Author Archives: natalie

Et in Stoppard’s Arcadia Ego

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I recently had the thoroughly enjoyable experience of seeing the current Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, and I would encourage everyone who can to go and do likewise.

There are so many different things going on in this brilliant play that everyone who sees it is likely to latch onto something different (and I would highly recommend reading the play beforehand so that you have a better chance of following all the various strands). No doubt a physicist or a mathematician would be entranced by the scientific angles in the play. But as someone who has spent a fair amount of time parsing fragmentary 200-year-old documents and trying to reconstruct from them what actually happened in the past, the aspect of the play that really grabbed me was the historiographical one: two characters who are 20th-century historians tangling over just what happened at an English country estate in the early 1800’s. (I say “20th-century” simply because the play was written in 1993, but of course they could just as easily be 21st-century historians–the study of history hasn’t changed significantly in the last 18 years, and perhaps it never will.)

Stoppard’s conceit is that the play alternates between two time periods: 1809 and a few years later, on the one hand; and the present (more or less), when descendants of the estate’s 19th-century inhabitants still live in the house and are hosting the two historians who are doing their research there. The audience is in the privileged position of seeing both what really happened in 1809, and what the historians think happened–rightly or wrongly.

It’s a delicious position to be in, and one that reveals the human psychology at work behind historical endeavor. We all want answers, we want certainty–or as close to certainty as we can get. And so, presented with bits and pieces of information, we construct a story that makes sense to us–a story that often requires making certain assumptions.

One of the historians, Bernard, decides that the subject of his own expertise–Lord Byron–must have been a guest at the house in 1809. After all, he lived not far away, and he was a schoolfellow and (presumably) friend of the resident tutor there, Septimus Hodge. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Well, yes–and he turns out to be correct on those points.

But Bernard goes on to deduce that while staying at the house, Byron fought a duel with another guest there–a minor poet whose work he had (presumably) savaged in print and whose wife he had (presumably) seduced. And that leads him to another deduction: in the duel Byron murdered the poet, who is not heard from thereafter, and had to flee the country. This story provides a convenient explanation for Byron’s otherwise puzzling voyage to Lisbon that year, at a time when Europe was ravaged by war and travel was risky.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Well, yes–and it also makes headlines and gets Bernard on the morning TV talk shows. The only problem is–as the audience knows and as the other historian in the play maintains–Bernard gets this part of the story all wrong.

In the play, Bernard later comes across evidence that disproves the central element of his theory, the murder, much to his dismay. But in reality–as anyone who has worked extensively with primary historical sources knows–these kinds of mistakes often get perpetuated for generations in secondary sources.

To offer a minor example, in the course of researching my novel A More Obedient Wife, I read what was then (and, I think, now) the leading biography of one of the historical figures I was writing about, James Wilson, an early Supreme Court Justice. According to this biography, shortly after Wilson married his second wife he freed a slave he owned. The author also mentioned in passing, without any citation, that this second wife was a Quaker and had undoubtedly urged her new husband to free the slave, in keeping with her abolitionist views.

A good story, I thought. And it makes sense, right? But as they used to say during the Cold War, “trust, but verify.” I managed to find the document granting the slave his freedom, dated shortly after the marriage, so that checked out. But nowhere, in any primary source, could I find any evidence that the second wife was a Quaker, or that she had anything to do with freeing the slave. And I’m pretty sure I found every primary source relating to the second wife, Hannah Gray Wilson, who was one of my two main characters.

What I did find, however, were repetitions of the assertion that she was a Quaker in at least two later secondary sources. Which is understandable. After all, we’re conditioned to believe what reputable historians say, especially if it seems to make sense. (Although I have to admit that this particular biography, written in the mid-1950’s, raised all sorts of red flags for me despite its iconic status. The author–Charles Page Smith–kept putting in details like, “As he read the letter, his glasses began to slip slowly down his nose.” Oh yeah, I wanted to say? How do you know?)

Okay, so sometimes historians get it wrong. Does that mean they should just throw up their hands and give up? Consign certain things to the dustbin of history that’s labeled “Unknowable”? Well, they should at least exercise caution–as the more skeptical historian in the play, Hannah, keeps urging (at least when it’s her competitor who’s the one jumping to conclusions). But as Hannah herself says, it’s the search for answers–not its ultimate success or failure–that’s important. “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter,” she says. “Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.”

Of course, there’s another way to come up with an answer, of sorts–one that accepts the unknowability of the past and just keeps going. I’m talking, of course, about historical fiction, which can provide the satisfaction of a “good story” without distorting (consciously or unconsciously) the historical record.

I decided, for example, that I really liked the idea that James Wilson freed his slave because of pressure from his new wife. It made sense, and it fit in with the story I was weaving. But the idea that she was a Quaker–even aside from the absence of proof–just didn’t make any sense to me. She was from a fairly elite family in Boston, a stronghold of Congregationalism, and I even have a reference to the church her family attended. (It was called “Dr. Thatcher’s Meeting,” after the name of the pastor. Actually, this may have been where Smith got the idea that she was a Quaker–today we use “meeting” to refer to Quaker congregations. But in 18th-century New England, the term was used to refer to Congregationalist churches as well.) So I made her an abolitionist, but not a Quaker.

So historical fiction has its uses, and its satisfactions. But it’s no substitute for straight-ahead, just-the-facts-ma’am history. When I put on my historian hat, I try to rein in my imagination and retain a healthy skepticism. As Arcadia shows us so wittily, it’s not always easy–and maybe it’s not always possible. Sometimes I may be more like Bernard than I’d like to admit. But the sad truth is that there are some gaps in the historical record that only fiction–clearly labeled as such–can fill.

History and Literature

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Note: This blog post was originally posted under the date February 17, 2011, which is the day I started writing it. I saved it as a draft that day and didn’t finish and publish it until some weeks later. I assumed it would go up as a new post on the day I published it, but I just realized that it didn’t — it was buried among older posts. So I’m putting it up as a new post in case anyone missed it the first time around!

There’s a certain kind of person who gets all starry-eyed when you say the name “E.P. Thompson,” or utter the title The Making of the English Working Class.

That kind of person would be me (I’ve met a few others). For those who have not been anointed into this cult, E.P. Thompson was a British historian, and his magnum opus was published in the sixties. When I came across it in 1977 or so, as a sophomore in college, I had never been so bowled over by a book before–at least, a nonfiction book. I suppose it’s fair to say the book changed my life: I decided I wanted to BE E.P. Thompson. After I graduated from college, I got a fellowship to study in England, with the intention of stalking my idol and becoming his protege.

I was informed, however, that the university where he taught–Warwick–was in a less than appealing location, and also that he had basically retired from teaching. So I ended up at the University of Sussex, charmingly situated near the seaside resort of Brighton, studying with a disciple of his (a woman who had also made the journey to the U.K. from the U.S. to study at the feet of the master, and who had never left).

What was it about the man, and the book, that I found so captivating? I suppose it was Thompson’s marriage of academics and the armchair socialism that I was then prone to: instead of writing a history of the elites, which is what so much of history is inevitably about, Thompson focused on what used to be called the lower orders of society: the mechanics, the artisans, the workers. In a deservedly much-quoted phrase, he said he wrote to rescue these people “from the enormous condescension of posterity.”

The difficulty with writing about such people as individuals–as thinking, feeling beings rather than statistics–is that they didn’t leave much behind in the way of a paper trail. They didn’t keep diaries (or if they did, the diaries generally weren’t preserved), they didn’t publish memoirs, they didn’t make headlines. But Thompson was able to unearth and mine what they did leave behind: broadsides, pamphlets, hymns. As I recall (and I haven’t read the book in many years), he used the techniques of literary criticism to penetrate the opacity of these sources, extrapolating from their choice of words and tropes to reconstruct their lives, their hopes and dreams and frustrations. For someone who was majoring in English History and Literature, it was perhaps the perfect textbook.

I didn’t end up becoming E.P. Thompson, as it happens. But I never lost my interest in trying to reconstruct the lives of ordinary people who inhabited the past. And somehow, at long last, I’m getting a chance to do it, through the medium of fiction. For the novel I’m currently working on, which is set in early 19th-century Baltimore, I’m in the process of inventing a character who is a member of the working class of that era (if it’s not an anachronism to use that phrase to describe a stratum of an essentially pre-industrial society).

My task has been made much easier by the existence of a book that, if it hadn’t existed, I would have been tempted to commission: Scraping By, by Seth Rockman. It’s an exploration, as the subtitle tells us, of “Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore.” A veritable gold mine! And, as Rockman politely implies in his introduction, his task is even harder than Thompson’s. Thompson focused on the artisan class–the skilled workers–who were generally educated enough to leave at least some written records behind. But, as Rockman points out, this was really the cream of the working class. The majority of workers were unskilled and largely unschooled. And, generally speaking, too worn down by the arduous process of trying merely to survive–“scraping by” in Rockman’s phrase–to even attempt the efforts at self-organization and resistance that Thompson chronicled.

So Rockman has to rely on documents like almshouse rolls and jailhouse records to reconstruct the lives he’s writing about. I found the book fascinating, but inevitably, there are huge gaps in the historical record. Occasionally a few tantalizing details of an individual life pop up, but most of it remains submerged, mysterious as the underside of an iceberg. And of course, the actual voices of these long-dead ordinary people, so vital to Thompson’s approach, are almost entirely lost.

That’s where fiction comes in–or at least I hope it will. In my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, I tried to give voice, through the medium of my imagination, to two obscure women of the 1790’s whose lives, as best I could reconstruct them, were fascinating and dramatic. But of course, in that case I had letters–to, from, and about them–to serve as my guide to who these women might have been. And in the novel I’m currently working on, one of my characters (again based on a real, if obscure, historical figure) left behind not only some letters but an entire year of a magazine she edited and largely wrote. Her voice resounds quite clearly across the centuries.

It’s the other main character in this novel-in-progress who I intend to draw from the ranks of the working class. Her experiences and her personality will be influenced by what I’ve read in Rockman and other sources–particularly Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty, which focuses to a large extent on the early 19th-century tension between elitism and democracy. This character, who I’m calling Margaret, will exemplify the nascent trend towards what became Jacksonian democracy: a servant who rejects that label in favor of “the help,” thought to be less demeaning, and for similar reason chooses to call her employer “boss” instead of master or mistress. She’ll have had some experience of the almshouse, and she’ll have chosen domestic service because her other alternatives–either “slop work” (low-paying piecework in the garment trade) or prostitution–were so unappealing.

But her voice will be my own invention–and so far I’m having a great time inventing it. Margaret herself never existed, of course, but surely many people like her did. And maybe at last, after two centuries, some of them will be speaking through her– or rather, through me. I guess I haven’t exactly turned into E.P. Thompson, but I feel that I’m trying to do through the medium of fiction part of what he accomplished as a historian. And I like to think that he’d approve.

To Outline or Not to Outline

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I’m at that juncture in writing a novel when I’d much rather write a blog post. (Some writers would probably point out that one is liable to meet with many such junctures in the course of writing a novel. They would be right.)

No doubt it would be better to resist this impulse and just force myself to stare at my computer for the time I’m now spending on this blog post, but I thought if I described where I’m at it might conceivably be of interest to others, writers and readers both. And it might even help me figure out what to do next with the novel.

Here’s where I’m at: after several years of research and two abortive drafts of perhaps 50 pages each, I’ve now started another draft, and I have about 20 pages. I feel that I’ve finally figured out my focus in terms of voice and time span and characters, and I have a general sense of what’s going to happen. The question is, do I now try to outline, in somewhat more detail, a plot?

I don’t really know what most other writers do about this, but I suspect it varies. I’ve certainly heard writers say that they just start with a situation or a character and see where the writing takes them. I would guess that this is the more “literary” approach. But I did just browse through an article about plot in an issue of Writer’s Digest that said something like, “It’s a good idea to sketch out as much of the plot as possible in advance. I always like to know where I’m going. Don’t you?”

Well, yes, actually. Generally speaking, I like to plan things ahead of time. In fact, this has been a point of contention for many years between my husband and myself. He’s a big proponent of what he terms “spontaneity,” particularly with regard to family vacations, and he thinks my insistence on having, say, hotel reservations and a general itinerary is micromanaging to the point of joylessness. Years ago I told him: fine, you can have one night of “spontaneity.” This led to a situation where we arrived at a ramshackle, haunted-looking “bed and breakfast” in some godforsaken town in upstate New York, where we appeared to be the only guests, and where our kids (then about seven and ten) flatly refused to spend the night.

But that, of course, is beside the point. The point is that I do like to plan ahead in most areas of my life. Why not when I’m writing a novel?

Maybe because I’d like to think I’m too “literary” for that sort of thing–that my characters will come alive and simply take over, as writers are wont to claim their characters do. Unfortunately, my characters show that kind of initiative only rarely. Instead, what often happens is that I get to the end of a scene or a chapter and I have little or no idea what to do with them next. Eventually I think of something, but I can’t help wondering if there isn’t some better way to go about this.

With my first novel–which was in many ways a learning experience–after I thought I was done writing I ended up cutting about 200 pages, mostly from the beginning, on the advice of a publishing-industry professional who said the story started too slowly. With my second novel–also in many ways a learning experience–I was told by another publishing-industry professional, after I thought I was done, that I didn’t have a plot. While I think that was something of an exaggeration, I did end up shoehorning another plot into the novel (no mean feat, let me tell you). Both of these changes made the novels better, but it would have been a lot easier if I’d been able to just write them that way the first time around.

The problem, of course, is that difficult as it is to write a novel without a plot outline, in some ways it’s even more difficult to come up with the outline. An unfleshed-out plot can seem ridiculous and mechanical: first she does this, and then she does that, and then she realizes something else. It’s enough to make you lose faith in your own endeavor. Plus, all that stuff that makes the plot (one hopes) seem less ridiculous–dialogue, nuance, perceptions–sometimes leads to an unexpected twist. Even if the characters don’t exactly take over, on occasion you realize something as a result of having written a scene that causes you to rethink your plan: now that she’s said or done X, she would never go on to do Y.

On the other hand, that’s no reason not to try. There aren’t any plot police roaming around who will force you to stick to your outline–just as, if you pass some intriguing and unanticipated roadside attraction on a family vacation, no one will actually prevent you from stopping. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a hotel reservation for that evening. And if the roadside attraction is really intriguing, you can always change the reservation.

Actually, I’ve already done some planning. Earlier this week I banged out a seven- or eight-page summary of the plot. It was helpful, but at the same time discouraging. There’s a lot I have to work out in terms of what happens when, and who does what to whom. And given that I’m working with some real people and real events, it can get pretty complicated.

So I just dug out an old artifact that I used to help me with my first novel, also based on the lives of historical figures: it’s a huge roll of paper I bought when my kids were little, because I read in some catalogue it would be perfect for art projects calling for … well, huge pieces of paper. My kids made a banner or two, but never used it much. Then, when I was writing A More Obedient Wife–a novel that was based on the lives of four real people and spanned a period of about eight years–I unrolled a length of it and turned it into a time line.

In that case, I ended up putting way too much information on it, but it was better than nothing. I’m hoping that this time I can be more disciplined. Now that I have a sense of what real events, and what people, are important to my story (which only covers about one year instead of eight), maybe I won’t throw in everything but the kitchen sink. And I’m focusing on one historical figure rather than four.

Of course, I’ll still be left with my other main character–a fictional one. What will I do about her? I’ll save that for another blog post. After all, there’s bound to be another point, soon, when I’d rather write a blog post than a novel.

The Beauty of Xiaohe

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The other day I traveled to Philadelphia to see an exhibition that the Washington Post has described as “one of the hottest tickets on the East Coast.”

Hot it may be, but I have to admit that some of the artifacts I saw on display gave me the chills. The exhibit, which is at the Penn Museum, is called “Secrets of the Silk Road.” And what’s chilling about it is that it includes a number of extremely ancient things that really have no business being around anymore: textiles, foods like pastries and wontons, even a couple of amazingly well preserved dead bodies–all of them thousands of years old.

The main attraction is a mummy–one that was, unlike the deliberately embalmed Egyptian variety, naturally preserved by the dry climate of western China–that has been dubbed “the Beauty of Xiaohe,” and that dates from between 1800 and 15oo B.C.E. Again, unlike Egyptian mummies, she isn’t wrapped up in material that conceals her face and skin from view. She’s wearing what was presumably the latest fashion in what we now call the Tarim Basin in about 1500 B.C. E–furry booties, a pointed felt hat, and (we’re told) a “string skirt” under the blanket she’s wrapped in.

She’s basically just lying there, almost as though she’s taking a 4000-year nap, albeit in a glass case. Her eyes are gone, but her eyelashes are still there, and quite lush. She has an adorable little pointed nose (as the Post points out, the kind of nose Michael Jackson spent his life pursuing) and prominent cheekbones (perhaps a bit more prominent now than when she was first buried), and an abundance of auburn hair that cascades around her shoulders. She is, or was, indeed a beauty, and it’s hard to take your eyes off her. But to me there’s something disturbing and frustrating about her as well, and about many of the other objects of daily life in the exhibit.

The Post review of the exhibit, which ran the day before I saw it, made an intriguing point about the “dichotomy between narrative history (which is obsessively interested in authority figures, emperors, kings, generals and the like) and the history of ordinary people (who strive for survival and, if they’re lucky, dignity).” I’m primarily interested in the latter–that’s what draws me to historical fiction, which allows you to get at lives that are otherwise opaque–and I looked forward to seeing an exhibit that focused on it. (The New York Times has also run a piece on the exhibit, which is surely the biggest thing to hit the Penn Museum in quite some time.)

But, as the Post article also pointed out, the fact is nobody really knows much about the people whose artifacts, and in a couple of cases bodies (there’s also a mummified infant), are on display. In fact, it’s all pretty confusing: a lot of different people apparently passed through this area, leaving traces of themselves behind, over the course of thousands of years. The signs accompanying the artifacts do the best they can with the little information available, but often they’re reduced to simply describing the object you’re looking at without giving you much in the way of context or background information. (Of course, sometimes the information wasn’t all that obvious: apparently the tall wooden objects situated at the graves where the Beauty of Xiaohe was found were phallic symbols, for the graves of females, and vulvas, for the graves of men. To me they looked more like oars and wooden renditions of those primitive stone faces on Easter Island, but what do I know.)

As the Post writer observed, the challenge of this exhibit is to get us to care about people to whom we can attach no names and no stories–in contrast to an exhibit about, say, Thomas Jefferson, or even Cleopatra. I did want to care, but I have to admit it would have been easier had there been more of a “narrative” available–something the Post article dismisses as a “now-cliched crutch” in the context of museum exhibits.

Cliched or not, it’s a crutch that seems to work, at least for me. Amazing as it is to see a 4000-year old woman, complete with eyelashes and hair, she doesn’t really come alive, as it were, unless you know something of her story.

And I guess that’s why the historical figures I write about–even the ones whose appearance remains a mystery to me–seem far more real to me than the Beauty of Xiaohe. I can always imagine what their eyelashes looked like, or their hair. But without some facts about their lives, and without the letters that have preserved their voices, I would never be able to imagine them.

The Oscars and the Truth

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As the Academy Awards approach–they’re now only a breathtaking few hours away–it’s interesting to consider that four of the ten nominees for best picture are, as they like to say, “based on a true story.”

Or are they? Two of them–The Fighter and 127 Hours–are presumably pretty accurate, or at least pretty close to the way the central characters’ remember the experience, since we see the real people on whose experiences the stories are based on screen at the end of the movie.

But the other two–The Social Network and The King’s Speech–appear to have taken some liberties with the truth. In today’s Washington Post, film historian Jeanine Basinger dismisses what she acknowledges to be historical inaccuracies in The King’s Speech as “nitpicks.” What difference does it make if films get the historical facts wrong, she asks, as long as the end result is a good movie?

Okay, let’s go through the inaccuracies she lists. Colin Firth is taller and more handsome than King George VI. Okay, fine–that’s Hollywood. Winston Churchill wasn’t as fat as the actor who portrayed him. No big deal. The King didn’t actually stammer that badly. Hmm, well, that’s a pretty central element of the plot, but exaggeration in the pursuit of a good story is a minor sin. And Churchill didn’t really think it was necessary for Edward VIII to abdicate before marrying Wallis Simpson. Whoa. That seems like a pretty big nit to me. In fact, that seems like a distortion of the historical record. And was it really necessary to change that fact in order to make a good movie?

The Social Network, from what I’ve read, is even worse in terms of hewing to the truth. For instance, according to the movie, Mark Zuckerberg’s motive for inventing Facebook was to impress and/or avenge himself on a girlfriend who had dumped him. But in fact, Zuckerberg still has the same girlfriend he had at the time he started what became Facebook. Beyond that, the movie portrays Zuckerberg as a socially inept, social-climbing, obnoxious, opportunistic (albeit smart) nerd. Given that they changed the girlfriend thing, I don’t have too much confidence in the rest of the portrayal. And yet Zuckerberg, who isn’t even thirty yet, will have to spend the rest of his life living in the shadow of a fictional portrayal that I would bet the vast majority of moviegoers accept as the gospel truth.

Don’t get me wrong–I enjoyed and admired both of these movies. But I have to admit that when I learned about their cavalier attitude towards the truth I felt a little uneasy. Kind of the way I’ve felt about books that purport to be “true” but turn out to be largely, or entirely, fiction. If that sort of thing bothers people–and given the furor surrounding the revelation that James Frey’s “memoir” a few years ago was more like a novel, that sort of thing does bother people–why shouldn’t it bother them when the medium is a movie?

Maybe some people will say that it doesn’t really matter what Churchill thought about Edward VIII’s abdication, or that Mark Zuckerberg has enough money that he shouldn’t care how he’s portrayed in a movie. I happen to disagree with both those observations, but the question is, where do we draw the line? And who gets to decide? Do we really want our understanding of history, or of the characters of real people, to be determined by movie studio moguls whose primary concern is “telling a good story”? I’m pretty familiar with the story of someone named Betsy Bonaparte, a 19th-century celebrity who married–and then was abandoned by–Napoleon’s youngest brother. Back in the early days of Hollywood, two movies were made “based on” her life. In both of them, her errant husband returns to her. That may make a better story in the eyes of screenwriters (or at least it did then), but it’s about as far from the truth as you can get.

The thing is, stories get a boost from their association with reality–which is why that “based on a true story” label gets slapped onto whatever seems to qualify. We get a little added frisson from the idea that “this really happened.” But are movie-makers–or writers–entitled to take advantage of that frisson when they’ve rearranged the facts? Yes, it’s true that real events don’t always naturally fall into a convenient narrative arc, and that people don’t always behave quite the way fictional conventions would dictate. But that, it seems to me, is part of the challenge of writing about real people: you need to make sense of them and their lives, not just convert them into characters who follow the path that you’d like them to.

This may sound strange coming from someone who has written a novel–A More Obedient Wife–based on the lives of real people. But I chose to write about people who lived so long ago, and who were sufficiently obscure, that I didn’t have to alter the historical record to come up with a decent plot. All I had to do was fill in the many gaps in the record with my imagination. (Okay, I did eliminate a few of the many siblings a couple of my characters had, but given that so few people have heard of these historical figures, let alone the siblings I killed off, I don’t really see that as a major problem.)

I’ve heard other authors of historical novels make a similar point. Even if they write about well known historical personages, they often choose to write about parts of their lives that are cloaked in obscurity. Otherwise there’s nothing to play with.

There’s another way to write about, or portray, real people without confronting this dilemma: make them relatively minor characters and embed them in what is clearly a fictional narrative. A case in point is the current Masterpiece Theatre presentation, Any Human Heart (which, alas, conflicts with the Academy Awards tonight). Its central character, a sort of British upper-class Zelig figure named Logan Mountstuart, interacts with a delicious array of real personages from the 20th century–Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming, and a corrupt and vengeful Duke and Duchess of Windsor. We get that added frisson that comes from watching “a true story,” or at least a story peopled with real individuals, but at the same time we retain our awareness that what we’re watching is fiction.

All that having been said, I’ll be perfectly happy if either The King’s Speech or The Social Network wins the Oscar for best picture, because both of them were terrific movies. I just wish that when Hollywood powers-that-be are looking for a good story, they would either find a true one that doesn’t require tampering with significant facts, or else come up with something that’s NOT “based on a true story.” After all, although it’s probably true that the number of basic plots available to mankind is finite, the number of variations on those plots is pretty much unlimited. You just have to use your imagination.

Ablene and Aibileen

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In a stunningly ironic development, this morning’s papers bring the news that the author of the best-selling novel The Help is being sued by a maid in Jackson, Mississippi, for allegedly using her name and physical description without permission.

Why so ironic? As those who’ve read The Help know, its plot hinges on the publication of a book that is a thinly disguised portrait of a group of middle-class white women in Jackson as seen through the eyes of their black maids. Much of the tension in the novel comes from wondering whether those white women will recognize themselves in the book, and what action they’ll take if they do. Only–this being the South in the early sixties–the maids who have told their stories are worried more about lynchings than lawsuits.

Ablene Cooper, the maid who is suing author Kathryn Stockett for supposedly portraying her in The Help, is seriously misguided for a number of reasons. Yes, there’s a similarity in names (the character in the book is named Aibileen, which is apparently how “Ablene” is pronounced) and appearance (both Ablene and Aibileen sport a gold tooth). And both have a son who has died. But Aibeleen’s story is not Ablene’s, nor could it be. For one thing, Aibeleen’s experience takes place fifty years ago, when Ms. Cooper (who is 60) was a child. For Ms. Cooper to argue that she is somehow “embarrassed” by the racial insults suffered by the fictional Aibileen in the early sixties is so convoluted as to boggle the mind.

One problem is that the book’s Aibileen is such a sympathetic, admirable character–unlike most of the white women portrayed in the book-within-the-book–that it’s hard to see how the real Ablene can credibly claim to have suffered any injury. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of Ms. Cooper’s claims is that the Aibileen character speaks in a “thick ethnic vernacular,” which embarrassed Ms. Cooper because she herself doesn’t speak like that. Ms. Cooper herself undercut that claim somewhat when she told the New York Times, “Ain’t too many Ablenes.”

Aside from the vernacular, she has a point. No matter how admirable the character she invented is, Ms. Stockett would have been wise to choose another name. (She apparently knows Ms. Cooper, who works for her brother and sister-in-law, only slightly; the real-life maid Ms. Stockett based the character on, and who was her family’s own maid when she was a child, was named Demetrie.) A writing teacher once advised me to change as many details as possible when a fictional character is modeled on a real person: if the real person is tall, make the character short; if the real person has blonde hair, make it brown; and so on. Surely it would have been easy to come up with some other name. But Stockett probably just started writing the book using the name Aibileen, and then the character and the name became inseparable. I know how that is.

But let’s leave all that to one side. The basic, and most obvious, point to make here–and the one Ms. Cooper has apparently failed to grasp–is that Aibileen is a fictional creation. That’s one essential difference between The Help, which is a novel, and the book-within-the-book about white women in Jackson, which was nonfiction (albeit with disguised names). Even if Aibileen were a lot closer to the real Ablene, Ms. Cooper would–or at least should–face a high bar in prevailing in court.

The fact is, ALL fictional characters are modeled on real people, to a greater or lesser extent. Even if an author doesn’t have an actual person in mind, he or she is probably borrowing various attributes of a character from different real people. And even if that’s not true, it’s likely that a fictional character, if done well, will at least remind some readers of an actual person. Should that person be able to sue? Clearly not. And where, exactly, do you draw the line?

But people can be quick to take offense, or at least to see the opportunity to make some money off a best-selling book. That’s why, if you’re going to write fiction based on the lives of real people, it’s a lot safer to choose people who are dead–preferably long dead. That’s what I did in my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, and that’s what I’m doing in the one I’m working on now. Not only are they themselves unable to sue, their descendants tend to be flattered rather than offended by an author’s imaginative riffs.

I confess to having some trepidation on this score about the novel that’s with my agent now. Its setting is contemporary, and let’s just say there are a few people who might think they recognize themselves in it if it should ever get published. But in that unlikely eventuality, I hope they’ll understand that the characters in the novel are no more “them” than the protagonist is “me”–and also that, in a way, ALL of them are me. They’re all bits and pieces of me and other real people and things that just came into my head. In other words, they’re fictional.

But who knows? A few weeks ago there was a chilling essay in the New York Times Book Review that told the tale of an unstable man who was convinced that a 1909 novel was a thinly veiled attack on his family, the Goldsboroughs of Maryland. He didn’t just sue. He stalked the novelist who wrote it, David Graham Phillips, and shot him six times near his home on Gramercy Park. After the shooting, when Phillips was asked whether he had in fact based the novel on Goldsborough’s family, he responded, “No, I don’t know the man.” They were, perhaps, his last words.

So if my novel doesn’t get published, I can at least console myself with the thought that I won’t have to worry about armed stalkers. Unless they’re zombies, risen from the dead. Now THERE’s a plot that would probably make the editors at major publishing houses sit up and take notice. Maybe I should give it a whirl.

Celebutantes of the 19th Century

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I recently went to a fascinating lecture about the Caton sisters.

Who, I hear you ask? Is that like the Kardashian sisters? Well, yes, kind of.

The Caton sisters were beautiful and wealthy, and basically famous for being famous. They were, if you will, the celebutantes of their time. But–given that their time was the early 19th century–they were way more discreet. And their parents–unlike the parents of Kim, Kourtney, and Khloe–weren’t into alliteration. The Caton girls were named, rather boringly, Mary Ann, Elizabeth (or Betsey), and Louisa. (There was also a fourth one–Emily–but she never made it as a celebutante.)

Before I went to the lecture, almost everything I knew about the Caton sisters was filtered through the letters of the two women I’ve been researching for the past few years, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte and Eliza Anderson Godefroy. All five women grew up in the same elite social circle in late 18th- and early 19th-century Baltimore.

I knew enough to discount much of what Betsy Bonaparte said. Not only did she have a phenomenally venomous tongue, but she clearly saw the Caton girls as her rivals for the title of Belle of Baltimore. Beautiful and wealthy herself, Betsy was the first Baltimore girl to snare a royal title–well, sort of. She married Napoleon’s youngest brother in 1803, but her hopes of someday rising to the throne herself (or at least some kind of throne–I imagine a principality would have sufficed) were dashed by Napoleon’s vehement opposition to the marriage, which he had annulled. Imagine Betsy’s anguish when all three of the Caton sisters ended up with titles after marrying into the British aristocracy (including one, Mary Ann, whose first husband had been Betsy’s own brother).

But Betsy’s animosity toward the Catons started even before their famous 1816 trip to England, during which the sisters were feted as “the three Graces.” Shortly before their departure, Betsy was scolded by her friend Eliza Anderson Godefroy for badmouthing Betsey Caton at a New York boarding-house. After swearing Betsy B. to the strictest confidence (for Betsey C. had “charged me not to tell it to you”), Eliza reported the gossip retailed by two gentlemen in New York who were Betsy C.’s “devoted lovers.” According to them, Eliza told Betsy B., “at a public dinner at the Boarding House you abused her in the blackest & most infamous manner, & that they made it a point to tell her to put her on her Guard against you_ I told her I did not believe a word of it & that they must be dirty Fellows indeed who would take such a business upon their hands.”

Eliza pleaded with Betsy B. “not to open her lips” about Betsey C. in the future (so, despite her protestations, she obviously DID believe the report). Perhaps Betsy B. grew more discreet, but her hatred of the sisters continued to burn with a hard, gem-like flame. In her later years, Betsy B. apparently spent many hours going through her voluminous correspondence and annotating it, just for fun. In 1867–fifty years after Eliza wrote her that letter about the New York boarding house–she wrote on the bottom, “From Mrs. Anderson Godefroy about my old Enemies the Catons who hated & injured me in Europe in 1816 & were, out of the Patterson father & sons Robert John Joseph & Edward, the most pernicious foes of my life.” (The Patterson men referred to were Betsy’s own father and brothers, so you get some sense here of what her relationship with her own family was like. But that’s another story.)

I trusted Eliza’s observations a bit more, but she was ambiguous on the subject of the Catons, especially Betsey. In that 1816 letter to Betsy B., Eliza seems to be endorsing her friend’s own dim view of the Caton girl: “No matter what she may be,” she tells Betsy B., “you cannot but injure yourself by speaking of her. .. she will always make herself appear the unresisting victim to your unmerited dislike.”

But maybe Eliza was only saying what she knew Betsy B. would want to hear. Many years later–when Betsey Caton finally snared a titled husband at the age of 45–Eliza reminisced about her with considerably more warmth. “Betsey Caton had more heart and more head than all the rest of the family put together,” she told a correspondent on hearing of the marriage. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the rest of the clan, but still pretty favorable to Betsey.

Right after she says that, though, Eliza goes on to say: “… but nothing so wastes the heart, so deteriorates all elevation of mind, as the system of coquetry she and her sisters were taught to practice almost from their cradles. It has however succeeded perfectly well with them, for the end of life is to obtain the object of our Soul’s ambition, and rank and title was theirs.”

The lecture I went to–which was given by Mary Jeske at the Maryland Historical Society–provided a more complete portrait of these three women. They certainly don’t seem to have been the demons Betsy Bonaparte thought they were. On the other hand, Eliza’s judgment that rank and title were their “Soul’s ambition” may well have been correct (they certainly were Betsy B’s!). Such an objective may seem strange to us, in this day and age, but in the early 19th century an excellent marriage was the highest ambition that most women could aspire to. And on those terms, the Caton sisters succeeded spectacularly.

Before the lecture, I found the Caton sisters’ story reminiscent of all those tales about impoverished British landed gentry marrying American heiresses for their money–the most recent version being the addictive PBS series “Downtown Abbey.” But as I discovered, the Caton girls actually didn’t have any money–not of their own. Their grandfather, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence) was indeed fabulously wealthy. But the sisters weren’t able to get a piece of that until Carroll died. And he lived to be 95, which was almost unheard of in those days.

After the first Caton sister married in 1817–not to an aristocrat, yet–it was rumored that her husband was shocked to discover, after the marriage, that she had no fortune. One of Betsy B.’s London correspondents wrote to tell her that no one was going to make THAT mistake again. No one, he said, would be taking Betsey Caton to the altar “unless the money is first paid down, or put into a Train that it will be forthcoming.”

It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Betsey Caton, whatever her ambition was in life. And it’s quite a tribute to the Caton sisters that they all managed to marry aristocrats–at least one of them, indeed, impoverished–even AFTER everyone knew they had no money. Can the Kardashians top that accomplishment?

Historical Fiction at the AWP Conference

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I’ve spent a good part of the last three days at the annual AWP Conference. AWP is an organization of writers and teachers of writing (the acronym supposedly stands for “Association of Writers & Writing Programs,” in which case it should really be “AWWP,” but never mind), and I had no idea there were so many writers in the United States. It was completely overwhelming. And exhilarating (look at all these people who care so passionately about writing!). And depressing (look at all these people who so desperately want to get published!).

But what I really want to talk about is, of course, historical fiction. Out of the hundreds of panels on offer, there were only three devoted to historical fiction, all well-attended. (Well, I really only know about two of them, because for some reason two of the three were scheduled to meet at the same time.)Listening to the panelists, I was gratified to hear echoes of many of the thoughts and feelings I’ve had during my own writing process: the need to find a gap or a mystery in the historical record, so that your imagination has room to play; the necessity of, as one panelist put it, gathering so much information about your period that you “drown” in your research (that was from Jane Alison, author of The Love-Artist, a novel about Ovid); the lingering anxiety that nevertheless you’ll get something wrong and be exposed as a fraud.

I certainly know the last feeling well–even though, by the time I started writing A More Obedient Wife, set in the 1790’s, I’d been working as a historian in that period for almost seven years. Maybe you can never really shake that anxiety when you’re writing about the past. (Although there are those rare birds, like Edward P. Jones, who are immune to it. He wrote his novel The Known World, about black slaveowners in the antebellum South, without doing a lick of research. One of the panelists–Robin Oliveira, who wrote My Name Is Mary Sutter–said she heard him respond once to a question about how he could do that. “It’s my book,” she quoted him as saying, “and I can do what I damn well please.”)

But what I wanted to ask the panelists and didn’t get a chance to was this: isn’t there also a sense in which we can know the past BETTER than the present? True, we can never be entirely sure of the details of daily life in the way we are of those that surround us now. But the past is not a moving target. It’s fixed, static–whatever happened there has already happened.

Maybe more important, we have a perspective on the past that we can never have on the present, because we know–in historical terms–what happened next. In that sense we have an advantage over our characters, who have no idea what lies down the road. We know which institutions and ideas will become discredited in the future. And we know which ones will ultimately win acceptance.

Take, for example, a character in the novel I’m working on, a doctor of the early 19th century whose ideas about the cause of disease anticipated germ theory. His contemporaries ridiculed him–disease caused by tiny invisible animals that somehow entered the body?–and he lost a good deal of his practice. Now, in the 21st century, I can simply present his experience, without authorial comment, and both the reader and I will know something that he doesn’t: that he was basically right. Another of my characters is a woman who dared to undertake what was considered a man’s job, and who argued, over sometimes fierce opposition, that women had the potential to be the intellectual equals of men if they were only given the same educational opportunities. Someday, she lamented at one point, her ideas would be recognized as valid. And we–the writer and the reader–will know that they were.

That kind of layering–the layer of what the writer and reader know, as compared to what the characters know–is one of the things I love about historical fiction. The closest thing I heard to it at the AWP panels was from a writer named Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, which is set before Alcott became a successful writer. “I knew what she would go on to,” O’Connor McNees said, “and she didn’t know. I had to admire her audacity.”

I suppose that’s what all of us aspiring writers need: audacity. We need to act like we’re all going to end up like Louisa May Alcott, even though we know that can’t be true.

They’re Just Not That Into It

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“I just didn’t fall in love with it.”

So ran the bottom line of a recent rejection of a novel my agent is shopping around. I cringed: I was suddenly inundated with extremely unpleasant memories of the last time an agent sent out a novel of mine–when, as I recalled, this was the standard rejection line,usually preceded (as this one was) with a few moderately flattering comments about my manuscript.

As it turned out, when I looked back at those rejections (yes, I saved them all–don’t ask my why), only one or two of them actually used the “didn’t fall in love with it” line. But for some reason, that was the line that had stuck in my mind, irritating as a festering splinter.

Why? It would seem that rejections that pick apart the specifics of your characters, your plot, your writing would be much harder to take. But for me, at least, they’re not.

Rejections, of course, are never fun, but anyone who wants to make it as a writer has to get used to them (unless you’re one of the anointed few who have a smooth and rapid ascent to success, in which case all you have to deal with is the jealousy and resentment of the vast majority of your fellow writers). And I think I’ve developed a relatively tough skin over the years. But hearing “I just didn’t fall in love with it” remains pretty devastating.

Maybe it’s because the line is so vague and global that it’s hard to separate the rejection of one’s writing from the rejection of oneself, something all aspiring writers need to learn to do. What it puts me in mind of, really, is high school, when it seemed that any guy who I was in love with “just didn’t fall in love” with me. Meanwhile, of course, the guys who WERE calling me weren’t the ones I had any interest in going out with. They were the equivalent, I guess, of those pop-up ads that seem to magically appear on any email I send or receive that has the word “publish” or “book” in it: “Publish your book now! Low rates!” Yeah, the self-publishing companies are all in love with me. They’re just not the ones I want.

And of course, the objects of MY affection are going all googly-eyed over others whose charms I fail to see. Yeah, maybe they’re more sensational, more provocative. But, I want to cry out, can’t you recognize my substance, my depths? Then the bargaining begins, at least in my head: okay, listen, I can give you what you want. I can goose up my plot. Or is it sex–is that it? Okay, I can put more sex in. I’ll feel cheap, but I’ll do it. I’ll do anything!

Of course, the problem with these rejections is that they never tell you exactly what you need to do to win acceptance. And maybe, in fact, there’s NOTHING you can do. Maybe they’re just not that into you. Oh, yes, they’ll say things like, “It’s probably just me–I’m sure some other editor out there will love this.” But you can tell they’re just saying that to make you feel better.

As with other things one has no control over–like snagging a date with the cool guy who doesn’t know you exist–the best strategy is simply to move on, if you can. And I’ve found the best way, maybe the only way, for me to move on is to focus my attention and energy on another writing project.

Because, really, waiting around for someone to fall in love with you, or with your novel, is simply no way to go through life.

Bachmann and Burr

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I actually had another blog topic in mind, but I just read Gail Collins’ op-ed on Michele Bachmann in today’s New York Times, and I couldn’t resist saying a few words, since–a rare occurrence in the pages of the Times, and the annals of political history–a historical novel figures in it prominently.

It seems that Michele Bachmann’s turn to the right started when she was in college and she read Gore Vidal’s historical novel, Burr–which centers on, as you might have guessed, our third Vice-President, Aaron Burr. “He was kind of mocking the founding fathers, and I just thought ‘what a snot,’ ”Collins quotes Bachmann as saying.

Okay, where to begin? Well, it’s nice to know that a historical novel can wield such power, but Bachmann’s got it all wrong. First of all, as Collins notes, Bachmann’s view that one can say no ill of a founding father “strips the founding fathers of their raw, fallible humanity.” (Not to mention that, as I said in an earlier blog post, there’s nothing less appealing than a novel with an infallible protagonist.)

But beyond that, Burr himself wasn’t even a founding father, at least not in the strict sense of the term. He didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence, he wasn’t present at the Constitutional Convention, and it’s not clear that he subscribed to any particular ideology other than his own self-promotion. More of a founding opportunist, you might say.

That’s not to say there was nothing to admire about Burr. For one thing, he had remarkably advanced views on the role of women (way more advanced than the views of most of the real founding fathers, who, as Collins points out, would have been shocked to find someone of Bachmann’s gender with a seat in Congress). But basically–and as deftly portrayed in Vidal’s wonderful novel–Burr was a lovable rogue, a charming and urbane scoundrel. Not exactly what Bachmann has in mind, presumably, when she utters the phrase “founding father.”

And infallible? Even many Burr’s contemporaries–actual founding fathers among them–held him in the utmost contempt. And with good reason. When, in the election of 1800, he tied for the Presidency with Thomas Jefferson–a result nobody wanted, since Burr was supposed to be running for VICE-President–he allowed the ballotting in the House of Representatives to go on through 35 rounds rather than do the gentlemanly thing and take himself out of the race. Later he was tried for treason for concocting a scheme to separate part of the United States and, apparently, set up his own empire (the details of this scheme were never clear). And let’s not forget that in 1804 he fought a duel with a real founding father–Alexander Hamilton–and killed him. All in all, not exactly a model for our times.

What would Burr himself think of his part in Bachmann’s conversion? I suspect he’d have a good laugh. I wish I could find it that funny myself.