Tag Archives: historical fiction

Changing the Course of the Mississippi River

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A few days ago I had the pleasure of appearing on a panel on historical fiction at the American Independent Writers Washington conference, held at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. My co-panelists were Barbara Esstman, author of The Other Anna and Night Ride Home (and a former instructor of mine, years ago, in a novel-writing workshop at The Writer’s Center); and C.M. Mayo, author of the intriguing The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire — based, like my novel, A More Obedient Wife, on the lives of actual historical figures. I’m grateful to the moderator, author David Taylor, for inviting me to join them.

I don’t know how the audience felt (we were the last panel of a day-long event), but I would have been happy to go on talking and listening and answering questions from the audience well past our allotted fifty minutes. I had a few thoughts I didn’t get a chance to give voice to. But luckily, I have a blog!

So … here’s one: how much freedom should a writer exercise in playing around with historical fact? One of my fellow panelists, Barbara Esstman, opined that novelists should feel free to make up, or alter, whatever facts they want to, and mentioned that in her novel she had changed the course of the Mississippi River by five miles. It’s all in how you present it, she argued. You can make anything believable, if you handle it the right way.

True enough, but personally, I’m loath to fool around with facts, or at least the ones that are fairly well known. Once, years ago, I had the opportunity to hear William Styron speak, and I asked him basically the same question about the interplay between imagination and truth. Styron, whose Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize, answered that historical novelists should give free rein to their imaginations with one important parameter: they should be careful not to contravene known historical fact.

Why? Because it can be distracting to the reader. At one point during the panel session, Barbara also cited John Gardner‘s famous dictum that a novelist should create for the reader “a vivid and continuous dream.” It seems to me that if your narrative includes a detail many readers know to be untrue, they may suddenly be shaken out of that dream. “Huh?” they’ll say. “That’s not how it was. What’s she (or he) talking about?” And pouf, the spell that you’ve carefully woven with your words will be broken.

Styron’s advice made sense to me, and I tried to abide by it in A More Obedient Wife. I changed some little-known personal details — for instance, I omitted a few siblings belonging to a couple of characters who came from dauntingly large families — but I worked within the general framework that history had given me.

It seems to me that geographical fact should generally be treated in much the same way. I once read a novel set in an area I was familiar with, and I was constantly distracted by “mistakes” the author had made about where things were. Maybe she’d made those changes deliberately, although I can’t fathom why. I wasn’t focusing on what she presumably wanted me to focus on — the characters, the story — because I kept calculating distances and drawing mental maps and asking myself what she was talking about.

Of course, as with everything in writing, there’s no hard-and-fast rule here. It’s always a balancing test. If you feel a fact is sufficiently obscure that no one will really notice if you change it, maybe you’ll want to go ahead. Or even if it’s not that obscure a fact, you may feel the change is sufficiently important to your story that it’s worth risking the distraction. Or maybe, like Philip Roth‘s The Plot Against America, the whole point of your story is that it’s counter-factual. And, as with everything in writing, it’s all subjective. Maybe some readers won’t mind at all if the Mississippi River isn’t where they expect it to be, and maybe some writers don’t care if they shake things up a bit.

But speaking just for myself, I try to stick with the facts and let my imagination play around in the gray areas — of which, in the stories I’m drawn to, there are plenty.

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.

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.

Keeping It Real

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I’m a big fan of Jill Lepore’s articles for The New Yorker, and I was particularly intrigued by one she wrote back in March 2008, called “Just the Facts, Ma’am.” Lepore, who is a professor of history at Harvard, made a number of points that echoed my own thoughts, but what really struck me was her observation that fiction “can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people … the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.”

Right on, I thought (or would have thought, if I still thought in the idiom of the sixties). That’s what I was trying to do with my novel A More Obedient Wife, and what I’m currently trying to do with the novel I’m working on: taking obscure historical figures–and my main characters all happen to be women–and supplementing the fragmentary evidence with my imagination in order to bring them to some kind of life.

So when I heard that Lepore had collaborated with another historian of 18th-century America, Jane Kamensky–who teaches at Brandeis–on a historical novel set in the 1760’s called Blindspot, I was eager to read it. I’ll admit I was a little skeptical when I heard it was a collaboration–I can’t imagine writing a novel with another person (even another person who looks almost like my twin, as Lepore and Kamensky do, judging from the book jacket photo). And I became even more skeptical when a friend told me the book had been panned in Publisher’s Weekly. But other reviews have been pretty favorable, and I tried to approach it with an open mind.

There’s certainly much in the book to admire. The authors know their 18th-century stuff (they’re the kind of readers I dreaded for my own book–the kind who’d be likely to pick up immediately on any embarrassing errors), and the style is fairly authentic to the period, but not so authentic a modern reader will find it tough going.

Still, my basic reaction was disappointment. I found it hard to care about the characters as much as I wanted to–they didn’t seem quite real to me. Part of the problem may be that the authors are at great pains (perhaps too great pains) to create a bawdy romp in the earlier part of the book, and then, when things take a more serious turn, it’s hard for the reader to switch gears. Or it was for this reader, anyway.

But another problem may be that these characters just aren’t real, in the sense that they don’t seem to think and feel like the vast majority of people of their class and their era. Not only are they sexually uninhibited–a characteristic I imagine has existed among humans in all times and places, at least in private–but they write about their sexual adventures in graphic detail.

I was readier to believe this of the main male character, Stewart Jameson, a portrait painter who is something of a rake, apparently based loosely on the artist Gilbert Stuart. But I had a harder time with the female character, Fanny Easton, a well bred Boston damsel who has fallen into distress. Okay, so she’s been seduced and had a child out of wedlock; but still–given the strict standards of modesty with which she would have been inculcated–I find it hard to believe she’d enthusiastically record an episode of extramarital oral sex in her journal.

Not surprisingly, Jameson and Easton also hold rather modern views on the role of women and equality of the sexes (although, in the authors’ defense, this is partly explained by the fact that for most of the novel, Fanny is disguised as a boy–so by the time Jameson discovers her true identity, he’s already formed certain opinions about her).

And not only are they opposed to slavery, they both have strong relationships to black characters: Fanny considers a slave child fathered by her own father to be her sister, to whom she feels deep familial ties–an attitude I suspect even the most ardent abolitionists of the time would have shied away from. And Jameson’s best friend is an African who has been highly educated by scholars as an experiment on the capacities of the African race, then sold into slavery–an experience that has left him irritatingly, if understandably, embittered. (This is the second novel I’ve come across lately featuring a character in the Boston of the 1760’s who has been educated this way–the first being the title character in the intriguing young adult novel, The Astonishing Adventures of Octavian Nothing. How many of these Africans could there have been?)

I can’t say with authority that people who held these attitudes didn’t exist in the 1760’s, but having read pretty extensively in the correspondence of Americans who lived some 30 years later, I will say that I’m highly skeptical. I suspect that Lepore and Kamensky just endowed their fictional creations with 21st-century systems of ethics because–well, it’s a whole lot easier to write in the voices of people you basically identify with, And it’s a whole lot easier for readers to get behind them–at least, for those readers who haven’t spent years perusing correspondence between actual 18th-century people. And hey, perhaps you’ll say, what’s the big deal? After all, it’s fiction!

Yes, but. If, as Lepore said in her New Yorker piece, what fiction can do is tell the story of ordinary people, shouldn’t she make sure that her fictional 18th-century characters aren’t just 21st-century wolves in 18th-century sheep’s clothing? Otherwise, whose story is she telling?

In retrospect, I see that this was the advantage of my decision to incorporate into my novels letters to and from the historical figures my characters are based on. At times it’s something of a pain: there, in black and white, are these inconvenient statements I would prefer to ignore. I’m forced to deal with attitudes that are alien to me, and are most likely going to be alien to my readers. As reflected in the title–A More Obedient Wife–these people didn’t exactly see marriage the way we do. And some of my characters owned slaves. While it’s clear from the letters that some of them cared about the slaves’ welfare, and viewed them as something more than just a piece of property, the fact remains that they owned other human beings.

When I had one of my characters in A More Obedient Wife, Hannah Iredell, muse that it was easy to forget that her slaves had feelings just as she did, one of the members of my writing group objected: how could Hannah say such a thing, she demanded indignantly? But to my way of thinking, how could she not? How could Hannah own slaves unless she was able to convince herself that they were in some fundamental way different from herself?

In the book I’m working on now, set in the early 19th century, I have other problems: both of my upper-crust main characters, to different degrees, express opinions about “merchants” and their vulgarity that are archaic if not downright repugnant. One of them is starry-eyed about titled Europeans–any titled Europeans. The other holds fairly advanced opinions about the role of women, but even she buys into commonly held female stereotypes of the time–and also expresses horror when she finds that her estranged husband has been socializing with servants!

My objective, and my challenge, is to find common ground with my characters despite the radical difference in our views of the world, a kind of “nothing human is alien to me” approach. I feel it keeps my characters real, in the sense that they’re rooted in authentic voices of their period.

But beyond that, it forces me–and, I hope, my readers–to stretch a bit, to empathize with people who were in many ways quite different from ourselves. And that, it seems to me, is one thing fiction can do that–with any luck–will carry over into our daily lives. We all need to figure out how to put ourselves into the shoes, and inside the heads, of people who are definitely not “us.”