the Soviet Union, which awarded him the Stalin International Peace Prize. But Soviet royalties were not forthcoming until 1957, by which time he rejected them, having left the Communist Party in shock and disgust at Khrushchev's revelations about the atrocities and moral corruption of the Stalinist era.
This was a deeply painful decision for Fast, who might have been accused of wilful ignorance about these appalling events. He gives a heartfelt, if intemperate, account of what he considered to be his ideological betrayal in The Naked God (1957) and a more reflective, if still defensive one in Being Red (1990), which some critics see as a partial retraction. Though still devoted to leftist ideals (he remained a socialist for the rest of his life), he had always had an ambivalent relationship with the CPUSA and its leaders. Looking back on his time as a member, he writes: "In the party I found ambition, rigidity, narrowness, and hatred; I also found Jove and dedication and high courage and integrity- and some of the noblest human beings I have ever known" (Being Red p.355).
As a result of this very public "defection", Fast's star crashed out of the Soviet literary firmament almost overnight. Thus, in less than a decade, he achieved the dubious - and possibly unique - distinction of seeing his novels condemned and his literary reputation savaged by both the Right and the Left.
After running for Congress in 1952 on the American Labor Party ticket without a hope of success, Fast took no more part in public politics, and although his writing remained committed to the struggle of the dispossessed against the oppression of the powerful, this was now portrayed on a more intimate canvas. April Morning, his classic novel of a boy's brutal coming of age during the Battle of Lexington, was published in 1961, and eleven years later came The Hessian, based on a small but shocking fictional incident during the Revolutionary War. Both novels, which Fast regarded as among his finest, explored the dehumanizing savagery of war through an ordinary person caught up in large events, and both were written, as was all his subsequent fiction, in a sparer, more emotionally detached style than his pre-blacklist books, those novels of his ardent, idealistic - even romanticyouth.
In between April Morning and The Hessian appeared Agrippa's Daughter, in 1964. It told the story of Berenice, King Herod Agrippa's daughter, who wrestled with her Jewish identity while conducting a long affair with Titus, the conqueror of Jerusalem and future Roman emperor. Although Fast had always enjoyed the company of women (agreeing with George Bernard Shaw that they were more intelligent than men), this was the first of his novels to have a female protagonist. It wasn't the last. During the 1970s and 80s he wrote a series of bestselling novels, The Immigrants sequence, which chronicled the fortunes of several generations of Americans as seen through the eyes
LANDER 13 Vo l.
ofa woman to whom Fast gave many of his own personal experiences and beliefs.
By the l 960s, his books once again taken up by mainstream publishers, Fast had reached middle age, leaving behind the passionate engagement of his earlier novels, as we have seen, for a more reflective and low-key type of fiction. Having disengaged himself from active politics and public life, he now sought personal fulfilment and liberation in Zen Buddhism and an increasingly pacifist outlook.
But the Revolutionary War continued to be a source of inspiration. Bracketing The Immigrants series, came The Crossing (1971) and Seven Days in June (1994). The Crossing takes up where The Unvanquished leaves off, bringing Washington's Continental Army out ofa series of crushing defeats to the tactically and psychologically important realization that retreat followed swiftly by surprise attack is a stunningly effective form of warfare against the British. Seven Days in June, a retelling of the Battle of Bunker Hill from both British and American viewpoints, is a prequel to The Hessian in that it shares the same protagonist when younger, a disaffected British Catholic physician who bas settled in America and finds himself struggling with his conscience over questions of loyalty, freedom and the morality of war.
Fast continued his astonishing output well into his eighties. His last novels were An Independent Woman ( 1997) , the final part of The Immigrants series, and the contemporary Greenwich (2000). But before these came two more historical novels - The Pledge (1988), a fictional rendering ofFast's own experiences as a journalist in India and victim of the anti-Communist witch-hunts at home, and The Bridge Builder's Story (1995) in which an American WASP is shattered by his personal encounter with Nazism and the Holocaust.
Howard Fast died in March 2003. "The only thing that infuriates me," he had commented some time before, "is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime."
If you've read this far you won't need me to tell you that the major theme running through Howard Fast's historical fiction is man's struggle for freedom; or that the roots of this powerfully consistent theme lie in the circumstances of his early life. Out of this emerges the archetypal Fast hero. More often than not (George Washington being a notable exception) he is a man out of the common people whom the people raise up to lead them by action and inspiration. Also more often than not, he is a man troubled by leadership, plagued with self-doubt and in the end consumed by the revolution he started (Spartacus, Tom Paine, and Judas in My Glorious Brothers). An exception is Gideon Jackson, the main protagonist in Freedom Road, who has no flaw or weakness and is thereby a flatter, less engaging character than most, undeniably moving in his strength and simplicity but a little too good to be true.
In Citizen Tom Paine, the protagonist has much in common with the younger Fast. Both men pulled
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themselves out of poverty by their own efforts, both were largely self-educated and earned their livings by the pen (but were known to reject royalties on principle); and both fiercely maintained their independence at considerable personal cost, including imprisonment.
In Spartacus and My Glorious Brothers, the heroes are seen mainly through the eyes of other characters, which lends an objective distance to counterbalance the highlycharged (though never wordy and rarely sentimental) emotion that characterizes much ofFast's earlier fiction. In Spartacus, this distancing reflects how little history tells us about the slave who so nearly brought down the Roman Empire (we all remake him in our own image, as Fast's characters do). It also enables Fast to show how slavery degraded not only slaves but their also their masters, whose slave-engendered idleness renders them physically decadent and morally corrupt.
The OWI had hired Fast for the clarity of his writing. His prose was never mannered enough to draw attention away from his story and message, yet there is a distinctive muscular style borne on Biblical rhythms, perhaps based as Andrew Macdonald suggests, on the English of the early New England settlers he admired: clear, powerful, uncluttered, direct (Howard Fast: A Critical Companion, p. 47). In his preface to the 2000 edition of Moses, Prince of Egypt, Fast writes: "I am a Bible student, and have been one since my teens, reading it for its beauty and literature, for its magnificent cadences and for its wonderful , ruthless history."
Fast researched his history assiduously, going so far, for example, as to take a crash course in Latin for Spartacus. Most of the results remain invisible, however, subtly enhancing but never intrusive. "I make no effort to simulate the so-called 'atmosphere' of an era," he wrote in "History and Fiction", "for in a subjective sense, 'atmosphere' does not exist; people accept the world around them as part of their experience, and a writer who does not accept the world that surrounds his characters will almost immediately lose touch with reality. And people, regardless of their era, are essentially the same: the present in which they live has for them a matter-of-fact and not a 'historical' importance ... ifthe writer is skillful enough, the reader subjectively partakes of that sameness and brotherhood which binds all men, whatever their time or race or condition."
While always serious and thought-provoking, his historical fiction shows a sure instinct for page-turning drama which only occasionally descends into the melodramatic, and a gift for creating characters who both engage and challenge the reader.
"As to why I write about the past," he says in "History and Fiction", "my books give answer. These great and splendid forgotten men did not live and die so that all they did might be traduced and falsified; they lived and fought and died so that we might inherit and use the things they built. And the same kind of scoundrels as opposed them then oppose men of good will today. It all becomes one; and the great tradition we fight for today is the same tradition they sustained and handed down to us."~
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels marked * are still in print. Details of current or forthcoming editions are given (in brackets where different from the first edition). Information on current editions (from www.amazon.com and www. amazon.co.uk) was correct at the time of going to press. Almost all of Howard Fast's historical fiction is available from Internet used bookstores such as www.abebooks.com and www.alibris.com
Historical Fiction
Two Valleys. Dial Press, 1933
Conceived in Liberty: A Novel of Valley Forge. Simon & Schuster, 1939
*The Last Frontier. Duell, 1941 (M.E. Sharpe, I 997)
*The immigrant 's Daughter. Houghton Mifflin, 1985 (Harvest, April 2004)
*An Independent Woman. Harcourt, 1997
Max. Houghton Mifflin, 1982
The Pledge. Houghton Mifflin, 1988
*Seven Days in June. Birch Lane Press, 1994 (ibooks 2001 as Bunker Hill)
*The Bridge Builder 's Story. (M.E. Sharpe, 1995)
About Howard Fast
Fast, Howard: The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party Praeger, 1957
Fast, Howard: Being Red Houghton Mifflin, 1990 (M.E.Sharpe, 1994)
Macdonald, Andrew: Howard Fast: A Critical Companion. Greenwood, 1996
Many short stories, articles by and about Howard Fast, and an extensive bibliography of all his works are available at: http ://www.trussel.com/f how.htm
Breakthrough Fiction Fortune's Favourite
MARION ARNOTT
Nowicki threw in his hand with a shrug and a smile and left the table. He was pleased to have lost so heavily: it was a good omen because, as the old saying had it, a man who was unlucky at cards was sure to be lucky in a certain other direction. Nowicki refused to name that other direction , even in the deepest recesses of his heart, because there were other old sayings about counting chickens and crossing bridges too soon, which he took very seriously. All the same, that other direction hovered nameless and thrillingly warm at the edge of his consciousness and suffused his pale face with a glowing radiance. For several days now he had lived one breath behind a crazy urge to laugh or sing for joy, an urge he could only control by reminding himself every ten minutes that Lady Luck was inscrutable and fickle and best not taken for granted.
He made his way to the dining car at the front of the train , stepping aside for ladies with a courtly bow, for gentlemen with a polite nod. It was surely another good portent that his civilities were so well received: he sensed respect in the smiles which answered his - some of them from people who only a week before would have passed him by on the street without even a glance - and revelled in the status accorded to him , the only volunteer on board the train. His smiles became ever more gracious as he progressed along the corridor; his small plain face was transformed by a rare sweetness.
Rosa, he saw as he approached her, had noticed a change in him He watched her deep blue eyes lighte? and brighten with relief at his coming. In spite of his wanness of counting on anything , he was buoyed up by a sudden optimism, and for a moment he allowed himself to feel what it was like to be enrolled in the ranks of the chosen ones, the favourites of fortune
The air of resignation which hung about him as shabbily as his old black suit fell away from him; he straightened his tie, tugged at his waistcoat, and slid confidently into the seat beside her. He was struck dumb
with pleasure by the sight of her face bathed in the pink glow from the table lamp ; the lamp's tiny crystal pendants trembled with the motion of the train and their light rippled across her face like rosy water.
"Max, you've been gone a long time I could not think what had become of you."
He heard the quaver of strain in her voice. "Rosa, I am sorry. You know how it is when men get together over cards - always just one more hand. And everything else, no matter how important, is forgotten."
He was pleased with his bluff and hearty man of the world air; Rosa had always liked it when van Borselen spoke like that. "Oh, you!" she used to say, halflaughing, half chiding, "You are impossible, van Borselen."
"Max, did no one speak of what is to become of us, of what lies ahead?" The quaver in her voice had become a vibration.
"No, my dear. We were more concerned with van Ess's Royal Flush. Do you know what the odds are against one of those? Goldblatt was apoplectic with rage - the man has no style. One should win or lose with the same composure or not play at all."
He hoped that he sounded cosmopolitan. Rosa was impressed by men who said such things, men with shrewd eyes, expensive dinner jackets and big cigars. Their confidence made her feel safe. Nowicki tugged the travelling rug snugly round her knees and promised silently that he would become whatever she needed him to be.
"Max, I should be much happier if they would only tell us where we are going - "
"Rosa, you must stop worrying. It's such a waste of time We're going where we are going and that is all there is to it. You remember the rumours that we were to be shipped out in cattle trucks or shot on the outskirts of the city? You were terrified." He tapped the pendants swaying from the lamps until they shivered with glassy laughter. "Well, here we are. No one murdered us, and if it is a little crowded in here, it is hardly a cattle truck, is it? All that worry for nothing."
"But surely they could tell us our destination! Why won't they?"
"Because it is an eastern backwater which even they have never heard of and probably can't pronounce. You must concentrate on what they did tell us. First, it is a safe place far from air raids and rationing." He gazed steadily at her until the worry lines disappeared from between her eyes. "Secondly, there will be hard work and plain food. I imagine the place will be boring and provincial, but I sh~II be there to look after you." He steadied the pendants agam. "Really, Rosa, I have lived through worse times in worse places. When I was a boy in Russia well, you don't_want to hear that dreary old stuff. But I did learn that the trick to getting by is not to mind too much where you are and to remember that it can't last forever. I have much experience of this kind of thing." He laughed more ruefully than he intended, but she squeezed his arm and seemed comforted. "Now, Rosa, you must take some rest and be thankful that it is not the Cossacks we have to deal with. You have
THE MAGAZINE OF THE HISTORI CAL NOVEL SOCIETY
hardly closed your eyes in three days. Everything looks bleak when one is tired."
She leaned against him with her head on his shoulder. The little feathers in her hat tickled his cheek. He could smell her violet-scented face powder. It brought to mind the cafes and restaurants of the city and Rosa at the glittering centre of it all, far above him, beloved, unattainable to a man such as he with nothing to offer. He blew gently at her feathers, amused by their insouciance. How like Rosa they were! After two years in an occupied city, after the mad whirl of the evacuation and three days of hunger and thirst on a packed train, still she kept up her appearance. He was touched by this feminine gallantry, so different from a man's, which depended on the transformation of the inner self, not the outer. Sometimes he was awed by the success of his own metamorphosis from Nowicki the dreamer to Nowicki the man of action.
Rosa stirred sleepily beside him. "Max, it was a lucky day for me when you walked into my shop." Nowicki blushed scarlet to the roots of his hair and was glad of the concealment of failing daylight. "You know", she murmured, "van Borselen wanted me to tum you away." Nowicki stiffened at the mention of that man's name, then smiled above Rosa's head. After all, van Borselen was hundreds of miles behind them, pining for Rosa, with only his wealth, charm, and his brilliantined wavy hair to console him, while Nowicki had the privilege of sharing Rosa's future.
It was unlike van Borselen to miss an opportunity, but be had calculated the odds and let this one pass him by. Nowicki edged closer to Rosa and considered his own policy of keeping fingers crossed and trusting to luck, if it could be called a policy when mostly he had never had any choice. Van Borselen maintained that there was no such thing as luck, but Nowicki knew this idea to be both cynical and na"ive, and somehow the measure of van Borselen's soul. Nowicki knew that there was no such thing as a calculated risk because Life was entirely unpredictable. Ifhe knew anything at all, he knew that. No plan could prosper without a sprinkling of luck. How could it be otherwise when risk calculation involved taking all factors into account and it was impossible to know them all? Always there were unknown quantities. Even the great Emperor Napoleon had acknowledged that fact. "But is he lucky?" he asked of every general, no matter how victorious and martially minded. Napoleon's own luck had run out in Russia, as all the world knew, and he had been lost. Nowicki had considerable sympathy for the Emperor as he himself knew what it was like to run out of luck so spectacularly. It was something he had in common with many emperors and kings and dukes - his greatest enterprise had been lost by the vagaries of chance.
After a lifetime's persecution and fleeing from country to country, he had at last understood that the greatest obstacle to universal brotherhood was a superfluity of languages. He, the most pacific and harmless of men, bad discovered that wherever he went, he was the object of fear, loathing and contempt. Irrational. Quite irrational.
Often, so often, he had wished that he could say, "It is only I, Max Nowicki, a nobody-in-particular, so what's to hate?", but he had never been able to because the hatred was expressed in a babble of European languages, most of which he could not speak. He had come to believe that the world spun on an axis of horrible misunderstanding. He had met with very little real wickedness on his travels, but a good deal of ignorance and fear.
It was the potential of Esperanto to wipe out all these misunderstandings which had inspired him to action. He planned to produce Esperanto Phrase Books at low cost to promote universal communication. He dreamed of Esperanto for the Housewife, for the Traveller, for the Military, for the Statesman. For two years be had attended night school to learn the language; then he had invested five years' savings with a publisher; and after that, for eight months he had trudged the streets of the city lugging suitcases full of his phrasebooks. His only reward had been the amusement of booksellers and a letter of congratulation from a fellow visionary living in exile in Spain.
There had been nothing amiss with his Grand Plan, of that he was certain, but Luck had dealt him a wild card, a completely unforeseeable wild card, in the shape of an outbreak of nationalism. Suddenly, everywhere, the fashion was for patriotic rhetoric. People sang rousing folk songs and searched for national heroes in the distant past. Blood, soil and national enemies were all the rage. His Esperanto phrase books had been no match for the feverish distraction of territorial dispute, invasion and war. Who could have predicted that insanity? Anyone would think that every government in Europe had been taken over by Cossacks!
He still burned at the memory of van Borselen's great booming laugh at this explanation for his failure. "Yes, yes, Max. When this is all over, a great many people are going to agree that it was all a horrible misunderstanding. Poor Max. The world isn't quite ready for you yet. Perhaps next year."
The one consolation for the whole miserable debacle had been Rosa, living proof that there is always some meat in the thinnest of soups. She had taken pity on his hoarse cough and knife-blade bones and employed him in her bookshop. Her kindness, that rarest and most undervalued of qualities, had overwhelmed him. And how it had irritated van Borselen! "He is a leech, Rosa, a parasite. He takes advantage of you," he said often, always just loud enough for Nowicki to hear. But Rosa never wavered. "Nonsense, Paul. To assist the gentle and the helpless is not to be taken advantage of."
Nowicki suspected that van Borselen was jealous of him, which was a matter of some pride to him. Oh, Rosa might flirt with the wealthy jeweller, she might dine and dance with him, and consult him about her business affairs, but her kindness was reserved for Nowicki. It was for Nowicki that she bad made hot chicken soup that first savage winter of knowing her; it was Nowicki whom she reminded to change his collars and trim his hair; she bad been a mother and a sister and a best friend to him. And if
his feelings for her were a little stronger, he had kept that fact to himself. Even a visionary must recognise reality sometimes . Then Fate had intervened in his life again when war camped out in the city. The early days had been van Borselen's triumph: van Borselen the black marketer, the fixer , the man with the most surprising connections in high places He had shed confidence like sunlight and persuaded all those around him that he could stand between them and the creeping despair which wreathed the city like a fog. Even Nowicki had been grateful to him : van Borselen had kept Rosa from hunger and want , and when the evacuations began, he had bribed, cajoled, and called in favours to keep her from being sent on ahead of her friends
But even van Borselen could not always arrange the universe to suit himself. When Rosa's name appeared on someone's list for the second time, he had felt unable to intervene. Procedures, he said, had been tightened ; there was too much risk . Nowicki had been outraged, seared to the core of his being by Rosa's paralysed terror and her efforts not to show it. Who but van Borselen would stop to calculate the odds in the face of her gut-wrenching courage?
Nowicki had had nothing to offer her but his company into exile , but he well understood that the worst terror was having to endure alone , and he was more than willing to s pare her that. And as it turned out , his hard won certainty that the worst times could be lived through had been riches to Ro sa , because he was the living proof that one could descend to the bottom of the pit and crawl back out again. Nowicki sighed as he remembered how with tears in her eye s she had tried to talk him out of his offer by reminding him of the dangers. He had answered her every argument with a defiant nonchalance which still thrilled him
" Everywhere is dangerous these days. Why there more than here?"
" So what if there are soldiers? All my life there have been soldiers : soldiers in navy uniforms, green, khaki, black. Personally , I find the current fashion for field grey rather elegant."
"So what if we are sent to a foreign place? The world is full of them I myself have been swept westward across five - no , six - frontiers in my lifetime and have lived to tell the tale Going east will make a nice change "
" So what ifwe are to live among strangers? Everyone is a stranger until you know them And we will have each other. "
Nowicki sighed again That had been his finest hour A man would have to live many lifetimes to have such an opportunity again Even van Borselen had been impressed He never again referred to the flotsam and jetsam of Europe in Nowicki's presence; even he did not have the nerve for that , not after he had seen Nowicki and Rosa clutching each other and weeping. Nowicki treasured the memory of van Borselen standing dewy-eyed and shamefaced He would treasure it forever.
It was from that moment on that the current of luck began to run in Nowicki's favour. Fortune favours the
brave and She could be generous. All the arrangements for Nowicki ' s evacuation had been made without difficulty : the forged identity cards , the travel warrants , the ration cards , his name on the right list for a small fee He had felt himself carried along on a swelling tide of outrageously good luck. There hadn ' t been even the tiniest hitch And it had been like that ever since.
Nowicki kissed the top of the sleeping Rosa ' s head and sat back as the train raced into the dawn . The darkness outside was vast. Pine forests and picturesque hamlets and a million hard little stars flashed by Nowicki was lulled by the rhythmic click of the wheels and lay drowsing.
Sunrise was slow and chill and it stained the snow with deep purple shadows . Nowicki yawned and looked forward to Rosa ' s awakening . When she had adjusted her hat and stretched the stiffness out of her limbs, they would share their daily joke. He would offer her a cup of ice chipped from the window frame and she would say , " Why , Max , the coffee is a little cool today " Long married couples had little rituals like that. The thought made him wriggle with pleasure
The train slowed and came to a shuddering halt. Nowicki was instantly alert Was this journey's end? With his fist he rubbed a clear circle on the frosty window glass. He peered out , but there was nothing to be seen but a picture postcard railway station half buried in snow and indifferent to their arrival. He could see directly into the stationmaster's office. There was a light showing and a feeble fire Surely someone up and about at this hour meant someone brewing tea , even coffee? How wonderful it would be to see Rosa's face when he handed her real coffee instead of ice! He glanced at her. Her face was pinched with cold ; a hot drink would hearten her. He raked through his pockets for money , but he had gambled it all away. All he had left to barter with was his grandfather's battered silver cigarette case. So be it then; he had no cigarettes to put in it anyway.
He slid out of his seat and stepped carefully over evacuees sleeping in the aisle He reached the corridor without disturbing anyone, not even the guard asleep at his post. He gasped for breath in the cold air and almost cried out when he sank to his knees in snow as he stepped down to the platform. He shoved his hands into his pockets and trudged to the station master's office through a crystalline silence.
His tentative knock was answered by two round-faced peasants in railway tunics undone at the neck . They were startled by his presence and he pointed towards the train , which seemed to startle them more Nowicki smiled reassuringly and wondered where they thought he had come from His request for coffee was met by an exchange of puzzled glances between the two men. Nowicki gestured towards the stove and the pot of coffee bubbling deliciously on top He held out his cigarette case and the bargain was struck.
Two cups of coffee were poured . There was even a little milk and sugar. The two peasants murmured at one another ; one laughed and the other shrugged Nowicki sensed some heavy meaning. It was at times like this that
his faith in Esperanto was restored. As it was, he could only guess at what the two peasants were muttering about. There appeared to be some kind of disagreement between the two, but Nowicki could make no sense of one pair of eyes which would not meet his and another pair which stared at him much too hard.
The coffee was cooling. Nowicki pulled himself together and, careful to keep his two cups of coffee level, bowed and smiled his thanks. The smile settled something in the mind of the man with the cigarette case. He tugged at Nowicki's arm, pointed to the train, and shook his head vehemently. The other man grinned unpleasantly, and still staring much too hard, shook his head also. Nowicki, filled with sudden dread, backed away, but the men advanced on him, chattering at great speed and more and more loudly, as ifhe were deaf. One waved towards the thick black forest of pine behind the station, while the other, grinning still, mimed a choke hold on his own throat.
The man with the cigarette case lost patience and lunged at Nowicki, seized him by the arm and tried to drag him into the trees. Nowicki panicked. They must think that he had more valuables! He had heard tales of the horrors inflicted on unsuspecting travellers in these godforsaken areas. Just about anything was possible! Fear spasmed in his stomach and he jerked himself free. His coffee splashed into the snow with a hiss, then he heard a louder hiss and the clanking of wheels. He turned in time to see his train pulling slowly out of the station, gathering speed with every yard.
He began to run. He fell heavily into deep snow and as be scrambled to his feet, wild despair clawed its way out of his throat in a howl of protest. Rosa! His luck could not desert him now, not when everything was going so well! He ran slipping and slithering towards the train, calling on Luck and Providence and God, promising that he would never ask for anything again as long as he lived, if only he could get back on the train. He pictured Rosa, alone and afraid, believing that she bad been abandoned, and he screamed, "Mein Herr! Mein Herr!" to attract the attention of the guard.
He ran and ran until his heart was bursting and his throat scorched by freezing air. The sound of clanking wheels carrying his future away from him spurred him on. He leapt for the observation platform and hung from the rail by his fingertips, kicking furiously and choking on thick black smoke studded with cinders which billowed back from the engine. He was only saved from falling by a strong arm clad in field grey which gripped him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him aboard the train.
"Herein, Jude!"
"Oh, that was lucky," spluttered Nowicki gratefully. The guard looked blankly at him.
Nowicki used the international sign language of the bow and the smile to demonstrate his appreciation. Unaccountably, the guard was convulsed with laughter. Nowicki bore the man's amusement with perfect dignity. Anyone would think the buffoon had never seen a man running for a train before Bi>
BREAKTHROUGH FICTION
Send your short stories to Richard Lee, Marine Cottage, The Strand, Starcross, Devon, EX6 8NY.
Entries must be 3000- 7000 words, on hard copy - NO EMAILS OR ATTACHMENTS will be considered.
Please send stamped addressed envelopes if you wish acknowledgement ofreceipt or return of manuscript.
Please send £10 (payable to Richard Lee) if you want an individual critique of your story.
We will print stories that have appeared elsewhere (if they're good enough) - but must know where and when. Also, if you should wish to submit a story to us and at the same time to another competition or magazine, we have no problem about that. If published in Solander, payment will be £100, or £200 for a "major" short story.
letter
Solander welcomes your letters and Emails. The editor reserves the right to edit correspondence for publication, hut probably won't.
From C.S. Guest, Bristol
Further to the long-running debate on the 'c ut-off , I thought the following extract from William L. Shirer's foreword to his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ( 1959) might be of interest:
'Some may think that it is much too early to try to write a history of the Third Reich. That such a task should be left to a later generation of writers to whom time has given perspective. I found this view especially prevalent in France when I went to do some research there. Nothing more recent than the Napoleonic era, I was told. Should be tackled by writers of history.
'There is much merit in this view. Most historians have waited fifty years or a hundred, or more, before attempting to write an account of a country, an empire, an era. But was this not principally because it took that long for the pertinent documents to come to light and furnish them with the authentic material they needed? And though perspective was gained, was not something lost because the authors necessarily lacked a personal acquaintance with the life and the atmosphere of the times and with the historical figures about which they wrote?' (italics mine)
Charlie Guest
The Quest for the New RI CHARD LEE
In the panel debate at our annual conference last year, there seemed to be only one idea that all the panel members (Derek Wilson, Manda Scott, Jane Jakeman, Elizabeth Chadwick and I) fully agreed on. Most (I think!) of the delegates agreed too. There is no 'classic' writer of historical fiction whose books read as if they were written today. We stuck our necks out for a couple of authors - most successfully Mary Renault and George MacDonald Fraser - but if they are exceptions, we concluded, they are of the sort that proves the rule. We weren't saying that we didn't like 'classic' historicals - far from it. What we were agreeing is that historical fiction shows its time of composition as much as any other genre. Publishers would seem to agree with us. It is fairly rare to find a historical novel from (say) the Seventies still in print. Ifwe go back further (here's another version of the old debate: when is the cut-off period for a classic?) there are fewer than for any other genre.
The irony of this is clear. Historical fiction is an extremely contemporary genre. Claire Conville (cofounder of Conville and Walsh Literary Agency) paraphrased this for us in agent-speak at the conference. She said that historical fiction constantly needs to reinvent itself. She isn't looking for old historical fiction. She wants new authors, and new authors are going to have to do something different.
All this made me look at the High Street bookshops in a slightly different way when I got home. It also made me rethink my own writing.
Of course, it is possible to get too tangled up worrying about 'newness'. The flip-side of our discussion about historical novels showing their age is the logical conclusion that a new book will inevitably show its (new) time of composition: so why trouble about it? Also, to wheel out a truism of publishing, established authors are generally required to repeat their 'formula' each year, whatever they may personally wish to do, and where is the newness in that?
Nevertheless, last weekend, when I should have been doing other work at my own branch of Waterstone's bookshop, I was trying to puzzle out the publishing 'angle' on each of the new historicals I came across. ('Angle', I think, in publishing-speak is another word for 'new' - and the best kind of 'angle' is that which can transform itself over a year or two into a 'niche'). The disappointing result of this is that I couldn't. I'm not about to get into the naming game, but all the old chestnuts are represented. There is fictional biography (mostly featuring artists or
royalty), 'victim' literature (institutional abuse of minorities, individuals, or women), erotica and sex in various guises (including promiscuity, prostitution, homosexuality and illicit romance), slice-of-life novels (normal lives in extraordinary circumstances, like World War, or far-flung empire), and 'genre' novels (I found no very new authors amongst these).
I'm not saying that the books I found didn't sound interesting. Some I have read and found excellent; several others are on my TBR pile. You will find details of all of them in the Review, and more besides. But none of them seemed to represent this Holy Grail of 'newness'. Many, indeed, might be accused of being on a bandwagon of one sort or another (the most obvious of these is the Roman bandwagon, which the success of Gladiator set rolling).
So what does 'new' really mean?
In my own small experience of choosing original fiction for Solander, I know that I'm looking for something new, but also for something that I'm already interested in. I guess this is where the fashion bit comes in. The last two stories we have published are both by the excellent Marion Arnott. The first was a retelling of Delilah's story from a humorous, feminine viewpoint. Is it a coincidence that I had read two feminine retellings of Bible stories in the previous few months (Anita Diamant's The Red Tent and Angela Elwell Hunt's Shadow Women)? Probably not. I wanted to publish the story because it is beautifully written and satisfying. But I am as certain that the other books I had read influenced my decision as I am that this influence was unconscious at the time for me. Marion's story in this issue (which you should all read: I really feel I'm sticking my neck out publishing one author twice in a row, and I'm only doing it because the story has real quality) begins as a seemingly light-hearted romance. Again, though, the underlying subject-matter is one that is very well known, never long absent from screen or book. Was I aware of this when I chose the story? No, I wasn't, and it made no conscious part of my decision. Then again, ifl ask myself whether I would have been as excited by a similar story set on a train journey to Siberia, the answer has to be 'no'.
It is now that I realise how appallingly difficult the odds are for new writers, or authors seeking to change identity or genre. I suspect most editors share something of my approach. We want to read a story that we feel is new, fresh, exciting, original - yet we unconsciously need it to resonate with something we recently enjoyed. It is a seeming contradiction. We passionately want a nonbandwagon story that fits on the bandwagon. This is why getting a first book accepted for publication is so ferociously difficult. No amount of market analysis or second-guessing does anyone a jot of good.
After ten years of thinking about all this, I have only two pieces of advice for new writers: (l) Keep writing, and write what you yourself feel to be new and exciting and challenging, and (2) Keep reading newly-published books for pleasure, and you will find that the zeitgeist influences your writing as unconsciously as it influences your potential editors .5'.>
CAMBRIDGE HISTORY
FESTIVAL
Come for 1, 2 or all 3 days Accommodation available
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 4
6 pm Reception
8.30 pm Concert of Tudor Mu s ic by the Elizabethan Consort
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 5 Elizabeth I 1533-1603:
Quatercentenary Event
Eliz ab eth 's A d ve nturers National Maritime Museum presentation Fa ces of th e Quee n National Portrait Gallery presentation Anglo-Spanis h R elation s Neil Hanson , author of a new book on the Armada
Changing P er ception s Michael Dobson and Nicola Watson show how attitudes to the Virgin Queen have changed over the centuries
Th e Mon s trous R egim ent Authors Jane Dunn and Leonie Freida on Elizabeth , Mary Stuart and Catherine de Medici
Eliz ab e th th e Great Whitbread Award winner Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch on the importance of ' Gloriana'. Cambridge University Press Reception : Professor John Guy on the problems of marriage for Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart
250 Years Young British Museum evening presentation
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 6
The Historical Novel Today *Special £5.00 discount for HNS members*
Some of today's best-selling authors, including Louis de Bernieres, Beryl Bainbridge, Tracy Chevalier, Jane Stevenson and Lindsey Davis, present their ideas about it and Nigel Wilcockson of Penguin Books reminds us of some of the great classics.
There will also be a complimentary lunch exclusively for HNS members, sponsored by Constable and Robinson.
Gala Dinner with Dr David Starkey
A Tasting of Historic Wines
Late Night Entertainment: The Shakespeare Revue , the international , smash-hit show
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 7 History on the Box
How well does history work on television ? Writers , producers and presenters of programmes as diverse as LOST CITIES OF THE MA YA , THE 1940s HOUSE , TIPPING THE VELVET , DINOSAURS , THE SPARTANS , TRIUMPH OF THE WEST , MILLENNIUM , and BBC2 ' s TIMEWATCH series discuss the pros and cons of presenting history in this medium.
LATEST on the FESTIVAL - APRIL
Extra event: His torians All Since the programme went to press we have arranged with Dr Elizabeth Stazicker, Cambridge City Archivist , to show some of the rare documents entrusted to her charge and to explain the ways in which people keen to research family or local history can access public records.
COMPETITION
Between now and July , literary agents PFD in association with BBC History Magazine are running an ess ay competition for 18-30 y ear old amateur historians. The prize of £500 will be presented at the Gala Dinner. Email us for details .
News about some of our speakers:
C J SANSOM is an exciting newcomer to the sub-genre of historical whodunits. In Dissolution he tells a gripping murder mystery set in one of the abbeys doomed by Henry VIII's massive land-grab (1536-9) and also provides thought-provoking insights into the upheaval of the Reformation.
MICHAEL DOBSON and NICOLA WATSON are a married couple who have jointly written England 's Eliz ab eth : An Afterlife in Fam e and Fantasy. We are greatl y looking forward to their highly illustrated presentation of the various myths that have grown up around the virgin queen in literature , film and TV
JANE STEVENSON has now published the last volume of her absorbing trilogy which began with Astraea Th e Empr es s of the Last Days bridges the present with the late 17th century and the adventures of Pelagius, Elizabeth of Bohemia and their son .
PAUL DOHERTY is a prolific historian and novelist famed for his thorough research and evocative recreation of the past. His latest offerings are a biography of Queen Isabella in which he explores the legend that Edward II was viciously murdered in Berkeley Castle and The Gates of H e ll , the third volume of a fictionalised recreation of the life of Alexander the Great.
CONCERT
The entertainment on Thursday 4 September which sets the scene for our Elizabeth I Day will be given by the Elizabethan Consort - six instrumentalists and singers who form a 'broken consort ' and who will present a v aried programme of music for early instruments such as might have been heard in Gloriana's court.
Sponsors : The History Channel, Random House Publishers, Cambridge University Press , Cambridge Newspapers , Constable & Robinson , Cambridge Wine Merchants, Time Warner Books and Orion Publishing.
For full programme and booking details contact: Info @ histfest.com or CHF, lndicombe, West Buckland, Barnstaple EX32 0SE Tel 01598 760 367
