“Every idea needs a visible envelope, every principle needs a habitation,” wrote Victor Hugo in his last novel, Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three),1 set in the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror, published in 1874.
Hugo was writing about the first French Revolutionary Convention in Paris in September 1792. In this chapter he describes in meticulous detail the hall in which the Convention was held as a stage for drama. The hall was the “envelope” of that Convention, while Ninety-Three, the novel, itself is the “envelope” of an idea, postmarked 1793, but containing what Ayn Rand, who wrote an introduction to an edition of Ninety-Three, deems a story about “man’s loyalty to values.”
Rand would express nearly the same idea almost a century later: in fiction, ideas must be concretized. “Abstractions do not act.”2 Men act on ideas, and in fiction men must be concretized, as well, else they will be but moving abstractions, fuzzy, nearly invisible blueprints of characters never realized or sharply drawn, never anchored to specific, personal attributes of the writer’s own creation, entities that are literarily incredible and unbelievable.
Hugo wrote in that introduction about the Convention: “Nothing loftier has ever appeared on mankind’s horizon. There are the Himalayas and there is the Convention. The Convention may be history’s highest point…It was through the Convention that the great new page was turned, and that the future of today began.”
I love Ninety-Three, and have reread it many times. That statement, however, is one of the few in the novel I have ever taken issue with. When I encounter it, a question invariably pops into my mind: And not the American Revolution? Was it not the loftiest event in human history? Was not the American Revolution a great new turn of the page of history, and the foundation of what would be the future of the world? The American Revolution was a success, the French a catastrophic failure. The American Revolution was radical, without precedent in history; the French, antiradical, and precedented in the past, when mobs and the “majority” established tyrannies in ancient Rome and Greece. The French sought to emulate the American Revolution, but ended with the Reign of Terror and an emperor. The American Revolution sought to grant men “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and largely kept that promise up until the end of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution promised “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but, obsessed with an “equality” rooted in envy and collectivism, it denied men both liberty and the fraternity possible to and among free men, and collapsed almost immediately into a new despotism.
Imagine it: If the American Revolution had failed—if Britain had suppressed the revolt of her colonies against tyranny, or if George Washington had succumbed to temptation to become George the First, the American king, as many wished him to—would not have the interminable warfare between rival powers continued well into the nineteenth century? The French Revolution, which may not have happened without the example of the American, was followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon, whose quest for empire led to a clash with Britain, a clash that did not end until 1815 and Waterloo.
But, Hugo can be forgiven his exclusionary pride in France. It would be churlish and presumptuous to belabor it. He was as much a patriot as he was a novelist. His evaluation of France’s history is not off the mark. At the beginning of that same chapter, where he comments on how men viewed the Convention, he writes: “One has a strange feeling: aversion to the great. One sees the abysses without seeing the sublimities. Thus was the Convention judged at first. It was examined by nearsighted men when it was made to be contemplated by eagles.”3
Hugo died in 1885, and as his country mourned his passing, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, a gift from a friendly and grateful France, was being erected in New York Harbor. It is almost as though France were making a present to America of the soul of her greatest patriot and novelist.
“To a Romanticist, a background is a background, not a theme. His vision is always focused on man—on the fundamentals of man’s nature, on those problems and aspects of his character which apply to any age and any country.”4 The British-American politics and culture of the eighteenth century are thus a background to the principal heroes of Sparrowhawk, but the ideas and principles that moved them are ageless, as applicable in that century as they are in this one. If the men who made the Revolution possible had not been “real,” there would have been no Revolution. It is such “reality” that I wished to make credible and “real,” as “visible” and credible as Hugo’s heroes were to him.
Sparrowhawk is an “envelope” of ideas, of principles, of men acting on those ideas and principles. It fills a gap in American literature about why the American Revolution happened, and presents the caliber of men who made it possible. It is about their discovery, in the characters of Jack Frake, Hugh Kenrick, and in a handful of other minor heroes, of ideas that were compatible with their existence as men who thought and acted for their own sakes and own reasons, and not from duty or loyalty to the Crown.
There have been numerous novels set in the pre-Revolutionary period. Most of them are little more than costume dramas. Their characters are twentieth–century men, imposters wearing eighteenth-century apparel, transported to a century alien to them in spirit, stature, and action. They are too recognizable and so not credible. If one is searching for a clue to why the men of the Revolution did what they did and thought what they thought, it is exasperating or confusing to encounter in fiction the kinds of men one is familiar with in one’s own time, men to whom the Founders’ moral stature, intelligence, and capacity for action are impossible.
Likewise incredible are those novels in which the primary characters are unrealized abstractions that expound the ideas of the Revolution. One wants to like them, or praise them, but their unreality prohibits their concretization, and as a consequence, the ideas and events of the Revolution also remain unreal and one develops no affection for them.
Cimourdain, Gauvain, Lantenac—the giants who move Ninety-Three, are credible, arresting, convincing characters integrated in a three-way conflict rarely matched in literature in the plotting and climax of the novel (except by Rand herself in We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged). All three could be said to be uncompromisingly idealistic and moved solely by their ideals: Lantenac, the ruthless royalist, by his vision of a restored monarchy; Cimourdain and Gauvain, the dedicated republicans, by opposing spirits of the Revolution.
But, as Rand noted in her introduction, Hugo was not able to imbue his giants with credible, convincing intellects. “His fire, his eloquence, his emotional power seemed to desert him when he had to deal with theoretical subjects.”5 Thus, the political dialogue between these three seems flat and stale when compared with the rest of the novel (although that dialogue is in another literary galaxy when compared with what passes for modern political discourse, in fiction and in real life). Given Hugo’s less-than-grand polemics in the novel that were responsible for a momentous event (including the acerbic, yet oddly vapid exchanges between Marat, Danton, and Robespierre earlier in the novel), and he understood the French Revolution at least as well as did its actual provocateurs, it is little wonder that the French Revolution failed.
One task in writing the Sparrowhawk novels was to project the growth of the ideas behind the Revolution in its heroes, to make the ideas as real and credible as the heroes. This meant introducing the principal heroes, Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick, at a period of their lives when ideas would have an almost immediate influence on them, and when their hold on their own lives and identities as independent beings was most crucial. Because they refuse to surrender those things, they are able to proceed, step by step, to each stage of maturation to become independent, self-contained men.
That task complemented the task of rendering all the characters, especially Frake and Kenrick, credible representatives of the ideas they represented or expounded, and to bring those ideas to life, as well. The degree to which readers of the series have expressed an emotional attachment (or revulsion) to these characters, is a measure of the success in making those characters real. To elicit an emotional, personal response to a character in a reader is also a measure of how convincing that character is. It reveals another thing, as well: the character of the reader himself.
Hugo wrote about the Convention: “These were all tragedies begun by giants and finished by dwarfs.”6 Elsewhere, he observed: “When greatness is a crime, it is a sign of the reign of the little.”7
America today is being finished off by such dwarfs, in philosophy, in politics, in the arts, and especially in literature. The dwarfs are nearsighted and wish to reduce everyone to their epistemological state and to share their subjectivist or nihilistic metaphysics. They assert that since none of the Founders was “perfect”—since Washington and Jefferson and Patrick Henry owned slaves, for example—then America is flawed, if not founded on fraud, fabrication, or myth, and so the ideas that inspired its origins are therefore dishonest, invalid, or arbitrary, and may be discarded.
This is the modern method of argumentation and persuasion: to attack the ideas by attacking the man, and presumably discredit the ideas as well as the man. It could be called refutation through irrelevancies. Most modern readers are inured to such circuitous sleights-of-mind, otherwise known as sophistry, having encountered little else in their education, in politics, or in the press.
It is such dishonesty and nearsightedness, promulgated by those intellectual dwarfs, especially in our universities, that I wished to correct and banish by offering an epic of giants (chiefly to preserve my own sanity, and as a vehicle of justice to the men of the Revolution), by arming a reader with an eagle’s perspective on the Revolution, to inculcate a vision of man not possible in the choking swamp fog of modern culture. Sparrowhawk, a novel written in an age when such epics are disdained by the intellectual and literary establishment, has enjoyed a success measured by its enthusiastic reception by a reading public desperate for relief from modern subjectivism and in search of reason, a success that renders the odds against the novel’s appearance and value irrelevant. That success has been personally encouraging and gratifying.
The series is, to borrow the title of a Terence Rattigan play about another hero, my “bequest to the nation.” It was my “mistress” for thirteen years; I denied it nothing and devoted most of my conscious hours to researching and writing it. Book Six: War was finished in the spring of 2005. It has been difficult to begin another literary project, such as a third Roaring Twenties detective novel, my having completed the first two novels of that genre before beginning Sparrowhawk. Researching and recreating the 1920’s served as training to investigate and recreate the eighteenth century.
Sparrowhawk is my fourth series, for a total of fifteen novels. Sparrowhawk itself is over two thousand pages or some seven million words in length. When I create a hero, I cannot let him go until I have developed him to his fullest. And when I reach that point, then his story is complete. There will be no further Merritt Fury or Chess Hanrahan adventures or cases; perhaps there will be a third Cyrus Skeen novel, ending, appropriately, with the stock market crash of 1929.
1. Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three, Lowell Bair, trans. (New York: Bantam, 1962), 122.
2. Ayn Rand, The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers, Tore Boeckmann, ed. (New York: Plume, 2000), 53.
3. Hugo, Ninety-Three, 122.
4. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Ninety-Three, Lowell Bair, trans.
5. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Ninety-Three, Lowell Bair, trans.
6. Hugo, Ninety-Three, 122.
7. Victor Hugo in “Genius and Taste,” from his “Postscriptum de Ma Vie,” in Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography, Lorenzo O’Rourke, trans. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1907).