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TalksWorking on the airloom: on writing historical fictionAs I pack up my notes
after five years' work on an historical novel, the question I'm
asking myself is what was I thinking? If history's a pack of
tricks we play on the dead, what's historical fiction? And
why me? Why have I just spent four years turning history
into fiction?
The reason, it happens, is eighteenth-century language and the accident of its freshness. Three hundred years
ago, the English language owed its freshness to the innocent
eye of British empiricism. Today, eighteenth-century English
owes its freshness to its innocence of Romanticism and Freud.
In the sentence Miri's husband was shouting
in his sleep, not words that she could recognize but simple,
blurting fanfares of distress (Jim Crace, Quarantine, 1997) the metaphor is given
pride of (last) place because what matters is Miri's husband's
unconscious anguish. This is a twentieth-century first sentence.
The sentence An author
ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private
or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary,
at which all persons are welcome for their money (Henry Fielding, Tom
Jones, 1749), with its spelled-out correlation of author,
gentleman, and innkeeper and the wit that finally settles on
that unmetaphorical word money, is an eighteenth-century sentence.
Today we think of eighteenth-century prose as Latinate, euphemistic, prone to grandiloquence. But in its time it felt unpacked
and stripped down, and it can still feel unpacked and stripped
down today. Then as now, its freshness resides in its freedom
from an assumption from the past: then, from the Medieval and
Renaissance assumption of an analogical universe; now, from nineteenth-
and twentieth-century assumptions of the importance of formative
experiences and unconscious life.
I'm thinking of eighteenth-century
language like Defoe's,
Put this way, the
eighteenth-century project sounds as nutty as Swift knew it was. But if nutty then, pseudo now. Why not be satisfied with close, naked, and natural in contemporary
English? By avoiding Romanticism and Freud, coming up with a
style closer to the writer George Saunders', say, than the writer
George Berkeley's?
Because
eighteenth-century language is capable of more than closeness,
nakedness, and naturalness. It also has a straightahead capacity
for homeliness, strangeness, intensity, and verisimitude.
The straightaheadness comes out of
the Enlightenment stance of direct engagement with the world,
out of the unruffled way eighteenth-century authors set down
ordinary, everyday substantives. The birds peck the berries or the corn, and
fly away to the groves where they sit in seeming happiness
on the branches, and waste their lives in tuning one unvaried
series of sounds (Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, 1759). This is also the homeliness of eighteenth-century language: here, the statedness of the set-up for a person/songbird comparison;
the proliferation of simple nouns; with only three modifiers;
the efficiency of the verbs: the sense, in all, of an orderly
arrangement of things in unagonized moral space. As if
the world were a home and morality
the good housekeeping of clear and honest perception.
For eighteenth-century
readers, what was sufficiently strange about
Johnson's sentence to make it feel new was its show of innocent
confidence in the value of natural observation. But what's really
innocent is the eye of the perceiver. Because if innocent perception
+ clear language + rational moral principles = communicable truth,
then subjectivity and Nature are redeemed together. And for modern
readers as well, demoralized by the daily slog through the Media
Blur, the Lies of Politics and Business, and the Aporia of
Universal Relativism, our real lives lived elsewhere, in our
secret moments, in our unconscious, and in our dreams, what is
new and strange is to come upon an author who greets the world
with unapologetic, rustic lucidity.
So
much for homely and strange. As for intensity, this, when it comes to the
novel, is an issue for me, and was probably the main reason
I was looking to eighteenth-century language. Being too long-haul
a read for its own good, the novel, while it generally welcomes
homeliness, resists the intensity of literary language, as
it does strangeness not rooted in simple-to-imagine characters
or a simple-to-imagine world, as too exhausting for the reader.
Poetry can be intense and strange, short stories can be intense
and strange, but how do you make a novel intense and strange
without tiring everybody out? One way—the eighteenth-century
way—is by attention to things in their plenitude. In eighteenth-century language, even the
more abstract substantives—like that Brontëan "rough
remedy"—have a thinglike status.
And this thingliness of the language
is, in addition, a wonderfully efficient tool for generating versimilitude out of fantasy. Look at Robinson
Crusoe, look at
So that's what I wanted and why: close, naked, natural language conducive to homeliness,
strangeness, intensity, and verisimilitude—language capable of
displaying these seven virtues without convolution, or complication.
Not much to ask, really, when all seven are available in one
compendious, lately (if you ask me) new-all-over-again 280-year-old
package.
Now all I needed
was eighteenth-century characters and an eighteenth-century story.
A work of short fiction
can originate in a voice. The dramatic tension within the voice
can generate a pair of characters whose conflict will make a
story. But language alone may not be enough when it comes to
starting something as long, and longer in the writing, as a novel.
You may be able to hear the voices in your head, but you may
not be able to write them
until they have something to tell.
Kiteing.—This is a very singular and distressing mode of assailment, and much practised by the gang. As boys raise a kite in the air, so these wretches, by means of the air-loom and magnetic impregnations, contrive to lift into the brain some particular idea, which floats and undulates in the intellect for hours together; and how much soever the person assailed may wish to direct his mind to other objects, and banish the idea forced upon him, he finds himself unable; as the idea which they have kited keeps waving in his mind, and fixes his attention to the exclusion of other thoughts. He is, during the whole time, conscious that the kited idea is extraneous, and does not belong to the train of his own cogitations.
I
liked the cruel solicitude of "very singular and distressing." I
appreciated Haslam's care
with the kite/idea analogy. I liked the way the image of the "air
loom" inspires him to accentuate, Swift-style, the concrete
in the metaphorical: "impregnations," "lift into
the brain," "the train of his cogitations." I
loved "floats and undulates."
Matthews was a madman
in for political reasons. Attempting to prevent the outbreak
of war with
As for Haslam,
he knew Matthews was a danger to no one, did not know why he
had him, but as chief on-site medical officer, had no choice
(if he wanted to keep his job) but to defend an unjust incarceration.
Besides this, his medical judgment concerning Matthews having
counted for nothing in the affair, he'd come out of it humiliated.
The Illustrations, so
lucidly, so empathically, so lovingly written, had, ironically,
the purpose of discrediting Matthews, of saying to the public,
Look, this is what he actually believes. The man is obviously
a hopeless lunatic. Why shouldn't we have him?
So
here, by a great stroke of luck, I had not only three excellent
characters—James Tilly Matthews;
his wife, nameless in the accounts but christened by me Margaret;
and John Haslam—not only three excellent
characters but my story, in fact the entire arc of my story. A
superb, relatively unknown story. All I had to do was
make a novel out of it.
Judging
from the story and my own predilections, it would be as much
a psychological
novel with an historical setting, as an "historical novel" of
the Sir Walter Scott variety, concerned with historical events
and their human effects—though it would end up being that too.
For contemporary models, I looked to Peter Ackroyd,
Hilary Mantel; T. C. Boyle's Water
Music, Andrew Millar's Ingenious Pain, Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, and
two years later to Emma Donahue's Slammerkin and Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger. Mainly I was looking at their language, and
to some extent their characters and the structure of their narratives.
What
I didn't consciously appreciate at the time, but have since,
is how much contemporary
historical fiction—and more recent examples would be Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Philip Hensher's The
Mulberry Empire, and Sarah Waters' Fingersmith—how
much is pastiche, more or less overt, as likely to be inspired
by historical authors and styles as by historical figures and
events. Waters' Fingersmith, for
example, is said to be a subversion of Wilkie Collins' The
Woman in White. In The Mulberry Empire, Hensher holds
up flash cards of Austen, Dickens, Surtees, Thackeray, George
Eliot, etc. that invite literary readers to play Name the Author.
At some point early in the 1980s a new age of pastiche seems
to have dawned, mainly of Victorian novels, probably inspired
by reprints of Victorian porn such as The Pearl and The Romance of Lust, which have kept Grove Press solvent and served
as bedside boomer reading for thirty years. Most of these novels
are romps; their subject matter is what John Sutherland calls "low-life,
high filth," but their provenance in fiction is arguably purer
than that of fictionalized history. And what
more appropriately postmodern strategy for flaunting and defying
the embarrassment of pseudo than
high-kicking pastiche?
Two novels I particularly
enjoyed and learned from. One was Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie (1998), set in nineteenth-century
Another thing: My
story would concern three unusually intelligent and capable people
who had risen by their own achievements to a precariously middle-class
status: Matthews, before his madness, had come out of Spitalfields,
where his mother was a widowed Huguenot silkweaver,
to operate his own tea broking firm in
As narrators, each
would be a writer: Margaret in a diary, for her own consolation
in the night, and in letters to her husband after the hospital
governors stopped her visits; Matthews in undeliverable letters
to her but also as part of his larger project of a log of Bethlem abuses
that would eventually lead to public condemnation of Bethlem at Moorfields and Haslam's dismissal;
and Haslam more retrospectively, in
a spirit of setting the record straight in the wake of the collapse
of his reputation, career and fortune.
The other novel that
impressed me, even more than Master Georgie, was Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997): As the two footmen carried the remnants of the pudding down the staircase
to the kitchen, Jack Maggs asked if
Mr. Oates was in the habit of calling on Mr. Buckle, but what
with the clatter of their heels and the rattle of the china,
the question seemed to go unheard. Jack Maggs is
energetic, witty, speedy, intensely thingly,
homely, unaffected, realistic, and vivid. It's a remarkably accomplished
evocation of the early nineteenth century by the virtuoso skill
of its language. It sets the bar high.
But it wasn't the height of the bar that had me stalled for months on my first page. Although by the time
I started writing, or trying to, I had my language, characters,
story, and a shuffle of usable plot ideas, I couldn't enter
in. I wanted a third-person narrator like Carey's, but he
shows no strain, I was showing nothing but. Who was my narrator?
What kind of voice does a narrator have when his sole reason
for existing is to translate the Eighteenth Century for the Twenty-first?
Artificial, convoluted, and tedious, that's what kind of voice.
Before I found my
story in Porter, I'd been clinging to the idea of some kind of
clever interweaving of historical and present time. In other
words, my anxiety about the problem of turning history into fiction
was pushing me toward the common artistic dodge of foregrounding
my technique for addressing it. This was also why my dual-time,
time-travel contraptions were so geeky. This is why my narrator
had no life.
Of course, there
was a simple solution, which of course I resisted as long as
I could: the first-person voice. What finally pushed me to it was three
things: First, seeing Bainbridge do it with such grace in Master Georgie, where she uses three first-person
narrators in six sections. Second, the realization that the first
person would also solve another problem, which I'd been trying
not to think about, though I knew the third-person was
only going to compound it. This was the historical-fiction writer's
dilemma of what to do about what kinds of chairs people sat on
and what sorts of carriages they travelled in. If your narrator's primary function is to communicate
a world, don't be surprised if he buries your characters and
story in petticoats and spittoons. A thingly language
is the stuff of a workable, workaday style. Logorrhea descriptitis is
something else. The beauty of first-person narrators, particularly
if they're still alive to the events they're recounting, is they
notice their surroundings only when they have dramatic occasion
to. This is a good thing.
The third reason
I knuckled down to the first-person was that by this time I had
a feeling, misconceived or not, that writing in character was
something I could do, which is to say without thinking about
it. Really, it's a form of acting: very, slow, acting. I'd tried
it with eighteenth-century characters twice before, in two short
stories, the 1986 one a little less stiff than the 1977 one.
So this would be my way in: not through a mediating narrator, or a clever
time-travel construct, but good old dramatic role-playing.
I had resisted the
first person because I knew it would mean not one but three eighteenth-century
voices, each recognizably different from the other two, and each
required to negotiate with discretion the distance of two centuries
while neither sounding not eighteenth-century enough nor too
eighteenth-century and thus creating obstacles for contemporary
readers for whom the stylings of Atwood
and Carver are the quintessence of the natural. As with pastiche,
a strategy more in the spirit of my anxiety, and of the late
Twentieth Century, would have been to make a thing of the artifice.
But the greater challenge, as Atwood and Carver always knew,
is to make the artifice seem natural. Except, that way there's
no avoiding displaying not your cleverness but the limits of
your language skills.
But once I made the
decision, my hope grew that the three voices, both in themselves
and in their interaction, would be what mainly conveyed the eighteenth-centuriness of
my story. The closeness, nakedness, naturalness, etc. of their
language, along with the eighteenth-centuriness of
their characters as evoked by their language and their concerns,
would do what no amount of description of gaslamps and
hairstyles could: create the sense of a former age. In this I'd
be assisted by the eighteenth-century hunger for referring to
things but not especially for describing them—and impulse that
comes later, thanks to Scott and a cultural mood of historical
self-consciousness, which resulted, it's been said, in the Victorians'
writing historical fiction about the present. Instead of that,
I'd work on my readers with the air loom of language and that way take them back in time.
Now, one thing about
Bedlam is that its reputation has been preceding it for 600years.
The connotations are in place even as the reader picks up the
book, particularly if, as mine would
be, it's a book called Bedlam. It
had taken readers' reactions to my novel The
Healer to teach me that my subject matter there was intractably
gothic, that you don't get to write realistically about spiritual
experience in the novel—an adamantly secular and social form,
it took me writing The
Healer to learn—without people thinking you're telling them
a supernatural tale. With Bedlam too,
the material was intractably gothic—horror, suffering, and alternate
realities—but this time I knew it before I started writing. This
time too the primary subject was not spiritual experience and
its social ramifications but love vs. power, a subject infinitely friendlier to a psychological/historical
novel. Given half a millennium of reader expectations about Bedlam,
I had two choices: either over the top or proceed with restraint,
letting reader preconceptions do the heavy lifting. My choice
was the latter: not the Grand Guignol but
the most accurate evocation I could manage of the reality of
the historical place. I wanted people to spend time in the old Moorfields building,
not for titillation sake but to gain some sense of what, behind
the image, it actually might have been like and how it actually
came to be as it was.
Put this way, how
naive, how out-to-lunch unfashionable the project sounds. more
in the spirit of today is what Sheri Holman has the narrator
of The Dress Lodger (2000)
say of a nineteenth-century
On the other, my
own experience is that reality has a way of impressing itself
upon the mind with a degree and subtlety of complexity that semiotics
ultimately fails to respect. And just as a mind that holds perception
as a priority will have a different quality to it than a mind
that priorizes thought, a fictional
text that owes its provenance to historical texts will have a
different quality to it than one whose provenance is fiction.
And while the historical does seem to introduce an element of
adulteration, or bastardization, or phoniness, to the endeavour—especially when not only the setting but the characters
and the events are historical—the thing is this: it's all a confection
anyway, an air loom emanation, that much we know, so why not
have fun with it another way and try for versimilitude?
Why labour five years on a text that
struts its own technique when the message that literary texts
are verbal artifacts is no longer the news it was over thirty
years ago now, when John Fowles put
an atomic bomb in The French
Lieutenant's Woman? If
I want to advertise my devices, I can always give a lecture and
put it on the Web.
Still, if like Sheri
Holman I could have come up with a modern idiom capable of evoking
eighteenth-century
But
why observe finicky rules when not one reader in a thousand
can spot an 1830s word
in an 1810 sentence and maybe three in 10,000 are going to worry
about it? Well, don't reviews of historical novels traditionally
end with a list of things the author "got wrong"? Didn't
Annie Proulx when she reviewed Guy Vanderhaeghe's The
Last Crossing in the Globe
and Mail take a moment from her rave to point out that cigarettes
weren't smoked until 18-such-and-such? And here's another, more
general good reason: formal constraints are helps to improve
the art. If an otherwise perfect piece of 1820s slang won't do
for a 1797 letter, then it might just inspire you to find something
earlier as good that will. This means ransacking Partridge but
also rummaging deeper in your own eighteenth-century word-hoard,
in the process of which all kinds of other things will turn up.
Like ancient pottery surfacing behind a plough, language fragments
will rise to mind that eventually you'll find a place for and
so your text be made a little more "likely."
I mean likely within the parameters indicated by Jane Austen when she advises
her niece concerning a story the girl has written:
I have scratched
out Sir Tho: from walking with the other Men to the stables &c
the very day after his breaking his arm—for though I find your
Papa did walk out immediately after his arm was set, I think it can be so
little usual as to appear unnatural
in a book.
The appearance of the natural is the morality of fiction. The attraction
of historical narrative for a fiction writer is at the same time
healthy and potential for disaster. Historians, like journalists,
lacking the necessary information, inclination, imagination,
or all three, tend to stop short of getting at the "inside," human-experience
dimension of the story that fiction is designed to explore. Fiction
writers will ever be drawn into the breach. But more than this,
the attraction for fiction writers of true narratives is that,
while not necessarily complex in themselves, they're often studded
with circumstantial, puzzling, and suggestive details that have
the power to inspire more complex, subtle, lifelike, and plausible
fictions than imagination is normally capable of on its own.
For example, after the failure of her writ of habeas corpus,
Mrs. Matthews sailed with her children for Jamaica. That's what
I would call an anomalous, suggestive detail. Were this my own fiction, it's a plot development I wouldn't
have come up with in ten years. But it certainly does have a
way of making a story about marital devotion pitted against insurmountable
forces more complex, credible, and interesting.
But the fact remains
that the modus operandi of fiction being imagination,
it can't afford too much of what
really happened, because the truth is too strange, too implausible.
Whoever it was said truth is stranger than fiction was a student
of the obvious. While a certain amount of the strangeness of
truth is generally good for fiction, for suggesting the anomalous
texture of the real, import too much, slip it in merely "because
it happened," because you know someone who walked out the
day after he broke his arm, or simply fail to assimilate what
you do import, and your reader will think either, Hell, that's
not very likely, is it? Or, What's with
all these chunks of undigested fact? Nobody wants to know what the author
had for breakfast.
Like linguistic precision,
a policy of historical accuracy in fiction spurs the author to
serendipity-friendly industry, minimizes the chance of reader
distraction by perceived error, and can, if carefully used, contribute
to verisimilitude. The primary issue is not referential or historical
truth per se but plausibility, which has everything to do with the integrity
of the illusion and nothing to do with accuracy for its own sake.
Melville can make all kinds of errors of whaling fact. They'll
only ever be secondary, chinks in the armour of
authorial authority. Moby
Dick being art, what matters is the formal coherence of the
text. In historical fiction an authorial bias toward the referential
of history results in the reader's beginning to feel a weight—and
weight is the word—of language, of research, of ball gowns and
furniture, of historic events, or of (God forbid) ideas, because
the referential, if assumed to have priority, has a way of swelling
to a significance out of proportion to, or not in key with, that
of the story.
In the writing of Bedlam, the first-person did help me to
go light enough on furniture and events that my
editor was asking for more on what
Still, my Bedlam remains a composite, a concoction. My John Haslam does not sound quite like the historical John Haslam, who tends to be wordier, more ponderous, though some
of his inspired phrasings have floated and undulated intact through
many drafts. For the most part my James Tilly Matthews
is more lucid than the man one imagines from the passages contributed
by his historical counterpart to Haslam's Illustrations and from the two extant
letters he wrote to Lord Liverpool calling his Lordship a murderous
traitor—though I'm pleased to report that, to my ear, my character
could be the author of the sane if desperate letters Matthews
wrote during his house arrest and imprisonment in France, letters
I discovered in the Paris foreign archives only after the novel
was mostly finished. In any case, mental illness is not particularly
dramatic—what will the mad not say?—and Matthews' raving seems
to have waxed and waned according to the degree of stress he
was under. My Margaret Matthews has been cut, by necessity, from
whole cloth, and I can only trust she sounds like a faithful,
resourceful eighteenth-century wife of a mad tea broker, who
like her husband was nobody's fool.
As
to whether Bedlam works, well . . . . It's
too easy to offer promising reflections on a literary text,
even reflections of the most accurate and formally sophisticated
kind (which these are not), without coming close to saying
anything useful about whether or not the thing is engaging,
or even readable. Such commentary exists in a parallel universe,
in a state of eternal dislocation from the actual experience
of the words on the page. A commentary such as this may point
to that experience, but it's not it, only draws inspiration
from the insights that went into creating it. Just as the literary
text draws inspiration from where it points, while remaining,
if it works, ineffably what it is.
Or so every writer
will ever vainly hope.
A
version of "Working the Air Loom: On Writing Eighteenth-century Fiction" was
delivered as the F.M. Salter Lecture on Language at the
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After
six or seven miserable starts, in the spring of 1998 I took another
look at
notes I'd made ten or eleven years before when I read Roy Porter's Faber Book of Madness, where he provides excerpts from an 1810 case
history entitled Illustrations
of Madness by the then apothecary of 
There the policy was to discharge patients after a year, unless
they were judged a danger to themselves or others.
But whatever exactly Matthews had done as a runner for the British
government and the