History and the Novel

EVERY history, as well as every historical novel, contains two kinds of truth: first the factual and literal truth in the recording of actual events, people, places, and time; second, the philosophical and logical truth of the comment which the historian or novelist makes in writing about his data.

History and the historical novel differ in aim, and are, therefore, different kinds of books, different art forms. They belong in separate literary categories, and are not subject to the same methods of construction or to the same critical strictures. They differ in kind. History and the historical novel are similar in that they both offer a philosophical comment on the past, direct or understood, based on the same kinds of factual data drawn from the same sources. And they both combine similar kinds of truth, factual and artistic.

Critical confusion results from the supposition on the part of either the writer or the reader, or both, that the historical novel is a kind of mule-like animal begotten by the ass of fiction of the brood mare of fact, and hence a sterile monster. In writing historical fiction, the author uses the inner and outer facts of human experience precisely in the same way that be employs them in writing any other type of fiction — with this exception: his facts must be congenial to the kind of past he has undertaken to depict.

From the consideration that the historian is fundamentally bound not to vary from a literal adherence to physical and temporal facts in depicting his events, and as to his comment must stick essentially to the scientific deductions largely drawn from his material, the false conclusion arises that the novelist is also bound by the same rules in handling his material, and that he is at best a bland and genial liar when he departs from literal truth to “deceive” his reader — that he is, withal, a sorry juggler with fact, and so a faker.

The historian is morally bound not to vary or to rearrange his data so as to depart from their literal, factual truth in time, place, or person, in so far as he knows. Consciously to do so is instantly to cease to write history and to commence writing, not fiction, but an untruth. That is the minimum contract the historian makes with his readers, the only basis on which their minds can meet in a book described as “ history.”

The novelist, on the contrary, deliberately sets out to produce a fiction. His function is to produce a complete illusion in the reader’s mind. And in writing historical fiction the novelist tries to make the reader feel that he has actually had a living experience of the dead past. In effect, the historical novel is simply a door through which the novelist leads his readers into other times than their own. But it is not a door to a storehouse of records and specimens of the past. The novelist’s door is the portal of a theater. Once the reader passes it, what he sees going on is not the actual past, but a drama arranged by the author about the past. The reader may then succumb to the spell of the dramatic illusion, but that is not to say that he has been deluded into thinking what he sees is the real past, any more than a man who buys a ticket to a play showing the assassination of Julius Caesar has a right to complain that he has not seen the actual event.

It is in this capacity to produce an illusion of reliving the past that the chief justification for the historical novel exists. Since no one, neither historian nor novelist, can reproduce the real past, one may infer that, if supremely well done, the historical novel, by presenting the past dramatically, actually gives the reader a more vivid, adequate, and significant apprehension of past epochs than does the historian, who conveys facts about them.

This is not to suppose that history must not transcend the literal. It may, and often does. But the novelist appeals to the imagination and emotions in full play; the historian, whose function is partly judicial, coolly informs the intellect about past events. In historical novels, as elsewhere, it remains true that “the play’s the thing.”

In making his drama of history, then, the novelist is morally bound, as a good craftsman, to give his readers as complete an illusion as possible of having lived in the past. He is, therefore, under obligation to alter facts, circumstances, people, and even dates

to play hob, if necessary, with strict literary history — provided the psychological truth he is trying to project demands that the literal and factual truths be altered to produce a more significant effect.

The novelist, to be sure, alters literal historical facts at his own peril. But it is an artistic and not a moral peril that he braves. The novelist is under no moral compulsion to record facts literally as they occurred, for he has already given full notice to his readers, by labeling his book a novel, that this is fiction and not fact; that it is a theater which he is conducting and not an office of facts and figures.

Readers, therefore, or critics who complain that they are the victims of a hoax, because they have been taken in by an historical novel, are simply proclaiming the fact that they do not understand the meaning of a literary label, or the difference between a playhouse and a reference room in a library. Inadvertently, they are also compliment ing the novelist on having achieved the effect which he set out to produce. Their taste has been assaulted, they say. But how? Because they ate pie, liked it, and were then outraged to discover it was not wholewheat bread.

All this, however, is not to say that the responsibility of the novelist to his material is not a strict one, since he may very well be responsible for the ideas and ideals of the past cherished by the reading public, even more than those for which historians are responsible. And, since what people believe about the past largely fixes their action in the future, the responsibility of the historical novelist is actually a great one. He ought not to fool with his sources. He may, quite properly, commit grand larceny on history, but he should not indulge in ill-designed counterfeiting. The notes he utters on the bank of the past must be good enough to pass current from hand to hand in the future: fine examples of the engraver’s art, meticulous in detail, bold and beautiful in general design, indelible. Anything else is wastepaper.

Long, and sometimes difficult, experience with trying to use the materials of history in constructing a work of the imagination in the historical novel has convinced me that the chief difficulties encountered are two. The first is the shaping of the whole story into a design that is part of a grand pattern of historical events, pregnant with important meaning. To do this gives the whole book a ponderable message, fits it into a supposed scheme of things. Not to do it is to write the weakest kind of romance, a poor adventure story in which X things happen to Y persons, with certain arbitrary results, all equally mysterious in meaning. But the trouble is that in the final honest analysis this “romantic” way is the only truly discernible manner in which events do happen and people exist — — mysteriously! All arguments for a grand scheme, “God’s purpose,” or a teleology that runs through all history, leading up to some “ far-off divine event,” rest on the sorriest kind of bad analogies, special pleadings, and arrogant or ignorant arrangements of materials. And that is true not only of mystical but also of “scientific" explanations of what history proves.

Logically, history proves exactly nothing. It has simply occurred. Yet the business of the historical novelist, as an artist, undoubtedly compels him to shape his story out of meaningless data into a form and a pattern which have human meaning, rich, if possible, in emotional and philosophical values. That is a tall order, and the only way to face it is to assume or to invent some supposedly discernible pattern in history and to shape the material in his book into an accommodating design that goes until, and is part of, the whole general pattern that he has chosen. Rash and silly assumptions about history will, of course, inevitably result in a silly historical novel.

The fixing upon a general design, then, is the first great difficulty. The second difficulty is contained in the first, but arises more specifically once the plan has been decided on. How fit the source material into it? This is not a mechanical problem, to be solved by mere arrangement of fact s, however, like the fitting together of the jumbled pieces of a picture puzzle. It is a psychological, artistic, and dramatic problem — one not only of selection, but of the preparation of material. The artist is now mixing his raw colors — his facts — on his palette so that they will blend into the tone of his picture as a whole.

Every good novel has its own atmosphere and its predominant tone. But that atmosphere and tone are not of the actual world; they are not to be obtained by gluing facts together into a kind of composite photograph in the album of the past. The atmosphere of the book, like the tone of a fine painting, is an emotional and mental experience, to be conveyed only by a successful artistic fiction. It must be a complete work of art, not a blueprint for the reader to work from.

To produce that finished result, the raw colors must be mixed in advance, blended, altered, and changed into becoming parts of a whole, and partakers of one general quality. The direct, objective reporting of facts, or t he importing of source material into a historical novel, essentially as it is listed in history, is ruinous to fiction. No real people, no raw facts, can be literally introduced without having them appear with all the awkwardness of intruders from another sphere. That that sphere is reality makes them seem all the more unreal in the world of the imagination. To do that is the mistake of the tyro, or of the honest fool, who mistakes reality for realism, moths and mulberry leaves for spun silk.

All this has been said before by others in other ways and in a better manner. The importance of resaying it now arises from the curious fact that lately all creative literature, but especially the historical novel, has been subjected to evaluation on the basis of something that it cannot convey; that is, literal, objective, unadulterated material and fact. Now no other art, no artist working in any other medium than writing, is subjected to any such literalminded, critical nonsense. What sculptor, for instance, who has a commission to make a statue of George Washington is blamed for not dressing it in a real pair of pants, authentically borrowed from Mount Vernon? The smile of the “Mona Lisa" would not be enhanced by exhuming the subject’s actual teeth. Yet it is for not committing similar artistic solecisms in writing that the historical novelist is most usually attacked.

The historical novelist’s real difficulty is, in fact, how to avoid the direct use of raw material. There are several devices. In writing The Disinherited I have principally employed the device of imaginary sources.

The Disinherited is based on several imaginary books, letters, diaries, and documents. In addition to those invented sources, the story has been founded on the fictional biographies of the main characters. These imaginary biographies of the characters are in fact the main basis for the whole story. They will not always be directly evident in the text. Only the biographies of the main characters are given completely, but I have, in every case, even of very minor characters, carefully imagined their entire life history, fitting them into the entire scheme of the story, so that two things will happen: first, every character, major or minor, will act consistently; second, each one will act in that peculiar way in which only an individual would. In dealing with Indians especially, I have carried out this method to project them, not as types only, but as individuals.

Thus, the whole novel is based on a general scheme of history, on imaginary sources, literary and human, constructed to fit into that general scheme, and all partaking, therefore, of the predominant atmosphere of the book. But these imaginary sources have been most carefully constructed, assembled, and given the details of life from authentic historical documents and records.

In order to give the imaginary sources as wide, authentic, and carefully rooted a basis as possible, I have for many years filled my mind with a vast deal of reading in books and other material of all kinds covering the epoch with which I deal.

I have tried to use this material, in constructing my imaginary sources, so that the characters in the book will think and act as contemporaries of the world which they inhabit, and not as a party of modern-minded people making a tour of the past. That comment of the present upon the past I have left to the reader. In reproducing the “scenery" of the past, and even its landscapes, I have not neglected the archaeology, botany, and biology required, but I have tried to “paint” the scenery as it would have appeared to people who were contemporary with it, and not to us. To produce this effect, and yet to keep it plausible to the modern reader, has been the most difficult problem of the book.