HISTORY AND FICTION

 

I am a big fan of Andrea Barrett.  She always makes me think.

This latest outing of hers certainly made me think -- made me rethink my stance as a historian who writes history. Do I approve of fictionalized history?  I am not sure that I do -- but this collection of introspective essays certainly made me ponder deeply about it.

First, let's have a look at the book.  It is small, just 194 pages including index, endnotes and acknowledgements, and is divided into seven papers. All of them deal with how fact is incorporated into fiction. But, where I expected thoughts on how writers of historical fiction rely on fine historical research, it is more about how she, Andrea Barrett, used historical research to bring her characters -- both real and fictional -- alive.

First, there is an introduction, explaining how a woman from a non-reading family somehow became immersed in books, with descriptions of the books that particularly inspired her.  Then comes the first essay, provocatively titled "The Floating Pants." It was one that I particularly liked because it was about voyages in the Arctic, replete with unfortunate seafarers trapped in boats and ships that are carried helplessly in slowly floating ice.  This, of course, led to the novel, Voyage of the Narwhal. 

A novel, where I would have written a non-fiction account of these strange arduous adventures. Which is better?  To bring the brightness of life to a character, perhaps a novel is better. Perhaps not. That is the question.

Then comes "The Sea of Information," an essay I particularly liked, as it was about her Fellowship at the New York Public Library.  The descriptions of her fellow researchers there were brilliant, as I could relate to them so well, having been a research fellow (though not at that wonderful library) myself.  It contained one sentence that probably describes best her reasons for choosing fiction rather than non-fiction, built around the one word "emotion," and following her description of her impressive research into the topic she was following at the time. 

Slowly I began to relearn something I'd once grasped but lost sight of: that emotion -- that central element of fiction -- derives not from information or explanation, nor from a logical arrangement of facts, but from powerful images and from the qualities of language...

Facts, she came to understand, can "wall off emotion," and take life out of the story.

Do I agree with this?  I certainly do not -- but it certainly made me think about it.  

This progress of thought continued with the fifth paper, "Traveling Corpse."  A great story, this one, about a strange litte war in Russia in 1919, when a corps of unseasoned American recruits was sent there in the Arctic winter to fight the "on for the Boche" Revolutionaries.  Two sergeants arrive in a tiny village.  One takes his own life with his service revolver.  The other carries the frozen corpse on a sled to Archangel, on an almost unendurable four-day trek through blizzard conditions, for no apparent reason.

Barrett found three published versions of the story, during a search that is vividly described. This was a triumph -- but then came the problem that the three versions were all a little different.  Which one held the actual truth? The essay describes how she sorted out which little variation felt better -- or more right -- than the others, and which one suited her purposes. 

This struck a chord with me that resonated loudly.  When I researched Island of the Lost I was in the same position.  To explain: in the 1860s two ships wrecked about the same time on the desolate and uninhabited Auckland Islands, in the sub-Antarctic. There were two castaway parties separated by impassable ravines, and unaware of each other.  One party -- the Grafton castaways -- worked together to build a cabin and live off the bleak land to keep body and soul together. All five survived the ordeal.   The other party -- the Invercauld castaways -- descended into a state of apathy and chaos. Of 19, only three lived to tell the tale.

Like Barrett, I had three accounts, two written by Grafton castaways, and one the memoir of an Invercauld survivor.  I had the same problem of sorting out what was the best echo of what really happened: what could I reliably believe? How plausible was the detailed account of building the cabin, for instance?  It was a huge relief to get photographs of remains of the building from a friendly archaelogist who was recording the site. How self-serving was the account of the survivor of the Invercauld disaster? Again, it was reassuring to find the logbook account of the ship that followed up the first report of the castaways, and sent a government party there.

My success, I felt, was that I was able to write an accurate account of what happened, complete in all details possible. What I wonder is what kind of novel Barrett would have written from the same material.  The conclusion she come to in that essay is very pertinent:

Another writer, given the same material, would have felt entirely different imperatives and written an entirely different story; which is one of the reasons historical fiction is so different from history. 

YANKEE ADVENTURERS

 

I have been stalled for a couple of years

The apartment building I live in, in earthquake-prone Wellington, New Zealand, had to be earthquake-strengthened, and as I am on the Board of the property, it has been a busy time. It included a newsletter, HG Newsflash, to keep the shareholders informed, so I have been writing, but nothing maritime, and nothing for Old Salt Press.

But now the work is done.  The project is virtually over, so I am back to my love for books about the sea.  Hopefully, they will keep coming.  The first is just out, and tells the story of the first American capitalists, the men who quarried the seas and the coasts in the search for profit, their eyes fixed firmly on making a fortune for themselves and the owners of their ships.

It is called Yankee Adventurers, the Rousing Story of Americans in the Early South Pacific

And of course it is published by Old Salt Press.  Herewith the blurb:

They were flamboyant, grasping, and incredibly brave. 

They were seafarers who dared to challenge the storms of the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn and burst into the Pacific. These amazing characters sailed where few others dared to go, in search of trade and profit.

China tea was worth big money in New York, Salem and Boston, but could only be bartered for silver, aphrodisiacs … or furs. So foraging for bêche de mer – sea cucumbers harvested from tropical lagoons, and then dried into a tonic for virility – or enduring terrible conditions on icy beaches in a brutal quest to harvest seal furs, was considered just part of the deal.

For a brief period, less than half a century, these adventurers succeeded brilliantly, but then history overtook them. Their markets and their prey dried up. But, in the meantime, they had altered the landscape of the South Pacific, for better or worse.

And this is their story.

SUMMER '36

 

This six-part Netflix series in French (with subtitles, of course), is loosely based on Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.  English "cosy" mysteries of the Midsomer Murders type don't usually adapt well to foreign versions, but in this case it works very well indeed.

The series is set in Nice, and as the title suggests, in the year 1936, when the shadow of Hitlerism and fascism is spreading over Europe.  Despite the growing menace - and the surreptitious appearance of German secret police -- the festivities go on as usual, with wonderful costumes, and plenty of cheerful effects.  I really enjoyed the sights of abbes and nuns in traditional garb in the crowded streets.

The story revolves around four young women, related in various ways, plus two older ladies, the mother and aunt of two of the young ones. They are equivalent to the passengers in Christie's train, but it is impossible to tell just how they are involved in the series of murders, each of which happens at the end of an episode.

Nice is particularly cheerful in the summer of 1936, as workers are celebrating their first legally paid holiday, and are (sort of) finding their feet in the swanky resort. One of the workers is married to one of the four young women, Eugenie Berthier, who is the heiress to a factory, and is visiting her estranged father for the first time in 17 years. Naturally, there is conflict, particularly when her 16-year-old niece falls in love with her worker husband's working young brother.  Her sister, Blanche, is involved in a very tawdry love affair, while her husband (though unknown to her) is secretly saving Jews from the Nazis.

And then there is Leonie Morel, an apprentice detective, who is working for the Nice police surreptitiously, as she is really trying to clear the name of her father, who is due to meet the guillotine for a murder he did not commit.  And her sister, Guilia Vincent, is also in Nice, working in a high - and very vulnerable - position at the luxurious Riviera hotel -- where a famous prosecutor is murdered in episode number one.

It is wonderfully complicated, and compulsive viewing.  The actors are all amazing, but I have to admit the one I liked best was the policeman in charge of the cases, Inspector Raven.  For a start, he is not dumb.  He actually solves the case -- but in an unusual kind of way.  The actor, Francois-Xavier Demaison, is so very good that I will be watching out for his name in the future.

Highly recommended.

TEASING AI

 

Some people love to tease cats or dogs (neither seem to mind, but play along with enthusiasm), but my current hobby is giving AI a hard time.

It began when I was annoyed by wrong answers.  I needed to register my plan with my new pdf program, and appealing to AI for help turned out to be useless.  I was advised to log in, and when that did not work, to do all the usual things like reboot the computer, clear my browsing cache, fiddle with the modem, and so forth and so on.  Finally I did the sensible thing, and appealed to the program's help desk.  I got a reply, and that right away, and apparently from a human.  Logging in was wrong.  I simply had to open the website, and look for settings. Voila!

So, what a blessed waste of time.  AI is simply Google on steroids -- and Google is now Meta AI, anyway -- and human understanding is beyond it.  For instance, when I asked for a suitable cartoon to put at the head of this blog, I got this answer:

'The viral AI cartoon trend' (which I had not asked for) 'involves users uploading selfies to generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and prompting the model to generate exaggerated, cartoon-style caricatures of themselves at work.'

Good lord and crikey dick, why don't these people get lives?

Instead, I have fun teasing the system.  One advantage of AI, I found is that you can ask long and complicated questions.  For example:

What was the lading of the trader brig Tybee when it arrived in Salem from Sydney on 20 October 1833?

Well, the little word 'Searching ...' came up, and after that I could almost hear the whirring as the question filtered through miles and miles of stratosphere to a multitude of data servers that were gobbling fresh water and electricity as they pondered.  Then a list of sources came up, mostly to papers and books I had written myself, plus a recommendation to consult 'the maritime collections and archives specific to the New England shipping trade.'

In a word, it was telling me to research it myself.  Personally, if a researcher came up to me with the same question, I would recommend searching Salem newspapers through the website 'Chronicling America' -- or else go to Wikipedia.  But that is by-the-by. The obvious conclusion is that AI is not going to replace people any time soon.

WITH ONE MIGHTY LEAP

 

My brother and I were not allowed to read comics

I'm not sure whether my mother thought they were bad for the eyesight, or bad for the morals, but it was a very strict regime.  So, though we were both voracious readers of "real books," whenever we visited friends, we dived into their comic collections with huge delight.

And a definite favorite was the English boys' comic book, The Eagle.  Though we didn't know it, the Eagle was a Christian response to the popular American comics, which the founder of the English  production, an English vicar, John Morris, thought were "deplorable, nastily over-violent, and obscene." So he had envisioned a comic book that was replete with action stories that were fun to read, but also conveyed respectable moral standards.  No foreigners would be depicted as villains or enemies, and in every group there would be at least one from an ethnic minority.

The Eagle, however, was not preachy at all.  In fact, it was exciting.  It introduced me to science fiction.  It's hero, Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, was inspirational.  He could be relied on, in any situation, to get out of trouble with amazing feats.  The feats felt authentic -- one of the writers was a very young Arthur C. Clarke. And the drawing was of very high quality.

Years later, when I had children of my own, to my amazement I met one of the men who had written for the Eagle -- not Arthur C. Clarke, but a fellow who could tell very amusing stories.  When he worked for the magazine, he said, he had been one of the two writers of the Dan Dare stories.  And he and the other writer had a private contest - each had a six (or so) week with the stint, and then handed Dan over to the other writer, having left their hero in a very tricky situation. 

Which the other writer had to solve.

Well, the other writer was in France, one time, and so, as my raconteur confessed, he thought he would create a situation that was utterly and absolutely impossible.  He dropped Dan into a 40-foot deep hole with sheer sides, with snakes and scorpions swarming at the bottom, and then headed off to France himself.

When he got back to London, he grabbed the comic with glee ... to find that WITH ONE MIGHTY LEAP out Dan had jumped, to carry on with his mighty deeds.

So Dan Dare was what we call today an action hero. 

I was reminded of this the other day when I picked up the second in the Orphan X series of books, The Nowhere Man, by  Gregg Hurwitz.  Orphan X, also known as Evan Smoak or the Nowhere Man, is definitely an action hero.  Taken out of an orphanage at the age of twelve, he was metamorphosed into a world-class assassin by dark forces in the US administration. Breaking away from this grisly business after a career of offing a large number of nasties, he now operates alone, and on the side of good.

Well, in The Nowhere Man, Hurwitz places his hero into all kinds of impossible situations. Somehow, X gets out of them, only to be recaptured and placed into yet another impossible situation.  In one, he is trapped in a kind of plastic cube, ready to be auctioned off to a large crowd of nasties who all hold a grudge because of what he has done in the past, and contemplate terrible things to do to him if they win the auction.

But, with the equivalent of ONE MIGHTY LEAP, he escapes yet again.

Marvelous stuff. Worthy of all the action heroes that went before him -- Superman, Batman, James Bond, the Saint, Robin Hood, and a personal favorite, Modesty Blaise.  They were not just in comics, but also on radio and in film, depicted by such flamboyant actors as Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Roger Moore, Sylvester Stallone, and that Arnie fellow whose name I have trouble spelling.

The world definitely needs action heroes, complete with their liberal standards. Right now, in fact, it seems imperative. An action hero or two could solve of lot of current problems. Watching one at work would be really nice.

Unfortunately, they do not exist.