Historical Fiction: 2009: July 2008 Archives

Australian-born writer Geraldine Brooks is the author, most recently, of People of the Book (2008), a novel about the stories uncovered during the conservation of the sacred Hebrew text known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. Her previous novel, March (2005), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. As a journalist for The Wall Street Journal in the 1980s and '90s, she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. Her husband of twenty-four years is fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Horwitz. Both Brooks and Horwitz will join us in January 2009 for our twenty-seventh annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Brooks will deliver the keynote address to open our first session.

Our conversation with Brooks begins with March, which tells the story of Captain March, known to readers of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women as the character of the father and husband who has left the family to fight in the Civil War. Brooks based her Captain March upon Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's real-life father, whose surviving letters and diaries reveal a close friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The fictional character of Captain March therefore develops alongside two founding myths of American history- the abolitionist cause during the Civil War and the intellectual currents of Concord, Massachusetts- while also providing an imagined backstory to a classic of American literature. The literary risks of such an imaginative weaving of truth and fiction are great. The reward of the Pulitzer, America's top literary honor, rarely given to a foreign-born writer, is proof of her exceptional talent. Brooks talks about this book and her love for books; about Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone; the "Tony Test," reading in the bath, and ordinary, everyday Geraldine.

Littoral: When you had finished with March, did you imagine it would meet with such success?

Geraldine Brooks: Of course not! You'd have to be delusional.

L: How did you feel about it, in that interim before public reception?

GB: I think with any book, there's an odd period when you've had to let it go. You've pushed the deadline and your editor's patience to the end, and you have to stop revising and tinkering. Then, alarmingly, it's out of your hands. There's a kind of nervous uncertainty: could I have done better? Will someone, anyone, want to read it?

L: In an interview with Dave Weich, you said, "As a reporter, if you don't know the truth, you can't write it, but in fiction you can make it up." I think that "make it up" part bothers some readers of historical fiction. Have readers been duped, who believe they know the history better after reading historical fiction? How does historical fiction contribute to our understanding of history?

GB: It's nothing to do with duping. It is the novelist's job to imagine, and my implicit contract with the reader is clear enough: This is a novel; I hope you enjoy the fruits of my imagination. I think if you call it a novel, you can do what you like, but you need to explain later what it is that you did. I believe the least one can do is offer an afterword, setting out where the facts end and the fiction takes over.
    Through the vehicle of story, I think it is possible to lead reluctant minds to consider our earlier selves. People who would not pick up a narrative history book will perhaps pick up a novel and find their interest engaged by predicaments from the past. I really believe in following the line of fact as far as it leads, to make a good strong scaffolding for the imaginative enterprise. Then, when you come to the place where that line of fact frays and disappears, I let imagination take over.

L: Your husband is a fellow Pulitzer-winner, and is also an author of a well-received book on the Civil War. We're looking forward to having you here together in January. To what extent do your literary interests and convictions overlap? To what extent do they differ?

GB: We started out as newspaper reporters together, united in the service of fact. Tony continues to write factual books; he says I've "gone over to the dark side," as he puts it, "making stuff up." He's an enthusiastic reader of fiction, though, so that makes him a great first reader for me. He's very impatient– if a novel doesn't grab him he won't keep reading. That's helpful to me: to see if my early drafts can pass the "Tony Test." During our long marriage, we seem to have managed to drag each other towards our respective interests. He brought me around on the Civil War; I turned him on to the wonders of international travel.

L: As a writer married to a writer, do you always think of yourself as a writer? Or is there still another self, an ordinary, everyday Geraldine?

GB: There's definitely Schlepper Geraldine. And, to be honest, she's a much more important person in the world than Writer Geraldine. If I stopped writing today, it would be years before anyone noticed. If I stop taking out the trash, feeding the dogs, and picking up the groceries, the howls of protest would be almost instantaneous.

L: I admire that sentiment very much. But, don't you hope for a lasting literary reputation? Did your career as a journalist inure you to good writing and hard work being taken out with the trash?

GB: I hope people will read and enjoy my books, that's it. Really. Anything else is just delectable gravy.

Francis's hands, as he looked at them now, seemed to be messengers from some outlaw corner of his psyche, artificers of some involuntary doom element in his life. He seemed now to have always been the family killer; for no one else he knew of in the family had ever lived as violently as he. And yet he had never sought that kind of life.

Francis Phelan is a man who believes his own hands have betrayed and destroyed him. He lives in an Albany peopled by ghosts, notably his son, Gerald's, dead 13 days after birth from the broken neck sustained in falling from his father's hands to the floor. And yet Phelan, the eloquent, violent, dissembling bum hero of William Kennedy's great novel Ironweed (1983), is the master of these hands. His entire body, though rundown from decades of sleeping in the weeds and on the streets, retains the devastating grace which brought him the accolades of sportswriters and fans as a ballplayer alongside the likes of Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson. His first murder weapon is a stone the size and heft of a baseball, and he hurls it through the window of a trolley to impact its strikebreaking driver's head with uncanny accuracy. His final victim's death is delivered by the ash barrel of a baseball bat, "with a stroke that would have sent any pitch over any center-field fence in any ball park anywhere."

It is Kennedy's distinct accomplishment in this book to have created Phelan as a sympathetic character, despite the murders committed by his hand, the willful abandonment of a wife and children, and the drunken cruelties which precipitate the deaths of his closest friends. Phelan is a thinker and a dreamer, and this is part of his allure; the Ptolomaic aside which concludes the book is the final instance of a life of deep and endearing reflection, a state of consciousness in which the dead live, board buses and trains, erect bleachers on the lawn to stare on Phelan and debate with him his acts against them. He considers his mistakes to be his greatest sins, and his premeditated sins to be the acts of a just "warrior, protecting a belief that no man could ever articulate, especially himself; but somehow it involved protecting saints from sinners, protecting the living from the dead." He is a man, finally, who has been failed by something more elemental than hands– by fate, and by fact.

Francis was now certain only that he could never arrive at any conclusions about himself that had their origin in reason. But neither did he believe himself incapable of thought. He believed he was a creature of unknown and unknowable quantities, a man in whom there would never be an equanimity of both impulsive and premeditated action.

William Kennedy's Ironweed 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. He join us this January, 2009, for the 27th Annual Key West Literary Seminar: Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth.

These hands belong to Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown. He lost the finger in an accident with farming-machinery as a child, and went on to an extraordinarily successful major league career from 1903-1916, winning more than twenty games six times and recording a 2.06 ERA, third best in history, over 481 games.

Michael and Ivy Meeropol have been added to the first session of our 2009 Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. The Meeropols are the son and granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed by the United States in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage in passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Their personal relationship to this controversial episode in American history has informed their professional work with an acute sense of what is at stake in the writing of histories and historical fictions.

Michael Meeropol edited The Rosenberg Letters (the complete prison correspondence of his parents), and co-wrote We Are Your Sons, The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg with his brother Robert. Michael Meeropol's interest in how fiction illuminates "the truth" about historical events and figures has brought him into dialogue with writers of historical fiction including E.L. Doctorow, whose The Book of Daniel is a fictionalized account of the Rosenberg family. Meeropol is also the author of Surrender, How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution, and a regular commentator on economic and political issues for WAMC, the NPR affiliate in Albany, NY.

Ivy Meeropol is a producer and director of documentary films and television series, a screenwriter, a journalist, and a writer of fiction. She directed and produced Heir to An Execution (2003), a documentary film about the legacy of her grandparents, which premiered in the Documentary Competition of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. She also directed and produced The Hill (2007), a six-part series about Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) and his staff; and directed the feature-length documentary All About Abe, the story of Abe Pollin.

Click here for a complete list of this year's speakers, with links to full biographical and media information.
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