Novelists and their sources - by Gillian Polack

Today I want to explore primary sources. Let me be honest: every day I want to explore primary sources. Today, however, I have a special reason. I’m in the middle of an online chat with some of my writer-friends about making a choice about what a character is going to do in a novel. The novel is set in the nineteenth century (and it’s not mine, so I can’t share more details, I’m afraid) and the character has done something that requires deep secrecy or they will lose everything.

Something that I always return to is that the type of secret a character will have depends very much on the nature of the historical novel rather than the nature of the history. If the novel is Gothic, there might be a child out of wedlock or an imprisoned wife. If the novel is historical fantasy, then the secret is likely to be hidden magic or a family heirloom that could destroy the world or that proves the character is royalty. If it’s historical fiction, then the secret is likely to be something that has been demonstrated as a secret in history as we know it. The character might be Giulia Tofana and the revelation would then be that she had poisoned an extraordinary number of people, for Tofana was possibly the seventeenth century’s most notorious professional poisoner.

The type of novel helps decide the type of secret. That’s a key part of how we tell our stories: finding the right example for the tale we’re telling. When you’re reading a fine novel and you stop and blink and think “That can’t be right” one of the reasons might be that the secret was perfect for another novel, but not for this one.

One of the aspects of historical fiction that I love most is that all these secrets can call on primary sources. Our actual past is complex enough and rich enough so that choosing the right sources can give the perfect secret for a character. The best historical novelists often have an almost uncanny knack for matching up story with source material. (Some of the best have an uncanny knack for inventing an entirely false past that feels perfectly real, but that’s another subject.)

The historian in me has a lot of primary sources on the shelf. I selected three volumes pretty randomly (if I’d seen my copy of Mary, Queen of Scots' trial record, I’d have selected less randomly, but it’s currently hiding from me). I want to introduce you to these three sets of sources and talk about how they might be used in historical fiction. As I said, today is a day for exploring primary sources. This whole article is an excuse for me to play with books, which is one of my favourite, favourite things in life. The reason for this isn’t because I am desperately intellectual. Some days things go wrong and today has been one of them, so this is me sharing comfort food with people who will appreciate it.

The first volume is The Letters of JRR Tolkien. The cover was viciously attacked by silverfish years ago, so it has a false air of antiquity. It’s a modern edition of a modern writer.

What do I need to know about it as a writer? 

Firstly, it’s an edition of selected letters. This means that the editor, Humphrey Carpenter, is presenting us with his view of Tolkien using Tolkien’s own words. Volumes of selected letters for some other writers on my shelves are very selected indeed. So much has been edited out that the person is a shadow of themselves. The first thing I did when I read this book, many years ago, was ask myself how much was Tolkien and how much was Carpenter’s view.

If I were writing a novel about Tolkien, this would be a critical question. These letters explain Tolkien’s interests and his writing style. They’re full of insightful thoughts and self-disparaging wit.

If I were using the letters to give glorious colour to an historical novel set in England’s literary scene in the middle of the twentieth century, then it’s easier. Tolkien’s letters are full of his participation in that world and illustrate it beautifully. 

If I were writing historical fantasy based on anything other than the quite specific world Tolkien inhabited, these letters would be no use at all.

The type of novels we write governs the way we use sources.

Let me go back in time. 

The wonderful thing about going back in time is one reaches a moment when one doesn’t have to seek permission to use a writer’s words directly. Their writing still has to be acknowledged: to claim the words as one’s own is still plagiarism, but it doesn’t break copyright law. This is why some writers use many, many words from Shakespeare’s plays in novels about Shakespeare. It’s an easy way to get colour. It’s not always a wise way to get colour. I’ve pointed out elsewhere that using the very clearly metred lines Shakespeare uses in his plays can totally foul up dialogue when Shakespeare is speaking them as part of ordinary conversation.

Some of Tolkien’s letters may give a hint of his speech. Others are purely formal. 

My next volume is Ethel Turner’s diaries. Turner (1872-1958) is best-known for the  novel Seven Little Australians (published 1894), and she was a very popular novelist of her time. Ethel Turner’s diaries were written in her private voice, and are more likely to reflect some aspects of her actual speech. In some conversations, it would be possible to reflect her actual words. It’s still not a good practice, for her words are from  a different time and place and carry a different shape to the words of a novelist in the twenty-first century. 

What I’m saying is that another reason we, as readers, might be jolted out of a perfectly good book is because something inside us is noting that change of voice when the writer has used the words of someone else without making it clear. If there is a paragraph added as “Bob read in Ethel Turner’s diary…” and then the words from that diary are quoted, that’s less likely to jolt the historically-aware reader.

Apart from helping a writer understand the voice of a character, what use are the diaries? So very many uses… They’re one of the best sources around for bringing everyday life to the reader. Letters can be good (I love the Paston letters specifically for the moment when Margaret Paston demands a tub of treacle – that demand brings all the Pastons into everyday life) but a good diary shows what the writer did that they felt worthy of comment. 

It might be waking up with a headache, or it might be writing down a secret. It might be hints as to family relationships.  Opening Turner’s diaries at random, I find that, on 26 June 1893, that someone said “a very wicked word, and I overheard’. She went through his denial and his excuses and then declaimed that the child was being ruined. This is immediately followed (in the same paragraph!) by a note about her newest publication.

One small day, and one small diary entry and it reaches out to us. This is why diaries are so handy for historical fiction writers who can use them (not all cultures and not all time periods have diaries): a good diary can make the everyday in a novel vibrant. 

I love diaries and letters so much that I have four shelves of them. They give me time with fascinating people. That’s the gift they give fiction writers who use them cleverly, too.

Alas, I’m a Medievalist, and very few diaries exist for the Middle Ages. In fact, most written sources are quite different for the Middle Ages. The random primary source I pulled down from a shelf (do not ask how many shelves I have of Medieval material, for it’s embarrassing) was Pipe Roll 45, of John I, or, to be more precise, The Great Roll of the Pipe for the First Year of the Reign of King John, Michaelmas 1199. This is one of my actual favourite books. In my perfect world I own many more volumes of pipe rolls. In my imperfect world I have wonderful friends, one of whom gave me this volume.

This volume was published in the year that Tolkien let his friend CS Lewis read The Hobbit for the first time and when Ethel Turner had her sixty-first birthday. It was over seven hundred years after John’s administration was documented in the Pipe Rolls.

It takes a lot of work to write fun stories of daily life from this kind of document. First, knowing Latin helps. Second, knowing the sort of documents copied into these rolls is essential. They’re not casual documents: they’re part of governance. 

Understanding the rules and the background means that a lot of cool stuff can be obtained to write fiction about or to use to bring a place and time to life… but it’s hard work. I was going to do what I did with Ethel Turner’s diaries and open this volume at a random place and give you a cool quote, but the pipe rolls are not written the way diaries are. They’re full of abbreviations and formulae. Names are there, easy to read (Hugo Bardulf, Galfridi f. Petri, Willelmus de Stuteuill) but they are the Latin forms and if you shouted that out to the street only some of the owners of the name would recognise themselves. The language of formal record and the language of every didn’t overlap the way they do, say, for modern England: they were entirely different languages. 

The writer needs to know more about what actually happened in England under John’s rule to effectively use a pipe roll. These rolls were not made to be read alone. They work alongside other documents. This gives writers handy approaches, for used alongside chronicles of the early part of John’s reign and the reasons for some of the entries springs out and gives novelists tools to illustrate disturbances and unrest or to give the actual names of those who might have met with John during his month in England that year.

Not all primary sources are easy for writers to use, and this is an excellent example. Where these are the critical sources for a place or time (as the pipe rolls are for John’s reign) then novelists depend more on the work of historians to make sense of it.

This brings us full circle, for the choice the novelist makes of which historian to use will depend very much on the story they want to tell.

The Hole in the Wall by H.M. Castor

Thisbe by John William Waterhouse (1909)
(via Wikimedia Commons - public domain)

Twenty-something years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to play Hermia in a touring production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was great fun, but by far my favourite part of each performance was sitting on stage in Act V and watching the mechanicals’ performance of their play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe. (The story in its original form is a tragic one but, as Shakespeare intended, the mechanicals in this production made it eye-wateringly hilarious.)

Pyramus and Thisbe live on either side of a party wall, and – since their love is forbidden in Montague-and-Capulet style – they rely on a hole in that wall through which to communicate.

Snout, as Wall:

In this same interlude it doth befall

That I – one Snout by name – present a wall.

And such a wall as I would have you think

That had in it a crannied hole or chink,

Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe,

Did whisper often, very secretly.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V Scene I)

I wonder if it’s my fond memories of Snout and this chink that led to my attention being snagged by another hole in the wall – a real one – mentioned in an ambassador’s dispatch dated December 1533. Here, we are deep in the period of Henry VIII’s ‘Great Matter’: Henry has married Anne Boleyn, while Catherine of Aragon – his spurned and determinedly resistant first wife – has been forced to live in exile from the court. Now the Duke of Suffolk has been sent to Catherine to order her to move to what she considers a less salubrious house. She refuses. Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, recounts what follows:

The Commissioners [Suffolk and his colleagues] remained six days at the place, that they might lock the house door and take away the keys, also that they might hear whether the Queen [Catherine], through the dismissal of her servants, the threats and the manifold bad treatment she was undergoing would not change her mind; but seeing her constant and unmovable, they caused all the baggage to be packed, got litters and hackneys ready, and made other preparations for the journey. The Queen, however, on the morning of that day, locked herself up in her room; and when the Commissioners came to fetch her, she spoke to them through a hole in the wall, and said, “If you wish to take me with you, you must break down the door.” But they dared not…

(Translation of despatch dated 27^th December 1533, emphasis mine. Calendar of State Papers Spain, Dec. 1533.)

This hole in the wall has, in the past, puzzled me slightly. Today, a hole in a wall would be an alarming thing – a sign of a major structural problem, perhaps, and certainly something unusual. Though Catherine considered her accommodation unbefitting for her status, it must be said that her standards were of the highest – she was still living in some state, and this was not a tumbledown or semi-derelict house. Hence my puzzlement. But then – oh joy! – I came across a book containing what amounts to nearly a whole chapter on holes in walls: Locating Privacy in Tudor London by Lena Cowen Orlin. And I discovered that holes in walls were a much greater feature of Tudor life than I had imagined.

Locating Privacy is a brilliant book and its analysis of what the concept of privacy meant in this period is fascinating. The very act of seeking privacy, for example, could be seen as sinister. Life was lived cheek by jowl with one’s fellows, whether because of crowded housing conditions (for those of lower status) or because of the convention of being attended by servants at all times (for those of higher status). The mutual surveillance that resulted was seen to a certain extent as natural and even desirable.

To many… privacy seemed a menace to public well-being. It threatened to deprive people of knowledge to which they thought they were entitled and about which they felt a sense of social responsibility. From this point of view, peepholes are significant not only as evidence of failed construction techniques, poor materials, bad repair, or accidental effects, but also as instruments of resistance. They restored the old communal conventions of shared knowledge and mutual surveillance. Any newly erected boundary could be breached by a defiant chink or cranny.

(Locating Privacy in Tudor London, Orlin, p.192.)

Partitions between different living spaces, Orlin shows, were often intended to be markers of boundaries rather than providers of privacy. In the overcrowded, subdivided, many-tenanted London houses occupied by the working classes, any desire for privacy might be overshadowed by other, more pressing concerns – such how to avoid having your neighbour’s waste-water channel flowing directly through your bedroom, or how to live with the problem that the communal cesspit could only be emptied by its contents being carried through your living quarters.

Orlin cites numerous recorded instances in which, to see into a neighbour’s house, a person had to do no more than lift a painted cloth. Even in less jam-packed situations, Orlin shows that internal walls were often insubstantial, no thicker than wainscoting, and that the flexibility this gave was seen as an advantage when tenancy arrangements changed.

Some peepholes might, straightforwardly, be key or latch holes. Wattle-and-daub walls and half-timbered walls might lose lumps of clay, and cracks and holes could of course be due to subsidence, poor construction or nearby building work.

In other cases, timber for partitions had knotholes, or had been recycled from other places and was often “pocked with peepholes” made by old nails and such like. Timber partitions might warp or shrink. And sometimes partitions were on purpose not built right up to a chimney, for fear that the timber would catch fire; a cloth would be used to cover the gap. Other gaps in walls were made specifically to carry waste water through a building to the outside – cases were known where these openings were big enough for burglars to get in through them, or apprentices (keen on escape from their masters) to get out.

In grand houses, too, holes might be included on purpose in a wall’s construction. An enclosed gallery running along the upper part of a great hall (an enclosed version of a minstrels’ gallery, in effect) was often provided with squints into the larger room below. Sometimes, the desire for a symmetrical pattern of windows on the house’s façade – designed without accommodating the interior floorplan of what might be an older building behind it – resulted in a window being placed just where an interior wall abutted the facade. In such a case, so that the interior wall was not visible from the outside slicing the window in half, the interior wall might be made to stop short of the window, creating a gap big enough to put your head through from one chamber to another. Another reason for a purpose-built gap in the wall might well be to let in light to an inner chamber or passageway.

Squint in the screen at St Peter's Church, Cassington, Oxfordshire
Photo copyright John Salmon
via Wikimedia Commons, license under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license

In this context, the common pre-Reformation practice of having squint-holes in a church’s rood screen to enable kneeling worshippers to see the elevated host takes on a different feel: what seems to us now perhaps an odd way of overcoming this spatial problem, back then must have seemed absolutely normal – just another instance of a hole in a partition. And we can see just how normal this idea was from a legal case presented to an ecclesiastical court in the early seventeenth century, involving accusations of adultery. The witnesses were asked:

Was the door or window open? Or did he or she see such acts through any hole or open place of the wall? How many open places or holes were there in the wall? How big was such place where he or she peeped…?

(Locating Privacy in Tudor London, Orlin, p.190.)

Sadly there is no way of knowing precisely what kind of hole in the wall it was through which Catherine of Aragon communicated her defiance to the Duke of Suffolk in December 1533. But Lena Cowen Orlin’s excellent book has made me realise that this mode of communication, though perhaps unusual for a queen, was unlikely to be a novel idea either to readers of Chapuys’ dispatch or, indeed, to Elizabethan audiences watching ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

Bottom, as Pyramus:

I see a voice. Now will I to the chink

To spy an I can hear my Thisbe’s face.

*

Professor Eric Ives (1931-2012)

Prof. Eric Ives (left), with (l-r) Nicola Shulman,  Brother Peter
(a resident of the Lord Leycester Hospital, Warwick) and me

I would just like to say how saddened I was to hear of the death, in September, of Prof. Eric Ives, at the age of 81 (read an obituary here). Acclaimed by David Starkey as the author of the best academic biography of Anne Boleyn, Prof. Ives had the gift of writing both accessible and deeply scholarly works. His The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn is utterly brilliant, and I would also highly recommend the controversial and fascinating Lady Jane Grey: a Tudor Mystery, and The Reformation Experience, the latter published only this June. I had the great good fortune in May this year to take part in an event in Warwick chaired by Prof. Ives – the first time I had met this longstanding scholar-hero of mine. I was nervous beforehand about giving a talk in his presence, but he made the evening a delight: he was extraordinarily generous and friendly, and a skilful chair to boot. What a lovely man – as well as a great expert – the world of Tudor history study has lost. May the books he has left behind be appreciated for many generations to come.




H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK, by Penguin in Australia, and will be published by Simon & Schuster in the US in 2013. It is currently longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the UK Literary Association Book Award.

H.M. Castor's website is here.

Bloodied Hearts & 1950s Underwear - Emma Darwin

When hanging out with my historical fictioneering friends, I sometimes feel a bit inferior. So many of them spent their student years reading Defoe, Joyce and Greene, or Clarendon, Elton and Schama, at least when the pubs were closed. I've dipped into both myself, a little, but I got my degree by pretending to be a tree.

The theatre, like any performing art, is devoted to tradition in a way that written arts don't have to be, so in the Department of Drama at the University of Birmingham our trees were rooted in the soil of this classic Stanislavskian exercise. Mind you, quite how the experience of being a silver birch or a cork oak helped Stanislavski's actors to play Uncle Vanya I've never been sure, although perhaps it was more fruitful when it came to rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard. But the more I write, teach and blog about fiction, the more I realise just what a good grounding a Drama degree is for a historical novelist.

I wouldn't dream of suggesting that just because we set our novels in the past, they're all about heaving bosoms. But when you've had to wear full, period costume for anything from Hamlet to Strindberg's Easter, you discover that the only way to breathe is indeed for your bosom to heave. Corsets work better than a Wonderbra for showing off your assets, but at the cost of 90% of your lung capacity. Racing up the spiral green room staircase to make your entrance through the audience, or running into the arms of your stage lover, shows you exactly why all those heroines keep fainting: sheer lack of oxygen.

Directors need to know this stuff, but so do novelists. Then there was Wardrobe. I not only know how to wear a corset, I've made one. And a straitjacket (Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty). I've realised how much sewing it takes to make a bodice, how much cloth to make a skirt and the petticoats beneath, and just how much mending it takes when you tread on the hem (A Doll's House). Even  a twentieth century show should have not just clothes but underwear actually from the period; fabrics have changed and so have erotic tastes in breasts, bottoms, waists, shoulders and makeup. And that goes for men as well as women, as I must remember now I'm writing a novel set between the wars. And have you tried getting out of a too-low sofa wearing high heels, a 1950s roll-on, and not much else? I have, because in Albee's The American Dream they switched sofas between the last dress rehearsal and the first night. Now, which of my characters shall I do that to?

Stage Management? I know how to research period weapons (Peer Gynt) and nurses' uniforms (Testament of Youth). I know that hiring real scaffolding for a Constructivist set (Meyerhold) brings in more dust than you'd thought existed in the whole of the West Midlands. I also learnt that if you fling a bloody heart to the ground it bounces, and reduces the entire cast of The Duchess of Malfi to giggles.

Some of what I learnt is useful for any novelist. There's Pinter: what's between the words spoken is as important as the words, so how do you make that happen in your reader's head? There's learning Shakespeare by heart and speaking it, to develop your ear for how character-in-action is embodied in the sound and rhythm of words. And it's useful for an author: after all those years of acting, I'm not too fazed at an event when the sound system goes down or the coffee machine starts up.

I also learnt that I wasn't much of an actor myself. Years later, as a beginner-writer, I came across the bizarre suggestion that you should "cut all adverbs". This is the bastard, tyrannical offspring off a good regime: fiction is built of character-in-action, so keep looking for the perfect verb for that action and don't settle for a bland one spiced up with an adverb. At which point, I had... well, I was going to say a lightbulb moment, but it was more of an olive-oil-and-wick-lamp moment, which sent me back to my undergraduate copy of Aristotle's Poetics:

For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse...if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.

He's talking about theatre, and Tragedy (Comedy got lost, and lost again in The Name of the Rose), but it could just as well be a snarky TLS fiction review, couldn't it? Action - actors - act-ors... I remembered working on Stanislavski's idea of "intentions", from An Actor Prepares, where for each speech you have to decide what the character is trying to do, in speaking it. Not, "he's in love with her", "she's furious with him", "they're bored"; your idea must be expressed as a verb: "to seduce", "to scold", "to destroy". As Aristotle says, there's no point in having a crystal-clear idea of your character and their thoughts and emotions, if you don't know exactly what that makes them do. It's all in finding the right verb.

Of course, we historical fictioneers have a particular relationship to this basic truth about narrative; we write about the foreign land of the past, and it's too easy for us to get caught up in the "qualities", the "diction and thought", of that foreigness. But it's how our characters act in their Then that makes the connection with our own Now. We wouldn't whoop at a bear-baiting, or happily die for our faith. But if I start thinking, "to cheer on the team", or "to save my soul" I begin to get it, and so can write it. And what about locking up a sister so she can't run away with her lover? Is that "to protect", "to control", "to possess" or "to prevent evil"? Now there's a story...