Twentieth
Century Blues
(Previously
published in 'Solander' magazine)
As
I was to give a workshop at last years HNS Conference I emailed my resumé
to the excellent Towse Harrison,
who had very kindly offered to introduce
me to the audience. At the end of my email I added, tongue firmly in
cheek, that one day I might write
a series based in the Celtic Dawn.
When she introduced me at the conference this ‘fact’ was highlighted
as some reassurance that I had aspirations as a ‘proper’ historical
novelist, not a scribbler who messed about in the muddy shallows of 20th
century history.
This
was a genial enough incident and I am not one driven to protest too
much, being rather busy writing novels that have, give or take a decade,
the twentieth century as their context. I do like to get on with this
magical task of writing. I have met too many writers who talk a good
novel rather than write it or who blame the publishers because their
period is not ‘in fashion’.
This incident,
however, tickled my interest and I began to take some note of the
snobberies around Twentieth Century historical fiction, which may
or may not find some expression here in Solander. This time span
does have a place in the Review publication – indeed it has its own
extended section encompassing a full range of Twentieth-Century
Fiction. The rhetoric in Solander gives me the feeling that it may reflect the view
that fiction set in the broad reaches of the Twentieth Century is
somehow inferior to the more distant delights of The Middle Ages, The
Age of Enlightenment, The Sea Under Sail, or the essentially male
romance of the battlefield before the ungallant evolution of tank
warfare.
This
is despite the fact that the course of the Twentieth Century has
witnessed not one, but a series of vivid, exciting, revolutionary
changes in industrial and military technology, as well as in political,
social and personal attitudes and values. Arguably, each decade
following from 1895 has in itself rendered as much change in these
matters as have whole centuries previously.
For
good or ill, certainties of the past have been replaced by relative
values. The individual, rather than the family, tribe or group has
emerged as the signifier of the century. In this time we have moved from
warfare dominated by group traditions and loyalties and institutional
hierarchies – occasionally personified in such hero-figures such as
Wellington or Napoleon – to the point at the end of the century where
an ideologically-motivated, suicidal individual can tip the balance of
national events. This same time span has seen the evolution of the penny
post and the weekly paper to email and texting, to Big Brother style media intrusion.
All
this is exciting stuff to be explored, analysed, and expressed by
novelists from across a wide spectrum who, whether or not they call
themselves historical novelists, use the historical context as the prism
to refract their understanding of the individual human dilemma. The very uncertainties implicit in this dynamic century are an
opportunity for fine, sensitive writing and great story telling.
One
problem with coming to grips with all this is what some might see as the
lazy desire for literary stratification. The first fissure is on
the line of ‘literary quality’. Sarah Nesbitt
makes an interesting argument regarding the controversy and
contradictions between fiction which is ‘out’ as ‘historical
fiction’, and so-called ‘literary fiction set in the past’ - a
sub-genre that dare not speak its name: as though to be labelled an
historical novelist is to be cast into the outer literary darkness.
Sarah
Nesbitt quotes Margaret Attwood and Peter Carey. I would add Helene Dunmore, AS
Byatt, Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, and Sarah Waters. It could be that, as
she says, this
move (into the past) indicates that historical fiction is getting the
respect it deserves. This idea does have its problems, however.
Alongside this new respect, it engenders further elaboration of the
snobbery that beleaguers not just historical fiction, but the broader
field of British fiction.
A
more subtle point may be emerging. In the matrix of snobbery, respect
and contempt in the field of historical fiction, we find that it's OK if
you are a ‘literary’ novelist to take the Twentieth Century as your
ground. But if you
use this century and you are a 'popular', widely-read novelist writing
about an ‘ordinary’ family in Manchester in the 1930s, your work may
be dismissed as ‘trivial’ or, astoundingly, you may be accused of being a ‘cardboard chatterer’.
People who have never penetrated your novel deeper than the cover,
ejaculate words like ‘nostalgic’, ‘sentimental’, ‘romantic’
, and ‘trivial’ in a flush of non sequiturs which bring down
any intelligent protest to their own trivial level. Your many readers
are relegated, mindless consumers who gain little insight and no
knowledge from their enjoyment of your work.
Then,
from inside the field of acknowledged historical fiction, we have
another fissure emerging. Here the ground settles around a tacit
understanding that the novels set in the Twentieth Century,
focussing on the complex, varied lives of working people, are less
historically significant than some novel about a detective priest in
Rome or a foot soldier in early Nineteenth Century Spain.
It
is important to note that an appreciation of a novel based in another
time than ours
varies with the reader’s experience of the balance between the
learning of facts and insight into human motive and experience and the
reader’s own history, life experience and personality. On the one side
of the balance there are enjoyable facts to learn such as, for instance,
the strategy for a documented battle, the conditions of life after ten
days under sail, or the layout of an Elizabethan knot garden. On the
other side, we enjoy the apprehension of the subtlety of human motives
from the very darkest to the brightest, and recognise mirror-selves in
other times, a recognition which can lead to some enlightenment of our
own lives in our own time.
A
recurring problem is that, for some people, the twentieth century is not
an ‘other time than ours’, rather it is some fuzzy taken-for-granted
‘present’ which, it is assumed, we all unquestioningly share. For
such people the grasp of their own century as history is shaky and they
find it much more
comfortable – and pleasurable - to
get to grips with a ring-fenced period like the Restoration or the
Celtic Dawn.
Such
people often also like their history picked clean of Twentieth-Century
perceptions and nuance, muttering furiously about ‘revisionism’ and
‘anachronism’. I would argue that it is impossible to write novels
in this arid fashion and conjure up a living, vibrant world for your
readers to share.
One
could equally challenge the notion that a brilliantly executed
re-enactment of a civil war battle bears more than a passing resemblance
to the real thing. The filth and smells, the blood and the screams of
pain, the perils of sickness and disability, the sheer boredom, the
grunting endurance: these require the magic of fiction to be rendered
true. A modern writer
cannot avoid bringing modern sensibilities and sensitivities to the
interpretation and expression of this truth through her or his fiction.
Perhaps
one problem with taking the Twentieth Century as one’s period – and
refusing to assume its fuzzy general reality - is just how much we now
know of the subtlety and the complex individual human reaction to the great events in this time. To
this end, it is absorbing to research the acres of letters, diaries, public accounts, political
treatises, contemporary press, fugitive literature, film, video, the
art, even the fiction and illicit literature of a particular decade of
the twentieth century. In writing about the Twentieth Century, we enjoy
phenomenally more resources than those for any previous century. But
then, from this massive resource it is inevitable that we conjure some
fresh human insights which are not there at all in the source documents.
In this way we make a new accessible truth which is not a lifeless,
nostalgic re-enactment. And
– as with the best of fiction set in other centuries - this new truth
is predicated on the modern perspective we bring to it.
In order to escape,
however, from the overwhelming weight of given events which
are part of our cultural knowledge, we must home in very close, feel our
way into the nuances of human identity and interaction which make the
public events live. Such fresh and communicable insights can only come
from writers with a shared Twentieth Century cultural history. Pat Barker
famously did this with Regeneration where she took the
claustrophobia of a hospital asylum as her arena and placed within it
historical and invented characters to present a late-Twentieth-Century
morality play on the reality of World War One. In doing this, Regeneration gives fresh insights into the
absolutes of war which challenge the received attitudes of her own and
earlier generations. This is not because this is a fine ‘literary’ novel – although it is - but also because it is a very fine
historical novel.
For
me this – and its greater emotional depth - makes Regeneration
superior to Sebastian Faulks’ much lauded Birdsong, both in literary and historical terms. Birdsong, however,
is a good read and does get Brownie points on the ‘information’ side
of the scale. More than one reader has told me that they had never
heard of the soldier miner-tunnellers out on the battle field and how
very interesting this was. Perhaps above all Faulks deserves praise for
putting this significant fact out into the wider public arena.
I
do admire such writers but I also have a soft spot for those novelists who lovingly excavate, with very little
document and trace evidence, the reality of the lives of those almost
without an historical voice. Among these I would include writers such as
Freda Lightfoot, whose novels bring working-class Manchester within
touching distance, and Elizabeth Gill, whose favourite focus is ‘men in
works offices with mud on their boots’.
To
get to the point where you can ‘hear’ these earlier
Twentieth-Century voices, and can walk in the footsteps of the speakers, needs a
particular approach. The public histories, facts and information are
easy to access. Using the British Library, the Internet and one’s
local library, one soon comes on the research cycle where the salient
facts begin to repeat themselves. Then is the time for more specific
enquiry. Freda Lightfoot says, 'I walk around the place I intend to write about, take photographs, do
sketch maps, note such things as what is in bloom if it is the Lakes, or
the remnants of old buildings and rows of back-to-back houses if I'm in
Manchester. Most fun of all, I talk to a great many old people.
They always say there's 'nowt much they can tell me' and then talk.'
They
look to personal experience and the words of the non-literary. Liz Gill
says, 'I
go for books written by local people about their lives. Old maps
and newspapers, local photo books, small print memoirs, old houses,
essays written about industries on Tyneside, my own knowledge of family
and industry, my family's history.'
I
don’t quite know where I am on this spectrum. I relish the large-scale
historical literature and scholarly document search as well as fugitive
regional sources and images. And while I do have the historian’s
caution about the absolute validity of such personal accounts as
evidence, I enjoy the fact that as this history is so ‘near’ we do
have the privilege of listening to the echo of actual voices.
I
listened to many hours of tape-recordings of reminiscence of individuals
who had experienced the Coventry Blitz for Land of Your
Possession. ForThe
Long Journey Home (about the fall of Singapore in 1942), I talked at
lucid, fascinating length with a lady of 98. As a young woman, she
escaped the island on one of the last boats not to be shot out of the
water. We drank tea made by her sixty-year-old daughter who had shared
her experience as a toddler. I also read eighty letters written by a
naval commander to his wife, as Singapore crumbled in the face of the
Japanese invasion. These were lent to me by the elderly man who, as a
boy, was the subject of the letters. His father who died in the waters
off Singapore the day after surrender, was one of the quiet heroes of
that tragedy.
It
is like a game of ‘touch’. I touched the son’s hand and he touched
his father and mother’s hands. There is a line of communication here
that is more than scholarship.
In
my new novel, Honesty’s Daughter, Benbow Hall
has a walled garden which is central
to my novel. In researching this novel, as well as
reading everything about the history and evolution of the walled garden
and learning how to propagate roses, I talked at length to the man who has gardened that same enclosed
space for 27 years. These close-in conversations helped me access the
magic of that particular garden. As
well as all this, I researched the history of the Hall itself, the
development of armaments in the North at the turn of the century, the
British in Colorado Springs in 1908, and conditions on the Somme in
1918. But it was talking to the gardener that was the key to the
reality in this novel.
You
might say that all this is no different to the great Bernard Cornwell
spending a day with the resident longbowman at
Warwick Castle, and I would agree with you. Perhaps it is
neither so romantic nor so overtly colourful, but it is essentially the
same literary detective work: how to walk in the shoes, and therefore
create true characters, of people who lived in other times and then say
something fresh about their lives which might connect it to ours.
But
it happens that the people I create are nearer to me as human beings
than is Bernard’s longbowmen. They are the contemporaries of my mother
and my grandmother and I feel that I have a genuine psychological
connection with them. Here we have the procedure of reaching back, hand
to hand, that game of ‘touch’ again. In the end it is not too
difficult to hear the echoes of their voices.
This,
you might say, should make the writing of a novel easy. But in some ways
it makes it harder. Without
a rigorous apprehension of the broader historical scene, and the placing
the fugitive evidence alongside the more objective verifiable public
evidence, one could slide away from this newly-minted truth into sloppy
stereotype, from tight storytelling into mundane repetitive saga. This I
avoid like the plague.
So
we have it: in this as in all other parts of the wider fields of ‘literary’, historical and other fiction, it is necessary to
mark out the fine from the dross, the true from the ersatz, the fresh
from the wearily repetitive. And it is important to feel unapologetic about the fact that one
is not embarking on a series of novels about the Celtic Dawn.
Not
yet.
