(Cynthia Mahamdi, Philip Gerard, Ron Hansen) The appeal of combining history and storytelling is evident in the popularity of historical fiction and films. But this is an uneasy union, much debated by historians. Three historical novelists share their ideas on the processes, ethics, and challenges of this genre, including doing research and transforming data intro drama, the ethics of key decision-making processes, and the special challenges of writing historicals set in Non-Western cultures.

Published Date: August 3, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Denver on Saturday April 10th 2010. The recording features Cynthia Mahamdi, Ron Hansen and Philip Gerard. Now you will hear Cynthia Mahamdi provide introductions.

Cynthia Mahamdi:

It's great to see you all here, it's also great to see other aficionados and possibly practitioners of historical fiction, a very popular, and increasingly popular, genre. The panel title, The Past is Another Country, comes from J.P. Hartley's novel, The Go-Between. And the full quote, I've always loved this quote, is, "The past is another country, they do things differently there," and I think it's that shiver of difference that gives this genre its power. It's an ability to take us back to the past. At least until someone actually invents a real time machine, that's the best way to go, is through the imagination. It's become a very respected and popular genre.

I can remember the day when it was shelved next to fantasy and science fiction and looked at as genre fiction, and now I think it's merged with the literary mainstream and it's become very, very popular. But it's also a problematic genre, it's a very difficult fusion between what we see as a science, history today is more seen as a science than an art, and storytelling. And it also raises very tough questions, not just aesthetic questions that we all have to deal with in telling a story, but also practical, philosophical and ethical challenges, and they're inherent when you try to transform history into narrative.

We have today two really seasoned practitioners of the genre and one relative newcomer, myself, and we'll be sharing our insights and experiences in grappling with some of the challenges involved in this genre. I'm Cynthia Mahamdi, I'm a first-time novelist. I'm preparing to take the next big challenge, which is publishing a first historical. I teach contemporary literature and film of the Muslim world at Santa Clara University, and also fiction writing. And my copanelists are Ron Hansen, my colleague at Santa Clara, who also teaches film studies and screenwriting. Ron is the author of 10 books, including The Assassination of Jesse James, which was just made into a film, you might have seen it, with Brad Pitt, as well as Hitler's Niece, Mariette in Ecstasy and Exiles.

And my other partner is Philip Gerard, who's the author of three novels and four books of nonfiction, and has also written many scripts for public television. Philip chairs the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I want to make sure that we have enough time left over at the end to have a conversation together, so I think it probably would be best if we just hold all our questions till the end and we'll just go in sequence. So I'd like to start by sharing my experiences in writing a historical that's set not only obviously in the historical past but in a non-Western culture. And if we experience the past as another country then I think if you set a historical in another culture then you actually are facing a double displacement.

You're not only separated by the differences that are created by the passing of time, but by those differences created by language and custom and belief. The working title of my novel is The Renegado, it's an inverted captivity story. And it's a story of an encounter, a cross-cultural encounter, between a shipwrecked American and a Bedouin, and it's set in North Africa in the 1840s, in the early years of French colonization. Writing this novel meant grappling with a huge problem, and this is a problem that I think Edward Said has made famous, the problem of Orientalism. What does it involve when you depict a non-Western culture, and particularly one that has had such a fraught history with Western culture?

Because I'm writing the novel at a time when we're still caught in this master narrative of the clash of civilizations, it's been a particularly strong imperative to find those kinds of narrative forms that suggest not a clash of civilizations but a dialogue of civilizations. The hope in writing the novel is to try to find a moment in the past, one of those lost pathways, those alternate moments, when West and East did not encounter each other in a hostile way but in a more dialogical way. And I think that there are many moments like that, but they've been papered over and subsumed by the larger narratives of colonization.

So in my search to find the right forums, to find the right materials, I had encountered four big obstacles. And I think that these are problems that any novelist who tries to depict a non-Western culture will encounter. The first problem I call the single protagonist problem or the Western hero. So in the first draft of the novel it was the Western character who was in the forefront, it was his perspective that dominated. It was his journey that was really what the book was about. And in the background was, as usual, the Bedouin character, right? The native. And I think you find this structure in captivity stories and travel literature and imaginative literature, in film, pretty much every cross-cultural narrative contains vestiges of this problem.

If you think of Dances with Wolves, and to choose an example outside of the genre entirely, Avatar, you can see the same story playing itself out. It's really John Dunbar's story in Dances with Wolves, we follow the journey of the cross-cultural encounter through him, through his eyes. Or in Avatar it's Jake Sully, right? Who's front and foremost in the narrative. The native characters are the sidekicks, the guides, the love interest, and we only get very brief tantalizing glimpses of what their encounter story was really all about. It gets worse actually, because then the protagonist, who's already hogged the story, then evolves into the Western hero. And the Western hero then has to go out and conquer and master this new environment, even teach the natives about their own country or about their own land.

So we find John Dunbar is the one who actually finds the buffalo, right? Never mind that the Sioux have been presumably locating and hunting buffalo for millennia, they need to rely on Lieutenant Dunbar to tell them where they are. And in Avatar is Jake Sully who has this big communion with the Na'vi deity and manages to unite all of the life-forms on Pandora against the hostile Earthlings. So the voyage from self to other which is really at the core of the encounter story is made by the Western protagonist and less so by the native character. That experience, the experience of an Indigenous people encountering Western civilization remains opaque, remains backstage.

So I've always wondered, what would Dances with Wolves look like if for example, the medicine man, Kicking Bird, were to tell his story alongside Dunbar's. If you had a double narrative and you could see that this is really a two-way journey. Or if the Na'vi in Avatar told their own story alongside that of Jake Sully. So after many, many, many, many drafts, the Bedouin character finally evolved into an equal protagonist. And it became very clear that the encounter had to be experienced twice, that you needed to follow this journey through two perspectives, not one. And that mastery had to be balanced by failure, and that whatever mastery occurred needed to be shared equally between the two characters.

Related to this was a plot problem. I guess the first problem was a problem of characterization and perspective, point of view. The second is of plot, and I call it the necessary conflict problem. And we all know that without conflict you don't have a story, but in this novel the conflict really posed an enormous problem to me because the classic model that we have for plot structure and conflict is of a binary opposition, what Ursula Le Guin has called the gladiatorial model of fiction. I love that phrase. There are also readers' expectations, this is an American novel but it's set in the Arab world, so I think a lot of readers would automatically expect that the Muslim character would become the bad guy. But if I reversed it and gave the bad guy role to the American, I hadn't really solved anything. And it turned out that actually, neither model fitted the story that I wanted to tell.

Fortunately, in my case history came to the rescue, the French were in fact invading, and that was very convenient. They had just launched a major campaign of colonization in 1841, so it was very easy for my characters to unite against a common enemy. So voilà, the French would turn out to be the bad guys. But history is not always so accommodating, and actually, a much more interesting conflict, one that occurs in actual cross-cultural encounters, and it's certainly in my story of encountering the Muslim world, is when both characters are affected by cross-cultural contact experience. And that contact experience leads them to question their own culture, and that's an internal conflict which I think is far more fascinating and interesting than the usual bad guy, good buy binary.

I came across a description by the Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, who talks about the dialogic encounter, and that became a model, a buzzword that stayed with me. And he says that unlike the way we think of cross-cultural encounters, they do not result from mixing and merging of two cultures, that that's a very common fallacy, but rather through contact between entities, two entities that remain simultaneously self-contained and open. So he has this idea of outsidedness, that you don't really enter a culture by losing yourself or by forgetting your own culture, as if that could happen anyway, but rather through this experience of outsidedness, which leads to what he calls creative understanding.

I'll read the quote directly, "It's only in the eyes of another culture that a foreign culture can reveal itself fully and profoundly. A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered another foreign meaning. They engage in a kind of dialogue which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of the two meanings and the two cultures." So it was an interesting idea that when you are outside you can ask questions of the other culture that that other culture cannot ask of itself, and that that works both ways. And I guess those of us who have traveled abroad have experienced that, right? And it's sometimes uncomfortable.

The Westerners who went native, I guess a little bit like Jake Sully and Lieutenant Dunbar, in the colonial era in North Africa seemed to have been really profoundly affected by these kinds of dialogical encounters. In North Africa from the 17th century through I guess World War I, these folks were known in the local patois as renegadoes, which is a kind of renegade. Then the Arab counterpart to the same word in the colloquial Arabic is [foreign language 00:13:04], which comes from the same root as the word cheater or adulterer. So the plot design that evolved was to have two renegades experience a journey toward each other, away from their own cultures, and then in the reverse, back to their own cultures and away from each other.

So I had two protagonists making two journeys, and early feedback to the novel was really disheartening. It was like, "You can't have two protagonist, you have to have unity of perspective." And actually, when you start reading you realize that there are many fine novels out there that have double protagonists. One that really affected me was Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, it's a history of the slave trade in the 18th century and he's got alternating viewpoints, and there are many others. In terms of plot structure, there's a central conflict that occurs externally with the forces that are threatening that journey, and internally, as each character wrestles with aspects of their own civilization.

The third problem, which in the actual process of writing the novel was actually the first problem, and that's one of sources. An enduring legacy of colonialism is that when you do research on a non-Western culture you find colonial sources, sources that are written in European languages and that contain the perspective of the European colonizer. And in the case of Algeria, what I found was centuries of French and English texts and then barely half a century of Algerian texts. But if you're limiting yourself to sources written in languages that you understand, say European languages, then whose history are you reading in fact?

If you read travel narratives, that are so useful to historicals, whose perspective are you going to find? So what I found again and again in these sources was a kind of Western fascination with the exotic other, the exotic native, and the masterful hero, the Western conquering hero. They were embedded so profoundly within the descriptions that I was using in order to build the novel's world that they crept into my subconscious. So in early drafts of my own novel for example, I had the Bedouin roasting meat in a full-out party at three o'clock in the morning, right? Which doesn't happen that often, which I call the permanent feast, and you find this in French travel writing, it's a very common trope. And I also had very helpful, caring natives who, when they weren't cooking, were concocting herbal remedies so that they could treat the lost Westerner, all they lacked were halos.

So these invisible tropes, that's the danger of this kind of research. So it meant that I had to rethink my research strategy and dig a whole lot deeper. I started to seek out translations of contemporary Arabic literature and Arab history, particularly post-Colonial history. I had to read deeply and also find a different kind of travel writing. I had mentioned the renegadoes, and the real renegadoes had left traces, very interesting traces, these are not easy texts to find. But you do find people who are honestly grappling with the encounter with the other, people who do lose themselves in the desert. I think there's a great line from Lawrence of Arabia where the prince says, "You're one of those desert Englishmen, aren't you?" And, "I'm afraid you're going to fall in love with our desert and colonize it," which in fact happens.

But the renegadoes find themselves on a very uneasy border, borderland territory between the colonial force and the aboriginal force. In doing this research I found this wonderful writer, if you ever have time to look her up, Isabelle Eberhardt, and particularly the diary of Isabelle Eberhardt is just an extraordinary story. She's a Russian Swiss woman raised in the early 20th century, raised in an anarchist household, dressed as a boy, so she already started out strange. She went to Algeria, had a lifelong interest in Islam, went as a young woman, took on a masculine identity, gave herself a man's name, converted to Islam and traveled all over the Sahara. And she's left an absolutely astonishing wealth of travel literature and her diary behind.

The forth problem and the last problem is that of language, primarily whose language and how much? In the early draft... In the early drafts I should say, I had tons of Arabic phrases which I thought were just so neat, and then I had this 20 page long glossary, and I was told by early readers, "No, this is not going to work." But the alternative was equally problematic for me, and that is to translate everything into English. And I think translation is a kind of papering over, it's a kind of obliteration of the original. And it raises a very interesting question, those people who really did encounter other people before the days of instantaneous translation software and interpreters for hire, how did they communicate if neither one knew the language of the other? And I think that negotiating language is a central part of the cross-cultural encounter story.

So the problem of obliterating the Arabic, I tried to find a different way of approaching the language, and I came upon... It's an interesting approach of transliteration, and that is a literal translation word for word, even though it doesn't have the same sense. And in fact, it may make no sense in English. I think it captures some of the strangeness, and if we think of translation as a hostile maneuver that intends to make familiar that which is unfamiliar, then translation could be seen as a maneuver of making strange, of deliberate estrangement. Allowing cultural difference a space in which it can exist within the text.

And it's actually closer to the reality of what happens in real cross-cultural encounters, when we really do sit down and try to piece together an expression word by word and we're amazed, "Well, why did they use that cluster of words instead of what I would have predicted they would have used?" Or amazement at the ingenuity and inventiveness of this new language. Or the shock of recognition of finding a universal human experience or emotion that does ring a bell and that you say, "Oh wow, I just never thought of it that way." And most likely what you will find is laughter. I think many of us who have traveled abroad realize when you try, you struggle to communicate with someone, the two of you usually wind up just giggling like little kids. It just becomes such a fun game to try to get something across.

One example from my novel, in one version of the North African colloquial dialect, how are you? Which is [foreign language 00:20:33], literally means, what is your weather? Because condition and weather are the same word. So on my first visit to Algeria I just thought that was a riot, how is your weather today? But it also struck me that we really do have our own individual weather systems, we do have stormy days and sunny days, we have cold fronts, we have heat waves. The Iranian author, Taqi Modarresi, speaks of translation with an accent. In his novel, The Book of Absent People, he's got a dozen or a couple of dozen untranslated word for word transliterated expressions from the Persian, which are just a riot.

You sit there scratching your head, you laugh, you ponder, and then you start thinking, "Who do I know who's Iranian?" So you'll actually find someone from Iran and bookmark your book and say, "Well, what does that actually mean?" So here what you have is a story about a dialogic encounter which actually brings about a real dialogic encounter, so I think a case of life imitating art. So to conclude, the challenge of writing a historical in another culture, in a non-Western culture, is a considerable one, but I think it's one that's worth undertaking. Obviously if we only write what we know... And we're told that again and again, "Write what you know," if we keep our imaginations safely at home and we never risk encountering a different culture, then I'm afraid that the master narrative of the clash of civilizations, particularly with the Muslim world, will prevail.

That will remain the master narrative if it is not challenged. But if we do undertake writing this kind of novel, I think you need to meet the challenges head-on. And that for me has meant examining and reexamining and reexamining ad nauseum the story or how we tell the story of the cross-cultural encounter. It's meant a deeper level of research, I think it also means learning the language, traveling there, trying to live with people, not just stay on the tourist route but actually live with a family. And to read Indigenous texts and outlaw texts, renegado texts. And lastly, it has meant to search for forums that depict the far better alternative than the clash of civilizations, which I think is the dialogue of civilizations. Thank you.

Ron Hansen:

I think all of us who are here are probably attracted to historical fiction for a number of reasons. I always used to say that the object of literature is to educate and entertain simultaneously, and I think there's an awful lot of education that comes through historical fiction as opposed to contemporary fiction. That famous quote from George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and I think that's what drew me to historical fiction, to see how past events somehow comment on present circumstances. I was trying to think about what I've learned in writing historical novels, and I developed 12 rules for writing historical fiction, and I thought you'd like those. They actually could be 50 or they could be three, but 12 seemed like a good number. So let me begin by talking about those, and then I'm going to move into a particular scene from one of my novels and show a clip from it.

So first rule, choose the exact period in which your novel will take place and know everything significant that happened in that period. It's a very bad idea to write historical fiction that's vaguely 19th century or whatever, you have to really be focused. I just finished a historical novel and at one section in 1927 I tell you a lot of events that were going on in 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic and so forth. And then a friend of mine who read the text said, "Well, you didn't say anything about 1925 and 1926." It's relatively easy to do, I just forgot, but that's really useful to locate your characters at a specific time and place. It's really crucial.

Second rule, read everything you can about your central characters or the period, know their clothing styles, their social customs, their monetary system, until you can't hold off any longer. In other words, I read as much as I can, do as much research as I can, until I'm just aching to start putting words on the page. And then I continue researching while I'm writing. Look for books on your subject area in the library, and look for books next to that subject in the library. You'll often find that you're in the BX section, and you're looking for BX460 but you find some interesting stuff at 410 or 510 or something like that. A lot of neighboring books will tell you a lot more.

Return to your original sources after you've finished writing the novel, or toward the end of it. When I wrote the novel Desperadoes, about halfway through I visited Coffeyville, Kansas, where there was a raid. This outlaw gang, the Dalton Gang, tried to rob two banks at the same time in 1892. So I went to Coffeyville before I wrote that scene, which is a long scene, maybe a 45 page scene, and then after I finished the novel I went back to Coffeyville, Kansas, and I saw all kinds of new things that I hadn't seen the first time. Because in imagining it I was forced to guess, and then I got it right the second time. And some things you don't even consider but after you've written a scene, for example, of them walking down the alley, you're just thinking the alley you grew up in. But then you go back to the scene and you realize, "Oh, that was only 12 feet wide, how did those horses get through there?"

So I recommend going back again, and the same thing is true about texts. The book I was just writing, there was a transcript of a trial. I read the whole transcript, thought I knew the story. Finished the novel, read the transcript again and found all kinds of new gems that were just floating to the surface. So I would recommend, read everything you can and read it again. One of the signs that it's time for you to start writing in terms of research is when you start correcting the authorities. Because when you read enough you'll realize that some people are just wrong, and when you can be pretty confident of that that means you're ready to start. But remember that the authenticity and the entrancing power of historical fiction depends on your deft incorporation of historical detail.

Three, find experts on the topic, either through conversation or correspondence or on the internet. My first two historical novels were written before Google, and I've been amazed at how much easier life is for a historical novelist now. When I'm trying to furnish a room, all I have to do is look up antiques for that period and suddenly they're named and I know what they look like and everything. I used to have to order books that didn't really apply because their titles seemed to be something I wanted. I wanted to know what other names of cowboy hats were, because I only knew Stetson. So I saw this book, it was called something like, "Stetsons and," something else, and so I thought it was going to be about hats. I ordered it, it cost me 25 bucks, comes in and it was just some clever title about the stock exchange, and so it was a total waste of time and money.

I'm personally one of those people who actually talks about what I'm writing at a cocktail party or whatever. Some people are very cherry about doing that, they get nervous about revealing too much, but I always learn something by talking about the novel I'm working on. And often it's just as simple as, "Oh yeah, I used to have a Model T." "Did you crank it?" "Yeah, I had to crank it." They would explain little things all along the way when I was at cocktail parties, so that was really useful. My first two novels, I found a book called A Dictionary of the Old West, and it just had weird idioms that people used back then, especially cowboys. But I kept that by my side and I'd shoehorn it in whenever I could.

I found a book called The Farm Encyclopedia of 1882, and I've used that over and over again, not only in short stories but novels. Because it had all kinds of recipes, the kinds of things that people took to cure themselves of various diseases, all of that was in there. It gave a fascinating insight into how people's lives where. In this novel, it's set in the 1920s, on eBay I found a 1925 Sears, Roebuck catalog, and it only cost me $5 but whenever I need to know something about fabrics or clothes or what they call them, which are different names, I would just refer to that. Maybe the women here know more than I do about fabrics, but there were all kinds of things I'd never even heard of before.

I didn't know what a midi dress was, but now I know because I had the Sears, Roebuck catalog to help me along. I generally read microfilm newspapers about the period I'm writing on. When I was writing about Jesse James, I read The Kansas City Star every day from January 1st 1882 to April 5th 1882. In those days newspapers weren't that long, but I found all kinds of fascinating stuff. You find out the prices of things, the kinds of foods they had, the kind of jokes they told. So the microfilm collection is really immensely valuable. If you're going back further in the past, I don't know if you're doing prehistoric times, but that's why I avoid those.

Four, make a basic outline of a plot before you begin writing. One of the advantages of historical fiction is that you generally have a sense of where the plot's going, there's something that attracted you to the material in the first place. But historical fiction is so much harder to write than contemporary fiction that you must've settled on a structure or architecture or the task will be overwhelming for you, and confusing or off-putting for the reader. I had a friend who used to reduce the writing of a novel to its simplest component, which was he thought 50 scenes. That's manageable if you think of it that way. But supposing you have 26 scenes in your novel, then that means you need to know what the letter B represents, what letter G represents, what letter Y and W represent.

You don't have to have all the letters but you have to have signposts along the way, and then you can fill in the subsets later on in the writing. It doesn't mean that you're confined. Because sometimes I would begin a chapter for example saying, "I'm going to show you a scene where Jesse James gives a gun to Robert Ford," and that's basically what I knew was going to have to happen in the chapter, and there were maybe three other points. But that meant that there was an awful lot of fill that came in later in the course of the writing, so it gives you a foundation but it still allows you to imagine and invent.

Five, include only historical information that is important to the development of your characters or the plot. There is nothing so tedious as reading a historical fiction that looks like a pageant, where everything is happening. What you want to do is give the reader a sense that you are focused in your storytelling. Even things that interest you may not interest the reader, and this is a way of putting a corset on I guess, to use an old term. Early on I find myself free associating with scenes that may not actually make it into the novel. The novel I just finished begins in 1925, but I did scenes from 1915 to 1925, just for myself. And I didn't ever intend to use them, I just wanted to show how this husband and wife met, how they dated, how they got married, and how they had a child. But by the time the novel begins, she's 30 years old, they've been married almost 10 years.

But all that information was useful in the development of my character, and it was not so useful for readers to know all that. When I was writing Mariette in Ecstasy, which takes place in 1909, I was going to do a whole story before the novel begins. She enters a convent at the age of 17, I was going to do a story from the age of one to 17 before she enters the convent, and then I put it off, I said, "I'll do that later after I know what the whole novel's about." So I got to the end of it, and then when I got to the end of the novel I realized I didn't need that first part at all, who cares? She comes in medias res and it seemed to be sufficient, and I hope it feels that way to readers.

Six, my historical fiction is generally about real people, and I feel a duty to stay as close as possible to the actuality of their lives. I think this is one of the crucial tenets for the historical novelist. A lot of your historical novels will be about periods where you're making up everything, but still you have to be very attentive to what actually happened. There's a contract that a writer makes with the reader, and a contract that the writer makes with his characters, that he's going to be as close to what he thinks actually happened as possible. Your take on your characters, in other words, should be as consistent with the scholarship that's available as possible.

Seven, have on hand reference tools, such as A Dictionary of American Slang. If you're writing about the American period you're aware that some words came into existent earlier than others. Often I had this alarm that would go off and I'd say, "Did that word actually exist?" So I went to my Dictionary of American Slang, or I went to the Oxford English Dictionary. I used the term lousy, and lousy felt to me like a 1940s expression, but actually, it came into being at 1680 or something. So those dictionaries are useful for that. There's nothing so awful as reading historical fiction where they're using vocabulary that doesn't belong, that is anachronistic.

When some of the actors were free associating on the set when I was there and Casey Affleck said, "Oh, don't get your girdle in an uproar," and I said, "They didn't use that term, it was corset back then." And a lot of actors who aren't used to this, when they free associate they're going to use 20th century expressions, especially vulgarities. And a lot of those didn't come into being. And that's one thing I hated so much about Deadwood, it was that it was so anachronistic in its vocabulary choices. So you actually have to be pretty close to what actually happened.

When I'm writing about something I often have a map of the region available so I can refer to it. I often cast the movie, or actually, the novel. So even if I'm talking about a woman who is a made-up person, I make her look like Emily Dickinson, I have a picture of Emily Dickinson there, and I do that for all the characters. When I was writing Atticus, which isn't a historical novel but it gives you an example, I had a picture of Richard Farnsworth. I don't know if you know him, the old character actor. He started out as a cowboy wrangler on movie sets and he gradually became an actor. But just having that in mind made it really useful to me because I could remember what they looked like, and it's easier for your descriptions if you know specifically that the eye color has to be blue and it won't change to brown 50 pages later.

This is number eight. Do not insert 21st century values into a historical context. Let your characters live in their own time with a mindset of that era, not your own. Watch in particular the intrusions of political correctness, feminism, and anachronistic judgements or attitudes about your characters and their world. I could not read The Clan of the Cave Bear simply because Auel's main character seemed to have been extracted from the 1980s and shoehorned into her prehistoric context. There's nothing that drives me crazier than to suddenly see somebody from 1980 doing something in 1740. And that's part of what your research is all about, is to see what the attitudes are, what was the social milieu these people were operating in?

Nine, do not give too much background information too soon. Do not answer every question the reader has before he or she has a chance to ask it. Parcel out items in your backstory as you hurry forward with the interesting action, and then at a resting point insert more of the necessary description or biography. 10, learn to pause in your writing and ask questions about the environment or the scene. Consider for example, the lighting. Is it fire, candle, a coal oil lamp, a gas retort, an electric bulb? You'll need to know when each form of illumination gained currency, and you have to do that for almost everything you're dealing with in historical fiction.

You need to know that kerosene for example is actually a copyrighted name for coal oil and did not occur until much later. It's just like Xerox is for photocopy, that's another form of anachronism. 11, remember that fiction writers are truth tellers, do not create a historical fiction of the way things should have been, but as they were. It's okay to exaggerate, it's not okay to distort. Do not sentimentalize, give them agency and purpose and present them with all their flaws as well as with those characteristics that make them sympathetic. In other words, choose your characters wisely.

And 12, by way of summing up, calling it fiction does not remove the obligation to be historical if it's historical fiction. In my research I found a picture of the revolver that was used to shoot Jesse James, and on that revolver it says, "This gun was given to Bob Ford of April 1st 1882." Bob Ford shot Jesse James on April 3rd 1882, I knew that had to be a scene, in which the gun was actually given to him by Jesse. But once you know that he has to give a gun to Bob Ford, what was Jesse thinking and doing? Was it just a generous gesture or was something else going on? So that presents a situation that is loaded with complications.

Also, just to set it up in case you don't know, that Bob Ford was in deep trouble for killing Jesse James' cousin. He was also in deep trouble for killing that cousin because the government could have arrested him and put him in jail. So he made a deal with the governor that he was going to capture Jesse James, he had 10 days to do it. The novel is called a Western but it's really a gangster book because it's about a guy who finds his life threatened in some way and goes around killing off all the people who he thinks are going to do him in. So really, the Jesse James gang is just The Sopranos 100 years earlier. So Bob Ford in this scene is nervous that Jesse James is going to kill him, and at the same time he knows he's supposed to capture Jesse James, and he suspects that he's going to have to kill Jesse James in order to capture him. I'll leave it there, we can answer questions later. Phil. Thank you.

Philip Gerard:

I'm not sure how to follow Jesse James but I'll try. My brief remarks I guess are going to be called, History has a Future and we are it. The great novelist of the West, A.B. Guthrie Jr., in his essay, The Historical Novel, identifies what he calls the two great questions to which there are no complete answers facing historical novelists. And the first is, "Shall the historical novelist deal with the actual figures of history or shall he go outside them? If he goes outside, what shall be his limits? If he employs the record, what violences if any may he do to it? May he invent words for the mouths of corpses? May he have dead limbs acting as live limbs never did? May he amend the facts, extend the annals? May he have a solider survive on General George Armstrong Custer's battlefield as one author did?"

He goes on, "My answer is my own, I don't like to tinker with the facts. I don't like to assume, no matter if I can't actually be proved wrong that an actual mouth said something or that an actual body did something that has no support in the record. Liberties like these tend to muddy history as the little story of George Washington and the cherry tree has muddied history. And they seem to me to be almost acts of disrespect, like disfigurements of headstones. If we use the record, I'm talking of known events, known people, known words, we must let ourselves be the prisoners of it." That's the end of his quote. But the record is rarely as clear and complete as we would wish, and life almost never happens in the dramatic, artistically shaped sense that a novel happens.

So even Guthrie takes only about a paragraph to conclude, "So, how can one have a novel if he sticks absolutely to the record?" And he answers it, "I guess the answer is he can't." I guess I'm here to argue for wearing a kind of ankle monitor for the record, but treading carefully in the shadow of the great disgrace of American culture, which is that our own history, let alone the history of the rest of the world, is largely unknown to far too many of us. So the historical novel and the lucky movie made from it is likely to be regarded by its audience as unvarnished history. So while you have to make it riveting, you also have to get it right, and I agree with everything Ron has just said. And there's another shadow, not everyone wants the story told. And in some cases, which I'll get to, people have active interests in keeping the story from being told.

When I first moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, which has been my home now for more than 20 years, I heard rumors of an event that had happened at the turn of the 20th century. It involved racial violence of some kind, but who did what to whom and exactly why or even when was murky, and it changed with the teller. I was the outsider in a sense, coming into a different culture. I embarked on a crash program of research and found that on November 10th of 1898, following a rigged election in which white supremacist Democrats took back state offices through intimidation, ballot box stuffing and other fraud, an armed crowd of 1000 or so white men converged on the offices of The Daily Record, which billed itself as the first Afro American daily newspaper in the U.S.

The aim of the mob was twofold, to run out of town its editor, Alex Manly, purportedly for an anti-white editorial he'd written. But that was only the pretext, the other purpose was a little bit more insidious. They wanted to overthrow the legally elected city government because that wouldn't come up for election for another two years. In fact, the mob was the tool of the state Democratic Party acting through local businessmen in secret conspiracy. But 1000 men armed with Winchester shotguns, army issued high powered rifles, and even a machine gun, are a hard tool to control. By nightfall the newspaper was burned to the ground and an uncounted number of Black men, women and children had been killed.

One local minister who hid in a railroad car watching the firing squads estimated the number of dead at 400. The coroner held 16 inquests, so the actual number of dead was somewhere between 16 and 400. Alfred Moore Waddell, an ex-Confederate cavalry officer who led the mob was a passionate orator. He would be on FOX TV or one of the talk radio stations today. He had toured the state in the previous weeks with a rousing speech that exhorted his listeners to quote, "Shoot down in his tracks any Black man who was found trying to vote." He finished his tirade with a signature line, "We will prevail if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with the carcasses of our enemies."

Indeed, during the violence there were reliable reports of wagonloads of Black bodies being dumped into the Cape Fear River. Another thousand or so citizens, mostly Black, and including political leaders, lawyers, preachers, businessmen, undertakers, were driven out of town at bayonet point or else fled on their own and martial law reigned for three days, and in many ways that mattered, the city never really recovered. I set out to write a novel about this, which became Cape Fear Rising. I figured there must be many other books already in the record, but there were only two that I found, both novels written by African American writers almost 100 years before. Stylistically very archaic, and ironically, not very accurate to the true events. The third, a badly written nonfiction treatment was so long out of print that I couldn't find it until after I'd already drafted the novel.

The thing was, the story was the biggest secret in town. When I gave my university chancellor a heads-up that I was going to write about it in a casual conversation, he invited me to a meeting of all the deans, subdeans, vice chancellors and provosts to tell them the story so they could prepare for the blowback. The police chief told me he had a similar meeting on campus with the county sheriff and university officials. A trustee summoned me to breakfast and asked that I redact the actual names of the white supremacist perpetrators of the plot, many of them... Sorry, many of their descendants still lived in town, many had exactly the same names, they were the third or the fourth, many of them were on our Board of Trustees. I did not redact the names, I thought that they were historical figures, every bit as historical as Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg.

I wrote the novel without tenure but was tenured just prior to its publication. Yes, a great argument for tenure. Nonetheless, there was some discussion among influential people outside of the university about whether my tenure could be revoked, the university backed me up. I had regarded the event as history, but it was very much a present tense issue in the community. Time and again after publication at readings and media appearances I was accused of making the whole thing up, but I've been very careful not to. First, I spent a year in archives tracking down primary documents, all the ones Ron talked about, letters, diaries, contemporary news stories, original drafts of the so-called White Declaration of Independence which was signed by 435 leading citizens. Various ultimatums given to the Black community prior to the violence. Coroner's records, birth and death records, wedding certificates, and testimony.

I compiled a timeline of events. I did my best when I wrote the novel to present any actual public event as accurately as any history would. I then researched and wrote pocket biographies of each of 60 or so major players, placing them at the events in which they had participated. I then culled that 60 to a couple of dozen and invented some bridge characters, a housekeeper and her son, an itinerant activist preacher modeled on the anonymous preachers that turned up in town during that period preaching violence. And most important, the Yankee couple, new to the South, who would be the focal point of the narrative. So I had 100,000 words or so before I began to write the novel.

When I did, I felt no compunction about placing my fictional characters into scenes in which real characters spoke words they'd only written in a diary or said to someone else at another time. As a novelist I was after their hearts, I wanted to imagine my way into their motives. I felt less compunction about making up the dialogue and the secret meetings in which men clandestinely crafted their plot, and also the documents that in their mind justified it, they were quite legalistic. We know the meetings happened, we know who was there, and we know what was decided, and we know what they did as a result of what was decided. I could fill in the rest I thought fairly accurately.

And I was writing a novel, a likely account of how this had all come to pass. Had I called it a history, I would indeed have become a willing prisoner of the record. Well, several things happened which belie the conventional wisdom that books don't make a difference in the world anymore. I won't dwell on my personal consequences, the late-night hateful phone calls, anonymous hate letters, speaking invitations suddenly rescinded, behind the back slanders and so forth. Good things happened, very good things. I won't claim to have made them happen, but the book certainly helped to set in motion a civic response to an event that heretofore had not been discussed in public.

The local media began talking about the events of 1898, if only to disparage the book. A local African American politician who attended the launch party of the book worked and finally succeeded after about 10 years in getting the state Legislature to conduct an investigation of the coup of 1898, my term which came to be adopted by the commission. Its report substantially verified the version of events as I'd laid them out in the novel, published its findings, including recommendations that the public school curriculum now address those events. My university hosted a conference of historians and other scholars on the 100th anniversary of the violence and published the proceedings.

An 1898 memorial committee created a variety of events to commemorate the violence, including a series of cross-racial dialogues, very successful and still going on, called Wilmington in Black and White. There was a stage play, there were lectures. Eventually the commission raised money for a monument to those killed in the coup who were all Black, and the monument was dedicated this past year. My own contribution to that commemoration was a radio drama commissioned by the local NPR affiliate and based on the book, although we took the made-up characters out and kept only the historical characters, and I hope to play you a clip in a moment.

Basically we did a War of the Worlds scenario, an hour long documentary that began in the morning with classical music, interrupted by a news announcer, Aileen LeBlanc, who is also the producer. You know her because when there was a hurricane she was the one on the Carolina coast on All Things Considered saying, "It's blowing out here." And the conceit of the piece was that inside the radio station it was the 20th century, we had radios, televisions, satellite feeds, outside it was 1898. So we began with the election results, who went back, McKinley and so forth, and then there was an interruption of violence, and various actors then acted this out as the correspondents went out on the street. And we had recordings of actual gunfire which I'd gotten from the sheriff's department.

There I think the guy's response was, "Well, we did most of the shooting the first time around, we're happy to do it for you." The clip I'm going to play you is an actor called Ed Carney who was in town making a movie, and he's going to do two minutes of the speech of Alfred Moore Waddell taken from the actual text of the speech the last time Alfred Moore Waddell gave it at Thalian Hall. There's a wonderful metaphor embedded in the book, Thalian Hall, which is the opera house in Wilmington, goes back several hundred years, it's attached to city hall. So the city hall and the opera house are joined literally at the hip, and so many of the civic events happened in the opera house and spilled over into the city council chambers or vice versa.

It happened at the time that they had just restored Thalian Hall to the way it looked in 1898. So we had Ed Carney in the studio doing the speech, we then went out to Thalian Hall, prior to the opening night of Big River, and we went on stage and asked for various levels of applause. And it's odd to me, but you can go into a hall of 600 people and say, "When I tell you, only the women clap." And you say, "Now," and they all clap, and then you say, "Okay, now the men stamp their feet," and they do that. So that's what you'll hear on this little clip when you hear the rousing ovations that build as the speech builds. I'm going to try and see if this works.

Audio:

Since it was printed in the Black newspaper, hardly anybody in the white community even noticed it.

Philip Gerard:

That's me as a commentator, building the scene.

Audio:

Newspapers around North Carolina, like our own Wilmington Messenger, reprinted it as part of the recent Democratic election campaign based on white supremacy. And they always reprint it right next to a new report of an alleged sexual atrocity committed by a so-called Black brute. Clearly it was meant to inflame white supremacists' passions. You could say that Alex Manly unwittingly played right into their hands.

Philip Gerard:

We kept coming back into the studio for commentary, then going back as the reporters.

Audio:

Unfortunately, [inaudible 00:55:00] fight for freedom in the press. Philip, thank you for being with us.

Under better circumstances I'd say it's been a pleasure, Aileen, I really hope things calm down out there.

WHQR commentator, Philip Gerard. For those of you who have just tuned in, we have preempted our regular programming for live ongoing coverage of the racial violence on the streets of Wilmington. A white mob has burned down Free Love Hall, home of The Daily Record, the Black newspaper. We're trying to catch up with our correspondents, we should have some reports coming in before too long. Meanwhile, maybe we can fill in some background. After all, violence like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. There have been a lot of inflammatory words written and spoken during the recent election. Just three nights ago on election eve, Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, the leader of the mob, delivered a sizzling address from the stage of Thalian Hall, Wilmington's grand opera house. WHQR's George Scheibner was at the scene.

[inaudible 00:56:01].

I'm George Scheibner here at the back of Thalian Hall, where tonight Alfred Moore Waddell is cutting a colorful figure with his thinning silver hair and his silver goatee, hook nose, piercing eyes.

[inaudible 00:56:12] family shall be safe from [inaudible 00:56:12].

He's dressed in his signature black coat. Waddell served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was finally defeated by our current Republican Governor, Daniel Russell. Ironically, Russell defeated him by circulating a speech Waddell made way back in 1865, in which Waddell urged that qualified Negroes be granted the right to vote.

[inaudible 00:56:31] sacrifices of the interests of the [inaudible 00:56:32].

Waddell seems to have done an about-face. Critics say his motives are political, power at any price.

[inaudible 00:56:37] community.

His followers find one of the finest examples of chivalry that the South ever produced, let's listen.

[inaudible 00:56:43] be prepared now, and immediately, to enforce what we know to be our rights. We will prevail if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with the carcasses of our enemies. You are Anglo-Saxons, go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him. Shoot him down in his tracks.

Philip Gerard:

Okay. I think I'll leave it there for now and we'll take some questions, thanks.

Speaker 6:

Mr. Hansen, what is the title of your book that is set in the 1920s?

Ron Hansen:

It hasn't been published yet, but it's called A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion.

Speaker 6:

A Wild...

Ron Hansen:

Surge of Guilty Passion. That's going to sell, huh?

Speaker 7:

When I entered my MFA program three years ago, I told a director that I wanted one narrative thread of my novel to be set in 16th century Germany. And he said, "Americans are not interested in European history before World War II unless it includes a vampire or a code." And I just wonder if you all -

Philip Gerard:

A vampire or a... What was the second thing?

Ron Hansen:

I think he's just totally wrong.

Speaker 7:

You think so?

Ron Hansen:

Yeah.

Cynthia Mahamdi:

If you look at the sales of historicals, look at the lines for historical films, blockbuster films, that's just not true. I think people go to entertainment media to get the history that they didn't get in school because they found it so boring. So this is a hugely popular medium, I think people are interested.

Speaker 7:

In the MFA programs do you think that there's a disparagement?

Cynthia Mahamdi:

Absolutely. When I first was hunting around for a PhD program in creative writing I went to NYU and Columbia for an interview, and I was told, "We don't write that kind of literature here," as though I was proposing pornography or something. So yeah, there's a strange disconnect between the people in academic programs, not all, but some, and the general reading public.

Philip Gerard:

One of the things that I've noticed is that people often think that you're cheating, that because the story's been given to you that you didn't have to imagine as much. But in fact, you have to imagine more, and I think that's the kind of prejudice you have to fight against. I remember, Ron, in Bread Loaf years ago when that woman came up to you at breakfast and said, "So Ron, have you written any stories you made up yourself?"

Cynthia Mahamdi:

Yes.

Speaker 8:

What about your publishers' responses to historical fiction?

Ron Hansen:

Very positive. Everything I've written they've published. What has been the publishers' responses to historical fiction? I think it's a genre that's just a steady seller. I met a woman today and she just sold her historical novel to Tor. And Tor I understood as fantasy fiction, and she said they're branching out because it's the same kind of escape hatch as fantasy fiction is, that historical fiction puts you in another time, another place, and people are attracted to that.

Cynthia Mahamdi:

Yes.

Speaker 9:

You mentioned Sacred Hunger and you were talking about racial violence, is there a greater degree of authenticity necessary when you're dealing with a historical tragedy that involves race or ethnicity as opposed to if you're writing about Jesse James, where if you get it wrong you're not going to insult the memory of the race of people or something?

Cynthia Mahamdi:

Absolutely, and I think that's where sources become very problematic. We've talked a lot about the record but I'm very suspicious of the record, especially when it comes to race, especially when it comes to colonialism and things like that. Because there's an entire other history which has not been told, and I think if you're writing a historical set in that period then it behooves you to find out what that unwritten history is, and that's where things get really hard.

Philip Gerard:

In my case, one of the things I learned in researching and writing the book was that there was not a Black community, there were as many different Black communities in Wilmington as there were white communities, and the reaction was different. An African American historian called me up and he said, "Thank God a white boy wrote this. Now maybe somebody will believe this story, we've known for years in our community." And then on the other side there were a couple of people who were adamantly quite angry that I had taken a story that they felt was not mine, that belonged to them and their community. But I think that it's a shared history, and I guess one way you know you do your job well is when lots of different people are mad at you for different reasons. Because you're not a cheerleader for any side, you're really trying to get it right.

Speaker 10:

For each of you, did it... I'm a history major but I love creative writing, and I love the idea of merging them together. For each of you, the love of history or writing, which one came first, or did they harmonize? Because that's something I'm always troubled with, which to pursue more, because they do harmonize in a lot of ways but it feels like the best thing at my age is to follow one path a certain amount. But I'm curious to know, because obviously you have to have a deep passion and respect and knowledge of history to write about it.

Cynthia Mahamdi:

Do you want to answer that?

Ron Hansen:

I began with a love of storytelling first, but history of course is stories, and loaded with them, and so they naturally wedded.

Philip Gerard:

I think I had an interesting talk with Ken Burns once about this, we grew up and played baseball together till, I don't know, he was 10 or something and moved away. And he said, history was so boring the way it was taught, at our schools it was taught as this fact, then that fact, then there was a war, "Here's how many people died, here's the dates of the war," and he was astonished to find out that history was about stories. And I went to the Catholic school up the road where we had... I forget the name of the textbook but it was really the great man theory or great woman theory of history where every event was really the story of somebody acting against forces and with other forces to try to make it happen. I'm not sure how accurate it all was, but it was a vision of history as stories rather than just the objects of the past. I'm not into antiques or anything, but I love the stories of things that happened 100 years ago or 200 years ago. So the two to me are one and the same.

Cynthia Mahamdi:

To the Ancient Greeks, [foreign language 01:04:02] in Ancient Greek means an inquiry into, so they didn't have the bifurcation that really started in the Enlightenment, where history went to the side of science and literature went to the side of invented narrative. So I think that's a relatively recent separation, and maybe it's a false one. If you love stories, if you think about all the time that has occurred, everything that's occurred before we came along, it's all history. So if you love it... I began with a fascination with history quite late. I loved it as a kid, but I attended a lecture when I was in grad school by someone who was reading original narratives from the Irish famine. These were first-person accounts of Englishmen who had gone to England to find out what's going on, and the stories were absolutely horrific, and then suddenly I could see an entire novel. And that was the beginning, then it became an addiction. So I think you're on the right track, it's not either or. Yes.

Speaker 11:

It's one of my favorite novels in any genre I've read, but I'm wondering, was it more or less difficult in terms of writing a historical novel that chooses a character as well-known as Adolf Hitler with our suppositions about him that we have? And do you feel like that novel... Obviously working on the novel, do you feel it expanded a general idea about Hitler?

Ron Hansen:

Yeah, it was very difficult to write about him because I think I heard a study that said there's a different book written about Hitler every single week, and so there was an awful lot of material to master. And everybody has a preconceived notion about what he was like, and usually it's under the category of monster. And that I had the temerity to say he was charming people thought was an act of violence. But in fact, you have to explain why people followed him, why he had followers and all that stuff. And that's where I think the historical novelist is a truth teller, and it would have been a violation of history to say other than that, "He was a human being, some people loved him, he did monstrous things." I got a lot of negative reviews basically because they thought I lacked discretion in choosing that subject to write about, but I thought it was a really important one to recognize the incipient characteristics that can lead to monstrous activities that Hitler pulled off.

Speaker 11:

What I thought was really interesting is that he comes across as still a monster and yet also a human being at the same time.

Ron Hansen:

Thank you, that's what I was hoping for.

Cynthia Mahamdi:

Yes, at the back.

Speaker 12:

Yeah, I was curious what you thought about Edward P. Jones' book, The Known World. He talked about how in that book that he didn't do a lot of research before writing the book, and I'm curious whether I can consider that book just a novel or a historical novel. Just a question of how much freedom you would give yourself when you're writing about a [inaudible 01:07:06].

Philip Gerard:

I don't know the book.

Ron Hansen:

Yeah. Well, I guess I would call it a novel, not a historical novel. Unless you have the research right there's no point in calling it a historical novel, it's just a general dream of a period.

Cynthia Mahamdi:

Yes, in the back.

Speaker 13:

Yeah, I was wondering if any of you could speak about any particular difficulties in writing historically in the shorter form. Say, Ron, in your 12 points, maybe you modified it [inaudible 01:07:35]. I would imagine maybe you don't figure out the plot beforehand or whatever [inaudible 01:07:40], I don't know.

Ron Hansen:

I wrote a short story about the blizzard in 1888 in Nebraska, and I did have a general idea of where it was going to go. And of course I began in the beginning of the day and at night, and that was my structure. I had access to a lot of reminiscences of people at that period and I would read all those reminiscences and just pick out the best stories and then change everything of course. Sometimes one sentence would spur a whole scene, and sometimes a lot of reminiscence would just be a mention, so it's a selection of detail there.

Speaker 14:

Can I follow up on that?

Ron Hansen:

Yes.

Speaker 14:

I teach Wickedness. My students always want to know-

Philip Gerard:

Wickedn