Historical Fiction: 2009: May 2008 Archives

When the 2009 Seminar begins, we will have elected a new United States president. For the sake of the children and the delicate-eared in our audience, let us hope it is Mr. Obama. Because panelist Gore Vidal will probably have something to say about the president-elect, and it may not be nice. Last week, he called Hillary Clinton "more or less insane." This week, in an interview with Mike Sager at Esquire.com, he assesses presumptive Republican nominee John McCain:
I've developed a total loathing for McCain, conceited little a--hole. And he thinks he's wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him.

Thanks to Jason Rowan for the tip. Rowan is the KWLS digital pioneer who oversaw the redesign of our site and started this blog. The podcasts were his idea, too. He's writing for Esquire.com these days. Check out his review of the Sooloos, a machine which will totally simplify your growing KWLS podcast collection.

Familiar Spirits is Alison Lurie's 2001 memoir of two men with whom she was friends for nearly 40 years– celebrated poet James Merrill, and his partner David Jackson. According to Lurie, the young Jackson was as talented as the unpublished Merrill. As the years wear on, however, Merrill attains fame and the highest of literary honors while Jackson's novels are regularly rejected by publishers. Frustrated, Jackson retreats, ceasing his literary aspirations beyond the Ouija-board collaborations which result in Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover. As he slowly and then suddenly becomes a shell of his former self, Jackson seeks solace in impersonal sex and substances of abuse, earning Merrill's complaint: "...He doesn't realize, he doesn't think– he doesn't use his mind anymore. And you know, if you don't, it's like any muscle, it atrophies." Merrill, for his part, later falls in love with Peter Hooten, rendered by Lurie as a shallow clone of Merrill's younger self, selfishly intent on keeping Merrill from Jackson and the friends they share.

I was struck by much in this account– the utter destruction sown amongst a once-loving couple, the decades-long sacrifice of Merrill's creative energies to the Ouija board, Lurie's acute descriptions of the fabrics and colors of clothing worn by her subjects– and especially by the candor whereby Lurie paints a portrait that is both love letter and character assassination. Her tale is tender like a bruise, displays great affection and yawning disappointment, is as complicated as only old friends can be. One has the clear sense that the heartbreak of "Jimmy and David" was not only their own, but was felt by many. In the end, Lurie questions whether Merrill's estimable body of work is worth the price he and those close to him paid in life. This is the harshest of critiques, plausible and relevant only because of the obvious quality of Lurie's friendship, and the more damning therefore.

This week's catch from around the web:

2009 KWLS panelist Gore Vidal talks to Melvyn Bragg of the UK Times Online about the ongoing, going, going Democratic primary season. Of Hillary Clinton's endgame, Vidal says: "I think her strategy is more or less insane."

Samantha Hunt, '09 panelist and author of a new novel about inventor Nikola Tesla, talks with Bloomberg.com about Tesla's eccentricities. For instance, "He had plans to build a ring around the equator so that just by staying stationary, you would be able to travel around the world in 24 hours."

And, from the online Wall Street Journal back in February-- Barbara Chai published interviews from our 2008 Seminar with panelist Junot Díaz, keynote speaker Lee Smith, and program chair Robert Richardson. There's also a collection of several short conversations with '08 speakers Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Jake Silverstein, and Silas House.

We are most pleased to announce the addition of William Kennedy as a panelist for January's HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. Kennedy's writing centers on life in his native city of Albany, New York. He has published seven novels in his Albany Cycle, treating life in Albany during the 19th and 20th centuries. These novels are Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Quinn's Book (1988), Very Old Bones (1992), The Flaming Corsage (1996), Roscoe (2002), and Ironweed (1983), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a PEN-Faulkner Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It begins:

Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods. The truck was suddenly surrounded by fields of monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking size, all guarding the privileged dead. But the truck moved on and the limits of mere privilege became visible, for here now came the acres of truly prestigious death: illustrious men and women, captains of life without their diamonds, furs, carriages, and limousines, but buried in pomp and glory, vaulted in great tombs built like heavenly safe deposit boxes, or parts of the Acropolis. And ah yes, here too, inevitably, came the flowing masses, row upon row of them under simple headstones and simpler crosses. Here was the neighborhood of the Phelans.

You can see the up-to-date roster of panelists here. Click here to register for the 2009 Seminar.

As a book reviewer for National Public Radio for more than a quarter-century, Alan Cheuse has been called "The Voice of Books on National Public Radio." Cheuse is also the author of several novels, a memoir, two short story collections, and a collection of essays on reading and writing. He last joined the Literary Seminar in 2003, and will return this January as a panelist and writers' workshop instructor when we explore Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Cheuse's forthcoming book, To Catch the Lightning, is a historical novel about photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) and his struggle to complete "The North American Indian," his epic project of photographing all of the native tribes of the western United States. I had a chance to talk with Cheuse recently, about NPR, Curtis, and the role novelists have in the writing of history.

Littoral: Why did you choose to write about Curtis? And why did you write it as a novel?

Okuwa-tse ("Cloud Yellow") - 1926

Alan Cheuse: I first encountered Curtis's photographs of the American Indian while I was in college. In fact I remember the first time I saw them. The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a great old rerun house, mounted an exhibition of them in the lobby in the late nineteen fifties. That was the first time I saw Curtis's work. I have long forgotten what movie I saw that evening in Cambridge, but I never forgot the faces and tones and settings of those portraits.

My research led me to Curtis the historical figure– photographer, self-made ethnographer, naive entrepreneur, difficult husband, and, through it all, devoted father. My novel, I hope, knits this all together in an inventive, forward-moving, uniquely presented way, giving especially the feel of his life, which narrative by historians doesn't usually do. Which is to say, historians usually work from the outside in, and novelists move in the other direction. I don't mean to pick a fight with historians here, but this is the way I see it. I suppose some of them might see a novelist waltzing through the field, picking up forget-me-nots and knotting them into a necklace and calling it history. But I'm not calling my novel history. I'm calling it a novel. I've written a novel about American journalist John Reed, and about an American woman painter based mostly on the life of Georgia O'Keeffe. The Curtis novel forms, at least in my own mind, the third in a kind of triptych about American artists, larger than life, but, I hope, still alive in our imaginations.

Navajo Medicine Man - 1907

L: As I understand it, Curtis' photographic negatives were awarded to his ex-wife Clara in the divorce settlement. Rather than see this transaction through, he destroyed them. Was the relationship between Curtis' professional and personal lives always so fraught?

AC: There's a scene in the novel in which Curtis and his daughter Beth (she took Curtis's side in the quarrel) and a few friends have a destroy the negatives party. Like most artists he found it difficult to draw a line between his professional life and personal life. He gave thirty years of his adult life to the project, but he was in spite of everything devoted to his family. Early on it was easier than later, when he became the Curtis history knows (who was the Curtis who knew history and its effects). He tried heartily to keep his family intact, but he couldn't. He tried to be a good man– as his oldest child and only son said toward the end of the photographer's life, "he was the best man I knew."

Novelist Francisco Goldman talks about José Martí, a seminal figure in the birth of the Cuban nation. The talk focuses on Martí's years in exile in New York (1878-1895), where he worked as a journalist, and later organized and raised funds for the revolutionary force which would eventually overthrow the Spanish. Goldman's informative history is followed by a reading of several excerpts from Martí's prose, including a piece about the 1884 presidential campaign between James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland, in which Martí makes the following ever-timely remarks:

It's hard and nauseating, a presidential campaign in the United States. The mud comes up to the chairs. ... They lie and exaggerate knowingly. They stab each other in the belly and in the back. Every defamation is treated as legitimate. Every blow is good, as long as it staggers the enemy. He who invents an effective slander can strut proudly. An observer of good faith has no idea how to analyze a battle in which everyone considers it legitimate to campaign in bad faith.

Goldman also reads from Martí's "New York Under the Snow," about the great blizzard of 1888, "Tributes to Karl Marx, Who Has Died," and a description of the beach at Coney Island containing the memorable line "this immense valve of pleasure open to an immense people."

From the 2004 Key West Literary Seminar: Crossing Borders: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature. This lecture was given in the auditorium of the San Carlos Institute, which served as Martí's operational base in Key West, and which each January hosts all KWLS readings, discussions, and lectures. Goldman will be joining us again in 2009, when we turn to Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. His novel The Divine Husband (2004) is an account of the love affair between Martí and María de las Nieves, famous throughout Latin America as "La niña de Guatemala, La que se murió de amor" (the girl from guatemala, she who died from love).
(48:20) / 22 MB



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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Francisco Goldman.

If you're thinking about attending the Seminar in January, or if you're a fan of either Marilynne Robinson, Allan Gurganus, or both, you'll enjoy what's going on over at Reading Room. It's an online panel discussion of Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping. Gurganus is an unabashed fan, and takes an enthusiastic and omnivorous approach to the book. His initial post suggested it may be "the greatest novel of our last quarter century." He's compared Robinson's artistry to silent-film star Buster Keaton, to metaphysical poet John Donne, to Emily Dickinson. And he's permitted the Times to reprint a fan letter he wrote Robinson after his book group read Housekeeping in 2006. In part, it reads:

After much study, I don't know how you did it. The book is so much about its making and yet all traces of construction seem obscured. "Housekeeping" seems the least autobiographical work I know and yet it's also the one closest-in. It's theological, but it always pertains as immediately as any fairy tale does. Harsh in its outcomes, it's also a psychological work of such density, restraint. The limpid acceptance of death finds reflection in all its aqueous properties. There are few living males in it and little dry land. Somehow it starts with death and moves toward life, a reversal of most books I know.

Check out Reading Room for more. You can read my brief review of Housekeeping in this post.

Four more authors have been confirmed for our 2009 Seminar: HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth.

Francisco Goldman is the author, most recently, of The Art of Political Murder: Who killed the Bishop?, a non-fiction work on the Bishop Gerardi murder case in Guatemala. It was named a "Notable Book" by The New York Times for 2007, and a best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Economist. His three earlier novels are The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband. He last joined us in 2004, for Crossing Borders: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature. We happily welcome Francisco back to Key West.

Alan Cheuse, "The Voice of Books on National Public Radio" has been "reading for America" every week on NPR. He is the author of The Bohemians, a historical novel about John Reed and Louise Bryant, Fall Out of Heaven, which focused in large part on the life of his father, a pilot in the Red Air Force, during the 1930s, and the novels The Grandmothers' Club and The Light Possessed. His forthcoming novel To Catch the Lightning (October, 2008) follows the career of turn-of-the-century photographer Edward S. Curtis and his quest to photograph the western tribes of North America. Alan last joined us as a moderator in 2003 for Poetry: The Beautiful Changes.