No, not that Hillary, which is spelled differently anyway. There's a probing profile in the most recent
New Yorker magazine of English novelist
Hilary Mantel, who is doing quite well for herself since she won the 2009
Man-Booker prize for her historical novel
Wolf Hall. I must shamefully admit that I have not yet read
Wolf Hall--that is, until I started it yesterday. (So far so good.) The profile, authored by
Larissa MacFarquhar, is chock full of fascinating information about, and insights from, Mantel as well as some rather pointed commentary about historical fiction. There's too much of interest in the profile to cover in one little ol' blog post, so go get the magazine and read it. (Maybe you have already.) But a couple things really stood out for me that I'd like to discuss. First, MacFarquhar provides this rather loaded statement early in the article: "These days the historical novel is not quite respectable. It has difficulty distinguishing itself from its easy sister the historical romance. It is thought to involve irritating ways of talking, or excessive descriptions of clothes. The past, in fiction, has more prestige than the future, but as with the future, its prestige declines with its distance from the present." Really?
Really? Are literary opinions really as myopic as that? After
Atonement and
Girl with a Pearl Earring and
Quiet Americans and
The Book of Salt and
Memoirs of a Geisha and
Oscar and Lucinda and
Cold Mountain and
Ragtime? Even after
Wolf Hall itself and its followup
Bring Up the Bodies, which won--just five days ago--the 2012 Man-Booker Prize? (This is the first time, by the way, that both a novel and its sequel have won the award. Kind of like the
Godfather movies.)
Maybe so. I hate to say it, but maybe it's so. After all, Mantel enjoyed a long career as writer of mostly contemporary realist novels before she started
Wolf Hall. And the reason she wrote mostly contemporary realist novels was because her very first fictional project, a historical novel set in the French Revolution, something she labored over painstakingly and lovingly for four years, was rejected out of hand by agents and publishers. As in without even reading it. As in without reading past the first sentence of her query letter. In the profile, Mantel tells a horrible if telling story: "'I wrote a letter to an agent saying would you look at my book, it's about the French Revolution, it's not a historical romance, and the letter came back saying, we do not take historical romances. . . They literally could not read my letter, because of the expectations surrounding the words 'French Revolution'--that it was bound to be about ladies with high hair.'" I've encountered the same blind prejudice, and much more recently than 1979, when Manel's first book was so soundly beaten back. Just weeks ago, I received a rejection letter in the mail from a magazine that is expressly commited to longer stories. The long short story may be the hardest fictional form to publish these days, so it's disheartening when one of the few periodicals seriously devoted to the form--a form which may be my favorite--delivers a laundry list of what it will and will not accept in terms of content. One thing it will not accept, the rejection slip explained, is "genre fiction"; and under the many kinds of fiction listed as "genre" there was "historical." Oh, really? So if I write a serious story about characters I care about and set it in the present, that's okay. But if I write a serious story about characters I care about and set it in the past it becomes "genre fiction"? Since when is human experience a "genre"? I have never in my whole career ever thought of myself as writing genre fiction, even when I wrote a novel that includes as part of its reality the idea of humanity being watched by an extraterrestrial race. (No, I'm not crazy, and, yes, it's actually a very serious book. Think of it as literary realism with aliens.)
This gets to the unique double nature of historical fiction, its "unstable reputation," as MacFarquhar puts it. Historical fiction is both a means of writing pulp and of getting to the most serious psychological realities of some of the most fascinating people and periods of the past. I just don't understand why a two-headed creature should so constantly be defined by only one of its heads. Especially by those who should know better.
Side notes: #1 The article on Mantel got me thinking of various other matters, related and unrelated to the author herself. One interesting tidbit that comes up in the profile is that prior to composing
Wolf Hall, Mantel's favorite of her own novels was
The Giant, O'Brien, a mythological treatment of Ireland. I am not one to ever tell an author (not even one of my students; especially not one of my students) as to where his or her imagination is "allowed" to go, but I have to admit to a certain disappointed sigh when I read Mantel's commentary on her book. I think Ireland has been mythologized by the English quite enough already, thank you.
#2 For historical fiction's sake, to say nothing of Mantel's, I'm glad that
Wolf Hall and
Bring Up the Bodies have earned such acclaim. I hope the same is true of the third book in the trilogy, upon which she is currently working. But I can't help but notice--on both sides of the Atlantic, but maybe especially on our side--an enduring fascination with Englands that no longer exist, whether that be Arthurian England, the England of feudal castles, the England of the Tudors, the England of the Enlightenment, Victorian and Edwardian England, the England of E.M. Forster, or the England of the great manor houses, those institutions that so famously came to an end not long after World War I. In short, the England of costumes and of Empire. Something about this has long pestered at me. As much as I love Shakespeare and the literature of his contemporaries; as much as I love eighteenth century novels; as much as I love Austen and George Eliot and the Brontes and Wordsworth; as much as I was charmed by those Merchant-Ivory period films in the 1980s and 90s; as much as I think television shows like
Downton Abbey are craftily written and brilliantly acted (and probably a hell of a lot of fun to be involved with), I hope we can all recognize that it's a good thing that the world depicted in such films and shows is
gone.
It's been a while since I spent a serious stretch of days in England--2006 really--but when I go there I'm always struck by the same idea: England's best days aren't back then;
they're right now. This is not to underestimate the fiscal difficulties the country has recently suffered through. I am well aware of such difficulites--we started them! But England ranks not only as the leader of the EU but as one of the leading socialist democracies in the world; arguably
the leading socialist democracy that is also significantly mulit-cultural. In the various quality-of-life and happiness surveys that get released periodically, the Scandinavian countries inevitably come out on top. But they are relatively small and relatively homogeneous entities. As an American, I tend to think that heterogeneity is valuable on principle, something to aspire to whatever its drawbacks. In recent decades, England has faced--and met--the extraordinary challenge of remaining both heterogeneous and socialist. It's a country from which the United States could learn a lot--if we could ever get over the seductive lie that being American always means being Better. It's a country in which, right now, probably the highest percentage of its citizens ever enjoy a passably comfortably life and a passably good education--a far higher number than under the Tudors, at least. That is no small feat. It is--and should be--a source of national pride. And it's why I'm glad that for every Merchant-Ivory costume drama or
The Tudors or
Merlin there's a
Four Weddings and a Funeral or a
Love Actually to remind Americans that there happens to be a vibrant England of NOW. I'll take that England over Forster's anyday. Except you can keep the rain.
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A former student interviewed me via email for a graduate school assignment last week. She was supposed to contact three working writers and ask them questions about their processes. It's an interesting idea for an assignment, and I was honored to be asked. Since this student reads my blog, she focused her questions--and they were good ones--on the making of my Van Gogh novel. Inevitably I found myself not only talking about my own specific work habits but discussing the ontology of historical fiction. What is it about this form that makes everyone so eager to define and proscribe? Maybe it's the notion that history is beyond one's own self--that no individual owns history-- or at least one shouldn't be allowed to, even for the sake of writing a novel. History, some argue, must remain unassailable. I know this is the approach that Hilary Mantel takes. She's spoken quite scornfully of those who would dare play with historical fact for the sake of dramatized presentation. (For example, she detested The Tudors. More than detested. She mocked it. Having never seen the thing, I can't argue with her.) For Mantel, a fond reader of history, someone indeed who came to writing because of her love for reading history, the first and abiding requirement for the writer of historical fiction is to get the history precisely right. Every fact that is presented in a novel must be verifiably drawn from history. In Mantel's mind--and about this she's right--the real facts of history often suggest colorful possibilites and intriguing personal quirks that writers can exploit. So why abandon them? Okay, fair enough. But finally I've decided that her approach sounds a bit too much like a straitjacket. Doesn't it force a writer to choose as his subjects highly chronicled personages, like Henry VIII and his court, because those are exactly the kinds of people about which facts are readily available? Surely other kinds of people are worthy of treatment in historical novels, yes? Not to knock the achievement of Wolf Hall, but I'm not sure the world really needed another book about Henry VIII, did it? (For the uninitiated, Wolf Hall is a serious and brilliant novel that details Henry's attempts to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The point of view character in the novel, Thomas Cromwell, is quite an intriguing man. But I suggest not reading Wolf Hall over a stretch of weeks. It's rather coldly narrated, and there is a dizzying number of characters to keep track of. Put it down, and you might not remember who they are the next time you pick it up. It's absolutely worth sticking with until the end, but it will try your patience.)
I guess here's my fundamental issue with the "facts only" approach: "Facts only" is the approach biographers must necessarily take. But writing a historical novel is nothing like writing a biography. I was about to write off Mantel as a schoolmarmish guadian of the literal until I heard her interviewed recently on the radio. She said something that caught my attention. Historical fiction must be based on the factual she said once again, but then she added that it was between the facts that the novel really happens. No matter how many facts an author assembles there will be "squishy" areas in which the writer's imagination can and must operate. Well, hallelujah, I thought. That's exactly it. That's the business of dramatization. You enter with your imagination what can only be explored with the imagination--namely the inner person--and you do your best to make him or her real. And that's true of any kind of fiction. And it's also why the protagonists of well-writtten historical novels feel more vivid to me than the subjects of biographies. Biographies too often strike me as being nothing but an assemby of data, as if a record of jobs held, books produced, and places lived is enough to capture a person's identity, the real him or her. But it's not. It never will be. I've waded through thick biographies, traversed a whole life, and come out the other end not feeling as if I knew the subject any better than before I started reading. And so here in essence is what I told my former student: The reseach I carried out on the Van Gogh book, substantial as it was, certainly suggested many scenes to me and a variety of people to depict, but the actual writing of the scenes was the same act of the imagination as with any of my other fictions, because I had to not just report but see through. I had to be a bit of a mind reader. I had to know my protagonist not from the outside in but the inside out. And that means entering countless "squishy" areas and making my own decisions, from the details of what a room looked like, to what was precisely said (and how) in a given conversation to how badly a moment of betrayal stung.
And here's the other "secret" about the historical fiction process that I shared with my student. While you do as much research as possible, enough to feel like you "know" your subject, to see through his eyes in the immediacy of a dramatized moment part of yourself has to be inside that subject. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that in my novel I merely pose myself in nineteenth century dress. I certainly was trying to capture what it felt like to be the actual Vincent Van Gogh, to live that actual life. But it's impossible to really feel grounded inside another character, to bring to him the right amount of empathy, without extending some of yourself into the character. So, yes, there's a piece of undercover me in the Van Gogh of my novel. How much? That is something you can't really quantify. And, here's my point, it's part of the normal alchemy of fiction writing. It is in no way unique to historical fiction writing. After all, writers say constantly that there is a piece of themselves in every character they write. And that's all I'm saying here. The same is true if one's character is a world famous man about whom scores of biographies and several novels have already been written. It's still the same process. You have to enter a squishy, indeterminate space; then you exploit the freedom of that space by forging a kind of union between yourself and the historical person. The result of the union is the protagonist of a novel. I'm confident this is just as much true of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell as it is of my Vincent Van Gogh. And because that protagonist is a character--and not just an array of facts--he breathes and moves and affects people in way no subject of any bigography ever can. And so maybe that means he's actually more real.
