Historical Fiction: 2009: March 2008 Archives

We are pleased to announce the addition of David Nasaw to our roster of panelists for 2009's Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent publication is Andrew Carnegie, awarded the 2007 New York Historical Society Prize in American History and chosen as a "notable" book of 2006 by the New York Times and a "best" book of the year by the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, and Library Journal. Nasaw has also been awarded the Bancroft Prize for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Non-Fiction, the Ambassador Book Prize for Biography, and the Sperber Prize for Biography. Professor Nasaw is a historian of the first rank, and his participation in the Seminar adds heft to what promises to be a lively discussion of truth, "truth," and truths among novelists and historians alike.

Click here for David Nasaw's complete biography, bibliography, and links to published interviews.

Jill Lepore is an historian, a professor of history at Harvard, and a novelist. In this week's New Yorker, she has written a piece examining four centuries of evolution in our thinking about the relative merits of "novels" and "histories." An insightful, informative brief on the surprisingly fluid ideas surrounding "fiction," "truth," "history," "fact," and other abstractions, the article adumbrates a lively relationship between the perhaps not-so-distinct disciplines at the heart of next January's Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Here's an excerpt:

Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they're more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other's clothes. The literary genre that became known as "the novel" was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn't called "novel." In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel's twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.

Link to the full New Yorker article.

We are very happy to announce that Madison Smartt Bell will be with us in January, for our twenty-seventh annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth.

History, of course, is ever-unfurling. We're living it right now. Fiction offers a focusing lens whereby the sense of a distant historical epoch may be rendered more clear. One point of access into our theme is by paying attention to what's going on in the world, and considering the relevance of this or that soon-to-be-historical issue to the work of our assembled roster of historical fiction writers and historians. In regards to Madison Smartt Bell, the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels which chart the Haitian revolution of 1791-1803, it is worthwhile to think of the recent and current travails of our neighbor, Haiti. A front-page piece in this Sunday's New York Times examines the current trend of nostalgia for the reign of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the notorious despot who, together with his father, François, terrorized the people of Haiti for more than 20 years. While Bell's focus has tended to land deeper in the Haitian past, an awareness of Haiti's twentieth century deepens the ultimate tragedy of the histories Bell has chosen to recreate. We'll be looking more into Bell's work here soon. In the meantime, the interview with him here gives some insight into his pursuit of Haitian history through the means of historical fiction.

In a coincidence too strange to pass up, Barack Obama's speech on race in America yesterday borrows the same fragment of William Faulkner that we've been using to promote next year's theme of Historical Fiction and The Search For Truth. The quote, from Requiem for a Nun, is correctly "The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Obama paraphrased it somewhat differently, as "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past.")

The historically unique candidacies of Obama and Hillary Clinton will no doubt be on the minds of the eminent historians and historical fiction writers joining us at inauguration time next January. We expect Eric Foner, well-known for his work on political history and the history of American race relations, to be especially salient. An article he published in The Nation last month provides some historical background to the race/sex subtext of the 2008 campaign, as it examines "the complexity of bringing together the aspirations of different social groups within a single political movement." You can find it here.

Gore Vidal will be with us next January, and I've begun preparing by reading Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (1999), an anthology of his previously published work "on sexuality." The title is a bit misleading. The subject of these essays, dating from the '60s to the 90's, is arts, letters, politics; elements of sexuality figure in regularly but tangentially. No matter. It's good reading, and gives a sense of evolving editorial politics surrounding sexuality at the publications where these essays were first published.
In a 1985 piece from The New York Review of Books, "Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With," Vidal describes a visit he and Tennessee paid to John F. and Jackie Kennedy in Palm Beach in 1958. According to Vidal, "the Bird" had never heard of "Jack," and repeatedly asked him whether he were a governor or a senator. "Each time, Jack, dutifully, gave name, rank, and party. Then the Bird would sternly quiz him on America's China policy, and Jack would look a bit glum. Finally, he proposed that we shoot at a target in the patio."
"While Jackie flitted about, taking Polaroid shots of us, the Bird banged away at the target. ... At one point, while Jack was shooting, the Bird muttered in my ear, 'Get that ass!' I said, 'Bird, you can't cruise our next president.' The bird chuckled ominously: 'They'll never elect those two. They are much too attractive for the American people.' Later, I told Jack that the Bird had commented favorably on his ass. He beamed. 'Now, that's very exciting,' he said."
Vidal is quite vicious toward many of the subjects in this book. In Tennessee's case, however, this seems to result from his affection. It's clear he wishes Tennessee had taken better care of himself. "I remember him best one noon in Key West during the early Fifties... Each of us had finished work for the day. We met on South Beach, a real beach then. We made our way through sailors on the sand to a terraced restaurant where the Bird sat back in a chair, put his bare feet up on a railing, looked out at the bright blue sea, and, as he drank his first and only martini of the midday, said, with a great smile, "I like my life."

Thanks to Dr. X's Free Associations, where I found this image.