CHAPTER 46

CRAFTING HISTORY INTO FICTION

BY JAMES ALEXANDER THOM

The world’s oldest profession isn’t what you might think. Storytelling is older. In fact, the words history and story come from the same Latin root and mean almost the same thing. But we’ve come to think of “history” as stories of times past. And not only is it old but it’s said to be the “truth,” so we’re obliged to know it. But if you know how histories get written, you suspect that the truth of history is often dubious, at best. In fact, the title subject of the genre makes me smile and shake my head: Historical Fiction. The phrase is redundant. Most history is more fiction than we like to admit.

Most historical accounts were written by fallible scholars, using incomplete or biased resource materials; written through the scholars’ own conscious or unconscious predilections; published by textbook or printing companies that have a stake in maintaining a certain set of beliefs; subtly influenced by entities of government and society—national administrations, state education departments, local school boards, etc.—that also wish to maintain certain sets of beliefs. To be blunt about it, much of the history of many countries and states is based on delusion, propaganda, misinformation, and omission.

It’s a problem at least as old as the Athenian historian Thucydides, who qualified his history of the Peloponnesian War by admitting “the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eyewitnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.”

One of the first lessons I learned as a newspaper reporter long ago was that there will be at least as many descriptions of any simple incident as there are witnesses. Add more versions as time passes and as the eyewitnesses rethink their memories. Apply that lesson to deliberate or motivated events like crimes, battles, love affairs, and public hearings, and you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, “a distillation of rumor,” or, as Napoleon said, “a set of lies generally agreed upon.”

A novel, or so-called “fiction,” if deeply researched and conscientiously written, might well contain as much truth as a high school history textbook approved by a state board of education. But having been designated “historical fiction” by its publisher, it is presumed to be less reliably true than that textbook. If fiction were defined as “the opposite of truth,” much of the content of many approved historical textbooks could be called “historical fiction.”

But fiction is not the opposite of truth. Fiction means “created by imagination.” And there is plenty of evidence in literature and art that imagination can get as close to truth as studious fact-finding can.

This claim is not intended to belittle historians. Most of them do their best to find and state the truth. I like and admire historians, and even associate with some of them. I’ve had the pleasure of dining, drinking, and conversing with a few of the very best of them, and I’ve learned a lot from them. Some are even my pen pals, and I cherish their friendship. Why, if I had a daughter who wanted to marry a historian, I wouldn’t object on the basis of any innate prejudice against historians. But I might advise her, “Tell him you’re the daughter of a historical novelist and see if he still wants to marry you.” The fact is, more historians look down on historical novelists than vice versa. And with good reason: There are even more bad historical novelists than bad historians. My hope is that you will be respected by good historians.

It can happen. If we study and work conscientiously to raise our image from the old, licentious, stereotypical “bodice-rippers” of our raffish past, we may eventually become comrades-in-arms with the historians who have traditionally scorned us.

Then we can fight proudly alongside them against the common enemy: ignorance of history.

A ROSY PAST

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. That statement might sound like a gag, but, actually, it’s a smart way to look at the past. I would describe nostalgia as “looking at the good old days through rose-colored glasses.” But to tell the truth, the good old days weren’t.

A longing for the good old days is a main motive for writing and reading historical fiction. It’s similar to a child’s love of fairy tales. Finding it ever harder to anticipate a rosy future, we take refuge in a rosy past: a past when men were chivalrous and brave and honorable, when women were virtuous and neither obese nor anorexic, when our founding fathers were idealistic and selfless, when the happy slaves on the old plantation adored their Massa, when hardy frontiersmen strode into the wilderness to create civilization and enlighten the ignorant savages, when men shouldered their muskets for the one noble purpose of throwing off tyranny and bringing Freedom to all.

The trouble with a rosy past, though, is that it doesn’t stand up very well under research. Specifically in the case of American history, greed was at least as powerful as idealism: The founding fathers (many of them slaveholders) set up a form of government designed to protect their own advantages; women were chattel; a large percentage of frontiersmen explored new terrains to get beyond the influence of the law, or simply as real estate speculators, like George Washington and Daniel Boone; and many frontiersmen shouldered their muskets because they either yearned to kill “savages” or were afraid of being labeled cowards; they even went to war to defend their right to own slaves.

Clear-eyed research, alas, turns up warts and all. True, our nation was the first ever to be created out of whole cloth, right out of the aspirations of enlightened men, and it became the richest and most powerful nation in world history. Americans’ inventive genius developed material wealth and creature comforts that the Old World had never imagined. But progress was ruthless, cruel, hypocritical, venal, and relentlessly violent—in other words, no more noble then than now. As one of my favorite essayists, Hal Crowther, puts it, “No one can trump Americans for self-righteous amnesia.”

Others agree. “Turning a blind eye to ugly aspects of the past can be a bad habit that carries over into the present,” writes columnist Norman Solomon. “Back in 1776, all the flowery oration about freedom did nothing for black slaves, women, indentured servants, or Native Americans. If we forget that fact, we are remembering only fairy tales instead of history.”

A good historical novelist has the same obligation as a good historian: to convey a truthful history, not perpetuate pretty myths.

The greatness of America isn’t diminished by the recognition that it was made like sausage: the grinding up of human meat—Native American flesh, slave muscle, women’s bodies, soldiers’ limbs (Redcoat, Yankee, and Rebel), laborer sinew, souvenir Filipino fingers …. Telling the truth, even when it’s ugly, isn’t unpatriotic. Showing the “other side” isn’t revisionism; it’s a widening of vision.

Therefore, the yearning to tell a great historical narrative isn’t an excuse to cherry-pick the glorious parts or ignore the brutality that forms empires.

Much as you the historical novelist might hate to do it, you might have to portray your dashing Virginian protagonist as a male white supremacist, because many such men of the past were. They were brought up that way. Many believed blacks and Indians were inferior, less intelligent races that didn’t have souls, an easy excuse to mistreat or kill them with impunity. Between Thanksgiving dinners, those quaint Pilgrims with their white collars and buckled shoes occasionally massacred villages full of Indian women and children, decapitated their chiefs, and displayed their heads on tall poles. Racism was even less subtle then than it is now. Most early American white men thought women should be seen but not heard. As a historical novelist, you might wish to make your hero “politically correct” by today’s standards, but if you do that, you’ll be lying to your readers.

My wife, Dark Rain, who is also a historical author, spent much of her early life idolizing a brave, beautiful, statuesque female Shawnee Indian chief named Nonhelema. Being of that same tribe, Dark Rain had esteemed her as a heroine. White girls had Clara Barton, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Amelia Earhart as inspiration; Nonhelema was about the only well-known role model for an Indian girl in Ohio. In the 1990s, my wife got a publisher interested in a novel about Nonhelema and began researching her long, spectacular life story in great detail.

Now and then I would hear my wife mutter in her office, “Oh, no!” Or growl, “You damned fool! How could you?”

“Who’s the damned fool?” I asked.

“Nonhelema!” she replied. “This woman did some of the dumbest things! Got involved with no-good palefaces. Believed their promises. Kept doing things for them that were bad for her own people! Drank like a fish! I didn’t know this. She’s got feet of clay! What kind of a ‘heroine’ is this, anyway? I’m so disgusted, I’m not sure I even want to write a book about her!”

I sat for a minute with my fingers steepled, amused and musing, then said, “You realize, of course, that your novel keeps getting better.”

She saw my point and didn’t like it. “Well, if you like this kind of a life story so well, you write it!”

“She’s your heroine,” I reminded her. “It’s your book contract.”

Eventually she came to terms with it. She asked herself, “So, Self, you’ve never made a bad decision? You’ve never followed your heart and got into a mess?” She decided to continue writing about the real Nonhelema, warts and all, not the idealized one she’d admired in childhood naïveté.

As it turned out, we got a better contract for the book from another publisher, and co-authored the novel, adding my knowledge of the battles and treaties in Nonhelema’s life to my wife’s understanding of her culture, spirituality, femininity, and conversion to Christianity. The book, Warrior Woman, was anything but a fairy tale about an ideal heroine. My wife ended up understanding her better than she ever had—and admiring her more because she persevered through all the problems she caused herself. As we know, real life is like that.

Even a story about a beautiful woman is better if it includes warts and all.

FACTUAL AND FICTIONAL FUDGING

One way to compare historians and historical novelists might be like comparing brunettes and blondes: Novelists have more fun.

Even historians seem to think so. Some admit that they envy us. It’s not just the fun of being free to make up stories. It’s also that we don’t have to take ourselves quite as seriously as historians do. Not quite.

To be really good historical novelists, we have to take our obligation to historical truth just as seriously as the historians do theirs. But we don’t have to bear the burden of being the authority on every factual detail. Our disclaimer is right there on the cover: a novel.

My friend and colleague Lucia St. Clair Robson isn’t a blonde, but she’s one of the good historical novelists, one who makes the work seem like fun. She expresses her attitude about the genre in an almost frolicsome tone: “After all, we really are making stuff up!”

She loves to find factual incidents that add humor and picturesque images to her historical novels, such as an incident in the Second Seminole War when a chieftain named Wild Cat and his warriors attacked a troupe of Shakespearean actors and carried away eighteen trunks full of Elizabethan costumes. The Indians showed up later at treaty talks dressed as Hamlet and his entourage.

It was delightful imagery, but there was a chronological problem: The costume caper occurred after her novel, Light a Distant Fire, ended. Says Lucia: “I took a poll among my friends. They all agreed I would be crazy not to use it.” So she used it. It was one of only two times she ever “deliberately fudged dates.” She explains to me, “I can only plead youth and inexperience as cause for the malfeasance and throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

That wasn’t even making stuff up. It was simply juggling time to make use of a colorful and amusing scene. In other words, a novelist can have more fun and wiggle room than a historian—although a historian could have put it in parenthetically or as a footnote.

Fun, yes, but notice what Robson said: Only two times did she ever deliberately fudge dates.

The other was when she placed Sam Houston and Davy Crockett simultaneously at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, when actually they had missed each other by only a short while. That’s only two conscious “time cheats” in a long career of novel writing. Many historical novelists take much greater license. Some twist historical chronology in knots to enable historical figures to encounter each other for dramatic effect. The great novelist E.L. Doctorow has felt free to alter just about any historical fact to improve a story, and his works become eminently readable bestsellers. But you certainly wouldn’t want to use them as reference books.

Lucia Robson’s facts can be trusted if, say, you’re a teacher assigning her novels as supplemental reading in a history class. “Researching as meticulously as a historian is not an obligation but a necessity,” she tells me. “But I research differently from most historians. I’m looking for details of daily life of the period that might not be important to someone tightly focused on certain events and individuals. Novelists do take conscious liberties by depicting not only what people did but trying to explain why they did it.”

She adds, “I depend on the academic research of others when gathering material for my books, but I don’t think that my novels should be considered on par with the work of accredited historians. I wouldn’t recommend that historians cite historical novels as sources.” But, she adds: “I think historical fiction and nonfiction work well together. … I’d bet that historical novels lead more readers to check out nonfiction on the subject rather than the other way around,” she says, and then notes:

One of the wonderful ironies of writing about history is that making stuff up doesn’t mean it’s not true. And obversely, declaring something to be true doesn’t guarantee that it is. In writing about events that happened a century or more ago, no one knows what historical ‘truth’ is, because no one living today was there.

That’s right. Weren’t there. But will be, once a good historical novelist puts us there.

  JAMES ALEXANDER THOM has written nine deeply researched American frontier books. He is the author of The Art and Craft of Historical Fiction.