1812 Nearly a century and a half later, the battle produced another, quieter clash when the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy declared the centrality of fact in fiction. ‘Dante can be wrong in The Divine Comedy’, she said. ‘It does not matter, with Shakespeare, that Bohemia has no seacoast, but if Tolstoy was all wrong about the Battle of Borodino or the character of Napoleon, War and Peace would suffer.’
‘We not only make believe we believe a novel, but we do substantially believe it, as being continuous [contiguous?] with real life, made of the same stuff, and the presence of fact in fiction, of dates and times and distances, is a kind of reassurance – a guarantee of credibility.’ She liked Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) because, along with its other strengths, it was ‘a compendium of everything that was to be known about whaling’.
The critic Frank Kermode, who (along with the present author) heard McCarthy’s lecture in Manchester in February 1960, remembered being told by an expert on whaling that Melville’s knowledge of the subject was inaccurate and unprofessional. ‘I mentioned this to McCarthy’, Kermode recalled, ‘asking whether … she would feel obliged to think ill of “Moby-Dick.” She replied that she certainly would. I called this attitude extreme.’1
It’s not clear where this leaves those readers of War and Peace who like to skip the war bits and cut straight to the love interest. In any case, Tolstoy’s treatment of the Battle of Borodino is more of an essay set out to refute the conventional wisdom of (especially Russian) historians than a historical event incorporated into fiction.
Was he right or wrong about it? Contrary to the official version, he writes in Book 10, Chapter 19 of War and Peace: ‘The battle of Borodino was not fought on a chosen and entrenched position with forces only slightly weaker than those of the enemy, but … on an open and almost unentrenched position, with forces only half as numerous as the French.’ Consequently, ‘its immediate result for the Russians was that we were brought nearer to the destruction of Moscow – which we feared more than anything in the world; and for the French its immediate result was … that they were brought nearer to the destruction of their whole army – which they feared more than anything in the world.’
So the French won the battle, but lost the war. That seems to get the balance about right.
1 Frank Kermode, ‘Bookend; Wilson and McCarthy: Still Entangled’, New York Times, 23 November 1997.