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Making it Up
HARRIET SMART talks to author JASON GOO DWI about making the shiftfrom non-fiction to .fiction.
T here is a guilty pleasure in writing historical fiction. You spend all that time in the library, getting to know your chosen period intimately, making sure of every obscure fact, and then, almost wilfully, you push away all your sources and simply start making things up. What could be more delicious, more subversive? Is it any wonder that successful writers of non-fiction often find themselves giving in to temptation and writing fiction? Perhaps there is something in the dust of the archive that feeds the storyteller inside them. Therefore, it was intriguing to have the chance to pick the brain of Jason Goodwin on making the switch. Jason had a successful literary career as a non-fiction writer before plunging into the world of fiction . A prize-winning travel writer and historian, he has written a widely acclaimed history of the Ottoman Empire : Lords of the Horizons, as well as books on subjects as diverse as the tea gardens of India and China, and the American Dollar. This year he published his first novel, which has been described by the New York Times as "the perfect escapist mystery." 1 The Janissary Tree is an action-packed, detective story set in a vividly realized Istanbul in the 1830s. The novel introduces readers to one of the most unique and attractive detectives in the genre: Yashim, who is wise and brave, as well as being brilliant both in the kitchen and in bed (from a woman's point of view) despite being a eunuch.
SothefirstthingihadtoaskJasonwas:howlonghaveyouwantedtowrite this book? Has the urge to write fiction been with you a while, tugging at your coat-tails while you did your research for your non-fiction works?
Jason Goodivin: Bernice Reubens was one of the judges for a literary prize - the John Llewellyn Rhys - which I won ages ago for a book about walking to Istanbul, and she said that what struck her was its novelistic style and shape. She told me to think of fiction. But it was only when I'd struck on a character - Yashim, the eunuch - and a definite time - the 1830s - that the possibility arose Of course, all that did come out of my research for Lords of the Horizons: a History of the Ottoman Empire. But it had to simmer at the back of my mind for years before I did anything about it. To be honest, I was chary of fiction There are no wires, are there? You have to have a story to tell - and an urge to tell it, too, with confidence, because writing is hard work. That said, wires or no wires, I've found the shift very liberating, and I love the whole process of, well, making it up.
HS: What do you think historical.fiction can sqy in terms of historical truth that straight history can't? Is it a riff on the known facts, embroidery, perhaps? The decoration which makes the line beneath more visible?
JG: I started my career writing travel books, then shifted to history - because the past is, as they say, another country. What I've found since is that historical fiction is a sort of time travel, complete with the sounds and smells of a place - stuff that straight history can't really reach. And historical fiction allows you to explore moods that don't crop up in the history books. In The Janissary Tree, for instance, the Polish ambassador expresses his regret for the passing of the
Janissaries: however corrupt and degenerate, they were still the soul of the Ottoman Empire, and one of the institutions that made it unique. Historians can't indulge their regrets in the same way. Probably we tend to make too clear a divide, anyway. A historical novelist is openly unreliable; but all historical judgements are subjective, too.
I like your phrase about decoration making the line visible. One way that's true is simply that historical fiction reaches people who would shudder at the idea of reading a volume of straight history. The facts about the Ottoman Empire are all out there, in the books, but plenty of my readers have encountered it here, for the first time.
HS: How didyou feel about, and how didyou deal 1vith situations when the facts as you knew them diverged sharp!J from what you wanted to do in your story? When you were faced with the sin of committing anachronism. I suppose I am asking how honest have you been? Do you take a calculated risk, i.e, there are twenty people in the 1vorld 1vho know this stuff as well as I do, and thry might not read the novel and catch me out? How much has to be accurate far you to sleep at night?
JG: I always wanted to stick as closely as possible to the historical truth, but I made a rule: the story comes first. The Janissary Tree is a novel, not a history book; it's an entertainment. But obviously,
some of the fun of writing this sort of book comes from sticking to the facts. That said, I tried to imagine my Istanbul so fiercely and vividly that I could move the characters around it without committing any glaring anachronisms -I don't think there is any excuse for anachronism. "Men of the Middle Ages! The Hundred Years War has begun!" ever. You have to know your stuff; you have to get the detail right, the atmosphere spot on.
Oddly enough, the plot required that a fire tower should exist in a particular district of the city, and I invented one-only to discover later, from an old engraving, that there really had been a fire tower there.
HS: Do yo11 think in some sense that a creative 11se of anachronism is what drives the historical novel?
JG: If you mean that the form and style of a modern novel is in itself anachronistic, then yes. Writing is about artifice. When you go into a character's head, or make a couple of Turks speak English together, it's for the convenience of the reader. It's not real, but it must sustain the illusion of reality.
HS: What other historical novelists do yo11 er!Joy or admire?
JG: J.G. Farrell is probably my favourite. Such control of the atmosphere of time and place. And I love Flashman.
HS: Reading The Janissary Tree, I kept thinking of Dickens, especial!J in the supporting cast of characters - although you have been able to explore characters that Dickens could never have done, for example, the transvestite Preen, though I think he would have liked to have had the chance! Is Dickens an inspiration or is that accidental?
JG: Inspiration, certainly; I even have a dog called Dorrit! Dickens was the master of the protean urban novel, using character to describe a period of huge social change and development. He takes his readers through the gamut of that emerging society. Yashim's Istanbul, at much the same time, is undergoing its own process of change : it's a city caught between tradition and modernity.
Yashim abroad, I'm happy to keep him on the Bosphorus. There are just so many layers to that city. I was drawn to Istanbul in the 1830s because it's such an interesting time in the city's history, a time of flux and change and new ideas, when the Ottomans embarked on a radical and ultimately unsuccessful experiment to renegotiate their relationship with their subjects, and with the wider world. So Istanbul in the 1830s feels the lure of modernity and the pull of tradition, all at once. On top of that, Istanbul was a great port, and the turnstile between Europe and Asia. It wasn't just a Turkish city: it was a Greek city, a Jewish and Armenian city, a world capital that was beginning to build up a sizeable foreign population, too. All those tensions and conflicts - it's the perfect place to find a dead body ...
HS: Yashim is, of co11rse, a e11n11ch, a rather brilliant variation on the "tort11red loner" school ef detectives. As an idea, I can see he presents a wonderf11I challenge for a fiction writer. Ho111 didyo11 set abo11t getting into his character, and 1vithoM giving too m11ch awqy, for those 1vho haven'tyet read the book, can yo11 explain how he still manages to have quite an exciting sex life?
JG: Eunuchs occupy a huge place in world history, especially in the East. They could be described as "perfect servants," because they could have no dynastic ambitions of their own. It was only in Western Europe that mediaeval states relied on celibate priests and monks instead. Yashim, my eunuch investigator, is effectively
INTRODUCING YAsHIM, THE OTI'OMAN DETECTIVE
dedicated to serving the people. There's a practical reason, too, why a eunuch would make a good detective in Ottoman society: there is nowhere he cannot go. He can go behind the veil, visit women in the harem. He is almost invisible. I worked out his back
story quite carefully - I'm not giving too much of it away, but obviously he faced and overcame a huge psychic challenge when he became a eunuch. It could have driven him to madness and despair: instead, he learned to banish regret, and even to appreciate the distance that separated him from ordinary life. He sees the world in all its folly, and all its glory. Also, as you say, he experiences desire. It's a very complex emotional area for him, naturally; physically, although he's lost his testicles he can still achieve an erection. Quite what that does for him is moot, but it makes others happy.
HS: The other thing that strikes me as very Dickensian is the idea of Istanb11I as a character in the novel itse!f, almost Yashims adversary, the thing to be solved as much as the crime itse!f. Perhaps this is characteristic of all satisfying crime 1vriting: Chandlers LA, Rankins Edinbt1rgh and Goodwins Istanbt1I? Will the future books be abol/t Istanbul or will we find Yashim in Paris or Mosc0111?
JG: I think Istanbul is the central character, as you suggest, and though I can't rule out some sort of emergency which might take
HS: Final!J, last but not least, the food I loved the 1vqy food runs through the book and how cooking is so important for Yashim. I know you are a passionate cook, so do you have a recipe you could share with us, something Yashim might have cooked? I was very tantalized l?J the descriptions of him cooking and wanted more detail!
JG: Well, Turkish cookery really goes to town on aubergines, which we don't use well at all in the UK. Imam b!Jaldi - which means "the imam fainted" - is a simple classic, eaten hot or cold.
Pro.fife
First thing to make is a fresh tomato sauce, melting onions and garlic in olive oil and then adding four or five tomatoes, peeled and chopped, along with a big handful of chopped parsley and a pinch of salt and sugar. I don't think you can cook tomatoes without a bit of sugar. You stir it round and set it aside. Use the smallest and narrowest aubergines you can find, although the big D utch ones work. The crafty thing is to peel off alternate strips of the skin, the way you might do a cucumber for a salad, so that it ends up looking striped: this is the best part, and it means that you don't end up with great billowing aubergine skins at the end. Then you make a deep cut lengthways in the aubergine, to make a sort of pocket - you can enlarge the pocket with your thumbs Stuff the aubergines with sauce, and pack them tightly together in an earthenware dish. Pour the rest of the sauce over them, the juice of a lemon and another dollop of oil. Then bake them in the oven, covered, for about an hour, until the aubergines have collapsed and gone soft.
HS: So although Jason Goodwin has made an effortless shift into historical fiction and is committed for some time to bringing us the further adventures of Yashim, I can't help thinking a cookery book should also be on his to-do list.
Notes
1. Marilyn Stasio, "Murder for Relaxation", New York Times: Sunday Book Review, June 4, 2006.
Harriet Smart is the author of four historical novels and one contemporary noveL She is current!) working on a trilogy set in the 1940s and '50s. She is also the co-designer of Writers Cafe, story development software for fiction writers. www. writerscafe. co uk.
Inside the HNS Community
LUCINDA BYATT speaks to PRJSCILLA ROYAL, author of a medieval mystery series based at Tyndal Priory
When didyou join HNS and can you tell us how the occasion arose? I joined in 2005 after discovering your website and the Salt Lake City conference. Although I was too late for a panel, I went. What fun!
Tell us brief!y wf.!J you er!Jqy HNS . Apart from your informative, well-run conferences, Solander and Historical Novels Review are crucial for keeping up with books, authors, trends, and everything relevant to historical fiction.
The inevitable question, what is your favourite historical novel? I must split this between two classics: Sharon Kay Penman's Here Be Dragons and Ellis Peters' Monks Hood. Both authors are irresistible storytellers. Ms. Penman's historical characters have soul and sinew; her research is reliable Brother Cadfael is my lodestar for defining justice.
What is your favourite period?
The more I learn about late 13 th - and early 14th -century England, the more excited I become. lt was a transitional period between the policies of Henry III, a relatively peaceful and deeply religious monarch, and those of his son, Edward I, a warrior known as the lawyer king. Since we also seem to be experiencing a major shift in political worldview, the Henry III/Edward I era grows in significance. Other periods that interest me are pre-Conquest Britain, Chinese and Japanese history, US Colonial, and World War I.
Can you tell us what drew you to historical fiction in your oum 1vriting and how this developed?
History, writing, and reading are passions from childhood. Although my major was world literature (so I could read anything from anywhere), history was my "relaxation." Writing became my constant enjoyment during thirty years as a bureaucrat. Before retirement, I finally put all three together into a medieval mystery series where I try to give history a human face and examine differences between "law" and "justice." Sometime I wonder if we repeat the mistakes of history because we forget that our ancestors (all people of any culture are our kin) differ from us only in the symbols and language used to express common humanity.
What books do you have on your bedside table at the moment?
In the immediate stack are Badgers Moon by Peter Tremayne, Aelred of Rievaulx: a S tut!J by Aelred Squire, Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli (trans. Michael Reynolds), and Plays and Fragments by Menander (trans Maurice Balme). Now in the pile over there ...
Lucinda Byatt is a 1vriter, translator and book reviewer living in Edinburgh She can be contacted at mail@lucindalryatt.com.
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Longhaired Cavaliers and Roundheaded Rogues
EVILLE FIRMAN examines some fictional treatments of the English Civil War.
O liver Cromwell and the Roundheads have had a bad press, or rather, a bad historical novel. This it has to be said is the single most glaring fact about the fictional treatment of the English Civil War. Historians have been much fairer, but then they have a far better understanding of the issues involved. In the mid 1960s, the English Civil War historian, Ivan Roots, described the trial of Charles I as, "one of those deeply moving occasions in which right struggles with right, or, if you like, wrong with wrong." He continued: >
The theme has appealed to imaginative writers who have ruined rather than heightened the drama by coming down heavily on one side or the other, usually the King's, making buffoons or inhuman monsters of Cromwell and his associates. The true inwardness of this tragedy lies in the fact that both sides were honest in this moment of truth. It is their inability to escape from the implications of their actions which is moving. 1
It is the sort of insight that historical novelists, rather than dry academic historians, should have. They rarely do. The reason is not far to seek: they are seduced by the romance. The Cavaliers I/Jere romantic and wrong, lllhile the Roundheads were unromantic and right. It is, of course, far more complex than that. But the stereotypes are very powerful and hard to shake. All Roundheads were narrow bigoted Puritans with cropped hair, and
the Cavaliers had long flowing locks, were handsome, witty and had perfect manners.
These are powerful images, but before moving on to examine fictional treatments of the English Civil War in more detail, it is worth looking at the origin of the terms "Cavalier" and "Roundhead" and how far the connotation they came to have differs from their original meaning. " Roundhead" originally referred to the fashion for cropping the hair short adopted by the London apprentices who supported Parliament on the eve of the Civil War. The fashion did not last, but the name stuck. If we look at portraits and drawings of the Parliamentary leaders, it soon becomes obvious that none of them have short cropped hair, including Cromwell. Indeed some have hair as long and flowing as any Cavalier. The only well-known Parliamentarian I have
seen who sports anything like the short-cropped R oundhead look is John Lilburne, the Leveller. But then, he was a dangerous radical and certainly does not conform to the Puritan stereotype. The apprentices too, to whom Lilburne was a hero, would not have conformed to this stereotype They were a boisterous lot, and not a few would have attended the playhouses. A little-known fact about this period is that on the eve of the Civil War, there was an opposition theatre, all trace of which disappeared, or perhaps was suppressed, after the Restoration. 2
As for "Cavalier," it is related to the Old Spanish "Cavallero," meaning a horseman or knight. C. V Wedgewood has noted that when the term was first hurled at the wild young men who supported the king by the equally wild London apprentices who supported Parliament, it meant something like "Spanish trooper - brutal oppressor of Protestants and national enemy." 3 Thus both were terms of abuse. When the two sides clashed in the London streets, the apprentices were "crop-heads," "Roundheads" and the king's men were "Ca valleros," arrogant Spanish troopers "Skinhead" might be the nearest modern equivalent for "Roundhead," and for "Cavalier," perhaps "Fascist," or "Nazi." It is clear therefore that the modern connotations of these words are very different. Yet it is our understanding of "Cavalier" which has undergone the greatest transformation, while "Roundhead," for many, especially those influenced by historical fiction, still has a negative connotation.
The reason for this, I would suggest, is that historical fiction still sees the period through the distorting lens of Royalist propaganda. Had Cromwell lived another ten years, it is likely that there would have been no Restoration, Britain would probably have been a republic - with Cromwell seen as its founding father - and our perceptions of the period would have been very different.
There are, of course, books which are fair to the Parliamentarians, though the other sort do seem to predominate, especially among popular, as opposed to literary, historicals. I recently reviewed E. V Thompson's The Vagrant King, published in 2005. Thompson is a writer of the popular historical romance-cum-adventure story for whom I have some admiration. He does what he does well. His books normally have a 19 th - or late 18 th -century setting, so in this book he was venturing out of his period. In it he has accepted the full-blown Royalist myth. His book contains all the basic elements of the myth. The hero, Ralf Hunkyn, serves the future Charles II and aids him to escape after the Battle of Worcester. He falls in love with the daughter of an unpleasant Roundhead, who of course cleaves to Ralf and accepts his devotion to Charles, the rightful king, without question. 4 With variations, this has been the basic plot line of countless historical
Peature
romances. There are of course exceptions Pamala Belle's The Moon in the Water (1983) contains a romance between a Roundhead soldier and a Royalist, though he is not the hero of the book . In general though, this type of fiction depicts all Parliamentarians as narrow, bigoted Puritans, except when they see the error of their ways Often, in the case of the women, salvation comes through falling in love with a handsome Cavalier.
In such novels the Puritan/Roundhead image of narrowness and bigotry is built up by frequent references to the ban on the theatres and the pulling down of maypoles etc. Margaret Irwin's The Stranger Prince, first published in 1937, enjoyed a considerable vogue in its time. A fictional biography of Prince Rupert, it paints an idealised picture of the England of Charles I as a land of happy peasants dancing round maypoles without a care in the world, until the wicked Puritans came along and spoiled everything. Thus on May Day morning Rupert goes out to bring in the May in the company of Queen Henrietta Maria. They meet with some Merry Englandish country folk.
A song sung in parts, in rough harmony, male and female, came ringing clearer and clearer as past them through the trees there trooped a procession of country boys and girls, brown, barefoot many of them, but in holiday clothes - scarlet waistcoats and blue and red aprons, and ribbons tying up the girls' loose hair - all bearing great branches of whitethorn, and some little osier baskets full of primroses and violets.
"Look, look!" cried the Queen, "they are bringing in May before us. How they put us to shame. Rupert, hold my horse. I must go down on the instant." 5
It was never quite like that of course. Pre-Civil War England was often a brutal place. Such festivals were not always a matter of harmless fun, with well-behaved young men and maidens dancing on the village green. Things could get violent. There were riots . People could, and did, get killed. It was this aspect of the matter that Puritans objected to. And they had a point. Seventeenth-century Puritans were concerned with a reformation of manners, with encouraging more decent civilised behaviour between people. Of course some went too far, but to dismiss them as mere killjoys is to misunderstand them. And unfortunately, such a misunderstanding dominates much historical fiction. All we hear about is how they wanted to close the tl1eatres and pull down the maypoles. Puritanism was in fact a very broad movement. In its original meaning the word simply meant the more radical Protestants, those who wished to purijj the Church of England of its Catholic rituals and symbolism. ot all Puritans in this sense were necessarily against the playhouses, or indeed maypoles. Later, like "Roundhead," "Puritan" became a term of abuse, applied to anyone who supported Parliament.
It is important to understand too that Puritans in this wider sense were not - as modern caricatures tend to suggest - solely, or even mainly, concerned with condemning sex. Indeed in some respects their attitude toward women was enlightened. For example they objected to the Anglican practise of churching women, that is to say the ceremony of purification after childbirth They saw it of course as a Papist survival. But they also had another reason for condemning
it, one which might win the approval of modern feminists. For in their view the practise "breedeth and nourisheth many superstitious opinions in the simp le people's hearts; as that the woman which hath born a child is unclean and unholy " A high -church Laudian vicar on the other hand is on record as refusing communion to menstruating women and those who had had sex ual intercourse the previous night . 6 So much for the Merry E n gland of Cha rl es I. Puritanism had a positive as well as a negative side to it, but it is rare for this to be acknowledged in historical novels written much later than 1900. Perhaps writers such as Irwin were too much in the grip of reaction to Victorian prudery to do the Puritans of an earlier age justice.
Walter Scott, the father of the modern historical novel, has a far more balanced view than many later writers in the genre. The Roundhead hero of Woodstock, Markham Everard, is honest and fairminded and bears no resemblance whatsoever to the snivelling Puritan hypocrite so beloved of the writers of historical romance. And, what's more, in Scott's book, the Roundhead gets the girl, the daughter of a Cavalier. A reversal of the usual romance formula for this period, guaranteed to give the average writer of romantic fiction a fit of apoplexy. But then, Scott was a historical, rather than a romantic, novelist. Everard's motivation is perfectly believable too. He disapproves of the king's execution, but sees Cromwell as offering the only hope for stability in an England torn apart by political and religious dissension. Had he lived long enough - the novel is set in 1652, and deals with Charles's escape after the Battle of Worcester - Everard would have become a supporter of the Revolution of 1688. In this respect he can be compared to Henry Morton, the hero of Old Mortality, Scott's earlier novel set in Scotland in the 1670s, which deals with the revolt of the Covenanters against the oppressive government of Charles II. Both are essentially liberals forced by their principles to take the side of what iliey regard as religious extremists, against an oppressive king. Morton of course does support 1688. This is Scott's view too. For though he romanticises the Jacobites in Waver!J and Rob Rqy, his underlying sympathies are with the other side.
Woodstock was published in 1826. In 1847, there appeared a book of seminal importance for the fictional treatment of this period: Marryat's children's novel, The Children of the New Forest Here we find the pro- Royalist myth in all its glory. Its appeal is obvious, dealing as it does with Royalist children of noble birth, hiding in the forest from the wicked Roundheads. The book is interesting for the wholly negative view it gives of the Levellers, who are described as "having taken up the opinion that every man should be on an equality, and property should be equally divided." He goes on:
The hatred of these people to any one above them in rank
or property, especially towards those of the King's party, which mostly consisted of men of rank and property, was unbounded, and they were merciless and cruel in the highest degree 7
The passage refers to the Levellers within the ew Model Army. Some Levellers did indeed have communistic ideas. Thus, the Digger movement, agrarian communists who cultivated the common lands, called themselves True Levellers But Levellers as a whole were not opposed to private property, but were certainly egalitarian and democratic. The date of the publication of Marryat's book, however, is significant. For the 1840s was the time of the Chartist agitation. Egalitarian and democratic ideas were again abroad in England, as they had been at the time of the Civil War and its aftermath. Scott too has a negative view of the Civil War radicals, both religious and political Historical novelists often tell us as much about the fears and preoccupations of their own times as of the times of which they write.
Attitudes toward the Levellers have changed since the growth of modern democracy. Their demands for extension of the franchise and a more egalitarian society are now seen as perfectly reasonable even by the political right, though the movement has been particularly taken up by historians of a left wing or Marxist perspective. On the other hand, with honourable exceptions - Pamala Belle, in The Chains of Fate (1984), being one - they have been little noticed by popular historical novelists. The crude Roundhead /Puritan stereotype seems still to hold
There are however two excellent literary historicals worth mentioning here. David Caute's Comrade Jacob (1961) deals with the Digger community that established itself on St. Georges Hill in Surrey in 1649 and its inspirational leader, Gerrard Winstanley. Caute draws good portraits of both Winstanley and General Fairfax, who had the task of ejecting the Diggers and restoring order. The other is the American writer, Mary Lee Settle's The Long Road to Paradise (1974), first published in the US in 1973 under the title Prisons. It deals with the incident in 1649 on the eve of Cromwell's Irish campaign, when two regiments, inspired by Leveller ideals, mutinied. Two of the ringleaders were shot in the churchyard at Burford in Oxfordshire. In compelling stream-of-consciousness
narrative, Johnny Church, one of the two, looks back on his life as a soldier under Cromwell and finally as a Leveller mutineer.
Cromwell's Irish campaign is of course a huge bone of contention and has contributed more than anything else to his demonisation. Even those writers like Caute and Settle who write from a left-wing perspective and are sympathetic to the Levellers, have had no doubts that Cromwell committed an atrocity at Drogheda. As to the writers of popular historical fiction, it is grist to their mill. An important book in this respect is Walter Macken's Seek the Fair Land. Originally published in 1959, it was a bestseller in its time . Macken's description of the slaughter of the inhabitants of the town is lurid, emotive, but grossly exaggerated. Tom Reilly, a local historian from Drogheda, has argued convincingly, by meticulous examination of the eyewitness accounts etc, that there was no indiscriminate massacre of the civilian population. Cromwell did execute the garrison, but this was permitted under the contemporary rules of siege warfare Moreover, his behaviour to the ordinary Irish population was by no means merciless. On the road from Dublin he kept his troops on a tight rein and even went so far as to hang two of his men for stealing hens from some peasant women. Strange behaviour for someone who was about to slaughter the innocent inhabitants of Drogheda.
Macken, however, can hardly be blamed for not taking account of later research . But there is at least one gross error in his book which certainly could have been avoided. He makes Cromwell's soldiers justify their slaughter, even of children with the saying, " its make Lice." As Reilly points out, this cry was used not by Cromwell's men, but by the Scots Presbyterians under Robert Monroe, who on 9 January 1642 were "responsible for the massacre of 3,000 Irish Catholic civilians at Island Magee." 8 This was surely an atrocity, but strangely it is Cromwell and Drogheda: which is remembered, not Monroe and Island Magee. Macken's error in putting it into the mouths of Cromwell's soldiers is a perfect example of how the historical novel can distort history, and distort it dangerously.
A sympathetic view of Cromwell is indeed hard to find in historical fiction, buL there is one writer worth mentioning who does give a positive view of him and the Protectorate. In his day, John Sanders was a writer of popular fiction, not of historical romance, but rather of the historical thriller. His hero, icholas Pym is an agent for the Cromwellian Protectorate. The four books in the series appeared between 1964 and 1968 and can be seen as a spinoff from the vogue for James Bond-type spy thrillers . His hero's only resemblance to Bond, however, lies in his resourcefulness in getting out of tight corners. He is the son of a yeoman, a Fenland farmer, and his reasons for siding with Parliament and serving Cromwell are convincing. These are stated in the first of the series, A Firework for Oliver.
As far as icholas Pym was concerned, the issues were simple. Selfish feudal arrogance, combined with a ridiculous belief in the Divine Right of Kings, against the liberty of freeborn Englishmen: 9
continued on page 8
A Master Storyteller
CLAIRE MO RRI S profiles bestselling historical novefistKARLEE KOE .
W hen Karleen Koen began work on her third novel, Dark Angels, she didn't intend to write about Alice Verney. Instead, she was attempting to fictionalize a piece of history linked to the early court of Louis XIV of France.
The facts in question have intrigued her for years, but "in trying to wrap my hands around this story, I figured out that at the end of the time period involved, Alice would be about twenty years old," Karleen explains "I thought, wouldn't it be fun to bring her - or Richard [Saylor] (both characters from her earlier two novels) - into this novel as a side character, just a joke between me and whatever reader might know me. But the joke was on me, because once I did that, somehow Alice and Richard just hijacked the novel. So I let Alice have her way."
Alice is accustomed to having her way. Appearing first as the elderly and feisty Duchess of Tamworth in Karleen's phenomenally successful debut novel, Thro11gh a Glass Dark!J, Alice came across as vigorous and opinionated. She was the matriarch of the Tamworth clan, who pushed their way back onto the stage in Now Face to Face, the sequel to Thro11gh a Glass Dark!J.
Hailed as a triumph by the publishing world months before its release, Through a Glass Dark!J was inspired by a reference to the South Sea Bubble that Karleen happened across as she was researching England in the early 18 th century
"I knew I was going to write a historical novel - some sort of Regency, I thought - but when I learned about the South Sea Bubble,
continued from page 7
This is exactly how someone coming from his background might have seen the matter. He is certainly no Puritan in the modern sense of a narrow-minded killjoy, but an engaging and sympathetic hero. The books are highly readable and a welcome change from the Royalist bias which pervades much historical fiction.
Historical novels have a tendency to romanticise backward-looking and reactionary causes. The English Cavaliers are one obvious example, another is the Jacobites, a third is the cause of the old American South. Gone with the Wind immediately comes to mind.
Notes
1.1van Roots, The Great Rebellion 1642-1660 (Bats ford Academic (Paperback): London, 1979), 137.
2. Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Ear!J Stuarts (University of Cambridge, 1980), especially chapter 12.
it occurred to me that this would be a terrific event around which to tell a story," she says. "People would be put in extraordinary situations and they would respond in extraordinary ways."
The resulting coming-of-age story became an instant success. Thro11gh a Glass Dark!J spent five months on the e111 York Times bestseller list, and Random House asked for a sequel before the novel had even graced bookstore displays.
3. C. V. Wedgewood, The King's War 1641-1647 (Fontana (Paperback) 1972), 49.
5. Margaret Irwin, The Stranger Prince (Chatto and Windus: London, 1956), 83.
6. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline ef Magic (Penguin, 1991), 43.
7. Frederick Marryat, The Children ef the Tew Forest (Puffin Books, 1998), 11.
8. Tom Reilly, Cromwell an Hono11rable Enemy (Brandon, 1999), 22.
9. John Sanders,AFire1vorkforOliver(Heinemann, 1965), 8. The other books in the series are: Hat of A11thori!J, tl7itho11t Dmm or T mmpet and Cromwell's Cavalier.
eviffe Firman has been a member ef HNS since its foundation. He left school ear!J 111ithout qualifications, but gained his first and higher degrees (a BA in English and History and a PhD in History), as a mature student. His PhD thesis was on ear!J Quakerism and he has made a st114Y over ma,ry years ef the English Civil War period, particular!J ef the radical religious and political movements ef the time. At the moment he is hoping to become a historical novelist.
Although Through a Glass Dark!J chronicles Barbara Alderley's coming of age, it really is a novel that defies classification. Yes, it is historical, but is it a saga, an epic, a romance? It has been compared to Gone with the Wind' for its ability to capture an era and re-create a period of history, and rarely do characters remain so resiliently in the mind years after closing a novel's back cover. As Barbara leaves the protective environment of her grandmother's Tamworth home for the whirling court of George I in London, and later for the court of France, readers are drawn into the intricacies of her life. As her relationships develop and falter, the importance of having money and title is underscored by the volatile South Sea investments and the dubious value of land in the colonies.
The title of this novel (and of ow Face to Face) was inspired by a chapter from the Bible (1 Corinthians 13) that is referenced at times in the text
"This particular passage is to me very much about the shifts and changes that we make as we grow up and mature and it can be on any number of levels," Karleen says. "It can simply be on the level of one's life, it can also be about how you think something's one way and it's not. And then there's also a spiritual piece, in that there are worlds that we don't necessarily see which we are impacting and we are impacted by."
Did Karleen encounter any challenges when she tried to sell her first novel?
"I didn't do any kind of market research, I didn't have any business plan, I just knew I was going to write a historical novel because I'd read them all my life, loved them, and learned interesting history by reading them," she says. "But I knew I wanted to work with an agent, and I had torn an article out of a writing magazine that mentioned agents who work with first-time writers. One of them was Jean aggar and she liked the novel and wanted to represent me."
Twenty years and three novels later, Karleen and Jean are still working together. Part of 0111 Face to Face was already written when Karleen first approached Jean. In this sequel, she continues Barbara's story, describing the fallout from the South Sea Bubble and the effect it had on the Tamworth family. Readers follow Barbara to Virginia, where she strives to bring some semblance of order to her grandmother's plantation, then back to the English court, where she must attempt to salvage something from what Karleen terms "the first real Depression."
Dark Angels, Karleen's new novel, takes place in 1670, when Barbara's grandmother, Alice, is a young maid of honour to Princess Henriette, sister of Charles II of England. While this novel, like Through a Glass Dark!J, is also a coming-of-age story, it is propelled along by the intrigue that is such a part of a court where there is no legitimate
heir. Alice is loyal, mischievous, stubborn, censorious, and not very good at forgiveness. Because of her position close to the royal family, she becomes caught up in the machinations of those at court who would, one way or another, secure the line of succession for England's throne. Because of her loyalty to those she loves and serves, she uses her influence to uncover the plots, which bring her perilously close to the dangerous Henri Ange, who is never quite what he seems. While Alice evolves as a character, and while details that have bearing on the other two novels - and future ones - are revealed, the treachery threatens to engulf her.
"Dark Angels was named for the fact that every character, all of us, carry within our own light and dark angels," Karleen explains. "Our shadow sides and our light sides Everyone has their own dark angels."
Were there challenges in penning a prequel, particularly as it related to Alice's character, and camouflaging how later events - known to readers of the earlier novels - came about?
"There were some restrictions with Alice, since she existed already," Karleen says "But - and I can only speak for myself - I have done an enormous amount of changing as I have evolved. So in Dark Angels, she's a young woman and what happens to her there is at the beginning of her life - what we see later is way at the end of her life."
Karleen's own development has been influenced greatly by historical fiction. Growing up in Arkansas and Texas, she devoured Georgette Heyer novels and "always had my head in a book. I knew more about Tudor England than I did about my neighbours down the street," she says, referencing her love for all things to do with Elizabeth I's reign. Historical novels, she says, shaped her, in part because she felt more connected to the places in them than she did to the places where she lived. This disconnection was in part responsible for her creation of Tamworth, the home of the family her novels centre around. In all three books, she portrays Tamworth as a place the characters can retreat to in difficult times. Alice is taken there in Dark Angels after suffering a particular traumatic event, and another character applauds this move, thinking, "Alice would heal at Tamworth. Everything did."
Tamworth is not based on a real place, but because Karleen does not feel like there was a place that shaped her, she wanted to imagine this, and to create one for her characters.
She did not grow up writing, and only majored in English at college because she wanted to read the books the degree required She went on to journalism because it seemed a way that she could make a living. Since that time, she has been writing (articles for magazines, press releases, reports) editing (for magazines, newspapers and institutions) and teaching, as well as organizing a non-profit group for women in the Arts, and consulting on a variety of related projects. But she never imagined she would make her living as a novelist, because although non-fiction writing comes easily to her, fiction takes her time (there have been ten-year gaps between the publication of her three novels). Also, unlike many writers, she is not driven to write. But she is driven to tell stories, which comes out of her intense interest for history and more importantly, for the people whose voices have been lost to history.
To unearth these voices, she condu cts an immense amount of research, reading old memoirs and biographies and period material, which is evident in her sumptuous depictions of the courts of England and France In Dark Angels, Queen Catherine of England keeps a pet fox, a detail that is based on something Karleen read as she researched the queen's life. She likes using snippets of history in her novels - such as a prison escape that occurs in No111 Face to Face. Since they happened to unnamed people, she makes them happen to her characters She tries to ensure that everything surrounding the real-life characters is historically accurate, but she will create a character if she needs one. For example, one of the major characters in Dark Angels, the Earl of Balm oral, is fictional, but based on an influential man who died in 1669, a year earlier than the novel's opening. "I needed him to be alive in 1670," she says "So I took this guy who was one of the architects of the Restoration, who was a general and might have had some of the characteristics I gave Balmoral, I just took him and ran with it!"
One of her strengths is her ability to present a story so seamless that unless a reader knows the period intimately, they will not guess who is factual and who is a Karleen Koen creation, though Karleen insists that she has to re-learn this skill every time she writes.
Another of her strengths is her ability to turn even the most minor characters into living, breathing human beings.
"I'm real interested in character," Karleen says. ''Why people do things and the repercussions of what they do and in how one lives a life. How do you live a life fully and where do you trip over things and what stops you from being all you can be."
This interest is evident from her depiction of kings (Charles II) to footmen (Perryman), while her heroes, like Richard, are so real they capture the hearts of many readers. While her inclination is to tell the stories of women who have not been heard in history, she pays equal attention to the men. The results are characters that male readers find believable, an accomplishment of which Karleen is proud. She admits that characterization takes her a while but "there is always a really exciting moment when these people become real. I don't have to make stuff up anymore - they're going to tell me, they're going to lead "
Which is how Dark Angels ended up revolving about the strongwilled Alice Verney.
Karleen finds it a challenge to write about characters who have been the subject of so much history, so much speculation, such as Louis XIV "Volumes have been written about this man," she says. "To let it go and create someone who lives and breathes is important, because you're not writing a biography, you're writing a story, and there's a difference."
Karleen is also proud to call herself a historical novelist. Her advice for those who would pen historical fiction? D on't let the research overwhelm. "Research is fun, but the bottom line is, you're trying to write a story someone else wants to read. So, as screenwriter Joe Esterhazy recommends, do the research and then walk away from it and write the story."
What is next for Karleen Koen? She is still trying to tell the Louis XIV story that Dark Angels was supposed to focus on; in Dark Angels, she ended up including only a small part of this story. Karleen suspects that she will need two more books to tell it as she would like - good news for her fans And will Alice and the other characters from Dark Angels make appearances in these future novels?
"I'm not looking for any Tamworths to show up, but I'm also not taking any bets, because I didn't expect the novel that evolved into Dark Angels to end up as it did."
D iscussing future novels, she gives a hint into the mind of a master storyteller, recounting how she reviewed a line of dialogue she'd written in Dark Angels, something Alice said to another maid of honour, referencing her childhood. "I thought, now there could be another novel," Karleen says.
If this is Alice having her way again, readers can only rejoice.
Notes
1. Review from Jean M. Auel, Through a Glass Dark!J, 1st edition (New York, 1986).
Karleen Kocn's no\'cls arc:
Through a Glass Darkly (1986) Now Face to Face (1996) Dark Angels (2006)
Her website is www.karkcnkocn.co111
Portals to Hidden Histories
Historical no velist MARY SHARRATT describes how living history museums bring E ar!J A merica to life.
In popular imagination, historical fiction seems to focus on novels illuminating famous figures of the past, such as Robert Graves' I , Claudius and Philippa Gregory's The Other B oleyn Girl While countless readers, m yself included, enjoy the vicarious delights of reading about emperors and queens, historical fiction can also be used as a tool for exploring the hidden lives of common folk who contributed just as much to the fabric of our history. Eminent historical novelist, the late Mary Lee Settle wrote, "Recorded histor y is wrong. It's wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it." The voiceless in history include most women, most people of nonEuropean ancestr y, and people of the servant and peasant classes. Some of the freshest and most moving historical fiction is written about historical underdogs, including Settle's own classic Beulah Land Quintet Charles Frazier's new novel, Thirteen Moons, depicts the fight to save Cherokee homeland, while Lalita Tademy's epic novels, Ca ne River and the forthcoming Red River, are based on the struggles of her African American ancestors in the 19 th century.
What research tools exist for historical novelists who wish to give voice to neglected histories? When I was researching the lives
Mar y's City, tucked away in a remote corner of Southern Maryland, has recreated Maryland's first capital through archaeology and primary sources Researchers have used clues from ancient foundations and fragments of glass to reconstruct historic buildings and give visitors an idea of what life here was like in the years spanning 1634, when the settlement was founded, to 1695, when St. Mary's City was abandoned for the present Maryland capital of Annapolis.
The most remote part of the museum is Master Spray's Plantation, a working colonial farm situated away from the other sites and also from Maryland Route 5 and most signs of modern civilization "It's easier to suspend disbelief and imagine you are in the 17th century," Public Programs Director, Dorse y Bodeman explains. Spray's Plantation is a first person site with inter[ preters in period cos'lil tume and in character. "We give visitors the opportunity to step into their lives," says Bodeman ''The y will come upon interpreters doing tasks people would have done in the 17 th centur y " These interpreters include Master and Mistress Spray, and their indentured of women, small planters, and indentured servants of the Colonial Chesapeake settlements for my most recent novel Th e Vanishing Point, I discovered that my best sources were living history museums. At Mount Vernon, George Washington's birthplace, I learned about
spinning wool and flax, and how even women of the wealthy elite spent their "leisure" hours spinning to keep their families clothed. In Colonial Williamsburg, I spent an entire day talking to various re-enactors about everything from tanning leather to period cures for consumption - cantering around on horseback was believed to be quite efficacious. The re-enactors at these museums don't deal in dry facts or dates, but an entire way of life. This article will focus on the two museums that had the biggest impact on me: Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and Historic St. Mary's City in Maryland. Both these sites provide excellent inspiration for historical novelists and history lovers who would like to know more about the diversity of lives in Early America, not just the lives of "great men," such as Washington and Jefferson.
Historic St. Mary's City
How do you recreate a place that disappeared centuries ago? Historical novelists try to do this with research and imagination. Historic St
servants. Their ta s ks deal with home and hearth - things that 21 "-century people can relate to
"Master Spray will talk about what he's doing in the tobacco field," Bodeman says. "This serves as an entr y to the visitors asking him questions. It's much easier to ask the interpreter questions than asking the same questions in a lecture hall The discussion can then develop into a more in-depth discussion about, for example, the economies of tobacco planting." Bodeman believe s that visitors will have an eas y time connecting with the interpreters, who are trained to make them feel at home. Other exhibits include Smith's Ordinar y, the reconstructed State House of 1676, and the Maryland Do ve, a replica square-ribbed ship that brought colonists to the ew World . Buildings recreated on the historical model are being added to the site each year. The rebuilt print house will open next spring and in the following year, the chapel will be finished
Visitors can also learn about the ongoing archaeological sites. Archaeologists aren't present year round, but interpreters are on hand to talk about the archaeological background. "Visitors are ver y interested in behind-the-scenes information about how we know
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about a place that disappeared off the face of the earth," Bodeman states She admits that it is difficult to reconstruct people's daily lives from archaeological artifacts alone "Archaeology doesn't find many life-way things." The only artifacts that survive in the ground for four hundred years are things like stone, bone, metal tools, oyster shells, and glass. Some artifacts found on site, however, do open a window into lost lives One is a container with small holes in it and a bone stopper. The container was probably filled with a noxious substance and worn to banish fleas in an era when whole families shared the same bedding, as did travellers at inns and ordinaries. '
The museum is not focused exclusively on the lives of European settlers. At the Indian Village Site, staff in contemporary dress, who are not necessarily ative American themselves, discuss the lives of ative Americans in the 17th century. These interpreters practice what Bodeman calls "experimental archaeology." Since very little about ative American history was written down, interpreters don't just learn from books but from living on-site and building ative American-style huts by trial and error. "The staff is out there living the life, learning to make fishhooks from the toe bones of a deer." Bodeman adds that these were inspired by deer-bone fishhooks found by archaeologists.
African-American history is not interpreted at the museum, because there would have been very few, if any, enslaved Americans present in the original settlement Slavery did not become a major institution before the 1660s. Throughout most of the 17 th century, European indentured servants were much cheaper and more readily available.
There were also very few European women. Bodeman states that in 1650, the white population in the colony numbered about six hundred and fewer than two hundred of those people were women. Even at the end of the 17 th century, there were still three men for every woman. The bulk of people coming to the colony were male indentured servants. A handful of wealthy men, such as the Calverts, came over to get the colony started. Malaria took a huge toll on the population and high death rates impacted both sexes. This, coupled with the scarcity of women and with high infant mortality, meant that immigration contributed more to the white population than live births. Moreover, indentured servants would be around thirty by the time they were free to marry and this also served to curb the birth rate Yet court records of the period prove that some female indentured servants had children out of wedlock Their masters would then seek to prolong their indenture to cover the costs of feeding the child. Court records of midwives provide a further glimpse into these early women's histories.
What does Bodeman hope visitors will gain from a day at St. Mary's?
''A connection to the people who came before us," she says. "I hope they would go away not with just bits and pieces of factual information, but a connection to what life was like four hundred years ago. What motivated people then - things like getting clothes, food, and shelter - wasn't different from what motivates people now. But how hard people had to work to get these things was very, very different."
Those who are unable to visit St. Mary's in person can take a virtual tour via the website: http: / / www stmaryscity.org.
Colonial Williamsburg
In contrast to St. Mary's serene backwater, Colonial Williamsburg is comprised of a monumental 301-acre Historic Area surrounded by a three thousand acre greenbelt to help keep out 21 " -century intrusions. From 1699 to 1780, Williamsburg, Virginia was the capital of England's oldest, largest, wealthiest, and most populous colony in the Americas. amed in honor of King William III and designed by Royal Governor Francis icholson, Williamsburg is one of America's oldest planned communities. The restored city features no fewer than eighty-eight original buildings and hundreds of others that have been reconstructed, most on their original foundations. Colonial Williamsburg portrays the capital during the years 17741781, the critical formative period of the American Republic. Also on site are Bassett Hall and the Wallace Gallery, which form the Museums of Williamsburg. The huge stores of collections include everything from period farm instruments to portraiture.
"The most unique thing about Williamsburg is our setting," says Dr. Rex Ellis, vice president of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. "It's like a stage set to tell a three-dimensional story. It allows us to take in the good, the bad, and the ugly. The buildings and reconstruction, the collections and reproductions build and design and acknowledge history in a different way than a textbook. We use a variety of ways to tell the story of history."
The diversity of Early American experience is in evidence from sites ranging from the Governor's Palace, the seat of British authority in the colony, and the Capital, the seat of colonial power and home of Virginia's vote for independence, to Great Hopes Plantation, a working farm, which invites guests to become part of the experience of 1770s-era enslaved Americans and middling white planters. In contrast, the Peyton Randolph House examines urban slave life through participatory programs.
First and third person interpreters play a crucial role in bringing history to life. "The buildings are just structures," says Ellis. Valarie Gray-
"It's the people that bring slav
life to those things, the people that animate the buildings. The artifacts and collections are just a backdrop." Interpreters are available throughout the day, and visitors who stick around until the evening can watch performances with scripted presentations.
Holm es portraying Lydi a Bro adn ax,
e and coo k to Geo rge Wyth e (Willi amsbur g)
The African-American experience in colonial Virginia is brought vividly to life by interpreters playing characters such as Lydia Broadnax, cook and slave to George Wythe, who was a mentor to Thomas Jefferson and one of signers of the Declaration of Independence. Wythe eventually freed Broadnax, who chose to remain in his service until his death - one of his heirs poisoned him. Eventually she acquired her own house in Richmond. Another interpreter plays the role of Gowan Pamphlet, a slave owned by entrepreneurial businesswoman Mrs Jane Vobe, who ran the King's Arms Tavern. In her service, Pamphlet waited on the likes of William Byrd III 2 and George Washington. Gowan Pamphlet's spiritual calling, however, steered his life in a completely different direction. He became a preacher, acting in defiance of laws not only forbidding persons of color to preach but also forbidding slaves to hold gatherings. After years of performing his ministry, including baptisms, in secret, he finally got his freedom and founded the First Black Baptist Church. Also interpreted is Ann Wager, a white woman who became mistress of the Bray School for African American children in 1760.
Third-person interpreters include costumed artisans representing the tradesmen and women of their day. These are professional, full-time artisans dedicated to specific trades, including carpentry, culinary arts, brickmaking, saddlery, apothecary arts, and
gunsmithing. Guests can observe the artisans at work and ask them questions about their trade.
One program that Ellis believes no visitor should miss is The Revolutionary City. "This is the newest program we have to interpret history in a more responsible way," Ellis explains. To convey the • series of major events that illustrates Williamsburg's central role in the American Revolution, each day consists of a two-hour interactive program that portrays the transition of Colonial Americans from British subjects to citizens of a newly fledged American nation. This is conveyed in a series of scripted performances, such as a thirtyyear-old carpenter torn between family and war, and slaves weighing the ironies of the freedom their masters seek while denying the same liberties to them. Visitors will have the chance to connect to the characters' personal stories Ellis says he hopes this program will provide insight into the privilege and responsibility of being an American, and also an awareness of the sacrifices made by enslaved Americans, as well as European Americans, in the struggle for independence. "You can't visit Williamsburg without being struck by the sacrifices made by our ancestors." The Revolutionary City can also be experienced by video via Colonial Williamsburg's website (details below).
I recommend devoting at least a full day to Williamsburg. There are plenty of hotels in the area and those who book ahead can enjoy a period meal in one of the taverns in the Historic Area. It's an interesting experience to walk around the site in the evening after the crowds have gone home.
But even those who cannot manage to visit can learn a great deal
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through Colonial Williamsburg's extensive website, which offers a variety of resources including virtual tours, podcasts, articles and online slideshows exploring African American history, children's programs, an online research library focused on the 18'h century and colonial period, and even a source list for 18th century costume design: www.history org.
James town Se ttlem e nt and Yorktown Victor y Cente r
Close by Williamsburg are two additional living history sites, also superb.
Jamestown Settlement has recreated the first English settlement in the Americas. Founded in 1607,Jamestown is currently gearing up for its 400 th anniversary. Visitors can learn about the lives and trades of people in 17 thcentury Virginia, including Powhatan Indians and European and African immigrants. Yorktown Victory Center is a must-visit for American Revolutionary War enthusiasts. The site interprets the lives of the men and women who witnessed the decisive Battle of Yorktown in October 1781, which ended the six-year struggle for American independence Information about both Jamestown and Yorktown can be found at the website: www.historyisfun.org.
Notes
1 In Virginia and Maryland in the colonial period, taverns were referred to as "ordinaries."
2. William Byrd III was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, a commander in the French and Indian War, and the initiator of what is believed to be the first major horse race in the Americas. A notorious gambler, he squandered his family fortune and eventually committed suicide in 1777.
Mary Sharratt is an HNS Reviews Editor and author of The Vanishing Point (Mariner 2006), a novel set in 17th -century Maryland
James Ingram portraying Gowan Pamphlet, slave and founder of the Black Bapti s t Church (Williamsburg)
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CARLA PASSI O suggests some museums for historical fiction research.
T he shadow darkened the doorway.
"He is dead," Piero said.
Isabella barely lifted her eyes from the needlework.
"The girl?" she asked.
"Dead too."
"It's war, then."
It wouldn't do to show weakness, not to this man. She waited. After he left, she slowly stood up and took a step. But her traitorous legs folded under her weight and she leaned . . . Wait! What sort of furniture could a damsel in distress lean on in 15 th -century Florence?
One of the hardest tasks facing historical fiction writers - and the one that sets them apart from other novelists - is to ensure that the settings of their books are true to period. And while some basic information is common knowledge - a Renaissance Italian heroine was sure not to have feasted on chocolate, for example - other details are more complicated to research. History books help of course, as do paintings. But writers also have an unexpected aid in historic homes, many of which have spruced up their offerings in recent years. A visit there will not only reveal the all-important details about curtains or furniture, but will also allow people to breathe the atmosphere of the period. And readers who can't bear to put down their favourite books will perhaps find echoes of their beloved characters in the same rooms
Tudor splendour
The choice of museums is so staggering these days that nearly every era and geographical area is covered. Writers and readers of Tudor England novels, for example, have that gigantic domestic life museum that is Hampton Court, in East Molesey, Surrey, on the outskirts of London.
Although leading British architect Sir Christopher Wren extensively renovated the palace in the late 17 th century, several Tudor rooms remain relatively intact. For example, the smaller rooms in the Wolsey suite, which belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, the first owner of the palace, still have the original 16 th -century linen-fold panelling, which replicated the effect of folded fabric The Great Watching Chamber, where any courtier above the rank of baron ate their meals, is the only reasonably preserved example of a Tudor State Room, despite later modernisations, and retains the original tapestries that Cardinal Wolsey - how willingly one can only fathom - gave to the king. And the azure and gold ceiling of the Chapel Royal is the same that presided over the christening of Henry VIII's only son, Edward, and the marriage to his last wife, Catherine Parr.
But the palace's piece de resistance are the gigantic Tudor Kitchens, where the displays have been recently revamped to show how a late medieval kitchen - a food forge of smoke and blazing fire - functioned, and what it took to nourish an entire court. The air is imbued with the scents of cooking meat and boiling soup, and it is easy to imagine armies of brawny cooks busy at their work, while liveried servants shuttled the steaming dishes from the servery's windows to the courtiers' dining halls Thanks to the five-year research work of a team of curators and food historians, visitors can capture the smallest detail, experiencing techniques and too ls used to prepare each dish, down to turning the massive roasting spits The Kitchens also stage live cookery events on a regular basis (call +44 (0)870 756 6060 for dates and further information). Hampton Court is open Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., weekends and Bank Holidays 10 a .m. to 5 pm. Tickets cost £12.30 for adults, £8 for children, and £10 for concessions (students, senior citizens).
At home in old London
Being a royal palace, Hampton Court is, by definition, a place to research the habits and lifestyles of the rich and noble, or their servants. But where can people find out about the way the English middle classes lived?
The right place is the Geffrye Museum, in Kingsland Road, London. Spread across the former almshouses of the Ironmongers' Company and a contemporary wing, it showcases middle-class interiors from the 17'h to the 20 th century.
Walking through its rooms, visitors can discover what the high-backed oak armchairs of an early 17 th century parlour look like (clue: distinctly uncomfortab le). Or find out that, a mere hundred and seventy years later, in the Georgian era, the slightly oppressive wooden panelling and tapestries of yore have vanished to give way to light and airy rooms with plastered, paintingstudded walls, clean designs and pride of place for the socially criti cal tea caddy. The rooms in the restored almshouse, by contrast, give a somewhat bleak insight into the life of London's poor and elderly in the 18th century. It's a world of basic one-room homes, decorated with sparse, often secondhand furniture and few trinkets.
The Geffrye museum is currently undergoing a complete overhaul of its 17 th -, 18 th - and 19 th - century rooms, which ends in mid ovember. The programme reflects new thinking in domestic-life research and, when completed, it will feature four entirely new rooms, including an oak-furnished hall in a London timber-framed house of the early 17 th century, and a parlour of a 169 5 house built after the Great Fire, where a writing desk makes an appearance in testament to the increase in England's literacy rates.
"The Geffrye's challenge is to ensure that these displays are not simply evocative and, occasionally, nostalgic; they must accurately represent the changing homes of London's middle classes," says director David Dewing. "The new displays have been conceived for an audience which is diverse, demanding, engaged and questioning." In other words, perfect for writers.
The Geffrye's opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 5
Life
on the w estern frontier
If 19th-century New York was all about modern comforts and rich fabrics (at least for the wealthy), life on the opposite side of the United States was rather more adventurous. It only takes a look at the Kit Carson Home and Museum in Taos to discover how the shining marbles of the East Coast gave way to simple adobe homes in ew Mexico.
n .You visit ere ... .YOU are trca ing on t c reams, successes, ai urcs an pri fa tamil_y, eavesdropping on distant conversations, pr!ing into its secrets."
-Guidebook of the Historic Houses Trust, on R.ouse Hill estate
p.m., and Sunday and Bank Holidays 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. The almshouse is only open on the first and third Wednesday of the month, and on the first Saturday of the month at selected times. Admission costs £2 (call +44 (0)20 7739 9893 for more information). Those who can't make it to London can take a virtual tour of the rooms on the museum's website (www geffrye-museum. org.uk/virtualtour/).
Living the Greek Re vival
Across the Atlantic, in ew York City, a little-known museum offers a rare glimpse into the life of the upper middle classes in the 19 thcentury East Village. Built in 1832, the Merchant's House is the only 19 th -century family house in ew York City to remain intact. It was home to a hardware merchant - the stern-looking Seabury Tredwell - and his family.
At the time, the Bond Street neighbourhood was one of the most fashionable addresses in town, lined with red-brick and marblefront row houses. The wealthy Tredwell abode was no exception. The Federal-style door opens onto an opulent Greek Revival interior of black and gold marble fireplaces, four-poster beds with rich damask hangings, and a profusion of mahogany furniture, doors, and balusters.
In the double parlour where the Tredwell patriarch, his wife and their eight children received guests and held dinners, light came from gas chandeliers It was a sign of changing times, since the ew York Gas Light company had been formed only twelve years before the Tredwells moved into their new home.
Another novelty was the call bells that summoned the house's four long-suffering servants to fetch water and empty chamberpots, pick up the soiled linens and lace the family ladies into their corsets. Even better, curious writers can find exactly what those corsets look like, because the house also has a collection of 19 th -century clothes, ranging from ethereal muslins with pretty floral patterns to austerely rich green taffetas with black-velvet trimmings and a perfectly preserved peach-cream silk wedding dress, complete with orange blossoms headpiece, which was worn in 1872 by a niece of the family.
The Merchant's House (+1 212-777-1089), on 29 East Fourth Street, ew York, is open Thursday to Monday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. (closed Tuesday and Wednesday). Admissions cost $8 for adults and $5 for students and senior citizens.
Trapper, scout, Indian Agent and military man, the controversial Carson was, for better or worse, the quintessential frontiersman. His house, where he lived with his third wife, Maria Josefa Jaramillo, for twenty-five years, is a compendium of Far West living. Despite being a home of reasonably high social standing, it only has modest trappings - a plain table, the odd barrel, some basic chairs. It is rather frightening to think that Carson, Josefa and their many children all huddled together in such a small space (which perhaps explains why the man of the house felt the need to go on lengthy expeditions every now and again).
Beyond the three rooms that are still furnished as they were in Carson's days, the rest of the building is devoted to guns, clothing
and other mountain life exhibits - an invaluable help for writers in
search of details. Kit Carson's home is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily from May to October (for winter hours and further information, please call +1 505-758-0505). Admission costs $5 for adults and is free for children.
And to get a complete picture of life on the frontier, just a short distance away from the Kit Carson Home, the Taos Pueblo is a living, breathing community but also an open-air museum of how the Tiwaspeaking people have lived in the area for the last nine hundred years. The striking ochre of the adobe homes, set against a deep-blue sky and snow-capped mountains, is a draw in itself, but any historical fiction writer will be fascinated to learn that much of the Pueblo dates back to the early-to-late Middle Ages The orth House and
Industry
South House, with their roofs covered in packed dirt, look much the same as they would have appeared to Spanish explorers and, later, frontiersmen.
The Pueblo is usually open daily from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., but it is closed for rituals between late winter and early spring and on some ceremonial days (call +1 758-1028 for information). Admission is $10 for adults, $5 for students and free for children under thirteen. Camera fees are $5. Just one word of caution -visitors must not take photographs without permission, must avoid private homes, the old church and the cemetery, and must never ask for explanations of local rites.
Looking English in Australia
Even a country with a relatively short history of European-style architecture, such as Australia, has its fair share of historic homes to visit for inspiration. One of the most interesting
among them is the Rouse Hill estate, in Rouse Hill, ew South Wales Built in the early 19 th century, it was the home of a free settler, Richard Rouse, who later became Superintendent of Public Works and Convicts at Parramatta, and his family. Convicts conveniently provided the labour to build Rouse Hill, whose Georgian style later earned it the nickname of "Cheltenham in the jungle," bestowed b y visiting English author Sir John Betjeman.
Beyond the wonder of a thoroughly English-style house in an Australian setting, however, the estate, which also has stables, outbuildings and thirteen hectares of grounds, offers an opportunity to soak up the atmosphere of 19 th -century Australian living.
Six generations of the family have lived on the estate and this has helped keep its interiors practically intact. Stacks of books are neatly piled on small desks, family portraits hang from the walls, and music sheets are carefully stashed by the piano. The Rouses and their descendants, the Terries, appear to have just stepped out from the rooms, which are rich in tapestries, fireplaces and old china. There are dolls and old butter churns; dressing cases full of trinkets; imposing presses designed to an imported English style that was all the rage in Australia by the time it had become terribly passe in England; and a wide range of period clothes, from the constraining bodice
of Victorian lady of the house Bessie Rouse to the hunting coat of George Terry, Master of the Sydney Hunt Club.
''When you visit here, tread softly, not only for its fragility, but because you are treading on the dreams, successes, failures and pride of a family, eavesdropping on distant conversations, prying into its secrets," states the guidebook of the Historic Houses Trust, which manages the property.
The Trust's philosophy- to make repairs clearly distinguishable from the originals - is particularly helpful to inquisitive visitors wanting to discern what is authentic. " ot here is there any pride in 'invisible mending' which may please and deceive the eye but distorts the historical record of the place," the Trust's guidebook explains.
Rouse Hill is open from 10 a m to 2 p m. on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday. Admission is in small groups by guided tour only Qeaving on the hour), and costs AU$8 for adults and AUS4 for children and concessions (for further information call +61 (0)2 9627 6777).
Grief and guilt in Renaissance Italy
All this, of course, is of little help to discover what griefstricken Isabella would have leaned on in Renaissance Italy. But then the country is a veritable goldmine of domestic life museums, which should come high up on the visit list for writers and readers interested in Italian history The best one is perhaps Florence's Museo Davanzati, a 14th -century palazzo entirely filled with furniture, paintings and objects of the time . The museo has finally reopened its doors after a lengthy refurbishment and can now be visited from 8:15 a.m. to 1:50 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday, although some rooms are still closed to the public (admission is free, call +39 (0)55 282828 for further information).
The giant wooden gate at the entrance swallows people through the ground floor hall into a time warp. Inside, the central courtyard was as much a place to let guests in as to keep enemies out - holes in the walls allowed the family to throw stones or pellets from a vantage point.
A steep staircase leads to the piano nobile, where the family lived and entertained. Here is the grand salon with a large fireplace, coffered ceiling and high-backed chairs with the rich golden and burgundy upholstery typical of the Renaissance But the most intriguing room in the house is the Salone dei Pappagalli or Parrot Room, a former dining room where a fresco with a rhomboidal theme - embellished by tiny little parrots - covers every wall, mimicking drape of fabrics. It looks rather unusual, but it was actually a rather fashionable decorating trick in upper-crust Italian Renaissance houses
And it is at Museo Davanzati, by the wall opposite the giant fireplace in the Parrot Room, that lies the answer to Isabella's quandary. Weighted by two deaths, burdened with guilt, she leaned on the forbidding china chest. And presumably broke it all.
Carla Passino is a London-based freelance journalist covering art, architecture and travel and an avid reader of historical fiction.
Beware! Banned Books!
CINDY VALLAR explores the censorship of historical novels and wf(y others want to curtailyour freedom to read
The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the ciry sheets of burnedpaper, fragile pages of grry ashe [sic], fo;ated down like a dirry black sno111. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grry negative, unti4 as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hands.
- Kemal Bakarsic on the burning of the ational Library in Sarajevo'
L ibricide, or the killing of a book, is the most extreme form of censorship, yet any act of suppressing literature is meant to limit what we read and prohibit us from reading what someone else deems unsuitable for us. The difference between libricide and censorship is that the former often employs violence and its inflictors wish to distort and change society so that all citizens think as the state or regime wishes them to think. Most attempts,
however, are less extreme than destruction, but no less emotional
I first encountered censorship when my mother finished reading a book from The Man from U.N C.LE. series and deemed it inappropriate for me . The problem was that I was halfway through it at the time; I don't know what she found offensive or how the story ended. ot that I didn't try to find out Rebel that I am, I looked in every nook and cranny where she could have hidden the book. I never found it. That memory of banning a book dwindled to an ember that wasn't rekindled until I became a librarian. The fact is that library books are challenged, and although I never encountered censorship where I worked, I kept abreast of attempts, both successful and unsuccessful. I also made it a point to add censored books to the collections I managed, for I believe people have a right to be informed, or as John Stuart Mill wrote, "The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by having what can
local newspaper, I wondered whether any historical novels were ever censored and if so, which ones and why
In 1928, a German publisher released a new novel set during World War I entitled Im Westen Nichts Neues. Erich Maria Remarque's book sold 600,000 copies before its publication in English under the title of All Quiet on the Western Front a year later. Paul Baumer narrates the story of his experiences and those of his comrades in war and of the ignorance he encounters from those still at home . War's reality and inhumanity make him an outsider. National Socialists were insulted because of the book's message of pacifism and antimilitarism. Political pamphlets denounced it, and in 1930, Germany banned the book. Three years later, all of Remarque's writings were burned. Harassment took such a toll that he fled, first to Switzerland, then to the United States.
B ·on1s PASTERNAK
Docto.c Zhiuo'5o
OHN B AYLEY
Censorship of All Quiet on th e Western Front spread to other countries. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read it, and Czechoslovakian military libraries removed it from their shelves Italy considered the book to be antiwar propaganda and condemned it. In the United States, Putnam rejected the manuscript because an editor refused to "publish a book by a 'Hun'l" 4 When the Book-of-the-Month Club asked for revisions, Little, Brown and Company agreed to remove three words, five phrases, and two scenes, one of which involved a married couple, separated for two years, having sex in a hospital. The publishers believed "some words and sentences were too robust for our American edition." 5
Another war novel that encountered political censorship was MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville, first published in 1955. During the American Civil I ntr o duction by J
be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. o wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this." 2 And how can anyone make an informed decision without knowing all the facts?
In 1982, the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom inaugurated Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read. I displayed and promoted banned books to library visitors each September. 3 After all, one of the best ways to get people to read a book is to tell them they can't. Upon reading a recent article in my
War, a southerner who doesn't favor the war pleads for help after witnessing the horrifying conditions within the notorious prison camp and the sadistic superintendent who brutalizes and terrorizes the captured soldiers The story is also about the Yankees and their struggle to survive. In 1967, Donald Hicks, an Amherst, Ohio history teacher, assigned the book to his students who wished to read it. One father considered the novel one percent history and 99 percent filth. Since only thirty out of 795 pages contained vulgar language, Hicks felt the novel's worth outweighed the objectionable sections. The school board president agreed: " maybe we should not shield high school students ... Perhaps they should know these facts exist
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even though they are bad and may not exist in our community." 6 The superintendent refused to remove the book.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is about an orphan, raised by intellectuals in Moscow, who becomes a doctor. Yurii Andreivich Zhivago is conscripted into the Russian Army during World War I where he falls in love with a nurse named Lara, even though they are both married. His life and their love affair unfold during the turbulent backdrop of the war, the Russian Revolution, and the reign of terror during the 1930s. Pasternak didn't attempt to publish his manuscript until after Stalin died. The Soviet Union's State Publishing House initially praised the manuscript, so Pasternak sent it to Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore in Italy. Then the State Publishing House reversed its decision and condemned the book because the "cumulative effect casts doubt on the validity of the Bolshevik Revolution which it depicts as if it were the great crime in Russian history." 7 The Italian publisher refused to return the manuscript to Pasternak and released the book in 1957 The following year, Pantheon Books published the English edition, and the author received the obel Prize for Literature. The Russian government forced him to refuse the award because they considered it a "hostile political act for recognizing a work withheld from Russian readers which was counter-revolutionary and slanderous."8 Russians didn't have the chance to read Doctor Zhivago until 1988.
During the past twenty-five years, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Delacorte, 1969) has been one of the most frequently censored books. Students, educators, parents, librarians, and the clergy have challenged it for its obscenity, language, violence, inappropriate behaviors, immorality, and lack of patriotism. "The book is an indictment of war, criticizes government actions, is anti-American, and is unpatriotic," 9 said June Edwards, who feared people would refuse to fight in future wars if they read about the horrors of war. Vonnegut's whole purpose in writing the story was to demonstrate that "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." 10 Based on his experiences during World War II as a prisoner of war (POW) in S chlachthof-fiinf (Slaughterhouse Five) in Dresden, Germany, Vonnegut combined history (the war and being a POW) with science fiction (time travel and telepathic aliens) to recount the story of Billy Pilgrim.
Bruce Severy, a orth Dakota high-school teacher, assigned this novel as required reading after checking with the superintendent. A student, who objected to the book's language, and a minister, who considered it to be "a tool of the devil," convinced the school board to ban the book, even though none of them had read it. Severy also lost his job. ' 'A few four-letter words in a book is no big deal Those students have all heard these words before, none learned any new words. I've always thought the purpose of school was to prepare these people for living in the ' big, bad world,' but it evidently isn't so." 11 The American Civil Liberties Union assisted him in suing the school district. As a result, teachers at Drake High School were permitted to use Slaughterhouse Five in junior and senior English
classes; no unsatisfactory comments could be made against Severy's performance as a teacher; and he was awarded $5,000.
Vonnegut's novel also has the distinction of being the first censorship case argued before the United States Supreme Court. Two members of a New York school board found nine books on library shelves that were considered objectionable, so they were removed even though the district had a policy for dealing with challenged books. Claiming the books' removal violated their First Amendment Rights, Stephen Pico and other high school students filed a lawsuit in 1977. Although the federal district court ruled in favor of the school board, the appellate court ordered a full trial. Eventually, the case made its way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the appellate court's decision In August 1982, the school board returned the books to the library, and if a student borrowed one of the books, the librarian had to warn parents about its objectionable content.
These instances of censorship are fairly modern, but literature has been suppressed for c·enturies. The earliest attempts trace back to the infancy of Christianity when the Church considered opposing viewpoints heretical. In 1559 Pope Paul IV decreed the first publication of the Index I.ibromm Prohibitomm The Vatican didn't abolish the Index of Forbidden Books until 1966. In the last printed edition, 4,126 books made the list, as did a number of respected authors - including Defoe, Descartes, Diderot, Flaubert, Kant, Locke, Pascal, Rousseau, Stendhal, Voltaire, and Zola - because of their immorality, vulgar language, and sexual content.
ikos Kazantzakis wrote a novel about Jesus of azareth, which was published in Greece in 1953 by Athenai, and in the United States seven years later by Simon & Schuster. The Last Temptation of Christ portrays Jesus as a man who struggles with fear, pain, temptation, and death. The author wanted to portray "the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh," 12 so that people of the zom century understood what Jesus endured. Critics praised the book, but the Eastern Orthodox Church excommunicated Kazantzakis. They considered his book "extremely indecent, atheistic and treasonable," 13 although no one involved in the decision had read the novel. The Roman Catholic Church included Th e Last Temptation of Christ on its 1954 Index. The publicity over the book's censorship actually increased sales, and Princess Marie Bonaparte recommended it to the Greek queen.
Most historical novels, as well as other genres, are suppressed not on political or religious grounds, but because of their sexual content. Many books banned during the 19m and early zo mcenturies were because the authors used dirty words. Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and athaniel Hawthorne's Th e Scarlet Letter dared to refer to prostitution, pregnancy outside of marriage, and adultery - all which occur in everyday life, even in the past. Over time society's view about sex has changed, so novels once thought pornographic are now bestsellers. Based on the 1906 Chester Gillette murder case, An American
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Tragec!J by Theodore Dreiser (Bone and Liveright, 1925) is about Clyde Griffiths, whose parents work at a skid-row mission. Their income doesn't provide him with the finer things in life or the social standing that he craves. Dreiser looks at how Griffiths' background and personality, as well as his environment, determine his fate.
After an all-male jury found the publisher guilty of violating Massachusetts' antiobscenity law in 1929, Boston banned the book even though neither the judge nor the jury had read it. They only heard passages read aloud during the trial. After reading a scene set in a brothel about a girl undressing, the prosecutor addressed the jury: "Well, perhaps where the gentleman who published this book comes from it
is not considered obscene, indecent, and impure for a woman to start disrobing before a man, but it happens to be out in Roxbury where I come from." 14
At the time of the trial, An American Tragec!J was required reading for an English course taught at Harvard University in Boston.
Forever Amber (Macmillan, 1994) by Kathleen
Winsor sold 1.3 million copies over four years before Massachusetts censors targeted it. Set during the English Restoration, the story recounts the life of an illegitimate daughter with noble
blood who becomes a duchess and the mistress of Charles II, marries four times, and has children fathered by three different men. The State Attorney General, George Rowell, apparently counted the various sexual references in the novel, for it contained "70 references to sexual intercourse; 39 to illegitimate pregnancies; 7 to abortions; 10 descriptions of women undressing, dressing or bathing in the presence of men; 5 references to
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The final reason for censoring books concerns social issues. Sometimes it's the language or the use of drugs that people object to, other times it's the racial content or sexual orientation. They consider the views portrayed in the novels to be harmful to readers and the characters do not conform to the censors' standards of acceptable social mores. Perhaps the best-known novel in this category is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London, 1884). People want Huck to reform his rambunctious ways so that he fits in with proper society, which he doesn't see any reason to do. Kidnapped and beaten by his father, Huck escapes to an island in the Mississippi River where he is reunited with his friend Jim, a runaway slave. The novel recounts their adventures and struggles - both good and bad - and Huck's desire to free Jim. Set during the early 1800s, Huck Finn was controversial from the start. The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned the book in 1885 because it was "trash suitable only for the slums," 18 not only because of the language Huck and Jim spoke, but also because of their unacceptable behavior. Around the turn of the century, the Brooklyn Public Library removed it from the children's shelves since "Huck not only itched but he scratched, and that he said sweat when he should have said perspiration." 19 Soviet border guards confiscated copies of the book in 1930.
SCARLET LETTER
Although the furor over the book died down for a time, the ational Association for the Advancement of Colored People raised objections about its racial content in 1957. This became only the first of many attempts to censor the novel. In 1973 Tennessee school officials demanded that Scott, Foresman omit objectionable material, and the publisher acquiesced. One missing scene concerns a family that drinks alcoholic toasts each morning to the parents. Language, however, remains a key reason for most censorship attempts. Until 1975, textbook publishers often substituted "slave" or "servant" for "nigger."
An earlier novel, athaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (Ticknor and Fields, 1850), is often required reading in high-school incest; 13 references to ridiculing marriage; and 49 miscellaneous objectionable passages." 15 Judge Donahue of the Massachusetts Supreme Court thought the novel showed " ... a certain amount of study and research Forever Amber is sufficiently accurate for the purpose of representing a portrait of the period and its customs and morals; that it does not exaggerate or falsify any traits of the Restoration." 16 He concluded, " while the novel was conducive to sleep, it was not conducive to a desire to sleep with a member of the opposite sex." 17
English classes. Taken from her English home and husband, Hester Prynne finds herself alone and friendless in Puritan Massachusetts. She falls in love with a minister, and they have a daughter, although she never reveals the father's identity. The townspeople condemn her, and she is forced to wear the scarlet letter ''N' that marks her as an adulteress. More than a century after its publication censors labeled it "pornographic and obscene" and "immoral." After a parent and principal objected to its inclusion in the English curriculum at a Michigan high school, The Scarlet Letter was removed from both
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the classroom and a reading list. When a high-school librarian in Missouri heard about a parent's demand to remove the book from the collection because it contained "4-letter words," the librarian realized the parent hadn't read the novel because it doesn't include any obscene language. The book remained in the library.
Member of Parliament, fared somewhat better in his attempt to censor the book that same year. His complaint required the publisher to prove the book's merit and explain why it shouldn't be suppressed. Prosecution witnesses repeatedly mentioned the book's disgusting scenes, especially Tralala's brutal rape. The magistrate said, "this book in its descriptions goes beyond any book of a merely pornographic kind that we have seen in this
ow me a oo t at o en s no one, a court [and] is more likely to deprave and corrupt than any of those cyclostyled horrors." 22
show 9ou a book that no one, in the hdle histor.9 of the world, has ever wiOingl9 read.
More recently published historical novels suppressed for social reasons include Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Simon & Schuster, 1961) and Last Exit to Brook!Jn by Hubert Selby, Jr. (Grove Press, 1964). In Catch-22, Captain John Yossarian, a bombardier in the United States Air Force during World War II, tries to get relieved from combat duty by feigning insanity. The military doesn't believe an insane person would willingly go into combat. Therefore,John must be sane. When Strongsville, Ohio English teachers wished to teach the novel, they were refused because Catch-22 was "completely sick" and "garbage." Catch-22 and two other books were also removed from the high-school library. This prompted five srudents and their families to file a class action law suit for violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The initial court ruling said the school board had followed Ohio law and done nothing wrong. The Sixth Circuit United States Court of Appeals agreed that the school board had the right to decide which textbooks would be used, but it didn't have the right to remove the three books from the library. "A public school library is also a valuable adjunct to classroom discussions. If one of the English teachers considered Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to be one of the more important modern American novels (as, indeed, at least one did), we assume that no one would dispute that the First Amendment's protection of academic freedom would protect both his right to say so in class and his srudents' right to hear him and to find and read the book. Obviously, the srudents' success in this last endeavor would be greatly hindered by the fact that the book sought had been removed from a school library."20 The school district appealed, but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brook!Jn recounts the violent lives of lowerclass hoodlums in Brooklyn during the forties and fifties. They use and brutalize other men and women, as well as their own children, to gain access to booze and drugs, and to have fun Themes in the book explore transvestites, prostirution, rape, abuse, and despair. When Sir Charles Taylor, a seventy-year-old Member of the British Parliament, read the book in 1966, he claimed what few years were left to him had been "defiled." He complained to the Solicitor General, but the book had already sold 711,000 copies and was no longer doing as well in bookstores, so nothing was done. When The Sunday Times learned of the complaint, they wrote : "Sir Charles Taylor, MP has described Last Exit as filthy, disgusting, degrading. It is one of the most important novels to come out of America " 2 1 Sir Cyril Black, another
The English publisher, Calder & Boyars, refused to cease publication of the novel. A year later, a trial opened with all men serving on the jury, so women
wouldn't be embarrassed at having to read such a book. Witnesses testified over nine days, and the jury deliberated for almost six hours before they rendered a guilty verdict. The judge upheld the verdict, but felt the respectable publishers had released the book in good faith. He fined them £100 plus court costs of £500. Selby's book was also banned in Italy and Ireland, and appeared on the restricted list in the Soviet Union.
On 7 August 2006, the American Library Association's Office of Intellecrual Freedom released the list of "10 Most Challenged Books of 2005." Homosexuality, nudity, sex, religion, language, and racism were the reasons why challenges were brought against these books, which were mostly written for children and young adults 23 One historical novel missing from the list was Huck Finn, even though it has often been challenged in the past. While some of the book's language is offensive, Dave Matthews, a Washington English teacher whose srudent once challenged the novel, believes that Huck Finn "raises our consciousness because it shows how terribly blacks were treated back then . We need to know who we are and what we come from. That's how society can change for the better." 24 The same can be said of most censored books
The next time you read a book, consider these comments from at Hentoff's The DC!J Thry Came to Arrest the Book. It's a young adult novel about an attempt to censor Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Show me a book that offends no one, and I 111ili showyou a book that no one, in the whole history of the world, has ever willingly read.
- ora Baines, History Teacher
Once a book is not allowed to circulate free!J, once a book cannot move free!J from one reader to another, it'sjust as if the book had been arrested and had its liberry curtailed.
- Reuben Forster, School Board President
Have you read a banned book recently? If not, consider reading one
mentioned above. Or try one of these historical novels:
The Color Purp le by Alice Walker
My Brother Sam I s D ead by James Lincoln and Christopher Collier
The House of Spirits and Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
Beloved b y Toni Morrison
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Fool's Crow by James Welch
Fallen Angels by Walter De an M ye rs
Grendel by John Ch amplin Gardner
The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Nigh!John by Gary Paulsen
The Innocents Within b y Robert D aley
The Fighting Ground by Avi
While you do so, remember what Benjamin Franklin wrote: ''Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom " 25
Notes
1 Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003), 2 .
2. Censorship: Opposing Viewpoints, edited by Andrea C. Nakaya (Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2005), 7.
3 Banned Books Week is celebrated the last week of September. It will run from 22 September through 29 September in 2007.
4. Quote from Erich Maria Remarque that appears in 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature by Nicholas J. Karoledes, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova (New York: Checkmark Books, 1999), 6.
5 . Ibid.
6. Ibid., 10
7. Ibid , 42.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 137
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 219.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 269.
15. Ibid., 291.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 336.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 364.
21. Ibid., 384.
22. Ibid., 385.
23. "10 Most Challenged Books of 2005" press release obtained from the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom's website located at www.ala.org/ala/ oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm on 8 August 2006.
24. Herbert N. Foerstel, Banned in the U.S A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public T.ibraries (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002), 191.
25. Banned Books Week, ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom's website, 12 January 2006.
Cint!J Vallar is an associate editor for Solander and the Editor of Pirates and Privateers. Amber Quill Press will publish her historical novel The Scottish Thistle, in November 2006. A retired librarian, she now devotes her time to writing, editing, reviewing historical fiction and books on maritime pirary, and conducting workshops on pirary, Scot/and, and historical fiction.
C elia Rees has written three highly acclaimed historical novels for young adults The first of these is Witch Child, which was published in 2000. It was very well received, and won the Prix De Sorcieres awarded by the Independent Booksellers of France. It was also runner-up for the Cento Literary Prize in Italy and was shortlisted for the Guardian Book Award, the orth East Book Award in the UK and the South Carolina Junior Book Award in the US. Celia followed Witch Child up with a sequel, Sorceress, in 2002. This was shortlisted for The Whitbread Book Award and for ew York Public Library Books for the Teen Age and Book Sense 76 selection. Celia's third historical novel, Pirates!, was published in 2003 and was the winner of the Michigan State Book Award as well as being shortlisted for the W.H. Smith Book Award and for various local book awards in the UK and the US.
Although she studied history at Warwick University, Celia's historical novels came rather late in her writing career. Her first novel was published in 1993 - Every Step yott Take It is a thriller for young adults set in an outdoor centre. This was followed by another thriller and then a number of ghost stories and suspense stories with a supernatural theme. Although these books all have a contemporary setting, some of them have a little history in the background. For example, Ghost Chamber (1997) refers back to the Templar Knights.
But it was not until the publication of Witch Child that Celia began to write historical novels in earnest. Witch Child is told in diary form. A young girl, Mary, sees her grandmother hanged as a witch. She would have been in danger herself, but the mother she never knew rescues her and arranges for her to go to the Puritan settlements in orth America. There Mary is in danger of suffering the same fate as her grandmother. She feels compelled to keep a diary, but she has to keep it secret and it is sewn into a quilt.
The sequel, Sorceress, starts off in the present. Mary's secret diary has been found at last and a researcher is trying to find out more about Mary. But she draws blanks until a Native American girl, Agnes Herne, contacts her and tells her that Mary may have been an ancestor of hers. Medicine power has always run in Agnes's family and Agnes's grandmother puts her in a trance and she sees what happened to Mary when she fled into the forest.
With these two novels Celia gives a vivid picture of eastern America in the 17 th century - both of the lives of the European settlers and of the ative Americans.
Her third historical novel Pirates! is rather different A young English girl is being forced into a loveless marriage of convenience with an absolute monster. She runs away with her slave girl - and they both end up on a pirate ship.
Celia told me about her research and from where she gets her ideas.
You studied history at university and yet your historical books have come fair!J late in your 111riting career. A,ry particular reason for that?
Although I studied history as part of my degree, I preferred teaching English as a subject and I came to writing through my work as an English teacher. When I started writing, it did not immediately occur to me to write historical fiction. I began writing thrillers, because the genre interested me and that is what many of my students liked to read. I moved on to the supernatural, because again, I was interested and the genre is very popular. These books all had a very strong historical foundation and it was while I was researching one of them that I had the idea for Witch Child. It was another matter to convince a publisher that a historical novel for teenagers was a good idea. Despite developments in the adult market (writers like Peter Carey, Rose Tremain, A.S. Byatt and Iain Pears were writing exciting and different historical fiction), it was an accepted truth in the 1990s that historical fiction for children did not sell. Luckily, I found an innovative and sympathetic editor at Bloomsbury Children's Books who was as excited by Witch Child as I was.
You used to be a teacher. How interested do you think modern teenagers are in history?
Judging from the emails I get, many teenagers are just as fascinated by history as I was when I was their age. I don't think the interest has ever gone away When I was teaching, in the '70s and '80s, there was a lot of exciting historical fiction about: writers like Leon Garfield, Rosemary Sutcliff, Barbara Willard, KM Peyton were very popular, as were "time-slip" novels by writers like Phillipa Pearce, William Mayne, Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, Jill Paton Walsh - the illustrious list could go on and on. Time slip is a bit of a hybrid genre, but it is a great way of introducing readers to characters within their historical context.
To get onto your own historical books. As 111eli as history,you are very interested in the supernatural and Witch Child and Sorceress combine the two. Didyou find that a naturaljumping-off place?
We write about what interests us, and hope that what interests us
will also interest our readers. I'm interested in history and also in the supernatural, or to be exact, in why people believe in the supernatural. Before I moved to historical fiction, I wrote several ghost stories and books which contain a strong supernatural element. These are contemporary novels, but as M.R. James said, history is never far from the ghost story, and these books all contain historical elements.
When I turned to historical fiction, I was interested in the beliefs of the people about whom I was writing. The mid 17 th century, when Witch Child is set, was a highly superstitious age; belief in the supernatural, in the invisible world, was universal and absolute. It would be difficult to write about the Puritans of New England and their Native American neighbours without referring to it. Sorceress also involves Native American people, who again have a strong belief in the supernatural.
You studied American history at universiry andyou sqy you are fascinated l?J the settlers carving out homes for themselves in the wilderness. And also about the different ideas and cultures of different races. You dealt with that theme on the eastern seaboard in the 17th century. Have you a'!)' plans to follow these themes through in a different part of Amen'ca and at a later time?
A novel's setting can depend on many things: the characters, the situation that they find themselves in, what the story is going to be about My novel Pirates! touches briefly on the North Atlantic seaboard and New York, but because of the nature of the subject matter, the story begins in Bristol, moves to the Caribbean, and from there ranges across the world. I do have an idea for a book that would take me to 19th -century America and the West, but it is just an idea at the moment, so I don't want to say too much about it.
Is there a'!)'thing else in American history which particular!J interests you?
There is much that interests me from the time before the Revolution to the Vietnam War and through to the present Whether I will write about any of it is a different matter.
Ho1v do you find Americans regard you as a Briton 1vriting about their history?
It doesn't seem to bother them at all. Witch Child and Sorceress were both critically well received and have enjoyed excellent sales. Witch Child is now used in schools. I was prepared for opposition, and was extra careful to make sure that my research was accurate, but it is worth pointing out that at the time when these books were set, in the mid 17 th century, Britain and America shared a history There was no such place as the United States and most of the settlers were first generation.
You are alwqys very careful to explain how you research your books - both on your own website and with notes in your books. You mention the Six Nations Museum and the help you received there for Sorceress, but 1vhat other research didyou do for that book?
John Fadden, who runs the Six Nations Museum near Onchiota in Upper State New York, is a full-blood Mohawk and without his help I would not have been able to write Sorceress. I visited him at his museum and he directed me to the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation up near the Canadian border I also visited the Mashentucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut to get an idea of Native American life, both in the past and in the present. While I was in America, I took photographs and collected information, postcards, artifacts, books and pamphlets. Apart from this, I relied on Warwick University's excellent collection of American History and fiction. I also used the Internet, which was particularly useful for filling in vital but hard-tofind details, like the native names, and properties of different plants and healing herbs.
Your other historical book - Pirates! - is rath er different. But it does have a slight supernatural element in th e necklace drawing Bartholome to Nanry.
Pirates! is set at a time after Witch Child, when the world was becoming more rational, but sailors were (and still are) very superstitious. When I was researching the book, I discovered that some pirates, like Blackbeard, had attracted supernatural stories. I thought it might be fun to have a character, like Bartholeme, who attracts such tales. I used other sea tales, some well known, like The F!Jing Dutchman, others more obscure, like "The Devil's Pilot," a tale from the orth Devon coast. The ruby necklace was always supposed to be iconic, so it was easy to give the gift an extra twist.
And like Witch Child and Sorceress, Pirates! has a very strongfemale character. What are your views on the female characters in your books?
I choose to write about female characters in these historical novels because I want to explore outside the stereotypes of women's lives presented to us by conventional views of history. Feminist historians have begun to examine the lives of girls and women who did not conform to the mores of their time. These are the ones who interest me.
Do you think that on the whole your books appeal more to girls than to bqys?
I dislike the way books are increasingly being slotted into gender continued on page 24
Peature Sources of Belief in Historical Fiction
G. M. BAKE R reflects on what makes historical fiction believable.
D uring the Historical Novel Society conference in London in October 2005, I was forcibly struck by the attitude apparently shared by all of the presenters, and, if nodding heads tell the tale, by the vast majority of the attendees, that what matters in historical fiction, above all, is to get the history right. And this means getting it right down to the minutest detail. Yet it would not be difficult to cite a shelf full of well-beloved historical novels which do not meet this exacting test. Would the detection of a single anachronous detail spoil our enjoyment of A Tale of Two Cities, Ivanhoe, Henry V, or Puck of Pooks Hill? And if not, why can it sometimes spoil our enjoyment of lesser works?
I certainly agree with Malcolm Archibald in his recent essay in Solanderwhen he states, "If the novel can make the reader suspend his or her disbelief, then it will hold his or her attention a single slip will inevitably spoil the flow of the story and therefore the enjoyment of the book." 1 But what sort of slip does it take to cause this fatal loss of belief?
In his essay, "On Fairy Stories," ].R.R. Tolkien addresses the issue of belief in fiction.
Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called "willing suspension of disbelief." But this does not seem to me to be a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator " He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the
continued from page 23
categories. I hope that my books are interesting and entertaining enough to be of interest to readers of either sex. It shouldn't really matter that the main character is a girl and there is a girl on the cover. They are not "girly'' books; readers should get over their own prejudices.
Areyou planning a sequel to Pirates!?
I am frequently asked if I'm writing a sequel to Pirates! At the moment, I am involved in other projects, but I have not dismissed the possibility.
Final!J, you live in a very beautiful and very historic part of the UK Have you neverfelt inspired to write a historical novel set in the Midlands where there is so much to choose from?
laws of the world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little
abortive Secondary World from outside. 2
THE O I BEST LLER
ROBERT fittjttlllttb
So, the arousal of disbelief is to be avoided at all costs. But is inaccuracy of historical detail the thing that is most likely to cause disbelief to arise? For those intimately familiar with a particular period, perhaps, an anachronism, even a minor one, may prove fatal. If you write naval history solely for an audience of amateur naval historians, then yes, you had better get every last spar and belayingpincorrect. ButForester and O'Brian did not write solely for amateur naval historians. or, I suspect, would finding a single error in their works spoil the pleasure of any but the most pedantic reader. Why is the world of Robert Harris' Fatherland not destroyed by its massive anachronism - a Nazi victory in World War II? Because Harris successfully builds his sub-created world in which we accept this as true Why then can a single error do so much damage in a lesser work? Perhaps because, in lesser works, the secondary world is less well made, more fragile, ever on the cusp of collapsing and throwing the reader back into the primary world.
While Tolkien is writing about fairy stories, we should note that he does not restrict this notion of sub-creation to fairy stories alone. What he calls "literary belief" applies to all works of literary art All stories take place in their authors' secondary worlds. The secondary
Some of the books I referred to earlier (the supernatural ones) are set in the Midlands and involve local ghost stories and historical locations. Witch Child starts off in a small village outside Warwick, and the book I am writing at the moment (another historical novel) begins in a country house not far from where I live. My characters often start off here, but don't stay put and I have to follow them. With Pirates! I was forced to relocate to the seaside, but my daughter was at Bristol University, so I got to know the port well.
I am interested to learn that you are writing another historical novel at the moment. We shall all look forward to seeing it.
Celia has an excellent website where she discusses her inspiration and how she researches her books, and lists her extensive sources: www. celiarees.co.uk.
Mary Moffat writes historical adventure stories for older children and dog lovers of all ages. Her website is www.marysmojfat.co.uk.
world of the novel is small and neat and rich and poignant. One of the great attractions of the school story, the country-house story, or the ship story is that they focus the drama down to a few characters interacting intensely on a small stage-unable to escape from each other, and unpolluted by the influence and interference of the wider world. In the Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling creates two little worlds, the world of Hogwarts and the little world of Privet Drive, each compressed, fantastical, and vivid in its own way. P. G. Wodehouse creates the little worlds of Blandings Castle and the Drones Club, C.S. Forester the little world of HMS Renown, Bernard Cornwell the little world of the Chosen Men tramping over their own particular version of Spain.
It is clear that belief in these secondary worlds does not depend on their unalloyed faithfulness to the ordinary round of human experience. These are worlds in which people talk in complete sentences, in which crimes are solved in a day, bombs are defused at the last second, and the weather is always a perfect reflection of the mood of the central character. In these worlds, heroes suffer enough psychological trauma to drive any normal person mad, and enough physical injury to leave a normal person crippled or dead; they turn up in the most unlikely places at the most convenient times; they overhear secrets, deduce mysteries, and devise stratagems with a regularity that puts the Pentagon to shame. And yet, if the tale is well told, we remain in the secondary world of the author's creation, believing it while we are in that world
It takes forty gallons of maple sap to make a single gallon of maple syrup. The raw source material is bland and unappetizing. It must be concentrated, filtered, and refined to make something sweet and delightful. In the Prelude, Wordsworth wrote:
There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence, depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to mount, When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. 3
The secondary world of the novel is a world in which these "spots of time" are extracted from "the round of ordinary intercourse" to create something that compels in every line and afterward sticks in the memory. The secondary world is a sharpened and intensified version of the primary world. Were it not, reading a novel would be as tedious as staring out of the window.
Ultimately, the obligation of the novelist is to provide good drama, not good history, good science, good psychology, or anything else. To
provide good drama, the novelist must create a world in which this drama can be staged. History provides a rich set of building blocks for the construction of the particular stage on which a particular play is to be performed. But the novelist is not under any obligation to choose all the blocks of a particular time. As Malcolm Archibald writes, "Austen and Dickens wrote with stunning accuracy." 4 But in both cases, it is the accuracy of artistic construction that is paramount, rather than accuracy of reportage. Dickens, after all, painted hugely sentimentalized portraits, even more so when he wrote of sorrow than of joy. If mere technical accuracy were sufficient, every competent journalist should be a lion of literature. What makes Austen and Dickens stand out is their ability to create compelling drama. Dickens himself lashed out against the cult of facts in his portrayal of the Gradgrind School (from Hard Times):
"Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind. "Your definition of a horse."
"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
"Now girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind. "You know what a horse is." 5
What is a horse? "Quadruped. Graminivorous."? Not at all; a horse is a knight's destrier, a cowpoke's companion, a little girl's best friend. Perhaps above any other animal, a horse is a beast of romance and drama. Raymond Chandler creates a unique sense of time and place. We know Chandler's Los Angeles; we have the sense and savor of it. I have visited Los Angeles, and I found little there that reminded me of Chandler's Los Angeles. But it is the real thing that is the disappointment. Chandler's Los Angeles is far more concrete, more specific, more flavorful, than the real thing. What the author must do, to give the reader a satisfying experience of person, place, or time, is to create a secondary world that has that savor - create it out of the building blocks of history and biography, or out of pure fancy - but make it work as a sub-creation, whole and entire in its own right. Only such a setting can make a satisfying stage for a satisfying drama.
Beyond the need to set a suitable stage, however, historical fiction also has a particular conundrum to solve: how to make the past present. When we look at artifacts in a museum, they do not look like the ordinary objects of everyday life, which, of course, they were to those who owned and used them; they look antique. We all suffer from what I would call historical astigmatism, a defect of our vision of the past that makes the things of ordinary life from times past appear quaint or exotic. A really successful historical novel (or history) dispels that sense of antiquity and makes the past seem normal without making it seem modern. It is a successful sub-creation in which the past - to
Peature
borrow the hackneyed phrase - comes alive.
It comes alive not because it is a faithful portrait, but because it is a corrected portrait This correction necessarily requires a deliberate act of distortion. It is like using a funhouse mirror not to distort but to correct the distortion that results from the parallax errors in our view of the past To show us the past as the past was to itself, the author must distort the image to compensate for our historical astigmatism.
Creating the secondary world of the novel involves many distortions - a web of fictions that weave a world at once artificial and satisfying. In historical novels, the most obvious such fiction is the manner of speech. It is a commonplace, in the instructions given to authors, that dialog cannot successfully mimic real speech with all its halts and stumbles. But for the historical novelist there is another dimension to achieving verisimilitude in dialogue. Few historical novels make any serious attempt to give the speech of their characters in the language, vocabulary, or idiom of their time. Characters cannot speak entirely in modern idiom either. Rather, the author creates an artificial idiom for them, one close enough to modern idiom to be easily understood by modern readers, and to avoid distracting them with its modern sound, yet not modern idiom, for the sound of truly modern idiom would wreck the secondary historical world just as surely.
Less immediately obvious, but ultimately more telling, is that historical novels rarely contain true portraits of historical people. Mark Twain deliberately placed a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Most authors do the same thing without acknowledging the act. They place modern men and women in historical setting and historical dress and have them behave as we would like to think modern people would behave in these circumstances. It is rare to see actual historical attitudes portrayed, except in caricature, or in the acts and speeches of villains The triumph of modern thinking over outmoded historical ideas is, after all, the theme of many historical novels. In this sense, many historical novels could be considered unacknowledged timetravel stories.
Just as you cannot easily see the astigmatism correction in a wellmade pair of glasses it is difficult to point to the thing that achieves the necessary correction in those books where it is done most successfully. Bernard Cornwell carries it off with great success in the Sharpe novels (especially the Spanish ones; less so those set in India). He is less successful, to my eye at least, in some of his one-off books like Ston ehenge and Gallows Thief.
As is often the case in the arts, failure is easier to analyze than success. It is easier to see some of the more obvious ways in which
many novels fail to correct for historical astigmatism, or even make it worse. It is elemental that a novel must be truthful about how the characters see their world. If it is the normal world for them, it will be the normal world for the reader. If the characters behave as if the world were exotic or quaint, then it will seem exotic and quaint to the reader. One of the easiest ways to fall into this trap is to get distracted by historical detail. In a modern novel, you do not describe every detail of how the hero drives his car, what the car looks like, or how it was built, unless there is some specific reason to do so - unless the characters have some specific reason in the story to suddenly take interest in the details of these ordinary actions and objects But in a second-rate novel of the age of sail, for example, all the details of the ship may be laboriously outlined, even though the characters are intimately familiar with these things and presently engaged in some life-and-death action like fleeing Napoleon's army or fighting off the Spanish Armada. In such a pass, characters would not pause to think about these details. If the novel pauses to describe them, this simply emphasizes to the reader the quaintness and exotic nature of the secondary world. Every detail may be correct, but the untruth of focusing on those details, at that moment in the drama, breaks the secondary world. The drama is lost. Only the history remains. Only the reader who enjoys the history for its own sake is likely to persevere.
If a historical novel works - works, that is, as a drama - then it works not because any individual historical detail is correct, but because of the author's whole success as a world builder and a storyteller. And while historical details may be the successful building blocks - indeed, the brightest ornaments - of the author's secondary world, it is also the case that in order to set the stage on which the characters can act out their play, there must also be a great deal of fiction.
The creating of a believable sub-created world for historical fiction requires many elements. Good historical detail, appropriately used, is certainly one of the ingredients. But detail alone does not build a world or tell a story The creation of the world of the novel involves both filtering and focusing to produce a sub-created secondary world that is compelling and convincing. To achieve this focus, many forms of deliberate distortion are required, first to create a world that is as small and rich and bright as it needs to be to engage us, but also to correct our historical astigmatism so that the secondary world we enter looks true to our modern eyes. And then, of course, the author must tell a good story.
Notes
1. Malcolm Archibald, ''A Question of Accuracy" Solander 18 (Vol 9 No 2 November 2005) , 35.
2 ].R R Tolkien, "On Fair y-Stories," The Tolkien Reader, (Ballantine: New York, 1966) , 36-37.
3. William Wordsworth, " The Prelude", Poetical Works ef William Wordsworth, ed William Knight (1896) , Book Twelfth, lines 208 -218. (Project Gutenberg, http: // www.gutenberg.org / files.12383 / 12383.txt)
4. Archibald, 35.
5. Charles Dickens, Hard Tim es (Project Gutenberg, http: / / www.gutenberg. org/ dirs / etext97 / hardt10.txt)
G. M Baker is a writer living in Ottawa, Canada. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic Advocate, Fanta.ry Book, Our Fami!J, New England's Coastal Journa4 5 toryteffer, 5 olander and The Rockford Review.
An Unashamed Yankee
DEA MILLER looks at the work ef author KE ETH ROBERTS.
A short time ago, in an upscale publication (I think it was The New York Review ef Books) a reviewer casually remarked that while the American Civil War has drawn the attention of any number of novelists, the American Revolution has not. My immediate reaction was to cry "Hogwash!" and to think specifically of Kenneth Roberts, three of whose historical novels - Arundel (1930), Rabble in Arms (1933), and Oliver Wiswell (1940) - have this conflict at their center, while Roberts' best-known effort - North1vest Passage (1936) - dealt with what Americans call the French and Indian War, the conflict that preceded the Revolution by twenty years. Two other books - The Live!J Lat!J (1931) and Captain Caution (1934) - went to sea with the new republic; Roberts' last book - Lydia Bailry (1947) - went from Haiti in revolt in 1804 to the Barbary Coast and the United States' involvement on "the shores of Tripoli." Eight books in a little less than two decades: not a huge accomplishment, but not trifling either. These are big, well-stuffed and commodious books - Rabble in Arms has 870 pages, Oliver Wis1veff 876, Arundel 632 and North1vest Passage 700 - and these are not leisurely reads, for Roberts liked action and provided plenty of it. In any case this is a writer worth, I think, revisiting.
Kenneth Roberts made his reputation as a ew England-style contrarian. Arundel and Rabble in Arms, which begin with the expedition that nearly captured Quebec in 1775, and end with the surrender of Burgoyne at
Northwest Passage. The English aristocracy - ladies and gentlemen by definition - do not, however, fare well in his pages, tending toward comic or idiotic caricature.
His narratives are laid out in plain and idiomatic speech, and if there are great themes and great moments there is no romantic excess, decoration or declamation, or very little. There is romance enoughStephen ason in Arundel moons over a blonde girl, Mary Mallinson, who was kidnapped by French-led Indians, and who becomes Marie de Sabrevois, her captor's mistress, and a very nasty piece of goods indeed ("She ain't anywhere around here, is she?" says an alarmed Cap Huff in Rabble in Arms). Stephen's son Richard, a sea-captain, falls for another man's wife in The Live!J Lat!J. Langdon Towne in North1vest Passage is enamored of Elizabeth, who eventually marries Robert Rogers (fortunately for Towne, as it turns out), and she is much in evidence in the second part of this novel (where Rogers, a consummate bush-fighter and leader of men, is brought low by the small minds of mean men - rather like Arnold, though Rogers never rose as high or fell so low). Lydia Bailey undergoes more perils than Pauline before she finally comes into the arms of Albion Hamlin. Roberts was unafraid of a little spice - lust is another matter, assigned, in my recollection, only to one villain.
I05~C e sens~ cha e '5 who
peak up and say theirriece.
Saratoga in 1777, have as a major concern the renovation of the character and even the reputation of Benedict Arnold, America's prime and emblematic traitor (his act, for Roberts, could not be excused but it could be explained). Oliver Wis1veff (where Arnold also makes a brief appearance) is written from the point of view of the Loyalist cause - as Ben Ames Williams, a friend of Roberts, writes in his Introduction to A Kenneth Roberts Reader (1943): "He is tireless in hunting out proof that Colonials during the Revolutionary period were (a) dauntless heroes, or (b) bloviating politicians and self-seekers " 1 Of course there were plenty of both. Reading Roberts can be a sovereign remedy against the more idiotic forms of American triumphalism and an unthinking worship of The Founders; his point of view would seem to be that people are people, then as now - some foul, some fair, many bone-ignorant, and a great many simply detached from all of the hullabaloo going on around them. This author does have a conservative bias toward what he would call "gentlemen," men of taste, intelligence and accomplishment combined, though he has no patience for the petty classbased (actually, often religion-based) social hierarchies that appeared in colonial ew England - a point made strongly in the first part of
Roberts liked plain speechemphatic speech (the exclamation point is often used) and he liked feisty, no-nonsense characters who speak up and say their piece: Doc Means in
in Arms, Thomas Buell in Oliver Wiswell, Jeddy Tucker in The Live!J Lat!J. One of his great creations is Cap (not short for "Captain" but for "Saved from Captivity'') Huff, the large and loud presence in the two Arundel chronicles, who also appears in orthwest Passage as one of the country-boy malefactors who introduced innocent Harvard men to the seductive delights of hot buttered rum (in fact, as Williams explains, Roberts didn't even like rum, but he became its best-known advocate and spokesman through this fictional episode). Another character who shows up in more than one of Roberts's books is King Dick, who "rules" a block in Dartmoor Prison (in The Live!J Lat!J) and who also is very important in Lydia Bailry.
Here I am obliged to fit Roberts into our current set of authorial mores. His ative Americans are individuals and are described as such: Stephen ason admires the Abenaki settled near Arundel, yet it was the close relations of these Abenaki who launched ferocious raids against colonial settlements from their base in St. Francis, the target of Rogers' equally ferocious punitive expedition in Northwest Passage. The Sac (or Saukie) who hold Peter Merrill and his companions
Rabble
Peature
captive are described with ethnographic exactitude, but no one has any illusions as to what would have happened if Burgoyne's "northern Indians" had been let loose on European settlements in the Hudson River valley and westward. As for people of African descent, the impressive King Dick speaks in a sort of dialect, as do the two slaves owned by Stephen ason's family (and they are called slaves, not servants or hired help) but the dialect is no more marked than the described "country'' (or local) accents of some State-ofMainers or the York State militiamen in Rabble in Arms. The boxer (or fighter) Little White (defeated by Daniel Marvin in Captain Caution) is an inauthentic, faking black man, a brutal (and cowardly) plaything of a white British aristo. Feminists, though, would find rather more egregious the ending of Captain Caution, when Corunna Dorman, hard sailor-woman turned "soft-eyed girl" sees the light and assures Daniel Marvin (the cautious captain) that ''You were never wrong about anything, nor ever will be!" Daniel's Aunt Phoebe, who commanded her own vessel and marched with Arnold and his men to Quebec, was tougher than that.
Well then. Roberts was born in 1885 and died in 1957. He was of his time (and he was a conservationist and environmentalist before his time); we might extend him the same courtesy that we should extend to H. L. Mencken, born in 1880, latterly and anachronistically accused of anti-Semitism and racism . Certainly the Great War and its reverberations in the United States peeled away from Roberts any tendencies toward romanticism and sentimentality; he wrote about war (and he had seen some of it at firsthand), and war might be necessary but it was not glorious, not least because it frequently gave fools and knaves (and more fools than knaves) positions of authority where they could afflict better men than they could ever be. Human callousness, ignorance, stupidity, brutality and inhumanity are big themes in Roberts, often cast in situations or terms of imprisonment: the horrible Dartmoor in The Live!J Lar,!y, the vile prison hulks in Captain Caution, Sudbury Mines (run by the Americans) and the military jail in New York City (operated by the British) in Oliver Wiswell And war and ill-fortune and stupidity combined kills people. Some of the "heroes" who marched to Quebec and nearly captured it died of smallpox and jail fever and were buried, anonymously, flung into a pit on Ile aux Noix, on the long American retreat to Lake Champlain. On Long Island "patriots" hunted their own countrymen, Loyalists, through the fever-ridden swamps, and killed them when they found them. On a roiled Haiti black, white, and "colored" fight and kill one another, and mercy is nowhere to be found.
Roberts had a fine eye for place (especially place in the Province of Maine), for weather (good and bad), and for food (good and bad). He was a thorough and careful researcher, and very rarely sets a foot wrong in terms of detail, of the "things" that surrounded his human characters in their time. He also had what I think of as the New Englander's love of gadgets, of something new that works better than what has gone before. Daniel Marvin obsesses over the advantages a "gangway pendulum" would give him when directing cannon-fire from a ship's rolling gun-platform, and he beats Little White by adopting a new boxing stance and tactic. In Lydia Bailry the irregular cavalry being trained to take on the forces of the Bey of Algiers are taught to use the sabre's point, not edge, thus dispatching the enemy at a distance before he realizes what mischief you are up
to. Eventually, I fear, at the end of his life Kenneth Roberts fell prey to gimmicks and gadgetry, becoming an enthusiast for the dubious "art" of water-dowsing, and in fact was a crank on the subject.
Roberts is not to be read for psychological subtlety, or not often. He does give us (in Lydia Bailry) a very convincing, nuanced portrait of the vicious, probably psychotic, but undoubtedly intelligent Jeanjacques Dessalines, the Haitian rebel leader (eventually "emperor" of Haiti) whom Napoleon's French generals were required to underestimate because he was black and an ex-slave. On the other hand, one would think that in a man like Benedict Arnold there would be found and explored depths and conflicts, but in Roberts' narrative Arnold, once a ship-captain used to making independent decisions, decided that given the pack of fools, mediocrities and incompetents that infested the Continental Congress the fledgling republic was better off returned to England (he also feared the growing French influence). In fact modern scholars are more and more convinced that the creation - the firm establishment - of the United States was not inevitable but a very threatened and vulnerable mutation,2 almost a miracle, so Arnold (and Roberts) was not far wrong.
In the end, this is a contentious and cantankerous American - an unashamed Yankee - author who created characters cast in what he would have called a very American mold and that we can recognize as such . He also was a first-rate Yankee storyteller, driving his narratives irresistibly, inventing densely populated human scenes, always strong for the individual and the idiosyncratic. He surely deserves to be remembered, and re-read.
Notes
1. Ben Ames Williams, A Kenneth Roberts Reader (1943), ix.
2. Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books, vol. LIII/10 (8 June 2006), 6063; also Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books, vol. LII/14 (22 September 2005), 41-43.
Dean Miller, beginning as a Byzantinist, has now diguised himse(f as a Celticist, and has become an expert on Bad Kings, among them King Arthur. He is also very.fond of the work of P. G. Wodehouse, and is a member in good standing of the Chicago chapter of The Wodehouse Society.
In CEvery Issue
Lady Grace's Revels
Fiction
by THEODORE IRVIN SILAR
Selected for publication l!J historical novelist RUTH DOWNIE.
T he two young men could riot believe their luck. They had been invited to Lady Grace's revels
Frequently, in the past year, Her Ladyship had thrown open the doors of the old manor house and held revels. o one could tell when - or why - the spirit would move her, but when it did, there was rejoicing throughout the district, so seldom did anything noteworthy break the fixed round of provincial life, and there were prayers that it become a regular observance.
It was Martinmas eve, and the lofty, torch-lit hall echoed with the sounds of laughter and music, dancing and animated conversation. In the near corner of a smaller, adjoining chamber, where a long table groaned with sweetmeats and drink, and candles shed a more muted light, Lady Grace stood, conferring from time to time with a select coterie. A wide archway linked the smaller with the larger room, affording a clear view of the proceedings.
Just inside this archway, Thomas Smith and William Philpott, scriveners, whispered together like schoolboys hatching a plot.
"Doubtless somebody commended us," William was saying, "but who? And wherefore?"
''Perchance no body 's at fault," suggested Thomas, "but some star. The face of fortune we have waited on a thousand years like dogs wait 'neath the table hath come about and now would shine on us ."
"Iwis. Plain sense. Clouds and astral things are jolly. And wilt thou be attending to the world wherein we stand eftsoons? Here jewels glitter, fire crackles, maidens hop about with cruel abandon. And I am stark, raving mad."
"We are not the only base-born here," observed Thomas. He nodded toward the glover's daughter promenading by the side of an old wool-factor, a governess twirling in the arms of a squire's bastard.
"E'en so. Her ladyship is by no means over-nice," William admitted. ''We are only the only base-born neither rich nor handsome here, that's all."
"Alas, for rich, but, handsome? Go to, wag. See to thine eyes. They want spectacles."
"Spectacles? Wherefore? The field is littered with 'em, all in a hotchpot: the graceless leads the graceful; the unfair leadeth the fair."
The dancing absorbed the young men's attention for a while.
" ay, but I have not done with thee," continued William, emerging with a start from his reverie. "To return to the matter. I would have thee unfold me thy thoughts. Thou hast 'em, they tell. Once more: Wherefore are we here? It must be some shift of thine, for, God bless me, it's none of mine."
"I know not a whit more than thou. Summon came.
Summarily we answered, what?"
"Did'st thou not leer like an insolent cutpurse, I mought believe thee. Out with it, villain! Have at thee!"
"Peace! I bow to thy superior wind. I fear I've wrote Her Ladyship a poem. Mayhap it hath had some small effect."
"Thou hast wrote Her Ladyship a poem. Thou hast wrote Her Lad ys hip a poem. And thereafter, what? A knighthood? A barony? Beatification?"
"Enough. Wilt thou hear it or wilt thou not?"
"I daresay I'll hear it willy-nilly. So prate on, Sir Ovid, prate on."
"I shall. And, Papistry, by the way, lacketh currency, in case thou had'st not heard."
Thomas began to declaim in a loud actor's voice.
The crimson rose grows sallow, the sciffron primrose wan, The cream of Trl!J with H elen cfqy, and graceless is the swan,
The diamond doth darken, the lark's a pulingpie, The crown of white on yonder height gro111s grqy, 111hen thou art nigh.
The nightingale, thry bruit, doth sing right prettify, The nightingale, if right prevail ought prentise at tf?y knee.
The angels watch in wonderment, as thou dances! f!y, Their firmament thine element, tf?y dancing-floor the S-9',
The dqys of Mqy are sullen, the dqy of Mqy is o'er, The Graces Three face rivalry, for thou hast Graces Four. Though Brilliance glint and ]l!Y sing, and Bloom 111ax commonplace, Thou wrestest a/4 thou bestest a/4 far tf?y Fourth Grace is Grace.
The sun is but a poltroon, the moon a winking rye, No dqy so fair but must despair, tf?y visage to outvie. The sun is but a candle, the moon a Pharisee, o night was e'er bedight so bright with light, as shines from thee.
The sun is but a mirror, the stars but broken glass, Howe 'er thry feign, thry feign in vain, thine image to surpass.
The sun is but an ember, the stars mere 1t111mmery, The world's arrqy doth lose the dqy when seen in fight of thee.
When excellence excelleth, no excess will stifftce, o earth!J scale can e'er avai4 to price a priceless price. When excellence exceffeth, then excess goes behind. When face to face with Grace on Grace, 'tis excess is outshined.
At the dying fall, amused onlookers returned to their conversations "Dainty," pronounced \,'{/illiam. "Decorous. Modest. And thankfully free of any plaguy fawning."
In P,very Issue
Returning to his conspiratorial whisper, Thomas proceeded to explain the source of his inspiration. He had been standing in the High Street, cursing his fate, watching another tedious day come to another tedious end, when the distinctive sound of Lady Grace's coach had reached his ear. Overjoyed at the prospect of anything new at all, he had turned to see a miracle pass: a matched team, a shining black equipage bearing the Burnham crest, and, he swore it, the face of Her Ladyship, fresh from London, smiling directly upon him with exquisite condescension.
From that day forward, he was her liege-man. He made her the subject of all his poems, the object of all his aspirations, the linchpin of all his dreams. It had taken a week's pay to bribe a servant to deliver the poem, but the sacrifice had not been in vain. Although the wait had been agonizing, he had been less than surprised when the invitation had finally arrived. How could such boundless love remain unrequited?
With an expression of disdain, Thomas protested the purity of his motives. His friend's insinuations were beneath contempt. It was Lady Grace's patronage that Thomas held high hopes of winning. Her patronage. A lady of such liberality and loving-kindness was sure to recognize the artistry that flowed from his pen. To add to which, he would make her immortal.
''Very good," interjected William. "We know wherefore thou art here. Wherefore am I here?"
"Once upon a time," responded Thomas, pityingly, "thou wert my friend. Once upon a time, thou had'st the right to gather up my crumbs and my remainders."
"I humbly cry thee mercy, my Lord," apologized William, with a low bow. "The fault is all mine. I reck'd not the intensity of thine intent. But pray remind this ignorant again how a piddling few strophes of rhyme are to make our fortune - or, more to the purpose, thy fortune and my crumbs?"
Thomas readily launched into a description of the play he was working on. It was to be a thing completely new, a thing never seen before, at once comedy, tragedy, history, romance. It was to seal his fame forever. It was to take London by storm.
"Hast thou e'er seen London?" asked William.
" ay," answered Thomas, " ever in my life."
"It don't storm so easy."
At the sudden roar of thunder, a woman screamed, the high windows at the hall's other end rattled in their mullions, and the music halted. Excited voices ooh-ed and ah-ed the ensuing lightning flash. The murmur of rain for a moment filled the hush. Whereupon, to a ripple of laughter, the dancers resumed their places, and the music struck up once more.
"But soft!" exclaimed Thomas. "Regard the comer."
William turned and saw a lone man standing in the entranceway. Blinking furiously, the man was holding out a wet cloak to a servant who was nowhere to be seen. Tall, almost giant, so barrelchested as would be considered stout in a man any shorter, his great long legs were encased in the most form-fitting of hose. William had never seen anyone so exquisitely dressed: every stitchery, ruffle, piping, cockade possible, it seemed, had been put into play.
'Sblood, if it don't think itself the whyfor of all the commotion!" Thomas whispered. "Thunders harbinger it, it thinketh . Good now! I wager we shall sport us."
William knew the man .
"He's called Sir John, Sir John Westfall, though not in his own right. Third son of a marquess's second wife, the 'Sir"s a courtesy."
"Sir'd by courtesy?" laughed Thomas, "Germanely sir'd. Mark! Our courteous Sirrah spy'th his Lady yonder. He maketh to do his court'sies from afar. Mark the sweep wherewith he cap'th and leg'th. But Her Ladyship is off - sir-reverence -to the jakes and oh! she see'th him not. His courtesy's nought. Oh, Will, this is too choice. Our obliging quarry diggeth his own pit."
The Mayor, separating himself from the throng, rushed up to rescue Sir John. Pitching his cloak at the flushed servant running towards him, Sir John followed the bobbing Mayor to where the dancers stood awaiting the next tune. The air of vexation with which he had begun walking had mutated to one of complacency in the time it took to reach them. Introductions went round, and soon Sir John had taken his place among the dancers, his high black forelock towering above them all.
"Mark, Will, how the press doth ebb and flood with every sally of this cloud-capped relief. Glide step-step. Glide .. . stepstep. Edifying. Gee haw! Gee haw! The finical cow sashayeth, a-dodging 'round the dung-cocks. Glide ... step-step. Glide stepstep. Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho!"
"Beware he don't hear thee, fool," warned William, trying desperately to keep a straight face "They say he pinks the likes of thee for breathing."
"Lo, how it glorieth in itself," raved Thomas, louder than before "It eye-eth all the rout to certify that all admire the capers that it cuts. Woe to its partner and woe to her feet. It's quite reckless of 'em. Look out, Madam!"
"Lo, we're seen!" said Thomas, dropping to a whisper, and communicating theatrically from behind his hand. "I read his mind. He thinketh, 'Who are these fine young fellows who admire me? Methinks I'll guerdon them with my regard.' See him nod his graciousness our way "
"He's a noddy all right," seconded William, meanwhile bowing obsequiously, "I'll grant you. A fine flower of England's blood.''
"'Tis tremendous and it trippeth light," said Thomas, loudly again, "tis' large and it leaps, tis' a hulk and hops . What could it be? I'll lay thee forty pence ."
"Soft, I say!" hissed William, "Thou art stepping in a sink whereout I'll be impotent to extricate thee, this time. Have a care for me if not thyself."
"'Tis an elephant," Thomas shouted, "a-tip-toeing for fear he might awaken mice. Come, Will. The riddle giv'th itself away."
"That will be quite enough," William asserted, taking Thomas by the arm and propelling him away from the dancers, "Come Come away. Forthwith.''
"I do not wish to," groaned Thomas, struggling and scowling angrily, "I wish to stqy.''
"Come, my blood-drinking, fire-breathing rakehell,'' insisted William, adamant, "it's time we ate the good Lady's meat and drink.''
Abruptly, Thomas stopped struggling
"That's right, I'll need sustenence,'' he said, as if to himself, and docilely acceded to William's importunity.
Having eaten their fill, and, just as they were starting on a third round of sack, Thomas's attention shifted from their badinage. William could guess the cause. Turning, he saw that Lady Grace was again standing surrounded by sycophants in her customary place at the far end of the table, and the Mayor was bringing Sir John to make his obeisances. William rolled his eyes heavenward as he watched his friend sidle up to them.
''.An it please Your Ladyship, my deepest condolences," Sir John was saying, "I obsequiously lament the death of the good earl, your father."
"Observe, Will, my Lord's obsequy," bid Thomas, and William was relieved at the moderate tone his friend had assumed, "obsequious to a very fault."
"Indeed" was the most William was about to venture. Luckily, a man inured to parasites seldom heeds them unless he has to. As Thomas was but one of those clustering about and talking about him as if he were a prize horse, Sir John plowed on, obliviously.
''We of high rank are obliged to one another, cousin."
"This Lord ranketh," Thomas asseverated. "I marked it from the first. The first time I clapped eyes on him, I marked it. o lord here is ranker. Good as the best. Rank so undue high heaven is assailed."
"Indeed," said William, not about to be amused, no matter how amusing the provocation.
"The nobility ought hang together, cousin," Sir John admonished Lady Grace.
''A sentiment of peerless sympathy," Thomas gushed, "expressed in a memorable figure. Like shipwrecks, nobles, by together hanging, stand fast against severally drowning."
"'Tis but duty," declared Sir John, in mock resignation, "but to do thee my duty, Milady, 'tis not hard. ot hard at all."
"Soft! Hark'st thou?" William hearkened. Would that he hadn't. "'Tis not hard at all,' he saith. I believe it. ot hard at all. Never."
Thomas's remarks had been to an extent masked by Lady Grace's polite rejoinders to Sir John's overtures. But this last evinced the slightest eye movement from Sir John Something, some incongruity, had broken through his intent concentration on the matter at hand.
Undeterred, however, Sir John embarked on his peroration. "Dearest, cousin, I am come to aid you, in whatever it is your pleasure to do. You have but to command, cousin, and your devoted cousin obeyeth."
"Hear how free my Lord cousins my Lady," Thomas exulted, "Such cousinage, I do declare, hath been truant since the days of Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Esau, Joseph and his cousins twelve."
"In your hour of need," Sir John concluded, "think me your own knight-errant, Milady, ready to do battle at your hest."
"Indeed," Thomas interposed into the general murmur of approbation at Sir John's gallantries, "my Lord, you are an arrant knight. A nonesuch. A very nonpareil. Courtesy is your cause and purport."
When did we change to direct address? William wondered, with mounting apprehension. He was not here. This was not happening. Life was full of dangers. That capon, for one, was not sitting at all well. It could kill him by the morrow. Why abet it? Pray, more, Sir. He gulped his sack. His eyes flitted about the room, noting
e o ore rvtn ar orn in York, Pennsylvania, on the same day as the first American andstand. Chaucerian, exicographer, poet, musician. olf kept from door's immediate icinity by teaching English t Albright College, Reading, ennsylvania. Studied jazz piano •th Wilbert Baranco and his ythm Bombardiers. Favorite ar: The Museum, Farnham, orset. Favorite restaurant: steria La Chiacchera, Siena, taly.
exits.
"Gramercy," responded Sir John, mechanically, his attention fixed on Lady Grace.
"Courtesy is what maketh you noble. Every quality that we admire in you must needs redound to courtesy. o courtier oweth courtesy so much Your magnanimity, your franchise, your estate, your office, your largesse, your Lordship, lay it at the door of courtesy, and we with no such portion hail you for it."
"Gramercy," repeated Sir John, with a curt nod, his eyes still on his object
"Surely, my Lord, you know the regard wherein all and sundry rightly hold you?" Thomas asked, bowing ostentatiously. "Your prominence proceedeth before you. Outstanding amongst men, to women awful, you bulk large amidst the vulgar fray. From your twinkling toes to that excrescence wonderful rank on your forward top, you are renowned, yea, fabled, near and far. Wherefore, all in all, your greatness weighed, more ponderous and fraught a gravity was ne'er conceived, it overtops this little world wherein it must, alas, reside."
"By thy leave," Sir John objected, "thou mak'st too much of me. I ain't as grand as all that. obody is."
"I bow to more prodigious capacity," conceded Thomas, bowing even lower. "Oh, William, did'st thou e'er hear fairer phrases?" William was no longer answering. His eyes studied the floor. "True Attic salt, the very article, elaborated with Laconic swell; sentence worthy o' th'immortal Plautus, nay, Terence: Aristophanes himself. Sir, thy words are true, and right, and choice. I bow to thine eminence. 'Tis gross. As gross as is the heaving mare and all the whales and cuttlefishes in it."
"Dost thou thou me?" Sir John asked, his attention caught. "Thou thou?" Thomas retorted, laughing heartily. "Indeed, I thou thee. I thou thee a thousand times, thou thou, thou. Dost thou thou me? That is the question " ''What?"
''Why ought I not thou thee?" Thomas went on. "'Tis but fitting. 'Tis common knowledge, some base usurer, thy grandsire's grandsire, seeing his main chance, to Richmond's skirts seized fast and tightly clung thereon thereafter like a cocklebur."
ot true, thought William. Sir John's forebears were in the Domesday Book.
"Insolence," said Sir John, coolly. ''.And lying insolence at that."
In P,very Issue
Thomas strode round to the side of the long table opposite Sir John like an actor hitting his mark. Conversation began to die down as the crowd noticed what was happening.
"Thou gorbellied, vain, beef-witted bladder," Thomas effused, pointing his finger accusingly. "Like a child whom elders watch to laugh at his foolishness, thou think'st the world dotes on thine every pose and affectation. When thou makest to turn on the toe, the rout doth flee for fear thy toppling crush them, and thou in thine unspeakable self-regard, think'st thou spin'st not, nay, the world must spin round thee."
William, meanwhile, had slipped into the crowd and was edging towards the wall. "'We are undone," he murmured, whereupon Lady Grace, whose attention the Mayor had been monopolizing, caught and held his gaze for a long moment. Then she turned, and, quickly discerning the cause of William's despair, she advanced to a nearer vantage point, the crowd parting for her as she moved Saying nothing, she stood and watched with grim self-possession the scene as it played out, hands folded before her.
"When thou flound'rest like a mud-fast ox, thou think'st thyself a sprightly prancing hart, pranked up in garments so bulging taut, each lace and point cry'th out as on the rack. What could be more insufferable than such dainty-brutish, trip-tread mincing? Peradventure, thy sottish simpering? Dost thou not know that he who simpereth, and looketh to see who looketh on him, no one craves to see."
The room was silent and still, except for Thomas's ranting. Sir John stood motionless, rapt, expectant.
"Addled jolthead, so boil-brained, thou can'st not tell raillery from commendation. I hate thee, I revile thee, I abhor thee. Or is e'en this too heavy going for thee? Overweening imbeciles with swords and undue disdain are the sorest bane of this downtrodden and benighted world. I hate thy kind as well as I hate thee."
"Moreover, pray, by what right dost thou lord it? Say what thou wilt, it stands: thou hast no title. Thy father hath the title and thy brother the reversion. The 'Sirs' wherewith we sir thee are but words."
"More grievous still, thou hast the impudence to saunter in here with an eye to what? To win the Lady with thy simpering? To save thy drained estate with mincing pretty? By what happy mischance do exalted ladies feign consider stout and vain and beggared dolts whose titles have no base?"
"Have at thee, thou dissembling, plume-plucked coxcomb, thou cock-a-hoop, thou misbegotten wretch. Thou'll soon forget thine idle lecher's fancies, for I have made up horns for thee beforehand. Lo, these many years, the lady was mine, and thou art but a feeble, paltry second. That is, had thy empty codpiece cod."
William had concluded that his friend had gone mad. The fool had never even seen the Lady Grace but for that moment on the High Street. Now he was her gallant.
"That is the last straw," roared Sir John. "I will have my satisfaction of thee, Sirrah, if I have to kill the entire company."
''And thou wilt have it," replied Thomas, "and spare the company, but for that thou hast that rapier, and I have nought," seizing a knife from the table, "but this carving knife ."
"Here's my sword," returned Sir John, drawing his rapier and throwing it hilt first across the table. "Take it It's sharp. I'll take this varlet's dancing-rapier," he turned to the cowering Mayor, who rendered up his sword immediately, "and I'll kill thee in a pissingwhile."
Sir John broke the tip of the blunted dancing-rapier over his knee, and stood at guard, the jagged end pointing menacingly at Thomas.
"Thou wilt not ask leave of Her Ladyship?"
Sir John glanced at Lady Grace and back at his opponent. "Nay I'll kill thee first and then ask leave "
They crossed swords over the table and set to. For a time, Thomas kept the master fencer stymied by two expedients: one was to keep the table always between himself and Sir John, and the other was to fan the air with his sword as rapidly as he could These unconventional tactics nonplussed the trained swordsmen - and further enraged him. Round and round the table they ran, Thomas eluding Sir John at every turn, and miraculously fending off countless would-be-lethal thrusts.
"Stand and fight, thou villain," shouted Sir John, breathing heavily, "Thou art no gentleman, that is clear."
"Gentleman? What's that? Fear not, I'll teach thee. There is gentleness and gentleness. The gentleness that courses through thy veins is blood, glass-gazing, and contumely. A gentler gentleness there is that's mine, for thou art gentle by courtesy of the lord, t1!] father, Marquess of this and that: I, gentle by endowment of the Lord, Our Father, Maker of heaven and earth."
It was obvious that Sir John's outrage and frustration were coming to a head. His attacks became more deliberate, more concentrated, more relentless.
Thomas was plainly growing weary. He careered wildly round the table, slashing the air when his opponent's sword wasn't even near, uttering ever fainter imprecations . Just as he began to declare, "Though thou kill me, thou art yet dull as an ox," Sir John, scattering roasts and candles and beakers, leaped upon the table, grasped the rapier in Thomas's hand by the blade, and drove the jagged end of the show-sword that he wielded through Thomas's breast by main force.
''And keener am I yet," gasped Thomas, blood spurting from his breast, "than all thy new-edg'd swords. So it is and so it shall be." Sir John drove home again to silence him. "Forever and ever." Again. ''Amen." The final thrust was to the throat, and Thomas Smith spoke no more.
2.
Sir John dug in his ear with a tortoiseshell scoop and frowned at his valet He had been at his toilet for several hours now and nothing was going right. Tonight of all nights, no emolument would tame his beastly hair, his clothes fit like they'd been cut for the chambermaid, and, worst of all, the fair complexion that was his pride had erupted into pustules such as he had not seen since his nonage. He shouted at the trembling attendant and sent him downstairs for more cosmetics. The villain's customary wizardry had apparently deserted him. And on such a night It was an outrage. Outside his window, a rank of cloud was creeping up on a bright gibbous moon. He lit another candle and addressed once more his mirror. It wasn't so bad. Or was it? He'd looked so long and so hard he couldn't tell anymore.
His thoughts wandered to Lady Grace Atwater, his hostess for the night, and now, it would seem, until a stronger claimant came along, for all intents and purposes Countess of Burnham in her own right, the old earl having died without male issue or collaterals. Would
that his own father had been so thoughtful. Sir John's share of the patrimony was scarcely competent after all those fingers had got through with the pie . His fool of a father had been at once profligate and prolific, the worst of both worlds.
What, he wondered, could have brought her back from London to this godforsaken desert? But for the hunting, he himself would have absconded long ago. And it looked to be no short visitation, either. She was settled in, and seemed intent on taking the old earl's place in country affairs. His mind ruffled through the inevitable rumors - heresy, treachery, vice. Hardly believable of such an innocuous and retiring woman.
Be that as it may, she was a match for him if ever there was one. Fair enough for forty, well-born, and rich. This conquest would need all the charm he could muster. And charm was deserting him wholesale. He shouted for his valet and looked for his riding crop.
Having whipped his horse into a lather, Sir John forged on through the rain He could just make out the tree-lined approach to the manor in the distance. He was late, later than he had planned to be. Curse the horse, curse the rain, curse the road, curse the valet, curse the luck, and curse Lady Grace Atwater and all her meinee. He hoped the water wasn't seeping underneath his cloak. It wouldn't be long now. He lashed the horse's hindquarters in time with every stride.
A footman swung open the front doors as Sir John rode up. The horse began to rear just as he dismounted. Leaving the task of calming the animal to the terrified underling, he stalked into the house, whereupon he found himself lost in a pitch-black passageway with only the distant hubbub of festivities to guide him. Cursing the darkness, he made his way towards the sound. A patch of light ahead revealed the hall's threshold. Hurrying up to it, he stopped, removed his cloak and hat, and entered.
For a long moment he was blinded by the sudden brightness, and cursed the light. Where was that damned footman? He could hear that he had made an entrance, and now an imbecile servant was ruining it Servants were always ruining things.
As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he made out the figure of Lady Grace at the far end of the adjoining room. What was he to do now? Go to her? With wet things in hand? Await assistance? Gallantry had always held him in good stead and so gallantry it was. He launched into his best bow and gave it his all. But when he came up, she was nowhere to be seen. This was all very irregular, and he wondered whether he ought turn right round and depart. But the Mayor was hovering attentively now, and there was the footman, and so, press on and let be what would be. Striving manfully, he succeeded in replacing the frown on his face with a beneficent smile, and the stalk still in his legs with a leisurely amble
If ever there were a rabble among whom he would shine, this was it: two widowed baronesses, a few old knights and their ladies, every squire for miles around with all their broods, motley tradesmen. There was Fitz-Morris, his partner in debauchery, of late his creditor, and a sure ally in this suit, if Fitz-Morris ever wished to see his money again. There was Theophania Langley, the glover's daughter. She was a game one, and of like mind, for she had designs on old Simes the miser. The prospect of a Widow Simes, he remembered, stood surety against a failure with the enigmatic Lady Grace Atwater -a comforting thought. That courtship for a certainty would be
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blessedly short and to the point. They already knew what they were getting.
Following a stultifying round of introductions, out of which Sir John retained not one name, the little hogshead of a Mayor called for a dance. Here the cost of the expensive dancing master that he had employed seemingly forever justified itself. He had drilled so hard and so long that his feet moved of their own will. He knew all the latest London innovations, both of step and gesture. The yeomen would be dumbstruck.
As well they were. Sounds of acclamation reached his ears, and he looked about to see from where they originated, whereupon the Langley cut a caper that forced him to step lively if he wanted to preserve his toes.
When it again seemed safe, he searched the onlooking crowd once more. Two suspicious-looking rogues were eyeing him gleefully. Doubtless, they had him marked for a purse-cutting later on. He nodded straight at them, and gave his knowing smile, to signal that he was on to them, and they had best seek prey elsewhere, for he was not a man to be trifled with.
The dancing wore on interminably, relieved by the avid glances of a brace of young beauties who, though little they knew it, had already been pricked out for favor as soon as he found the time He was cutting a fine figure now. He must remember to treat these swains affably. It was rumored Her Ladyship doted on them. By all means, Master Jack. By your leave, Mistress Jill.
At the sound of an altercation, he looked up to see one of the two cut-purses lead the other off. Wine-sotted cut-purses, no less: by Cock, this lady was not particular. Every Hob and Dick in the country was here. We would see about that.
Sir John tried to glean what pleasure he could from the dancing, but he had more weighty things on his mind, and let his demeanor show it. Thankfully, at the resolution of the third dance, the Mayor, ever receptive to intimations, grasped Sir John by the hand, and led him across the hall, through the portal to the adjoining chamber, and into the presence of Lady Grace Atwater, Countess of Burnham. The lickspittle's ornate introductions were as long-winded as a winter's day, but Sir John waited patiently, as the interval allowed Lady Grace the opportunity to fully take in his form and figure. Sir John likewise availed himself of the opportunity to appraise the charms of his intended. She was tall, almost tall enough that her height would be a detriment. But not quite, God have mercy. Her erect carriage, most dignified, but less than haughty, enhanced the impression of consequence. Her hair was arranged in a simple yet becoming configuration, its blackness offset with rows of white pearls. Her modest black gown might have betokened mourning, or even a Puritan bent, were it not for the sumptuous filigree of silver with which it was decorated. Her white forehead, unwrinkled as far as Sir John could make out, culminated in a fetching widow's peak. An un-prophetic one, Sir John reassured himself, crossing his fingers. Her high, straight nose and her dark eyebrows only heightened the effect of poignancy tempered with amused resignation that her deep-set blue-green eyes emitted. Her prominent cheek-bones were underscored by what looked like real rose, and her upper lip protruded ever so slightly over the lower, as if a bee had stung it. That upper lip was inexhaustibly expressive; one could just imagine how it could pout, how it could mock, how it could tremble with anger, or fear, or ... longing. Sir John felt his gaze fixing upon that soft damask anomaly just as he heard the Mayor's speech wind down. Taking command of himself, he tore his eyes from the beckoning
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trap and prepared to make his opening gambit.
The clamor of the crowd was infelicitous for his purposes, to say the least, but "Onwards" had always been his motto, and so, taking a deep breath, he plunged into the speech he had been rehearsing all week.
He was heartened by her response to his first sally. As sure as day, was she resigned to her father's death. It made her Countess, for God's sake. Furthermore, assuming a demeanor of abject mourning would thankfully not be necessary.
An appeal to fellow-feeling came next. The idea was to create a bond based on their common difference from the rabble, along with reminding her ever so subtly who his father was. The particulars of the blood-line he could count on the Mayor to elucidate in excruciating detail. With the help of a friendly deacon and a beaker of canary, Sir John had taken special care to craft this line of reasoning. Which also went over well Lady Grace was wholehearted in her approval of mutual assistance.
ow was the time for the first innuendo. A spoor must be laid, faint but unmistakable, nothing vulgar, nothing that could be misconstrued as anything other than - what it was not, a chaste and humble proffering of service, of devotion, of duties to be fulfilled - duties unspecified. That deacon knew his business.
"Hard at all. Never," he heard. What was that? A parrot? He almost lost his place. By a supreme effort, he regained his mental footing and finished his recitation, word for word, concluding with a grand and yet self-effacing bow.
The loquacious Mayor piped up and stole the Countess's attention. It would be a good while And some knave was pestering him with some nonsense. Flattering words, flattering words - he'd heard them all a thousand times. ow it looked as if he'd be hearing them a thousand more. He decided to put a stop to it - in his best, most affable manner, of course, for Her Ladyship's benefit.
"By thy leave," he protested humbly, "Thou mak'st too much of me. I ain't so great. obody is."
He'd said nothing out of the ordinary. And yet the fool went on and on. What the good-year was all this? What kind of flowery fustian? "Prodigious"? "Swell"? "Thine eminence"? "Whales"?! "Thine"!
"Dost thou thou me?" asked Sir John, turning his head slowly while he spoke, a gesture that usually cowed. He was alert now. He had been right. Something had been out of kilter. He suspected impertinence.
Ah, there it was. More than impertinence, more than impudence - insolence. But it made no sense. When his trencherfellows mocked him, all was in jest. Here was a complete stranger. Did he not know the rules of civilized comportment? o, there could be no question. Sir John was being called upon, called upon in the basest of ways - with insults, calumny, ridicule. It was insupportable. Were the wretch a gentlemen, propriety would demand Sir John give him the lie and throw down his gage, whereupon seconds would negotiate terms and a meeting would be arranged. But to afford a common lout the courtesies due a gentleman was to sully the very name of gentleman, to cast civility before swine. Rage welled up from the pit of his stomach like an irruption of molten steel. When he was enraged he could not think. But he must think. He must make plans. Was he missing something? Could this base-born villain by some off-chance be a master swordsman? He didn't look like one. And then, the strangest vagary stole into Sir
John's head . ... Could there be something to what the boy said? ... Nay! Nay! and ay! again. He could not think that way! He would not think that way! The villain was already dead, and well-killed. All that remained was the pretext. And the villain was wrong. His dancing was elegant. The rabble waited upon his smile. And his title ? His title was Sir John Westfall and he was going to worst this base-born mouther of presumption and silence his flapping jaws forever.
Sadly, the whole bloody rout was listening to the tirade now. Were they too mocking him? ot for long, they wouldn't He would stick them all if needs were. He had already condoned enough effrontery to keep him for a lifetime.
Sir John stood like a statue, saying nothing, looking neither to the right nor to the left, listening for just the right words. Which were not long in coming. In short order, the cur had insulted the lady, and that was the excuse for which Sir John had been restraining himself. Well and good. The villain's time had come.
In his rage, Sir John could scarcely see. In his mind, he was already wading in blood. It took immense fortitude to maintain the presence of mind to see the arrangements through. The silly Mayor's silly dancing-rapier would suffice A wishbone would suffice. If His quivering Honour would just hold still.
What did the villain want now? Leave of Her Ladyship? She who bore the blame for this! He'd be damned before he asked leave of superannuated whores!
When they took their stances, Sir John knew what he was up against. His opponent stood like a sheep waiting to be slaughtered. That is - unless it were a ruse. How could anyone not a swordmaster in disguise bear himself so insouciantly? Enough thought Onwards.
The first strokes decided him. He had never seen anyone handle a sword in such an idiotic fashion. It was maddening, especially because, having never practiced with any but adepts, Sir John had never learned how to counter idiocy. Like some giant humblebee, the villain would fly round the table and fan the air, fly and fan, fly and fan, in some ludicrous parody of Cob's Traverse. Sir John tried every feint, beat, parry he knew. He gave the blade with an open invitation. Since the fool would not - knew not how to counter, since the fool would not - knew not how to recognize an opening were it presented to him on a golden salver, all was for naught. It was humiliating. Sweat began to pour down Sir John's once meticulously painted face and the contemptible monologue continued to pour from the villain's mouth. Sir John longed to shut it for him, but his composure was long gone, his all-consuming rage hampering his abilities. Contrary to all his training, he could not hoard his strength, he could not premeditate his blows - every thrust and lunge and counter went all out. Sooner than he would have, had he been fencing with his fellows, he began to weary.
But his opponent was wearying too. Seeing his chance, Sir John's fury drove him to make an end come what may. The unlikely event of his own death seemed a fair price. As if of their own accord, his legs leaped onto the table, his left hand seized the other's weapon, and his right thrust with such force it cracked open a ribcage.
The blood-gushing carcass would not stop talking however. Silence! the right hand spoke. Silence! Silence!
"What say'st thou now, bully boy?!" panted Sir John. " ought?! Let us see then what liest beneath tl!J codpiece, thou lying villain "
Plucking his own rapier from the corpse's hands and using
it as a tailor's shears, Sir John cut out his victim's codpiece and flipped it to one side, exposing loins plainly ravaged with chancres.
"Just as I thought," he exclaimed. "Pox'd as an old sailors' whore A mystery solved. He was mad."
Sir John Westfall had never killed anyone before. His formidable reputation had always daunted challengers and compelled apologies. Thus, far from satisfying him, the fountain of blood at his feet only magnified his towering rage "Out!" he bawled, voice breaking with the strain. "Out! Every one! I'll see this chamber empty e'er I count ten or I'll see it a charnel-house."
In short order, he was alone with Lady Grace.
"I'll have you now, Milady," he said, and swived her right there on a platter for all he was worth
3.
Lady Grace woke her steward early. The word went out: ''Air the hangings, stoke the kitchen fires, and send Jack after musicians, for 'tis Lady Grace's pleasure for to hold revels." It would be a shame to waste these last halcyon days before winter set in in earnest.
All morning she had overseen the taking in of foodstuffs, the cleaning and refurbishing of the hall, the settling of accounts, and now she sat before a beaker of wine and a plate of bread and cheese at her desk in an upper chamber, admiring the prospect from her window: across the long expanse of lawn, broken here and there with grazing horses, to the rolling patchwork of hill and dale, forest and field that was her demesne, to the distant purple hills, over which grand billowing squadrons of clouds sailed in slow and stately majesty through a medium of azure.
Her heart swelled with peace, and contentment, and fulfillment. Everything wore a sheen of rightfulness. She was finally where she belonged, and the sun was shining, and the sky was blue. For a moment, as if she were hovering on air like the peregrine in the distance, all her cares, all her dreads, all her bad memories fell away, and for the first time in her life, she was at one with creation.
There was a knock on the door and her steward shuffled in with the invitation list. Since the old man had served as the manor's intercessor to the outside world all his life, she depended implicitly upon his advice. Given free rein, Lady Grace would have rapidly expanded the list to include everyone from beggars to kings. The steward moderated her enthusiasm with the sagacity of many years. His cogent and often colorful explanations of the inescapable exigencies of country life would swiftly bring her down to earth . They soon arrived at fairly workable compromises by establishing a middle ground between those who could not possibly be invited and those who could not possibly be overlooked. Within this middle ground was their tilt-yard. Lady Grace would insist on the Langleys, for the sake of the life and fervor the numerous clan brought to all festivity; the steward would insist on the influential wool-factor Simes. Lady Grace would suggest the flamboyant ne'er-do-well FitzMorris; the steward would counter with the widowed baronesses.
One invitation was not negotiable, however. The time had come. Lady Grace had acclimated herself to the society and mores of Burnham. With the help of her steward, she now knew what bounds not to overstep, where the pitfalls were, whom to propitiate, whom she could confidently ignore. There were a pair of scriveners, it seemed, former students of her old tutor, whom she would have
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on the list come what may. Vigorous young men, after all, were never unwelcome when there was to be dancing.
She was surprised at the steward's equanimity. He was amenable to the young scriveners. On one condition. There was a knight, it seemed, Sir John Westfall, a vigorous young man in his own right, by the way, and one whose gallant presence would add the perfect final touch to their hard-won hodge-pudding. Who was he? A man of birth, acquirements, and refinement. And where had he been keeping himself? More manly pursuits than rustic revels ordinarily engaged his time. But the steward was sure that he could be induced to make an appearance.
With a sigh, Lady Grace acquiesced and the three names were duly affixed to the list. Leaving her to her reveries, the steward shuffled out of the chamber list in hand and wearing a satisfied smile, having earned his bribe.
Lady Grace had to make an effort to avert her gaze from the figure of the young man standing in the portal talking animatedly with his friend. Calling her best courtly manner into play, she feigned interest in an earnest discourse on the treatment of glanders. Her eyes, however, could not help but stray. She hoped her avidity was not too conspicuous.
Why did he not come to her, shower her with that animation? It ought to be evident that she did not stand on ceremony. To her mind, these revels of hers were more bacchanal than formal occasion. A word, a bow, a proffered hand in a reception line: that was all the consort she had enjoyed with him. It was not enough.
How comely he looked. Broad straight shoulders tapered to a narrow wasp's waist. The cherubic roundness had left his cheeks and been replaced by finely chiseled features. Long, exquisitely expressive hands danced in the air as he spoke, never still. As ever, traits to excite either a woman's envy or her love. And those eyes. There was something inexplicable in them, some perfect wedding of boyish impishness with the crinkled obligingness of wise grandsires, to melt a tigress's heart.
Oh, he was declaiming. Was that her own name she heard? Yes, repeated more than once. It had to be that mad doggerel he had sent her. "When excellence excelleth, no excess will suffice." How wonderful! The sheer excessiveness of it. So much bolder than the handiwork of the bloodless poetasters at court, with their pale shepherds chopping logic and thinking it seduction. Every hope she had had for him was coming true. She had wished for him to flourish, and flourish he had. The proof was there for all to see: the eagle pride of his demeanor, the elegance of his bearing, the audacity of his verse. odding graciously as a red-faced squire reeled off the recipe to a tried and true specific, her thoughts drifted back to her first encounter with Thomas Smith.
It was a rainy and raw Lenten night, and Lady Grace was hurrying unaccompanied through the dark, wet streets of London, the hood of her cloak held tightly about her face. Even the footpads would be indoors tonight. onetheless, her ears were attuned to the slightest anomaly. Pausing at a street corner to let a lumbering wagon pass, she thought she heard a faint whimpering. There it was again,
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scarcely audible, but distinct from the soughing of the wind and the creaking of harnesses and shutter-bolts. It seemed to be coming from a narrow lane not far off. Crossing her fingers, she crept up to the lane's entrance and peered round the corner
A single canclJe stood in a low window, shedding just enough light into the lane that she could make out the figure of a tiny, palpitating bunclJe of rags lying against the wall. Approaching it and kneeling, she saw that it was a young child, not more than five or six years old. Shivering violently, feverish, lips rurning blue, it could well have been in its death throes.
A homeless urchin dying in the street was no novelty to London eyes. She knew she ought to pass on and turn her mind to other things. The scene would recur, should she want to relive it But some whim, some - obstinacy - held her; a wave had swept over her, an irresistible urge to catch the child up, and feed it, and heal it, and cosset it, and redeem it.
What was it that recommended this child above all the other homeless, dying urchins? The answer was self-evident: Beauty Dirt and grime notwithstanding, the child was angelic. Lady Grace was reminded of a tiny, delicate young princess she had once seen in the train of a German prince, a perfect cherub.
When she took the child into her arms, however, it began to struggle in its delirium. Ignoring the wounds it inflicted on her, she began cooing, as she'd sometimes seen wet-nurses do. These melodious, feminine sounds seemed to pacify it. She wrapped her cloak more closely around it, and, by the time she reached the townhouse, the child had stopped shivering, and was fast asleep.
It was her father's townhouse But her father, the earl, was old. He never came up to town anymore. He had married and procreated late in life. Lady Grace was the only surviving result. When, in childbirth, his young wife had died, followed presently thereafter by his second child, a son, the earl had retired to his seat in Burnham, there to tend his garden, and to adjudicate petty country disputes, and to surreptitiously flirt with the Puritanism he had no intention of ever embracing.
Lady Grace, though young, had been in London for some years now, trying co make her way amongst the toils and chimeras of court. It had been long since she remembered what for, other than that it was what was done To marry, she supposed, had been the plan. But the courtly suitors who pursued her were idiots. They bored her unconscionably, as court itself had begun to do. Courtly talk was so empty, so unnatural: insincere flattery of the basest sort cheek by jowl with merciless back-biting, which the venom and which the antidote it was pointless to discern. othing mattered but favor, who was in, who out. The question had been moot to her for a long time.
Luckily, her father's neglect was her godsend. He held precisely no aspirations for her whatsoever. She could marry, she could remain a spinster, she could join a nunnery, it was all the same to him. The townhouse was hers to make use of, or not, it was all the same to him The duenna he hired for her kept marvelously to herself, and yet counterfeited enough custodial facade so that, in effect, Lady Grace enjoyed the freedom of the city, given, of course, a healthy circumspection.
When she arrived at the townhouse, Lady Grace issued strict instructions. Clap to all the shutters Close all the curtains. She was not receiving. She was not at home until she gave word otherwise. She carried the child upstairs, to her own chambers on the
first floor, and set about saving its life if she could. Peeling the filthy rags from its body before a roaring fire, she learned that it was a boy, although a boy so fair as to arouse a girl's envy - or her love. Ensconcing him in her own bed, she spent the ensuing long days soothing his brow and inducing him to eat, and then spoon-feeding him, and then looking on with satisfaction as his appetite came back and he devoured everything she put in front of him. She could not, however, induce him to speak. He was the most timid, fearful being she had ever seen. He jumped at the movement of her hand as she made to brush back his forelock. A noise on the stairs sent him into a panic Clearly, he was not deaf. Had she brought home a changeling, raised by wolves, or bears, or elves? Surely such beauty never housed an imbecile's mind.
She found that he responded best to gentleness. Contrary to her preconceptions about boys, far from engaging him, horseplay frightened him. o, only the sweetest, daintiest ministrations, like those a new mother lavished on a first-born, brought a smile to his face and a light into his eyes. An only child, brought up by undemonstrative governesses prone to the strict pietism so rife Burnham-side, Lady Grace had never been exposed to the pleasures of child-rearing The boy's need for pampering evoked in her a profound and overwhelming outpouring of emotion that surprised her with its ferocity. If only he would speak
On Good Friday morning, Lady Grace slipped into the chamber with their breakfast. Fresh cross buns that her cook had made especially for the holydays sat on the tray beside more usual fare The boy by this time had recovered wonderfully Hale, rosy cheeks rose and fell with the regular respiration of untroubled sleep. She looked forward to the moment when the smell awoke him and he tore into the repast like a famished kestrel. But she could not hurry him. She had to wait patiently for his eyes to open and adjust to the strangeness of a tribulation-free world, before she could make her presence known.
In due rime, his little nose sniffed, his little arms stretched, his little eyes opened, blinked twice, and straightaway sought out the source of the delicious scent.
To her delighted surprise, as soon as he caught sight of the cross buns, the boy broke into the cross buns rhyme! Here was the key to his heart - song! She swept him up in her arms and danced him around the room, joining in with a full heart and a relieved mind. All the morning, all the afternoon, and into the night, they sang. Lady Grace had always loved nursery rhymes; one of the few joys of her straitened childhood had been learning and singing them. Each rhyme she dredged up from the distant past brought happy recollections with it. But the boy was astonishing. His little head held a treasure-trove of rhymes, saws, entire ballads.
With the disinterment of old recollections came a memory of what she had imagined life in the capital would be like before she had ever set foot in London. Fed on nothing but fairy tales and courtly romances, her dreams had been laughably fantastic. High adventure alternated with deathless love; chivalry received its due, as did dastarc11iness; monsters and pixies and witches and wizards haunted the streets; and splendid pageants were held daily. Romances being as they were over-larded with the hitherings and thitherings of heroes, while heroines sat, spinning, somewhere offstage, she was often forced to imagine herself into the hero's role. In other words, sometimes she was the damsel, but sometimes she was St. George - once even the dragon. What did it matter? Imagination was free :
blessedly, as knights in shining armor were few and far between in latter-day London-town.
One night, however, after the holydays, as spring thunders shook the walls, and she sat embroidering fairy tales to her taste, in her darkened chamber before a roaring fire, with the boy peacefully sucking his thumb in her lap, her hulking manservant came to the door with a message. The man was a giant: one hand could compass a man's skull; he had to stoop to pass under the lintel. She had found him useful in various capacities, and he was harmless as a fly. But the giant struck abject terror into the boy Hearing the sudden deep voice and seeing the looming shadow at the door, the boy was thrown into a frenzy of fear. Leaping from Lady Grace's lap, he ran to huddle in a corner, shivering much as he had when first she had chanced upon him.
And so it was: just as she had first chanced upon him. The sight of the huge man had thrown the boy into a kind of a trance. He was mute again, terrified again
"Whatever did they do to thee?" wondered Lady Grace.
It took another week to bring the boy back again to his happy, receptive state. Lady Grace banished the giant manservant from the house, but took pains that the boy became accustomed to the other servants, man and woman.
When this was accomplished, she turned her thoughts to the future. What, she wondered, was she going to do with the child? She could not keep him. How would it look, she, the Earl of Burnham's daughter, rearing a ragamuffin from out of the gutters? For a moment, she seriously entertained the alternative of never leaving the townhouse again. The thought was not an unattractive one, the boy having so miraculously satisfied her deepest yearnings. But she was not quite ready to become a confirmed anchorite. She still enjoyed the society of her fellow human beings of occasion. Moreover, sequestering would certainly do the boy no good. He needed the opposite; to dive into the stream of humanity and learn to swim with the best of them. After some thought, she resolved upon a more pragmatic plan. There was a schoolmaster back in Burnham -a man who had once tutored her, in fact, and given her what little wit she possessed. He plied the birch-rod with the utmost severity. But he was fair. And he would be forever indebted to Lady Grace for sending him such a scholar. She would send this brilliant boy to be reared in a schoolhouse. Where better? She would provide a stipend for the boy's keep, of course, but he would never be told the source He would be led to believe that he was an orphan who had been bequeathed a small competency, and that was all. Providence must be trusted to do the rest
Thus, she sent for the schoolmaster's wife, a warm, hospitable, matronly woman. Satisfied that the boy took to her with little urging, Lady Grace released him into the woman's keeping, with many admonishments concerning the child's care and tutelage.
It was truly marvelous how one could run through fifteen years in the wink of an eye, like a pipe of wine with the bung left unstopped, and with never a thing to show for it. To be sure, all those years in London had not been a complete waste. She had learned the ins and outs of court life, the proper answers to all questions, the proper questions to all answers, the proper ways to act and dress and behave, all the fashionable cynicisms, all the fashionable selfdelusions. And she had learned a method of conversing so politic, so non-descript, so immoderately judicious that she could speak for hours on end and reveal no more thought or character or emotion than a blank wall .
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When her father finally died in his eighty-ninth year, she felt a mixture of sadness and relief. Her father had been a good man, unprepossessing perhaps, but a stranger to malice and spite, and she would miss him, seldom as she had seen him in recent years . Ever since the death of her mother, however, though she had died everso-long ago, her father had not been at peace with the world. And so perhaps it was for the best. They were together now, as was meet and right - leaving Lady Grace - by the grace of God, by the hand of fate, or by less benign dispensations, who was to say? - essentially free. The never-ending lesson in judiciousness was at an end.
She had been her father's sole heir, as far as anyone could tell, and she had not lived in London for twenty-odd years not to know lawyers sharp enough to beat off reversioners and remaindermen before they could so much as become a nuisance The unencumbered estate - chattels, messuage, appurtenances - was hers to dispose of as she pleased. London having long since lost its charm, Lady Grace decided that it was high time she tried the rustic life.
She looked forward to lording it over her little faraway corner of the world. She could see herself, like a miniature version of the Queen, dealing out a little magnanimity here, a little justice there . It would be like having a great, boisterous, motley family. Most of all, she looked forward to seeing her young ward.
Oh, me. Under the spell of Lady Grace's reverie, all the claims of the world had gone by the wayside. The cabal of squires by her side could have been plotting war for all she knew. The wine she had drunk, however, would not be gainsaid.
When she returned, she saw with pleasure that Thomas and his friend had moved a little closer, and were taking refreshment at the foot of the long table. She saw with less pleasure His Honour the Mayor of Burnham bringing yet another guest for her to meet.
This is a strange hippogriff, she thought, half bear, half peacock.
The Mayor was one of those singular persons who could speak interminably without saying anything, but to whom one always had best attend with half an ear, for he never failed, at the most unexpected moment, to abruptly halt his maunderings and ask a pointed question, the kind of question one simply had to answer or look the arrant fool.
So this was Westfall who stood before her. Her steward's creature. She wondered idly how much the old slyboots had extorted from the man. All the traffic would allow, she reckoned. Giving herself over to her years of inculcation, the right words marched out of her mouth in lockstep order.
"Gramercies, kind Sir. In thinking on my sorely missed father, you do me honour. Much as I do deeply regret my father's passing, perforce I am constrained to resign myself to the fact, and trust in God's mercy."
"I am in your debt, Sir, for these kindly representations. With all my heart, I affirm and commend your sentiments. Indeed, mutual assistance is the very axletree round which the heavens gyre."
"You do me honour "
''You do me honour."
All the while she was answering Sir John's ludicrous overtures, Lady Grace also overheard what Thomas was saying, for life at court had taught her how to attend to two conversations at
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once. Extraordinary, she thought Exiled in the far provinces, he had nevertheless learned to sound just like the wits of court. The resemblance was uncanny : the wordplay, the contemptuousness, the icy control. But ridicule was a dangerous game. Surely a young man who had learned so well to master his words had learned enough to master his tongue. To know one's limits was the soul of courtly survival. Thankfully, the man was paying Thomas no heed whatsoever, and so she turned her attention again to the Mayor, who had begun, of all things, a lengthy rehearsal of the man's bloodlines, in an apparent effort to plumb precisely the level of consanguinity he shared with Lady Grace.
Lady Grace, ever solicitous of the least of her guests, found herself wracking her brains to answer the Mayor's questions about her relations. With his customary abruptness, "Such flowery adulation," he remarked. "Methinks I spy a preferment-hungry poet."
"A brave poet," said Lady Grace.
But the Mayor's questions redoubled, and various bystanders added their contributions, and, since Thomas seemed to be holding his own, Lady Grace let the Mayor's silliness have her full attention.
Suddenly she saw William Philpott. And William Philpott was no longer by his friend's side.
At the words, "We are undone," she was at court again. All was not well again. The sun did not shine again The sky was not blue again. Hurrying to the head of the crowd, she saw that it had already gone too far. She knew these murderous cavaliers from court. All sweetness and silk and pretty phrases until their dander was up, whereupon they would wade so deep in blood, savages recoiled. Thomas, the bear-baiter, was become the baited. She knew the future. She had seen it too many times She folded her hands, and began to prepare herself.
Indeed, thought Lady Grace, it is true, thou hast had me, Thomas, and well I was thy play-fellow, thy worshiper, thy mother, thy guardian angel. But thou hast got thyself beyond my power to save thee. Eftsoons, I shall be thy gravedigger, and once more watch over thee in thy sleep.
Her heart leaped at a last forlorn hope. Would the man ask her leave? o. Of course not.
The duel was a farce. Were it anonymous clowns cutting capers round the table, she might have laughed. Would that it were. But it was not. There was only one recourse, in such a pass. She must harden her heart. She was at court again. She must harden, harden her heart.
And so, when finally the man said, "I'll have you now, Milady," ''Yes, Milord," she promptly responded, with a smile she had once seen the Queen give in acceding to one of her soon-tobe-former ministers. Laying herself out on a platter, hitching up her underclothes, and spreading her legs like the outstretched wings of a swan, "Be my guest," she thought, as she gave her ravisher the pqx she had caught from the same charwoman as Thomas Smith.
END
Guest Editor Ruth Do wnie's degree in English Literature left her so intimidated that she only took up writing fiction many years later as an antidote to studying double-entry bookkeeping. Since then her work has won several competitions, including the Fay Weldon section of BBC3's "End of Story," and sunk without trace in others. The chapters which won her the Historical ovel Society's first writing competition have since been adapted into a novel, Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls, which was published by Michael Joseph in August 2006. She is currently working on a sequel.
This is what Ruth Downie had to say about "Lady Grace's Revels."
Judging this competition was both a delight and a trial. A delight because each of the finalists convincingly transported me to new - or rather, old - times and places, and a trial because each entry had something different to commend it. In the end I settled on "Lady Grace's Revels" as the overall winner. One of Lady Grace's guests describes the play he is writing as, "'a thing completely new, a thing never seen before, at once comedy, tragedy, history, romance,"' and this captures the tongue-in-cheek approach of the story.
The "period" language in which the disastrous events are narrated is extravagant and frequently very funny. The approach of relating the tale from three viewpoints, with each character adding something new, works very well and of all the entries, this was the most memorable. Congratulations to Theodore Silar for producing an entertaining wmner.
Making the Leap --------.. From Fact to Fiction
Popular Historian ALISON \VEIR
talks to LUCI DA
BYATT
about her first historical noveL
Ali son Weir is a name that will be familiar to many: her nine non-fiction books provide a meticulous analysis of some of the most intriguing figures inmedieval,Tudorand Elizabethan history. Her own trademark style is a densely narrated storyline tightly based on original sources; as one reviewer wrote last year, ''Alison Weir is a one-off. To describe her as a popular historian would be to state a literal truthher chunky explorations of Britain's early modern past sell in the kind of multiples that others can only dream of." 1 Yet, earlier this year, she decided to do the unthinkable for a serious historian and make the leap from fact to fiction I met Alison Weir after she had spoken to a packed audience at the 2006 Edinburgh Book Festival about Innocent Traitor, her first historical novel, and I began by asking her what it was that had prompted her to embark on this uncharted journey into the murky waters of fiction.
Having written her first historical novel as a teenager, Alison said that she always wanted to try her hand at another. Finally, while she was working on Eleanor of Aquitaine, she realised that because much of the work had been done in the 1970s it really only needed "topping up." Given that she had a little spare time, she decided to write a novel "for fun." But she needed to choose a subject that wouldn't be too demanding, and above all wouldn't need any extra research. Moreover, it had to be a subject that would turn into a relatively short book but at the same time be a "gripping tale." "There was no other choice," she added, "it had to be Lady Jane Grey, whose story is very tragic, but also very compelling."
Innocent Traitor is written using an intriguing framework of changing narrators. This is clearly an ideal device for conveying different information and motives, and it adds to the tension of the novel by offering "an opportunity for all perspectives" to be included. Alison confessed to keeping one of her earlier books, Children of England: Heirs of Henry VIII, open beside her as she wrote Innocent Traitor. This suggested the narrators: "Jane couldn't have known about certain aspects and events, and so I had to have different narrators. That's how it came about." Alison originally included sixteen narrators, but eight were edited out, although these parts have been rewritten into the main narrators that are left. In response to the complaint that some readers might find it confusing to distinguish between the minor characters, she replied, "I've read successful historical novels with over twenty narrators. I love the thread of dramatic irony that
runs the book." Then, with a laugh, she added self-deprecatingly, "I've seen it done better by other authors, but I'm a novice."
It is a prohibited luxury for a historian to "get inside" a character's head, making her say and feel things in a way that is completely offlimits for an "academic" historian. "Obviously," Alison continued, "a historian does it at her peril. Often when I'm researching, I wonder how the characters felt. But, as a historian, you have to restrict yourself to real facts, to what you can infer legitimately from what you're reading, so it's liberating to make that leap of the imagination and to be your character." She added, "that's why I like writing in the first person. Although I have to say that my publishers would like to see me cope with the challenge of writing in the third person, in the past tense. So the next book is going to be a mixture: I'm going to be writing about Katherine Howard. There will be preliminary passages to each chapter with her interrogation in the present tense. Then she will go back in the first person, into the past tense to remember what really happened behind that interrogation." She then admitted to another ambition by stating that she's "long wanted to write a time-slip novel." Although she added, "I'd really have to think that through ."
Alison Weir's best-known books have been about women: strong queens like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Isabella (also known as the "She-Wolf of France''), Elizabeth I, and Mary Queen of Scots. I asked her whether she finds it easier to write from a woman's point of view? She admitted that this was much more evident in her earlier work because "There were some female historians at the time, but I wanted to focus on people's personal lives: the minutiae, the details of everyday life, the clothes. I think women readers, in particular, want to find out about this Women have a more particular view of things, men have a broader view." When writing Innocent Traitor, she found that "all the details that I have learnt about over the years are very helpful when writing a novel because they're in your head and you just put them in naturally. I'd spent time reconstructing past worlds and I now had an opportunity to do it very, very colourfully, and it really helps."
However, can't too much detail be a hindrance? Doesn't it drown the story, I asked? ''When my agent saw the first draft of the novel, he commented that the first few pages were just a long spiel about the historical background. 'There's far too much information,' he told me. This should be woven in naturally - into episodes, into conversations. He said, 'Show rather than tell.' This was a completely new concept for me."
Leading on from there, I asked whether there was any area of research specifically required for a historical novel that was new to her? Maybe something that she would not have covered for a history book? Surprisingly, she replied that only one area was obviously new: Jane's visit to the printers where she met Caxton. Otherwise, Alison admitted that the main bulk of the research had already been done. Jane's mind, it is a stark 'all-or-nothing' situation." When writing the
One reviewer of Innocent Traitorpicked up on a couple of anachronistic slips in the dialogue. In her own defence, Alison claims that you can never please everyone. This is language that she has dealt ,vith over the years, and she has immersed herself in it by reading letters, speeches, and plays. You get to know the turns of phrase, but "we'll never know how they spoke." " \'v'hat is clear is that I'm writing for 21 "-century readers. You've got to make the two lots of speech 'meet in the middle' and make it sound accessible to a modern reader. I was horrified to see that a couple of anachronisms had slipped in - they should not have got in there!" Comparing her approach to that used by other authors, she added, "you can go 'very modern' as in Suzannah Dunn's The Q11een ef S11btleties. But, I thought that her novel worked -I got a very real sense of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, more than in most historical novels about them. The language made me wince, but it was the author's deliberate choice. \'v'hatever you do, the language must be real."
One of the problems about choosing such a well-known figure as Lady Jane Grey is that it can be hard to write a fictional account of a story with a well-known ending. I asked Alison how she succeeded in maintaining the suspense and pace of this tragic story, as well as keeping tension and interest in the plot.
''A lot of people know Jane Grey as the ineDay Queen, and they know she was beheaded, but they don't know about the inside story. Also, right up to the end, Jane had a choice - she could have saved her own life, but she chose not to. Her faith wouldn't allow her to, she couldn't compromise. So even though you know the ending, you almost wish you could change it! However," she went on, "in the end, readers don't know how it will be told. Moreover, sometimes a violent ending to a book can itself be an attraction. Look at how many novels are sold about Anne Boleyn and Mary Stuart - there are loads of them. It's a genre that went out of fashion for many years, probably as much as three decades: there was a huge surge of interest in the 1950s and '60s in historical novels centred on wellknown figures, usually queens."
I questioned Alison in particular about the Catholic confessor, Dr Richard Feckenham, who tries to help Jane come to terms with her conscience and with the impasse in which she finds herself while she is imprisoned in the Tower. Is he a real character, I wondered? Alison told me that he was Abbot of Westminster and a remarkable figure, one of the few who showed real compassion for Jane and her predicament. Unfortunately, she added, "the debate in the Tower was edited out, but in that scene Feckenham was the only one who was kind to her and made any attempt to understand her." But, she stressed, the relationship ,vith Feckenham "was another opportunity to demonstrate Jane's 'fundamentalism'. Throughout the novel, I was very conscious of the need to justify Jane's dogmatic stance on religion In other words, why did she decide to make herself a martyr?" In fact, in the closing chapters, it is clear that Jane sincerely believes that she would never meet Feckenham in the Hereafter. "In
novel, Alison was also keen to show that Mary Tudor demonstrated Jane 's mind, it is a stark 'all-or-nothing' situation." When writing the novel, Alison was also keen to show that Mary Tudor demonstrated unusual tolerance: "she was set against killing Jane. But she had no choice but to execute Jane, she was in a corner. It was Jane's father, the Duke of Suffolk, who was the real villain. In fact, the letters written by Jane to him are printed verbatim in the novel."
Alison Weir started writing at the age of fourteen, and her first book was a novel about Anne Boleyn in which each of the twenty chapters was na~rated by a different person. However, as with many teenage novels, it ended up in her bottom drawer, along with several others. She is now planning to write a non-fiction book about Anne Boleyn, based on her seventeen days in the Tower - and, she joked, the novel might reappear in the future Later, Alison went on to write The Six Wives ef Henry VIII in three years in the early '70s, but was "very demoralised when it was rejected in 1974. After that, I didn't finish anything else for a long time." As often happens, work and family took over and writing was relegated to the odd spare moment. However, "when the children went to school I thought, I'm going to have another go." The rest is history, you might say.
A writer of Alison's experience is well placed to comment on the changes that have taken place in both the popular history genre and historical fiction over the years. In particular, she told me how, "in the early days popular non-fiction was not allowed to have notes and references. It was seen as potentially alienating for the readers who were used to reading historical novels. Instead, I had to weave the sources into the text It was horrendous because you wasted so much text. But after Eleanor ef Aq11itaine became a bestseller, I was allowed to include footnotes."
\'v'hen asked about which historical novelists have inspired her, Alison is lyrical in her praise of Hilda Lewis. "She was a great source of inspiration for the narrative - all written in the first person. Her books are among the finest historical novels ever written." I was interested to learn that they are being reprinted by Tempus, thanks to Alison's intervention since she edits one of their "Queens of England" series.
orah Lofts is another writer who inspires. Alison confessed that she has all sixty-three of Lofts' books, adding, "She is absolutely stunning." And, of course, there's Anya Seton. These three authors, she thinks, are "way ahead of any other historical novelist I know, though that's a personal choice." She stresses that "there's a big push towards historical novels at the moment Thank goodness for that! A lot of my author friends are thinking of crossing the divide "
When I asked about some contemporary writers, Alison was less fulsome in her praise : "Tracy Chevalier writes beautifully and I've enjoyed reviewing her books. But sometimes I find them so slow.
Where's the narrative? I feel so overwhelmed by details that I don't get any se n se of her characters as real characters. They feel very shad owy, but that's my ow n personal view. Her descriptive writing is wonderful." Coming back to the genre, Alison emphasises that historical fiction is " und ergoing a renaissance. Publi shers are racing to get historical novels." The genre has been influenced by the modern novel. "Sarah Dun ant writes the most exquisite novels - she
s a istorian, tJOU ave to restrict _yourself to real facts, to what _you can infer legitimatel_y from what _you're reading, so it's liberating to make that leap of the imagination and to be _your character.
- Alison Weir.
really brings a period to life. Although," Alison pointed out, "her second novel (In the Compa,ry of the Courtesan) was over-heavy with descripti on. You find yourself thinking 'get on with the story'. But that 's me -I like a narrative that moves along quite quickly. I don't have the patience to read a lot of description. However, it's a new take on the historical novel."
I am impressed by the work schedule that Alison Weir outlines for the coming months: she is currently writing a non-fiction book on Katherine Swynford, due to be published at Christmas. Thinking back to Anya Seton's famous novel, Alison said that she "is quite amazed at what the research has thrown up. It's very different from Anya Seton's interpretation, in some ways, but in others I'm amazed at h ow Seton arrived at her conclusions. She had extraordinary insighL" Then, of course, there's another novel in the pipeline: this time the heroine will be Katherine Howard, and it's scheduled to be written in the early part of next year.
Having met Alison Weir and h eard her talk about her writing with such passion and enthusiasm, I know the stories of both women are in safe hands.
Notes
1. See the review of Innocent Traitor by Alan Massie, Scotsman, April 1, 2006.
Lucinda Byatt is a 111riter, translator and book revie111er living in Edinburgh. She can be contacted at mail@lucindaf?yatt.com
Red Pencil
CI D Y VALLAR ana!Jzes the 111ork behind polished final manuscripts. In this issue, she profiles JE IFER ROY.
"I11 193 9, the Germans invaded the to111t1 of LodZJ Poland. Thry farced all of the ]e//Jish people to live in a small part of the ci!J called a ghetto. Thry built a barbed-111ire fence around it and posted azi guards to keep everyone inside it. Ti110 hundred and seven!} thousand people lived in the Lodzghetto.
''In 1945, the //Jar ended. The Germans surrendered, and the ghetto 111as liberated. Out of more than a quarter of a million people, on!J about 800 1/Jalked out of the ghetto. Of those 111ho survived, on!J h11elve 111ere children.
''I 111as one of the h11elve. "
Excerpt from inter11ie//J 1/Jith Sylvia Perlmutter, March2003'
T hus begins the prologue of Jennifer Roy's Yello//J Star, a novel for young adults. As a child, Jennifer's aunt lived in Lodz, Poland. Situated approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Warsaw, Lodz was the second largest Jewish community in that country when the azis invaded on 1 September 1939. One week later, they seized control of this city. In February 1940, they erected a barbed-wire fence around a small section of the city and forced all Jews to live there. With an average of 3.5 persons crammed into a single room with no running water and no sewer system, living conditions were horrendous. Older children and adults labored in one of the many textile factories that supported the German war effort. They received meager food rations rather than money. More than 20 percent died under these circumstances. The deportations began in January 1942, and within a fortnight, the azis had shipped about ten thousand people to Chelmno, an extermination camp. After September and until June 1944, deportations became rare occ urr ences. The approach of the Soviet troops, however, prompted Heinrich Himmler to order the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, the last remaining one in Poland. With the exception of a few hundred people retained to work, the remaining J ews were sent to Auschwitz by August 1944. When the Soviets liberated Lodz the following January, only 877 Jews were still alive.
My parents taught me to explore, to enrich my education, to learn what wasn't taught in school. Since the Holocaust wasn't touched on much when I was in high school, I exp lored on my own. When I became a school librarian, I understood why we must never forget and always added books on this tragedy to the collection so others could learn what happened. I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum several times, alone and with students, but two moments remain indelibly engraved in my mind. After I entered the building, I rode an elevator to the top floor of the museum where the story begins. When the doors opened, I saw a photograph, enlarged to fit the entire wall, of dead bodies in one of the death camps. More than anything else, this image brought home the reality of the Holocaust. So did my visit to the museum at night when only members walked
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the halls. The silence was suffocating and the mood, somber. The walls of the railroad car that carried Jews to Auschwitz seemed to close in on me, and standing before the gates of the camp, I felt small and inconsequential as the imagined cries of separated families and barking dogs echoed in my head.
I am not Jewish, nor do I have any relatives who witnessed the Holocaust Or so I thought. One thing I learned in my studies was that many survivors prefer not to speak about what happened. This was true of Jennifer Roy's aunt, Sylvia Perlmutter. As she grew, Jennifer was aware of the Holocaust and knew family members, including her father, survived the ordeal, but they tended to change the subject rather than talk about their experiences. Only later, as Ms. Perlmutter grew older and her memories resurfaced, did she wish to share her experiences so people remember the Holocaust. I understood her reticence to talk about terrible horrors, for my father-in-law never spoke of them either. After he died in 1995, my husband gave me his father's papers to sort through. While reading about his military service during World War II, a word popped out from the records - Dachau.
Begun in March 1933 and in operation until about the time the Americans liberated it in 1945, Dachau was the first regular concentration camp the azis established. Its inmates (political dissidents, Jews, and other non-desirables) were forced to labor for long hours with little food in unsanitary conditions; some underwent torturous medical experimentation. The camp also served as a
training ground for SS guards A lieutenant with the United States Seventh Army Medical Section, my father-in-law worked from late May through July 1945 in Hospital Unit Number One at D achau, ten miles northwest of Munich, Germany. The Americans had liberated the concentration camp on 26 April, and at that time they found more than thirty railroad cars of decomposing bodies. In spite of the aid provided to the survivors, nearly two thousand died from dehydration and dysentery. My father-in-law's memories of the horrors he saw will never be known. Unlike Ms. Perlmutter, he never spoke of them.
When I began reading Yeffow Star, I expected to read a chapter or two before setting the book aside. Instead, I read the book from cover to cover Jennifer Roy brought little Syvia2 to life. I felt what she felt,
saw what she saw, wondered what she wondered, feared what she feared. Jennifer managed this astounding feat through revisions until she found the right voice to tell her aunt's story, and although Yeffow Star reads like nonfiction, it is a novel told in first person free verse. An odd choice, but had she written it in a vein similar to most novels, Syvia's tale wouldn't have captured my attention as it did.
Jennifer's first dilemma was to find her character's voice and decide on which format rendered the most compelling story. She tried third person narrative, the point of view in which many novels are written
Sylvia and her father ran and ran. "Over the wal4 "Papa said, as he lifted Sylvia over the brick 111all that ran along the dirt road "Papa, no!" Sylvia cried But she tumbled over, to the other side, into the graveyard. Ooj! She landed on the hard ground. She 111as too efraid to open her eyes. To see the dead people
"I felt that it was too dry and stiff. The words didn't convey the sheer drama of the moment," Jennifer says. This is due in part to the simp le fact that third person narratives lack intimacy. This voice allows the author to share information with the reader beyond just a single character's point of view, but the narrator is simply a reporter of events.
Using first person provides the reader with greater intimacy because the narrator is a participant rather than just a witness. "[Y]our main character quite literally invites your readers into his or her head and shows them the world through his or her eyes." 3 The drawback of using first person is that the author can only portray what the character knows and nothing else. Jennifer next tried first person narrative:
"Over the wal4" Papa said. He lifted me up, and I tumbled to the other side. Into the graveyard. "Papa, no!" I cried, as I landed on the hard ground. I was too afraid to open my eyes. To see the dead people
Better, but still not what Jennifer wanted. "I wasn't enjoying writing it It wasn't really flowing, I didn't feel attached to the story, to my words." She had taped all the interviews with her aunt, so she "listened again to my aunt's lilting, European-accented voice. Suddenly, the voices of all my Jewish relatives came flooding back to me. American English tinged with Yiddish and Polish, with anxiety and resilience
... When my aunt recounted her childhood to me, she spoke as if looking through a child's eyes She made her experiences feel real, immediate, and urgent."
E s c ap e
Through the hallway, down the staircase, out the front door. Hurry, hurry. Quiet, quiet.
Across the street
to a tall brick wall that separates our neighborhood from an old cemetery Up you go, I'm right behindyou.
First Papa lifts me up and over.
Thud! I land on my hands and knees on hard dirt.
Papa climbs over and jumps to the ground.
This 111ay, this 111ay, Hurry, hurry
Papa picks me up and takes my hand again, and we start running. It is nighttime, but the moon is shining There is just enough light to see the rows of light-colored gravestones.
Papa pulls me along, weaving through the stones until he stops So I stop. We are next to a stone that is a bit taller and wider than most others I've seen.
Papa drops to his knees and pulls something out from behind the stone. A shovel.
"Papa, where how?"
I am out of breath from running Papa puts his finger up to his mouth to say shush, so I am quiet, and I watch Papa thrust the shovel into the soft ground.
The H o le Dig. Dig. Dig. Papa works quickly, scooping and tossing, until there is a shallow hole surrounded by mounds of dirt.
Papa stops digging and looks at me.
"Syvia," he whispers, "get in and lie down." "You will hide here tonight."
Lie do111n in the hole? Alone?
I truly mean to obey my papa
and do it because I always do what Papa says.
I am a good girl. But I am in a cemetery in the dark, and all I can think of are scary things like dead people and Nazis, and instead of lying down in the hole, I scream : "No!No!"
"No! No"
I can't stop screaming.
"Syvia!" Papa rushes over to me and pulls me into his arms My face is pushed into his chest so my screams become muffled. A button presses hard into my cheek, and I can taste the old wool of his coat. I stop yelling and close my mouth.
But my feelings can't be pushed down inside of me anymore after so many months of being brave. I just can't keep quiet.
"I don't want to die, Papa," I sob. "I don't want to die!"
Papa holds me for another minute, And then he says,
"I will hide here with you."
He releases me and picks up the shovel again. Dig. Toss. Dig. Toss.
I stop crying and watch the hole grow longer.
Papa drops the shovel and steps into the hole. Then he lies down in it. "See?" he says. "It's not so bad ."
"It came out as free verse And," Jennifer said, "after I wrote that vignette, I felt the story coming to life. It worked."
Her second dilemma was deciding where to begin Syvia's story. "I wrote first what I considered a 'climatic' moment - the escape to the cemetery. I thought the book would dive right in at this part to grab the reader's attention. But after I wrote the whole graveyard experience in verse, I tucked it away for later. I had gotten my onm attention, pumped myself up to write the book. Then I turned to a fresh page (I write longhand on legal pads!) and began again - at the true beginning." It begins in the fall of 1939.
H ow It B egins
I am four and a half years old, going on five, hiding in my special place behind the armchair in the parlor,
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brushing my doll's hair, listening.
The worry of grown-ups fills the air, Mingling with the lemony smell of the just baked cake cooling on the serving platter. Clink, clink, Mother's teacup trembles on its saucer
"Must we go, Isaac?" she says to my father, who has come home from work unexpectedly, away," Papa says.
interrupting the weekly tea 'We must leave Lodz right "This city is unsafe for Jews."
Stroke, stroke, my hand keeps brushing my doll's hair. My mind freezes on one wordJews.
Jews.
We are Jews.
I am Jewish. We observe the Jewish holidays and keep kosher, but that is all I know. What does it matter that we are Jews? I whisper the question into my doll's ear. She just stares back at me.
Having found the right voice and experimenting with telling the story in free verse, Jennifer turned what began as a dry recounting of her aunt's story into an intimate account of a child's introduction to war and what it really meant to be a Jew during World War II. 'Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully." 4 In doing so, Jennifer discovered the "flow and sound" for which she searched.
You might think this was the end of her dilemmas, but you'd be wrong. She submitted the first half of the novel to a major publisher. "They loved it, but they wanted some changes. Big changes. They thought that it should be rewritten in 'regular' prose with poems sprinkled about to highlight critical events. They said 'verse is so constrictive'." She discussed this with her family and other writers whom she knew. "They were all unanimous - keep the verse, politely decline the publisher! It was hard to turn down an offer, but I wanted the book in verse " Her decision not to alter the story paid off, for the "free verse is what has distinguished Yellow Star from others in its genre, according to starred reviews in Publishers Week_{y, Booklist and Schoof Library Journal." The PW review was the one that first drew me to her book.
Yet, some changes this publisher suggested made sense, so Jennifer made certain that "Sylvia's voice and observations mature[d] as she
did." She also agreed that Papa played "too prominent" a role as the story progressed. In the final version, she focused "on Sylvia and who she was - not just what she reported." When the editor from this first publisher saw the reviews for Yellow Star, she wrote, "[S]ometimes it just takes the right house - congratulations on your success!"
The right publisher was Marshall Cavendish . Her editor, Margery Cuyler, provided some insights that allowed Jennifer to revise once more to fine-tune the story. First, Syvia's minor relatives popped in and out of the· story. She had to clarify for the reader "who
was who and what happened to them " This necessitated additional phone conversations with her aunt
Another suggestion from her editor was the inclusion of prefaces before each section of the story, which is subdivided into time periods. These prefaces orient the reader with what's happening outside of the ghetto and what plans the Allies and Germany were instigating that Syvia's family wouldn't have known about. Adding these elements required additional research, which also allowed Jennifer to include a timeline of important dates during the war at the end of the book.
Something most authors never get to do outside of speaking engagements and interviews is to explain how the book evolved Since this is a historical novel that reads more like nonfiction, and to prevent readers from becoming confused as to whose story was being told, Jennifer added an introduction. 'We were all concerned about a little girl telling such a detailed story, when in truth it was my grown aunt telling me history fifty years after it happened. I didn't want readers confused about how I had 'become' Syvia . So I wrote the Introduction, describing how this book, and my part in it[,] came about. I added my truth to my aunt's truth. And, finally, I wrote an ending- telling what happened after the war and updating the reader on where the characters are today, and how they got there " Both add to the poignancy of the story.
The last revision is minor compared to all the other changes her story went through, but it was no less important. What should the title of this book be? Jennifer had two working titles, Growing Up in the Lodz Ghetto and Syvia} Story: A Childhood in the Lodz Ghetto While both provide a hint as to what the story is about, neither title grabs your attention. If you saw the book on the shelf with either of these titles, you'd most likely skip over it. Margery Cuyler realized this and "red penciled" both. She then called continued on page 45
Jennifer Roy
The Editor's Last Word
B efore she heads out on holiday, a friend often asks me to recommend a historical novel set in the place she's visiting. She wants to learn something about the history of the area she's chosen to spend time in, but claims guidebooks send her to sleep. Obviously a novel will not give her a list of "must-sec" attractions in Buenos Aires, the top ten restaurants in Barcelona or "the three-day tour" of Beijing. But it can give her a flavour of the city, country or region, particularly as it would have been during the period in which the no,·el is set. And the fact is, holiday experiences are frequently framed by history. Even at a get-away-from-it-all resort on the Mayan Riviera, you are coaxed into visiting the ruins at Tulum or Becan. In Wales you can barely drive five miles without encountering a castle, while in India, vestiges of the British colonial period sprawl through every major city.
Until recently, I believed that my friend's method of trip-planning was fairly unique But then a co-worker mentioned an upcomin g trip to Russia and asked me to suggest historical novels set there. She told me that she did read Lonely Planet and Fodor's, but she wanted an "enjoyable" way to discover the history behind the world's largest country.
Her comments prompted me to conduct an informal survey of readers who like to travel far from home - people who are not H S members or otherwise connected to the world of historical fiction What I discovered is that most of tl1ese readers turn to historical fiction to inform tl1em about places they hope to visit. Furthermore, many were inspired to visit certain places after reading historical novels set there.
So can historical novels replace travel guides? Perhaps not. There is of course that all-important factor: tl1e author has never travelled to, say, Imperial Rome or Tokugawa Japan - except in their imagination. And no matter how exhaustive tl1eir research, the novel, including its setting, remains their invention. But if done weU - and as devoted historical fiction readers we know that "well" is a term that defies definition -a historical novel can provide context for a traveller when they happen upon a fortress or alley or beach where some notable event has reportedly taken place.
I haven't been persuaded to give up my guidebooks - not yet. But when I recently finished Sarah Dunant's In the Compa,ry of the CoHrlesan, I reaUy did feel the urge to plan a trip to Venice. And earlier this year, when I perused my "to-be-read" shelf, I selected Margaret Drabblc's The Red Queen because I had just booked a flight to Seoul. As it happened, this novel was the reason I ended up walking the entire circuit of Suwon's world heritage fortress, l lwaseong. I was fascinated by how Drabble's protagonist, Babs, went there as she sought to learn more about the crown princess. \'v'ho knows, if not for Drabble's novel, my choices while in South Korea could have been markedly different, and my experiences less memorable as a result.
ln this issue of Solander, we've tried to give you a taste of other places, whether it's the Early America of Mary Sharratt's living history museums or the Istanbul of Jason Goodwin's engaging detective, Yashim, the Florence of Carla Passino's fictional Isabella or tl1c death camps in Cindy Vallar's analysis of Jennifer Roy's Ye//01v Star. A recent article by travel writer Daniel Wood on the dearth of terra incognita was promoted with the cover headline "What's Left to Explore?" (UYeshvorld, Fall 2006). In the world of historical fiction, everything!
co11ti11ued fro111 page 44
Jennifer and asked, "What do you think of the title 1e/!0J1J Star?" 5 Jennifer's response? "Perfect."
Jennifer is a former teacher of gifted-and-talented students and children with special needs She has written more than thirty books for children and young adults, but ) el/011 1 Star, a 2006 Boston GlobeHorn Book 6 honor book, is her first historical novel. Currently, she resides in upper ew York with her husband and son. She enjoys reading, playing piano, and scrapbooking. You can learn more about Jennifer and her books by visiting her website: www.jenniferroy. com.
Not es
1. Jennifer Ro y, } el/ow Star (Tarrytown, Y: Marsh all Cavendish, 2006), page not numbered.
2. Syh-ia Perlmutter was called Syvia as a child. Jennifer chose this nickname for her character.
3. Renni Browne and Dave King, Selfeditingfor r"iction l/1/1ite1:r ew York: HarperCollins, 1993), 30.
4. J\Iichael Seidman, Fiction: The Art and Craft ef lf"nti,(g and Ce1ti1ze, Published (Los Angeles: Pomegranate Press, 1999), 169.
5. For those readers who aren't familiar with the ye llow star, the Christian Church first instituted its use in the 13 th century co identify and isolate Jew s. The Nazis first required Jews co wear an arm band with the Star of David in December 1939. This later was changed co the yellow scar with Jude, the German word for Jew, inscribed on it. Jews, however, weren't the only group of people the azis singled out in this way. Political dissidents wore red; common criminals, green; Jehovah's Witnesses , purple; immi gra nts , blue; Roma (gypsies), brown; lesbians and "anti-socials," black; and homosexuals, pink.
6. The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award is presented annually in three categories for excellence in children's literature.
Ci114>, I Ta/lar is a freelance editor, an associate editor far Solandcr, and the Editor of Pirates and Privateers (1/J/v1v.cinrfyvalla1:cot11/pirales.ht111!). A retired libra1ia11, she also 1mites historical 1101 1els, teaches JJJorkshops, and reiiieu 1s books.
