Taking the Historical Novel Seriously
by Samuel Hux (September 2018)
Interior with a Book, Richard Diebenkorn, 1959
Inane as the question may seem, maybe, it’s the sort that insinuates itself into a reader’s mind—although it’s seldom asked aloud because the reader “knows better”: fact is one thing, fiction something else. And it’s the kind of question, so obviously naïve, that the historical novelist tries to avoid, assuring the reader that although he’s tried to remain faithful to the spirit of the depicted times, he has sometimes made unhistorical connections for the sake of narrative consistency and interest, often confiding in obligatory preface, as William Styron did before The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), that he’s produced “a work that is less an ‘historical novel’ in conventional terms than a meditation on history.” The historical novel has long been something of an embarrassment to the conventionally educated intellect, the kind of book which, if it’s good, must really be something else: disguised commentary on the present, speculative essay-in-fiction-form on the nature of history, and so on. Otherwise . . . not quite fit subject for serious critical attention. An odd prejudice when you think of it, given the fact of, say, Tolstoy’s War and Peace!
Nor quite an acceptable diversion, as the mystery novel, for instance, is for many intellectuals. There may be those who swear by Georges Bernanos or whoever as casual moralist or whatever, but most know and accept that they are relaxing with a kind of mental stylishness. I am one who never became addicted to mysteries and who shook for a time the habit of the historical novel. The first reading I can remember, school work aside, was juvenile history: Lincoln splitting rails and Patrick Henry declaiming. Then, because an aunt was member of a book club and adored “old-timey” things, I graduated to historical novels—drums and Mohawks, nubile slaves on Caribbean islands, fortresses to be scaled, housing ladies lusting for the innocent adventurer, and yummy etceteras. But, I learned when I entered college that in the historical novel which did not transcend its poor nature Important Things were being messed about with—and that was bad for you since the person who does not understand the past as it was is doomed to repeat it. And, if you were not so impressionable as to allow your sense of where we came from to be distorted, reading such popularizations was a waste of time anyway: there were no redeeming intellectual values as in the whodunit, which was, after all, good mental exercise, like mathematics. If, in the whodunit, unlikely methods of detection were employed, what was lost?—who the hell cared about the police force anyway, or the self-employed Pinkertons? History was quite another thing altogether: one might be crippled for life if he thought an American mistress of a French planter was behind, to some small degree, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution in Haiti.
Coherence and intelligibility: a very modest prescription, and a difficult one, for the past one is to make coherent and intelligible is, by nature, problematic, in a sense existing only by virtue of the mind seeking coherence and intelligibility.
events (the “facts”) and motives (the “suppositions”); but often enough to make that distinction juvenile we know more about why someone did something than we know about what precisely he did—just as one can often recall why one behaved in a general way several years ago without being able to recall the particulars of behavior in which easily recalled moods and feelings manifested themselves.
Unless one takes a superficial view of the past—that things just happened and that’s all there is to it!—it is obviously difficult to write history. I doubt that’s subject to quarrel. But—a problem: While we realize the difficulty in one part of the mind, we dispense with in another: we insist that we know what is “real” in written history and what is “supposition” or “necessary surmise” or “useful possibility” a minute after we have agreed that—epistemologically speaking, harrumph—such distinctions are often too facile for adult consideration. Once we have dispensed with that difficulty we were considering the moment before, we embrace an attitude whereby “suppositions” are to be held in check in “real” history, they being the soft side of the discipline when compared to the real stuff, the hard facts . . . while extremes of “supposition” are tolerated, so long as not taken too seriously, in the historical novel—an attitude revealing as much ignorance of the nature of historical fiction as of history.
War and Peace, for example, Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma; but that’s too easy, the serious consideration proving nothing beyond one’s good taste. A better measure: James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, and Sir Walter Scott’s.
To take the historical novel seriously one has to be, paradoxically, a good deal more naïve and somewhat more patient with the sort of question I characterized earlier as “inane.”
meant to believe it, or probably not, or possibly not. But, in truth, the author’s intention at this point ceases to matter. Whether it’s history or historical fiction, there’s a reader as well as a writer, and I think the reader does believe. Or will in good time. And a recognition of this fact is the only way truly to take historical fiction seriously. I confess that I will seldom think of that minor figure of American social history, Evelyn Nesbit the pin-up queen, without thinking of Red Emma Goldman, and I’ll not think of the anarchist without recalling her as a practical nurse and a vigorous masseuse.
I refer here to E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (two years after Vidal’s novel) to take note, by way of specific and demanding example, of some facts of reading. The very evident preposterousness of its propositions, when viewed coolly, serves as a test of the premises I’m trying to set forth.
of the fictional characters, not of the history-book figures. Imagine a hypothetical novel in which a young fictional colonial adventurer serves with British troops in the Seven Years War. Distinguishing himself in battle through Yankee ingenuity he becomes a favorite of the commander, the historical Marquis of Granby, who keeps him at his side as improvisational tactical advisor the remainder of the campaign. On the eve of the battle of Minden, our hero hears Granby confide to a mysterious emissary, “Consider, sir. If we can succeed to effect this flanking movement tomorrow, it is not impossible that Frederick the Great should appreciate his allies doubly; his co-operation in the Canadian venture would not then be beyond conceivable expectation. Mark this well.” You know the sort of thing. We feel that something like this might have been said; and—I’m guessing royally here—we might find in some text that “previous to the victory at Minden, John Manners, Marquis of Granby, was interred for hours with an ambassador from William Pitt the Elder; historians can only guess at the particulars but assume their gravity.”
There it is, but I do not think this foolish. I think there is something essentially and inescapably naïve about the human mind, and much of professional (or professorial) history is in consequence a futility. The educated intellect may not be so much embarrassed by historical fiction itself as it is by its own child-like vulnerability.
With a cool and privileged view of a previous time, the historian deals with an atmosphere assumed sufficiently documented, events assumed sufficiently documented, and suppositions. With the same privileged view, the historical novelist deals with an atmosphere assumed sufficiently documented, some events assumed sufficiently documented and some not, and suppositions. The difference is in degree.
The historian makes suppositions primarily about motive and possible connections between events we’re reasonably sure occurred, which often necessitates the positing of other events and motives which plausibly might have occurred in order to make the connections. Let’s pretend a moment: The King of Vitalia and the Duke of Wisteria attacked the county of Azania within four days of each other. A month before they both had passed through Ristofia on the way to their favorite spas. It’s a reasonable supposition, perhaps, that they met in Ristofia and conceived there the pincers movement on Azania, famous for its spas which the Count of Azania had reserved for himself alone.
By what standard of judgment one process is truer than the other I do not know, but I suggest it’s a standard which fails by assuming, as I suggested earlier, that factual event is by the nature of recollection and reconstruction easier to know and thereby more real than motive. And, are plausible events which make connections between “knowns” somehow more intellectually respectable than imaginative conceivables which particularize an atmosphere? I doubt that social history, as opposed to conventional history of political events, would rule so.
I doubt that this principle would be seriously disputed, allowing for changes of names to suit one’s estimate of excellent achievement and less. In a sense it’s too easy. There’s a certain sophistication one enjoys in agreeing that, yes, fiction has its ways of establishing fact and history its ways of being imaginative art. But even this implies some basic difference between historian and historical novelist which is not exact, not when the reader, again, is considered. Some constants of human “naïveté”—call it—intervene, and equalize matters:
Did Pericles really make the famous oration attributed to him? If not, he should have. Or rather: If not, he still did. That’s kind of tricky, but closer to the way we perceive the past. Try to read Thucydides and Herodotus with their elaborate re-constructed dialogues, in-character conversations and confrontations, as only “fictions” true to the spirit of things instead of as “history.” Try it—and failing (I mean while you’re reading them)—try it again, and again. Still: Solon said to Croesus . . . not conceivably could have said . . .
There’s something primitive about this, I agree, even as a mere analogy, and ostensibly antithetical to a serious human science such as historical investigation. Nonetheless, if history is the attempt to make the outlines of what we know about the past “coherent and intelligible” and congruent “with our own experience of the possible,” then: history may be rigorous, sound, sophisticated, but—outrageous truth—to the extent that it doesn’t seem sufficiently, actively “made up,” essentially uncertain and “frail,” to the extent that it deals only with “facts,” it will be acceptable rather than convincing.
It is also our manner. And history written in a manner greatly less naïve, a touch of invention absent, we will admire for its scholarship, accept, and file away not quite believed.
If I have said something of some small consequence in all this above, then perhaps I will be excused for descending to answer the minor question with which I began. Yes, Charlie Schuyler (or Charles Burdett, rather) now is, or is on his way to being, Aaron Burr’s son.
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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.
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