"Roundheads and Ramblings"
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Posted on Wednesday, November 09, 2011 11:48 AM
One of the questions I struggle with has to do with the boundary lines between fiction and non-fiction. Perhaps because of my academic background, I can argue that no such line exists. "Facts" are elusive and hard to pin down. Many of the things we thought we knew for certain prove to be false. New information emerges to change our views on all sorts of topics. And history? It's only what we think we know about something at any given moment. History changes.
So when does a historical account of a particular event become historical fiction? That's just one of the issues that will be addressed by the Institute for Historical Research when they open their online conference, Novel Approaches, in a couple of weeks. I'll be interested to hear the views of other writers, but before we get into the discussion, I want to get my own position written down. That doesn't mean I think I'm right. I just want a stance from which to begin. So here's an outline of the distinctions i make when I try to label a particular book as fiction or non-fiction. Roughly, it follows the position I established in a panel on this topic at the Military Writers Society of America conference in September.
A history of a particular event, or a biography of a person, must be based on documented evidence. If you tell me that someone said X, I want to see the proof--a letter, an official report, a diary. If you are quoting someone, I want to know where the quote appeared. Just as a scientist might approach new research, I want to be able to duplicate your findings. Now, at this point, most historians are cringing and shaking their heads because they know how very difficult it can be to find such evidence. Still, if you tell me that your story is true, I expect you to be able to prove it. And what you cannot prove, you must omit.
Much of what we casually label as non-fiction or biography should actually be labeled "creative non-fiction." This is a category in which the author relies on fact, insofar as the facts are known. But if there are gaps in the records, if events cannot be determined, then the author is free to speculate or fill in those gaps with the most plausible solution. If I read such a book, I expect to find the author admitting which parts come from his or her creative imagination and which ones are factual in nature. If you check my book, Beyond All Price, you will find at the end a section called "Author's Note," in which I carefully lay out which few characters are products of my imagination. I also discuss how I filled in the gaps in Nellie Chase's life story.
Authors who have used creative non-fiction well include Colleen McCullough, in her series of books on the age of the Caesars, and Sharon Kay Penman in her wonderful books on medieval English rulers and their families. In both cases, I know the authors have done their homework, have read all the pertinent documents, have walked the streets they describe, and consulted the best historical accounts. These authors are writing history, not fiction. Their talent lies in their creative ability to make their historical figures come alive for modern readers.
But what about historical fiction? How does that differ from creative non-fiction? Here's where I draw the line. Historical fiction takes imaginary characters and places them in an accurate historical setting. Le's take just one example. Sharan Newman has extensive academic credentials in medieval history and does her research in some of the world's best-known medieval archives, but her series of historical novels, set in 12th-century France, features a wholly imaginary Jewish girl named Catherine Levendeur. Catherine lives in a historically-accurate world and encounters some real medieval persons. She struggles with the real challenges of her time, but her life and experiences are fictional. That's historical fiction at its best.
What sets historical fiction apart from general fiction or historical fantasy? Consider Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series. The author paints what seems to be a wonderfully realistic picture of 18th-century American life, but her characters are time-travelers who pass "through the stones" to arrive on the scene of critical moments in the American colonies. They have completely fictional encounters with people whose names we recognize, which makes them seem believable. These time-travelers comment on the historical events happening before their eyes, but their reactions are anything but historical. Jamie, the 16th-century Highlander, is sometimes overcome with admiration for the wonderful accomplishments of the 18th-century, while Claire, a 20th-century woman, must struggle with the temptation to introduce modern knowledge into a world not yet ready to accept it. The novels make great escape reading, but their history is unreliable, if not misleading.
Questions remain about the popularity of these various categories. How do you react? When you read a novel set in a particular time and place, do you want your history to be accurate? Or are you more interested in the story than the setting?
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Posted on Thursday, July 14, 2011 9:41 AM
On Monday, I posted a long article about a new historical discovery. I was excited to have found out that at least a few contemporaries of the Battle of Secessionville (June 16, 1862) had referred to it as the Battle of Stono. That was the historian in me, showing up to demand that my novelist persona pay attention to the facts. Now, I admit that those two facets of my writing career are often in conflict. When I'm writing history, I want to know (or make up) the story beneath the cold hard facts. I can't indulge that temptation, of course, except when I put on my novelist hat. And then, right in the middle of imagining a great scene, I find myself shuffling off to verify the facts. A historical novelist must be both, and it is not an easy chore.
In this instance I was so excited that I pasted a copy of my article onto a Facebook page, one followed by a small group of descendants and enthusiasts from one of the Union regiments involved in the Battle of Secessionville. I thought they would be "interested" and they were. But at least one of them became defensive and somewhat argumentative about it. As a result, I received both public and private messages about our ensuing discussion.
The person in question used a pseudonym in his comments, but I was aware of who he really was and that he had written a book about our mutual topic. His book was straight history; mine was a historical novel. Therefore, he pulled his historical persona on me -- reminding me that the "official" records showed no instance of anyone EVER using the term "Battle of Stono." I felt like a small child being called to the principal's office to have my fingers slapped. The quirk in our argument is this: he is not a historian by training or occupation, while I am. The question raised becomes one of methodology. What constitutes "evidence' for a historian? And do incontrovertible facts ever exist? I would argue that everything can be material for a historian, and that any fact labelled " the official version " is likely to be full of distortions, if not downright lies.
I was ready to let the discussion die, but I can't let it go without one more revelation. This morning I found ANOTHER term for this relatively unknown battle. I've written before about the various editions of the Laura Towne diary and my own evaluations of their relative worth. My Monday discovery of the Battle of Stono came from the xeroxed copy of her handwritten diary -- the one I decided was most authentic. The reference staring up at me on my desk this morning is the printed 1912 (expurgated and propagandized) edition. It reads: "the steamer being crowded with the wounded and sick from the battle of EDISTO."
Where in the world does that come from? There are three battles associated with the island of Edisto, SC -- The Battle of the Tory Camp in 1781; the Battle of Rivers Bridge in February, 1865; and the Battle of the Little Edisto on March 28, 1862. All three of them have been called the Battle of Edisto. But this description of the wounded and sick was written on June 23, 1862. The wounded cannot have been lying around in the swamps of South Carolina for three months waiting to be taken to a northern hospital. And there is independent evidence of 47 wounded soldiers from Secessionville being loaded onto a steamer to be taken to New York for treatment within days of the June 16th battle.
No, I don't believe for a moment that the Battle of Secessionville was ever called the Battle of Edisto. Both date and location are all wrong. Where did this idea come from? Well, the editor of the Towne letters was not a historian, either. He was a lawyer by training and a writer of children's edifying literature by occupation. I suspect he, too, looked at the handwritten manuscript, saw the term Battle of Stono, and shook his head. He had never heard of it, so he looked for another possibility. Since the Battle of Secessionville is not exactly a household word, he simply found another battle that took place in that part of South Carolina and "corrected" the silly woman's error.
That's how "historical facts" come out wrong, folks.
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Posted on Friday, June 03, 2011 8:30 AM
A day or two ago, after posting my evaluations of the last two diary sources, I made a small, but amazingly significant, discovery. I was leafing through the handwritten copy of Laura Towne's diary. looking for a particular comment, when a date discrepancy caught my eye. One entry was dated "July 19th 1862." The next one was "July 20th 1901" Then came "July 21st 1901" and then "July 22d 1862".
I recognize an obvious explanation here. The person making the copy simply wrote down the current year instead of 1862. I've made the same mistake myself. When you are writing dates, it is all too easy to write down the current year instead of the appropriate one. History students do it on exams all the time, and their professors get a chuckle out of reading that Attila the Hun died in 1998. We've all misdated checks, particularly at the beginning of a new year. I've seen a Jeopardy contestant or two make the same mistake -- one that cost them hundreds of dollars.
Now a history student may simply not know the right answer. And a Jeopardy contestant may be guessing. But this is not the same sort of wrong answer. When the wrong date slips out for something you know very well, it almost always is a date that has some other significance. In this case, I think it is pretty conclusive evidence that the diary was being copied in 1901. That makes this version the earliest copy of the four, the only one of the four known to the two people who were most involved with it -- Laura and Ellen.
But 1901! That's the year that Laura died -- on February 20th, if I remember correctly. And that makes it even more important. Here's what I think happened. When the new 20th century dawned, Laura Towne was 75 years old. She was undoubtedly already ill, and, because of her extensive medical training, I am equally sure that she knew she was suffering from a potentially fatal illness. She would have begun putting her affairs in order, and one of the things she wanted to do was make a copy of the diary for her dear friend, Ellen Murray, to keep.
She shortened some of the entries and omitted others. She corrected her intemperate judgments as she went along. She was, in fact, composing her own obituary -- writing out the story of her life as she wanted it to be known. And she may not have been able to finish the task. The handwritten copy ends on May 28, 1864. The original diary could have continued much longer.
Does this simple mistaken date prove that Laura herself wrote the copy? No, probably not. Ellen could have done it in the months after Laura died. But it increases the probability that the handwriting is, indeed, Laura's. Once again, I am brought back to Paul Hyams' bit of advice: "Saying 'There is no evidence'
is a historian's excuse, not a defense for a novelist. A novelist must bring
imagination to the mix, hoping to come up with the hidden solution."
A good friend suggested to me last night that this whole problem might make a good presentation at a history conference. It would not. Historians do not accept what they can not prove. But a novelist? A novelist must listen to all those little voices that suggest 'what might have been.' To my own surprise, I am now hearing the voice of Laura Towne in a way I have not heard her in all the months I have been reading about her. This handwritten copy of her diary will sit on my desk as a personal message, and her words will guide and color the story I am trying to tell.
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Posted on Wednesday, June 01, 2011 8:29 AM
Pretty Is As Pretty Does
Today I want to discuss the other two editions of the Towne diary. The printed edition is easy to dismiss. The Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, edited by Rupert Sargent Holland, was published in 1912. Holland used two sources, a typescript of the diary, which was prepared by Horace Jenks, and a similar typescript of Laura's correspondence, in whose preparation Helen Jenks had a hand. A side-by-side comparison of print edition and the Jenks typescript reveals that Holland, or someone guiding his efforts, made a great many additional cuts in the original material.
Let's start with Holland himself. I have been unable to verify a direct connection between the Jenks family and Holland, except that Horace and Rupert were the same age, both born in 1878, and attended Harvard at the same time, where a friendship between them is at lease plausible, if not likely. Holland is best known in the library world as the author of "historic" books such as Historic Boyhoods, Historic Girlhoods, Historic Ships, Historic Inventions, Historic Railroads, Historic Heroes of Chivalry. Are you sensing a pattern here? Laura's writings may have barely escaped being titled Historic Letters and Diaries. The Holland edition falls into the early 20th-century genre of "edifying literature". Laura is always healthy, always optimistic, always content — never a living mass of contradictions and human failings. I'm sure the resulting volume pleased Laura's family, but as a historical source it is nearly worthless.
By the process of elimination, I am down to a single source — a curious hand-written copy of the diary housed apart from the main collection of Penn Center documents. I find its background reassuring. It is purported to be a copy of the diary made by Laura herself and given to her long-time companion, Ellen Murray. In 1908, this hand-written copy passed to Ellen's niece, who was the daughter of Ellen's sister Harriet Murray and T. Edwin Ruggles, who was also a member of the original Gideonite band of missionaries. Evenually the copy passed to Ellen's great-niece, Helen Shaw.
Helen Shaw loaned the hand-written diary to Edith M. Dabbs, who was helping to catalog and archive the papers at the Penn Center during the 1960s. So who was Edith Dabbs? She was the wife of a Penn Center Trustee who served from 1960 to 1970. After his death, Mrs. Dabbs stayed on as the archivist of the Penn Center. She was an English teacher, the wife of a USC English professor, and a trained journalist. She wrote several books, perhaps the most important of which is Sea Island Diary: A History of St. Helena Island, published in 1983. Her primary source material? This hand-written copy!
Mrs. Dabbs allowed the University of North Carolina Library to Xerox the manuscript before she returned it to Mrs. Shaw. Mrs. Dabbs kept a copy of the Xeroxed manuscript among her papers. On its covering sheet, she made a note: "Ellen Murray wrote the first page of this manuscript, from which the Xerox was made, from the original manuscript of the diary kept by Miss Towne. After page 1, the entire manuscript is in the hand of Miss Towne who kept it originally in two small composition books." This copy now resides in the Edith M. Dabbs Collection at the University of South Carolina's Carolingiana Library. The woman who catalogued that collection will not commit to a statement that the handwriting actually belongs to Laura Towne, because she has no other corroborating evidence of Laura's hand. The claim, however, seems reasonable to me, since it comes down through the family of Ellen Murray.
One final question remains. Is this copy different from the others? Yes, it is substantially different. When it is side-by-side with the print edition, there are six or seven differences per page. Most of the changes, however, are editorial ones. It is easy to believe that Laura made this copy for her dearest friend, sometimes leaving out small things that Ellen would already know, but more often, just polishing the language. And here's the telling difference: the disparaging comments about the freedmen from the other copies have been modified or eliminated. It is exactly the sort of editing I can imagine myself doing on something I wrote 30 years ago. In my novelist's imagination, I see Laura shaking her head at her own foolishness and saying, "Oh for Heaven's sake! I can't believe I ever said that!"
Is the result a truer vision of Laura? I think it is. She undoubtedly came to South Carolina with the same inherent prejudices and preconceptions that almost all the abolitionists shared. They had an idealized view of what the Negro race could become, but little knowledge of the realities of slavery until they met it face to face. As a result, they were horrified by much of what they saw. Laura's intemperate reactions in her first weeks there come from that shocking reality. But unlike many of the original abolitionists, who simply gave up and went home, Laura stayed in South Carolina for 40 years, working among the people she had come to love.
This handwritten version of her diary speaks to me as none of the other copies do. And I think it gives a clearer picture of the mature Laura than any other source I have found. Laura Towne is not the derogatory words she wrote in her first few days on St. Helena Island. She is, rather, the work she accomplished, the task to which she devoted her entire life. If she edited the diary to reflect the attitudes of a lifetime, that was her privilege. She deserves to be judged by what she did, not by what she said.
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Posted on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 9:20 AM
OK. I've struggled with this problem long
enough. It's time to make an
informed guess and then act upon it.
You'll remember that I've been looking for the original diary written in
South Carolina by Laura M. Towne during the Civil War. I haven't located the
original. What I HAVE found are
four versions of that diary — each one different in content and in tone. They might as well have been written by
four different Lauras. Which one
should be my guide as I try to portray Laura in this new novel?
Let's start by putting
an end to the search. I am
convinced that the original diary no longer exists or has fallen between the
cracks somewhere in a distant family member's attic. Everyone I talked to seemed to "know" where it is
— except that they were all wrong.
Even the highest level archivists admit that they cannot produce
it. My own explanation?
I think it disappeared for the same reason there are four versions of
it. Laura's friends and family
members had varying memories of her — memories they did not want to challenge
by allowing the public to read Laura's most private thoughts. How do you keep
her thoughts private? By hiding
them away where no one will ever find them. And somebody did a really good job!
If I were still
thinking like a historian, I might be tempted just to drop the whole thing
right now. A historian must be
sure of her sources. If the
original is not available, the quest is over. But as Dr. Paul Hyams reminded me here a couple of weeks
ago, saying 'There is no evidence'
is a historian's excuse, not a defense for a novelist. A novelist must bring
imagination to the mix, hoping to come up with the hidden solution. So here goes.
Source number 1 is a microfilmed
copy of a typescript of the diary, very obviously produced on an electric
typewriter and then carefully proofread and corrected with proofreader's
marks. I have no idea who typed
this version, but I can date it to the 1960s or early 1970s, when electric
typewriters were available to writers.
That makes this version a hundred years younger than the original. And
for that reason alone it is unlikely to be the closest match to the
original. In a hundred years, too
many other individuals have had a chance to make changes. Out it goes.
Source number 2 is
also a typescript contained on the same roll of microfilm from the University
of North Carolina's Southern History Collection. This one differs in several ways. It was typed on an old manual typewriter, evidenced by the
slightly misaligned letters, the standard evenly-spaced font, and the tendency
of some circular letters to be shaded because the typewriter keys have
collected ink in their depressions. It is also identified as having been
prepared from the original by Dr. Horace Jenks for the information of the Board
of Trustees of the Penn School. The approximate date of preparation was 1908,
just after the death of Laura's long-time partner, Ellen Murray.
This one called for
more investigation. First, who was
Horace H. Jenks? He was the son of Helen Carnan Towne, who was the daughter of
John Henry Towne, Laura Towne's older brother — which makes him Laura's
great-nephew. His mother had inherited Laura's estate in 1901. By the time of Ellen Murray's death, Horace and his older
brother Robert were taking over trusteeship duties at the Penn School from
their mother. It is safe to assume
that both Horace and Robert Jenks had seen Laura's diary; when Horace
authorized a typescript, he was working from the original.
But that's not the end
of the story, because this typescript has its own problems. It is incomplete. There are gaps in the dating, sometimes
for several weeks and sometimes as much as three months. Furthermore, Horace
was a Harvard-educated academic, who dutifully used the required ellipses
whenever he omitted sections of the diary. The typescript is riddled with those little series of dots. . . . . I'm grateful he at least marked them, but omissions simply
raise more questions.
Did he just leave out
the boring parts? No, the omitted
sections often occur at times when diaries and letters from other Gideonites
reveal internal disagreements, disputes with the army, massive epidemics of
killer diseases, or unusual danger from the threats of war. The result is a fairly happy picture of a woman who is doing
the job she was sent to do, teaching slaves, treating minor ailments, and learning
how to live in a surprisingly hospitable new land. It's a lovely picture, but obviously inaccurate. That's the trouble with ellipses.
One other
characteristic of Source Number 2 bothers me. In it, Laura frequently expresses
her displeasure with — and sometimes outright disgust for — the freedmen of
South Carolina. She comments on how dirty they are, how uncivilized, how slow
to learn, how uncooperative, how rude, how lacking in ordinary common sense,
how superstitious, how cruel in
their treatment of animals. Her attitude in the early sections of the diary
does not in any way reflect her abolitionist belief that the Negro was as
capable as any white person. In
later sections, the complaints diminish, but favorable judgments are still hard
to find. So why would Horace leave such derogatory comments in the typescript?
Maybe he was just
being honest. Maybe Laura Towne was a bigot. No, there's a more plausible explanation. As early as 1900, Horace Jenks was
leading a movement to change the very nature of the Penn School. When Laura
founded the school, she wanted it to offer a standard "English"
education, so that the children of freedmen would grow up with the same
educational advantages as their white neighbors. For almost forty years, she taught academic subjects —
sometimes offering Latin, advanced algebra, philosophy, and ancient
history. Horace Jenks and several
other trustees favored turning the Penn School into a vocational center. They had begun dropping the academics
and substituting classes in shoemaking, blacksmithing, basket-weaving
(really!), sewing, and agriculture. The change reflects the racial biases of
the early 20th century, of course, but the edited transcript of Laura Towne's
diary gives the erroneous impression that Laura shared those views. Why did it not appear until 1908? I suspect it was because Ellen Murry was no longer around to oppose it.
This typescript has
its value, but only for the sake of what it reveals about the editor, not about
the original writer. I may use it
for comparative fact-checking, but it's not a reliable guide to Laura. There are still two other sources — a
printed edition of the diary and letters and an elusive handwritten copy. We'll look at those tomorrow. |
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