THE CRITICS have been having a stab at me again. Me that is, in my capacity as a novelist. In my capacity of critic I never stab anybody, for I know how life-denying it is to be stabbed. Writing a book is damned difficult work, and you ought to praise any book if you can. But praise is a bland commodity and readers don’t like to read it. Hence the almost wholly destructive connotations of the term ‘critic’. When somebody says: ‘Oh, don’t keep bloody criticising all the time’, you know that somebody has been stabbing with at least paperknives. When you’re in a critical condition it’s assumed you’re not going to get better. Criticism is in a critical condition.
The process of feeling (I don’t think thought comes much into it) that animates critics of my novels is something like this: (a) this is not really a bad book; (b) I don’t like its author; (c) what can I pick on to make it seem to be a bad book? The easiest answer has nothing to do with the characterisation or style; it has to do with the piddling business of factual accuracy. Make a list of, say, historical gaffes and you’re in critical business. ‘The Titanic did not go down in 1913’ (the whole point of one of your characters’ thinking it did says something about that character, but never mind). When I publish a historical novel the critics can really start bloody criticising. All they need is Pears’ Cyclopaedia.
The great word is anachronism. There are three kinds of anachronism. There’s the blatant kind used for an easy laugh by George Bernard Shaw – making Cain in the Garden of Eden quote John Ball, Cleopatra quote Shelley, the Christians sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ as they’re thrown to the lions. There’s the don’t-give-a-damn-history-is-bunk-the-past-is-really-the-present kind dear to the unscholarly heart of Shakespeare. Clocks strike in ancient Rome, Brutus and Cassius wear hats, Caesar gets knifed in the doublet. And, while the Bard’s hand is in, Ancient Britain is contemporary with Renaissance Italy, with Augustus Caesar as a probable patron of Michelangelo. The third kind is supposed to be unwilled and reprehensible, and I’m supposed to go for it.
My latest incursion into historical fiction is set in the first century of the Christian era. A professor of Latin reviewed the book and didn’t like my narrator’s quoting a line of Juvenal a few years before the line was written. Fair enough, but how about my using the word ‘assassination’ in the very first paragraph? That’s a far worse anachronism, since an assassin was a hashish-eater sent on his mission of murdering Christians by the Muslim Old Man of the Mountains. Plenty of Christians in the just-pre-Juvenal time, but Mohammed didn’t start keeping camels till a few centuries later. Once you’re committed to using a modern language for presenting ancient history you’re committed to anachronism. But your pedantic critic will permit that: not even a professor of Latin would demand that you write about Romans in Latin. He could have a stab at it, of course, but he doesn’t have to make his living out of novels.
But even if you could wield the scandalous idiom of Suetonius or Petronius, getting all the details right, you wouldn’t easily avoid anachronism. My Argentine namesake Borges wrote a short story about a twentieth-century Spanish writer writing Don Quixote the same as Cervantes. No difference at all, except that you know you’re reading a modern writer. If I make one of my characters quote Catullus, you can’t help knowing that I’m a twentieth-century writer making him do it. That means I know that Catullus has influenced Ben Jonson and Herrick. I’ve been sophisticated by history. I’m not a Roman innocent.
Talking about Ben Jonson, he has a line in his Volpone about Lollia Paulina coming in like starlight, hid in jewels. Now in my novel I actually have Lollia Paulina in the flesh, and I’d be a terrible Roman innocent if I didn’t swathe her in Jonsonian jewels stellarly scintillating. Pretending to be ignorant of what you know all too well is not easy. My Latin professor is upset about my making St Luke, who was a Greek doctor, know too much about phagocytes. Well, why shouldn’t he have met some madman who had a theory about phagocytes and then dies in a drunken brawl before he’d been able to publish it in the Roman Empire equivalent of The Lancet? That’s the sort of thing that any good-hearted reader unspoilt by being a professor of Latin (surely phagocytes are Greek?) would naturally take for granted.
What my critical professor apparently didn’t notice – it wasn’t in his professional sphere, anyway – was that I committed the unforgiveable sin of bringing Sigmund Freud into Neronian Rome. What all historical novelists are supposed to stick up on the wall behind their typewriters is a reminder that neither Freud nor Marx existed before they were born. It’s probably out of order for Shakespeare to know about the unconscious (although he did, of course) or Socrates to brood on the theory of surplus value (well, he might just about do that so long as he didn’t call it the Mehrwert). I have Freud in my novel as a doctor someone has heard about somewhere, perhaps in Vindobona in Pannonia (Vienna in Austria to you), who thinks, though not in so many words, that neuroses have no somatic etiology. I call him Efcharistimenos, which is Greek for Freud. That’s the rich full-cream milk of anachronism, and this man has to niggle about phagocytes.
I also have Oscar Wilde in the depraved imperial story. I call him Selvaticus, which is wild enough, and I have him kicked out of Rome by Claudius for blatant sodomy, but not before he’s passed on his depraved wisdom to Petronius. Surely somebody’s going to pick on that as a ghastly anachron? If you look carefully you’ll find the Rolling Stones performing at an imperial banquet and people seeing off St Paul on his mission to Spain singing ‘Now is the Hour’. If you want the best anachrons, we have them.
The point is, I think, that the past is made by the present. The pattern we call history is not in history: it’s made by us. The historical novelist knows he’s shoving the only people he knows – those who read the Guardian over breakfast in Hampstead – into fancy dress. If he can avoid making them say ‘Gadzooks’ on the one hand and ‘Okay’ on the other he’s doing as well as can be expected (though Franco Zeffirelli has sent me a film script about Marcus Aurelius in which the plebs are okaying like mad). The only thing we will not accept is an American novel about Geoffrey Chaucer in which people say ‘ass’ instead of ‘arse’. That’s too much of an anachron.
Times Literary Supplement, 2 August 1985