Historical Fiction: 2009: June 2008 Archives

Barry Unsworth was born in 1930 in Durham, England. He is the author of fifteen published novels and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Three of his books– Pascali's Island (1980), Morality Play (1995), and Sacred Hunger (1992)– were shortlisted for Britain's premier literary honor, the Man Booker Prize; Sacred Hunger won the Booker in 1993. Unsworth's sixteenth book, Land of Marvels, a historical novel set in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I, will be published in January, 2009. He will deliver the John Hersey Memorial Address at the Seminar on January 15. Unsworth lives today in rural Italy with Aira, his wife. In this installment of our ongoing interview series, Barry Unsworth talks about the effects of expatriate life, of aging, and the role historical fiction plays in understanding our past and our present.

Littoral: What are you working on now?

Barry Unsworth: I have a new novel in mind, but I haven't started seriously working on it yet. I am at that very early– and very pleasant– stage, when the idea is exciting and the sense of potential very great, and there is none of that feeling of inadequacy that will come with the attempt to put the words down, an inadequacy in oneself and in the resources of language, experienced every time and always forgotten again. The novel will be set in contemporary Rome and will try to deal with some of the masks and mythologies of that extraordinary city in the course of its long life, and with the fortunes of a cosmopolitan group of Roman residents.
       I have lived here in rural Italy for the last 16 years. It has affected me in certain ways– affected the way I write and what I write about, and the way I view the world. A beautiful country and likeable, highly gifted people, betrayed by their own history of disunity and the weakness of state institutions. Corruption, the abuse of power, intricate connections between politics, business and organized crime– I suppose you find these things everywhere, but you find them here in spectacular fashion.

L: As a novelist, you've often chosen historical settings over contemporary ones. Why do you choose to write historical fiction?

BU: I don't think it has been so much a choice as a sort of gradual process determined by accidents of circumstance– like many things in life, I suppose. I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn. The seed was there, I think, but I didn't start writing historical fiction until much later. Pascali's Island (1980), which was my sixth novel, was the first to be set in the past.
      Nowadays I go to Britain relatively rarely and for short periods; in effect, I have become an expatriate. The result has been a certain loss of interest in British life and society and a very definite loss of confidence in my ability to register the contemporary scene there– the kind of things people say, the styles of dress, the politics etc.– with sufficient subtlety and accuracy. So I have turned to the past. The great advantage of this, for a writer of my temperament at least, is that one is freed from a great deal of surface clutter. One is enabled to take a remote period and use it as a distant mirror (to borrow Barbara Tuchman's phrase), and so try to say things about our human condition– then and now– which transcend the particular period and become timeless.

L: I'm curious about your relationship to language. Spoken language, of course, is mostly absent from the historical record. As an expatriate, I would think that you are daily obliged to speak a language not your own. Two questions, then: What is involved in recreating the idioms in which your historical characters speak? And, how has living in Italy affected your relationship to English?

BU: As you say, it's rare to find examples of direct speech in the documents of the past. You can find speech patterns in the literature of some former periods- Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, for example, the 18th-century novel, even in medieval love lyrics or drinking songs. And journals can be helpful, being often written in a more intimate and colloquial style.
      If you go back far enough, or if the characters have become legendary, it ceases to matter; Achilles or Caligula or Robin Hood can speak in more or less any way you choose. I think the problem arises when you want to be true to the period and at the same time comprehensible to the reader. You can't make your characters speak in the language and idiom of their own time if the language of the period would seem archaic. It would put too much strain on the understanding and would seem false in any case. There might be various ways of dealing with this, but I have generally found it sufficient to avoid anachronism and contracted verbal forms. If the novel is set in the 14th century, for example, you wouldn't make one character say to another, "You look great in that dress," or "Let's get on with the job." The extra degree of formality that results from avoiding such blunders does not, in my opinion, inhibit the writer's powers of expression or stultify his or her prose, in fact it can stimulate invention.
      How my relationship to English has been affected by living away from the country is difficult to know; it would be a slow and probably imperceptible process, a sort of linguistic decay, which one would hardly be aware of from day to day. My style has grown terser and sparer, less exuberantly metaphorical, less joyous in a way. But that may well be due to the sobering effect of the years. Anyway, as I draw nearer to 80, I like to interpret it that way.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, David Levering Lewis, will join us for the 2009 Seminar: Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor at New York University, specializing in 20th-century U.S. social history. He is the author of a two-volume life-and-times of W.E.B. DuBois, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize; and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (2000), which also won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He is the first author to win two Pulitzer Prizes for biography for back-to-back volumes.

Professor Lewis has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (twice), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. He is a former trustee of the National Humanities Center, a former commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery, a former senator of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and was president of the Society of American Historians, 2002-'03.

Lewis joins fellow historians Eric Foner and Jill Lepore, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, Booker Prize-winner Barry Unsworth, and iconoclast Gore Vidal for what promises to be an invigorating, weekend-long debate on the diverse contributions historians and novelists make to the writing of history. Click here to register.

We are happy to announce the addition of Calvin Baker to the second session of our 2009 Seminar: Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Calvin Baker was born in Chicago, attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools, and graduated from Amherst College. At the age of twenty-three, he published Naming the New World, which Publishers Weekly called "brilliant," saying Baker "proves himself a powerful new male voice in African American literature." With his second novel, Once Two Heroes, and his third, Dominion, Baker has continued to garner acclaim from major media, including USA Today, The Village Voice, and GQ. Dominion was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award, as well as one of New York Newsday's Best Books of the Year. In 2005, Esquire Magazine named Baker one of the best young writers in America.

Click here for our complete roster of panelists.
Click here to register.

Photograph of Calvin Baker © Henry Leutwyler

Pulitzer Prize-winning Australian novelist Geraldine Brooks will deliver the John Hersey Memorial Address on Thursday, January 8, 2009, during the first session of our twenty-seventh annual Key West Literary Seminar: Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Booker Prize-winner Barry Unsworth will have the honors for the second session, delivering his keynote on January 15.

Each year, we begin the Seminar with The John Hersey Memorial Address, established by members of the literary community in fond remembrance of Hersey (1914-1993), a much-loved figure in Key West, where he lived with Barbara, his wife, for many years. Hersey's writings include the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bell for Adano, Hiroshima, A Single Pebble, and Key West Tales.

On Saturday, January 10, we will host a special Gala Evening with Gore Vidal. The famed iconoclast and prolific writer returns to the island he came to know as a friend of Tennessee Williams in the 1950s. This event is in memory of John Malcom Brinnin (1916-1999), another greatly-loved Key West figure, the author of several collections of poetry, as well as biography and social criticism including Dylan Thomas in America, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World, and The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic.

Click here for pictures of John Hersey and John Malcolm Brinnin from the KWLS archives.

Image of six year-old newsboy, "Little Fattie," is by photographer Lewis Hine, 1910. It is in the public domain.

We are delighted to announce the addition of Peter Matthiessen to Session One of our 2009 Key West Literary Seminar: HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. Matthiessen is the author of more than twenty-five books of fiction and nonfiction, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was made into a major motion picture in 1991, and The Snow Leopard, which won the National Book Award in 1979. His new book, Shadow Country, is a revision of his acclaimed trilogy about the legendary life and death of Floridian Edgar J. Watson, originally published separately as the novels Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River and Bone by Bone. As a young man in the 1950s, Matthiessen co-founded The Paris Review, worked as a commercial fisherman off Montauk, NY, and, it was recently revealed, served in the CIA. He is no stranger to South Florida, nor to our stage, having previously appeared at the Seminar in 2006, 2002, 1999, and 1991. You can find Matthiessen's author page here, with biography, bibliography, and links to interviews, reviews, and features from around the Web.

We are happy to announce which panelists will be appearing at which session of our twin bill 2009 Seminar: HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth.

Session One, from January 8 - 11, will include Geraldine Brooks, Peter Ho Davies, Eric Foner, Alan Gurganus, Ursula Hegi, Tony Horwitz, Samantha Hunt, Jane Kamensky, Jill Lepore, Megan Marshall, Peter Matthiessen, Ivy Meeropol, Michael Meeropol, Patricia O'Toole, Barry Unsworth, Gore Vidal, and John Wray.

Session Two, from January 15 - 18, will include Russell Banks, Andrea Barrett, Madison Smartt Bell, Alan Cheuse, Elizabeth Gaffney, Francisco Goldman, William Kennedy, Thomas Mallon, Valerie Martin, Anchee Min, Mary Morris, David Nasaw, Marilynne Robinson, John Burnham Schwartz, and Barry Unsworth.

We will likely add a few more panelists over the summer. Speakers and session assignments will be announced as they're added to the roster— right here in the News category of Littoral, and also on our Speakers page, where you can see all of our current speakers, with links to their biographies, bibliographies, and other information from around the Web.

You are welcome to attend either or both sessions of the Seminar, which run from Thursday to Monday. If you are interested in registering for the Seminar, we urge you to act soon, as seats do fill quickly. We will hold your space for a deposit of $100. Click here to register.

"Possibly," he says, in this recent interview from The Independent.
Will they re-unite this January, when Vidal joins us for Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth? It seems, well, unlikely:

"There are rumours that you have a daughter from a relationship with a woman living in Key West, Florida [in the 1950s]; are they true?"

"Possibly. I don't believe so. The father was either me or a German photographer. I believe the mother is dead. The child was a girl. Every Christmas, I would receive a picture of them all around the tree, and there's the little girl, looking like me. I could have a daughter, yes."

"Have you tried to contact her?"

"No. Why would I?"

"Because you might have a sense of responsibility, which, in the age of DNA..."

"I sent her mother money for an abortion. Which she used to go to Detroit, where she found a rich man."

Photograph of Vidal ca. 1945 by Carl Van Vechten. It is in the public domain.