An Interview with Margaret George (redux)

This is an interview I published in Solander back in 2005. Since Margaret George's new novel about the late reign of Elizabeth I comes out next year, I figured it's worth a rerun:

Margaret George's internationally-bestselling novels have so far spanned 1st-century Egypt, Biblical-era Palestine, 16th-century England and Scotland, and ancient Greece. Though George is known for her portrayals of controversial historical figures such as Henry VIII, Mary, Queen of Scots, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, and Helen of Troy, they all have one thing in common: they are simultaneously larger than life and shrouded in misperceptions and misunderstandings. Big names do not intimidate her: "How else can I find out what it's like to be the most beautiful woman in the world? she jokes.

"[Helen] has been a mystery for over 2,500 years," George explains. "Even Shakespeare didn't know what to make of her...Marlowe contributed the `face that launched a thousand ships' to our quotations about her, and even Poe wrote a poem `To Helen.' I wanted to get to know her better. History is coy about her. The best way to approach her was through art."

George's determination to bring Helen to life has led her to university courses on the history of Troy, the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, museums around the world, and the site of Troy itself in modern-day Turkey. While film and dramatic depictions of famous historical figures sometimes influence her (she especially admires Robert Shaw's portrayal of King Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons), George typically prefers a more traditional approach to research. She remains unimpressed with the recent Hollywood film Troy, though she notes that it did "give rise to a number of documents about Troy that I found helpful, including one in which a new Trojan horse was built and testes to see how many men could fit inside it, how it could be rolled and what its maximum size could be. Conclusion: not very large and not very many men."

Details such as these give George's works their characteristic feel. Selecting the right "writing music" for each book also helps re-create the atmosphere of the time and place. "As usual, Helen was a difficult lady to capture," she says. "I wanted something `ancient,' but nothing was quite right."

So what mood-music finally helped her to conjure the greatest epic of the ancient world? "It's embarrassing to admit this, but the soundtracks from Pirates of the Caribbean and The Time Machine were quite evocative."

This seeming paradox only reinforces George's conviction that fiction--historical or otherwise--is more about connecting to the reader's emotions than getting the physical details scrupulously exact. "I think historical novels resonate when they tie into human concerns. We don't read them for facts, really (nonfiction is better for that), but to understand what the facts mean, emotionally, to us. Henry VIII, to me, wasa a study in what happens to someone who doesn't live up to his gifts. Now that is something we can all relate to; we don't have to be royalty to understand this dilemma. It's one each of us faces--how do we use what we've been given? Draping it in the form of Henry VIII makes it an `historical novel,' but really it's a morality tale."

Still, fidelity to time, place, and character remain particularly important in the historical genre. George notes the controversy among writers, readers, and publishers about whether to use "slagy language in an attempt to make the long-ago seem more accessible...in my opinion it doesn't work. I dont' accept Agamemnon saying, `We've gotta have a plan, guys!' or the like. It sounds absurd, and actually has the effect of distancing you from the characters, rather than what the writer intended. Dialogue doesn't have to be purple prose or too formal, but it should echo the times, if possible."

George also cautions historical writers against the "slice of life technique"--telling only a relatively small part of a famous person's life. "I know why writers are doing it--we are all under pressure to make things byte-size and have the books smaller--but these are not byte-size people and don't lend themselves to that treatment." Still, she acknowledges that the realities of the marketplace must sometimes intervene. "In spite of myself, I'd have to say f you can make it reasonably short and portable, that would be something to aim for. People travel so much now, they want something they can tote along. I can't manage to do that, but maybe you can." since each of George's books weighs in at 800-plus pages, she's aware of the irony of the advice: "Do as I say, not as I do!"

Perhaps not surprisingly, George offers Shakespeare as a model for modern writers. "He was amazingly accurate in his facts, considering the resources available to him, but he never sacrificed action and character to them. And of course, being Shakespeare, he managed to make them short as well."

So where does the divide between historian and fiction-writer lie? It can be a difficult gap to bridge at times, even for the most talented in both fields. "We historical fiction writers would like to think we influence `real' historians," says George, "but outside of a very few instances, they ignore us, the careful and the sloppy alike. I think Robert Graves's I, Claudius was respected by historians, but then Graves was a scholar himself. Shakespeare is of course the exception as he is in everything else. However, he fell down on the job with Helen of Troy. He wrote about her in Troilus and Cressida, but for once he failed to capture the essence of an historical character. She was too much even for him." Hey, it happens to the best of us.

Seasoned and beginning writers alike can benefit from some of the strategies that have helped contribute to the success of George's books: "Choose someone who's already well-known rather than an obscure person, because it helps if your reader already knows who your character is. Don't make your potential reader guess what your book is about--and don't give it a vague, nondescriptive title,or an overly literary one. People may not get it on first glance and move on to the next book on the table. Never automatically assume your reader will be interested in your story. It is your job to make him or her interested. Just imagine someone tired and yawning when they pick up your story and try to overcome it. It's a good exercise for writers."

"Write about what excites you. That way you will enjoy coming to work each day, and the journey will be an adventure."


You can learn more about Margaret George, her adventures in research, and her books at www.margaretgeorge.com
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Reductio ad Hitlerum

You know who else wanted the government to control health care? You know who else was a vegetarian? You know who else appreciated the arts, wore pants, liked King Kong, endorsed the Volkswagen? HITLER HITLER HITLER!!!!

There's an actual term in rhetoric known as Godwin's Law, aka Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies, which essentially states that the minute someone on any side of any debate invokes the Hitler comparison, any chance of rational discussion comes to an end.

I wish I could find the study I came across a few years back. It was a formal study conducted by several rhetoricians of online chat rooms in the U.S. and Europe. Basically, the study found that the length of time the online discussion continued was directly proportional to the likelihood of someone invoking a comparison with Hitler. In other words, the longer it goes on, the greater the chance of Hitler popping up.

But this was true ONLY for American chat rooms. The researchers found that the European chats continued much, much longer before anybody brought up the Hitler comparison, and even then it was extremely rare, almost always in the context of specific discussions of war and genocide. Europeans, they concluded, are VERY reluctant go into such dark territory so lightly - you do not pull out Hitler, the Third Reich, or the Final Solution simply to win some stupid point about smoking or the arts or public policy reform, etc. This seemed to be much less true for Americans, perhaps because the horrors of Hitler are for them more distant and abstract.

Europeans are, however, quite ready in online arguments to compare one another to Stalin, far less so than Americans. He seems to be the European bugaboo of choice. I told my class this, and their response was, "Who's Stalin?"

Sigh.

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Frocks 'n' herbs....

Today’s discussion on the HNS Yahoo group got me reflecting on the sanitized nature of a lot of historical fiction, and why that might be. Chris Gortner has referred to this as the “frocks and herbs” type of histfic, in which much emphasis is placed on the details of dress and manners and speech, with the nastier bits like blood and fleas and syphilis and tooth decay edited out.

I’ve noticed it too; as others on the list pointed out, few women in historical novels ever seem to reference their menstrual cycles, or die in childbirth, or visit the privy. Various characters in my own recently-submitted manuscript do all of the above - and of course Jane Seymour dies of postpartum septicaemia right on schedule - but I had the nagging sense throughout the writing process that I hadn’t sufficiently captured the smells, the itchiness, the narrowness of daily life in the sixteenth century. It can be overdone as well, so I may have erred on the side of caution. Still, when I read, I’m not nearly as interested in what the character is wearing as I am in his/her psychology, or limitations of their field of political, religious, intellectual vision.

Here are some things that seldom come up in historical novels, plus a few anachronisms that get to me. There was an even better discussion in the Yahoo group, but I’m recapping it here and adding a few of my own:

1) Menstruation. As many readers observe, this untrivial detail of daily life has an effect on a character’s psychology and behavior, as well as being an annoying mess in the pre-Kotex era (and in some times/places, carrying a hugely negative stigma). But you almost never hear about it.

2) There seems to be a lot of childbirth, and miscarriages galore. These are sometimes neat (mom screams and baby pops out!) and sometimes messy, with water and blood all over the place. No matter how much the women suffer, though, both they and their babies pull through just fine with astonishing frequency, given the alarming rate of death in childbirth for both moms and babies right up until the last century.

3) No one ever has fleas, or is very dirty. If they do, they’re probably the villain.

4) Visiting the privy. Maybe it happens, but I never read anything about paper or cloth or water to clean up with afterward, or whether such places were segregated by sex. I had to guess at how 16th-century waiting women at court might have gone about relieving themselves in the course of their day, since there’s almost nothing written about it. It’s a little more possible to estimate how the king and queen took care of their needs, so I had to adjust it from there.

5) I kind of cringe whenever a character can “feel the blood pounding in her ears,” or seems to have an excellent understanding of the cardiopulmonary system, the way the lungs take in oxygen and distribute it through the bloodstream to the brain, etc. Your average citizen really didn’t have a detailed understanding of the inner workings of the human anatomy until well after the Enlightenment was underway.

6) When characters blithely violate social/religious taboos of their times and all they get are dirty looks, instead of whipping, imprisonment, or death by burning. Especially pre-modern women who seem to be walking around with 21st-century independence, self-esteem, and sexual liberation. I’m looking at you, Shakespeare in Love.

7) The poppy syrups. Oh, the poppy syrups. Everybody’s got an opiate readily at hand to dull the pain of headache/childbirth/execution/toothache/heartbreak/whatever. They would have been incredibly rare and expensive, and not nearly on a par with modern narcotics in any case.

I’m sure I can come up with more, and so can you. My summer reading, as a matter of fact, would probably yield a trove of many more. Anyone who can call any of these out, or provide guidance to quality fiction that breaks some of these down, I’m all ears.

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Haiku

Ninety-nine bottles
Of beer on the wall; ninety-
Nine bottles of beer.

Also, have you ever had an idea, but you didn't want to let it leak out from your subconscious, so you didn't talk about it or share it with anyone, really, and when people asked you about whether you were working on anything, you suddenly turned from a fairly outgoing, social person into a reticent, secretive weirdo who people probably thought was all paranoid and strange and maybe dangerous to talk to, but really you were just not ready to let it out and risk losing your edge on it just yet, and it had nothing to do with them?

Yeah, me too.

Oh, also, school starts in a little over 2 weeks. I'm not ready.

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Research!

Here's an addictive little book that I've read so many times it's literally fallen apart. Of course, it was cheap, crappy binding to begin with.

Bonuses:

Lots of cool anecdotes about major and minor royalty, from the famous to the obscure, in alphabetical order. If you're looking for a subject to write about, or just like to know more about the antics people get up to when they're held accountable for absolutely nothing, it's worth buying, reading, memorizing, and keeping forever.

Cautions:

1) I've found a number of inaccuracies, and I'm sure there are plenty more. For instance, Randall claims Anne Boleyn was bulemic, purging herself right there at the table during royal banquets. I assume this is his weird interpretation of a contemporary account that describes one of her ladies-in-waiting holding her napkin at the table, in case she wanted to "spit or do otherwise"--more likely blowing her nose or something a bit more benign. Things like people's dates of birth/death and number of children, etc. are also demonstrably wrong in places.

2) Several entries are given a very brief, cursory, even breezy summing up, while others go on and on (at least 3 separate entries divert to Queen Victoria, for whom Randall can be said to have A Thing).

3) Traces of sexism and homophobia. The publication date (1989) cannot excuse this entirely. People knew better even then.

In other words, it's not a scholarly source that can stand on its own, but it's a good place to start. This is where I first met Juana la Loca of Castile, Farouk I of Egypt, Henri III of France, John Brown, and many, many others who have since become my friends.

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Tabitha King is a much better writer than her husband

Today's selection is not historical. It's not recent. It's not even in print. But it's creepy as hell.

Small World straddles the line between horror and sci-fi. How can you not love this cover blurb: "For [cougar/socialite] Dolly, it was lust for revenge...for [eccentric, emotionally stunted inventor] Roger, it was just lust."

But, truthfully, the language here is several grades above that of He Who Must Not Be Named (the writer she is always, and unfairly, compared to - guess who). It's taut, rhythmic, and stays in your head long after you put it down. And it's a thrilling, fast-paced story, full of vivid details, by turns hilarious and deeply disturbing.

Best of all, her female characters are living, breathing, 3-dimensional people with complexities and belivable thoughts and behaviors - unlike those of a Certain Writer to Whom I Will Not Unfairly Compare Her. And I don't think it's because of her gender; after all, female authors are just as capable of writing shallow stereotypes of women as male authors are. "Tabby" is just a plain good writer.

I read it for the first time in the seventh grade, and still have my copy; it bears the marks and stains and folds of many moves between dorm rooms and apartments, many hospital stays, many car trips and plane rides, beign carried in backpacks and shoulder bags and suitcases. I've mailed it to friends as gifts, and imagined my enemies into some of the character roles. What higher recommendation can there be?

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Fan, Flash, and Slash

I have recently been drawn, with car-crash-like fascination, into the world of fanfiction. The interwebs are crawling with home-penned tales of sequels, prequels, long-lost unknown characters, and soft porn (and, occasionally, hard porn) that is somehow connected to popular fiction/TV/movies.

Today's case study: Harry Potter fanfic. Once you dip into this genre, you'll realize that a little over 99% of fanfic is pretty bad, but what a range of badness there is. Random sample sentence: "His insides imploded, and a single tear escape from his emotionless eyes." That's nowhere near the bottom of the barrel, which should give you an idea.

A lot of it also overlaps with the genre of flash fiction, which is fiction of usually 500-1500 words. Straightup flash fiction can be a good and useful exercise for the writer, and often a fun read, but fan-flashfic is often short because the author's imagination is...well, limited. Example: a short scene in which Hermione discovers that her cat, Crookshanks, has impregnated Filch's cat, Mrs. Norris. The end.

Then there is the more sinister/hilarious subgenre of slash fiction. Named for the slash between the two main characters' names, as in Harry/Snape. Draco/Harry. Kirk/Spock. Holmes/Watson. Ad nauseum. Notice that all characters are male, usually involving some tense antagonism/interpersonal dynamics. This is because slashfic always deals with a gay relationship between its two primaries, usually--but not always--accompanied by plenty of BDSM. (Male/female sex is called hetfic, never slashfic). While some put emphasis on the emotional complexities of the relationship (those tend to be ok, though be warned there are toxic levels of angst), slash is usually synonymous with sex.

It's worth a read. One of the most fascinating things about slashfic is that a LOT of it appears to be written by girls/young women. You can read more about that here. Again, a lot of fanfic and slashfic is pretty awful: contrived, poorly spelled and punctuated, devolving into one-dimensional stereotypes and rehashes. And some of it's truly disturbing, particularly the ones that feature Uncle Vernon as a raging drunk who beats the crap out of Harry. It makes you wonder what's going on in some of these kids' lives. But every now and then, you come across a gem: some people really do nail the voice and style of the piece they're working from, so that you end up wondering what they'd be capable of if they did their own original stuff.

And now, presenting the absolute best slashfic on the web - it's about 1/3 of the way down the comment thread for the AV Club's review of the 2008 film Frost/Nixon. Come on, it was begging for it. You know you want it.


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Here Come Da Chair

Well, it's official: I'm Program Chair for the 2011 HNS Conference. Huzzah!

Details pending (you know, trifling details, like where and when), though Richard Scott and Ann Chamberlin will soon embark on a hotel-finding quest and shall doubtless emerge victorious. More details then, both here and in official venues like the HNS membership list and the HNS Yahoo group.

I'm thinking I'll organize a complete bacchanalia. After all, the world might end in 2012.

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Sticks and Stones

And in the "Glad I didn't write that" category....

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a popular Victorian novelist, best known for penning the immortal purple phrase: 'It was a dark and stormy night." (Snoopy owes royalties.) The folks who run the Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest have a site that includes a showcase of actual samples of published writing that would make even Sir Edward squirm.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing:

"With listeners leaning over the velvet restraining ropes and angling for pictures, John Glenn urged them to remember Shepard's 1961 Redstone flight in its political context, when the Soviet Union was seducing world opinion with the lingerie of Earth-orbiting technology."
-- Billy Cox, "Shepard Statue Honors American Space Cowboys," Florida Today, March 24, 2000.

Yes, you did just read that. Enjoy.


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The Duchess's Diary

(Oh Val, I hear you say: tell us more about critical theory and literacy, please. Well, I'm tapped out - maybe sometime when I'm feeling more boring.)

I've noticed that many, many blogs discuss new and recent historical fiction, but relatively few discuss histfic of the past (historical historical?). So I think I will focus on long-lost (or quasi-lost) gems that deserve to be unearthed.



Today's book I wish I'd written is The Duchess's Diary by Robin Chapman. First published in 1980, the only places I can find it new are Amazon UK and Barnes and Noble. Let's let them sum it up, shall we?

"Maria Isabel, Duchess of Caparosso, falls in love with Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, but believes he has misrepresented her character in his work. Consumed by the need to clear her name, her quest for truth and her progress back into the world with hope restored, is a love story that reaffirms the reader's faith in humanity. "

Aside from having too many commas, that summary pretty much nails it. This book is 120 pages long (a refreshing change from some of the doorstoppers that came along later), and every page is lyrically beautiful. Best of all is Maribel's more-than-ambiguous madness...but just because she's mad doesn't mean she's not also right. It's fantastic. And I wish I'd written it.

Here's the copy I found for a buck at a used book exchange many years ago (though it bears a price sticker in British pounds). Tell me it's not weird and spooky yet also oddly alluring - just like the novel itself.

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The death of reading (again)

Every 3 or 4 years, some pointy-head likes to bemoan the death of reading and literacy in general. As a pointy-head myself, I have done enough research to know that these sorts of complaints have been going on for literally hundreds of years. I have a great quote from Harvard professor James Jay Greenough in an 1893 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, in which he laments that the "postal card and the type-writer are eroding the art of letter writing." Beautiful.

Actually, with the advent of the Internet, people are reading and writing more than they ever have before in the history of human civilization. Whether they are doing it well or correctly is not the point. Yet this week one of my colleagues forwarded us yet another article (by Caleb Crain of The New Yorker) about how we're all going to hell in a handbasket, literacy-wise. Below is my abbreviated response (I took out much of the posturing):

I am automatically suspicious of any equation of textual literacy with intelligence and logical thinking, which seems to me frought with the troubling assumption that nonliterate/preliterate people and societies are incapable of rational thought, that they cannot absorb complexities or spot contradictions, etc.

The “death” of any medium often simply means its metamorphosis into another form, which we can choose see as a beautiful thing. Perceptions of death and decline are also very subject to manipulation, as we know: I objected at the time to the NEA report’s narrow definition of “reading” as “reading creative literature,” and I object to it now. Personally I find it kind of neat and inspiring that nonfiction reading is booming, that the 9/11 commission report was a national bestseller. I think we need to be very careful about jumping to these kind of the-sky-is-falling conclusions when faced with suggestions that people are not reading what (and how ) we think they should be reading.

Print is definitely declining, and cost is probably the biggest factor in this. But Crain’s article seems to exploit longstanding popular fears about the “decline” of reading = the decline of civilization. (Note the negative construction of his data: reading levels and time are “declining,” “falling,” “shrinking,” etc. He does not “celebrate” the “growth” of literacy in other media, audial or visual or virtual or what have you. You’d think that, if we’re not reading, we must be sitting around in caves scratching ourselves.)

A hundred years ago, novels were considered brain-rotting trash, and any truly worthwhile humanitarian would be reading philosophy or the classics in his/her free time. Nowadays it is fashionable to disparage television/the internet/texting/video games (Crain himself uses The Sopranos as his example of plebian entertainment), and elevate novel-reading to the highest level of mental, intellectual, and emotional sophistication. I’m sorry, but, reader/writer/teacher/scholar that I am I remain skeptical.

[He also says some stuff about Walter J. Ong's research about orality and literacy, which I find off-base. Normal people will find it boring, though, so I'm skipping it here.]

But I find Crain’s entire approach suspect. Statements like “The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy” are very puzzling – isn’t the Internet itself the ultimate literacy tool? I worry that Crain has taken the all-too-popular fearmongering view, combined with an unhealthy does of self-congratulation: we who read literature for pleasure are so much better and smarter and more evolved than those who don’t. (He ends his article with nothing less than a dire prediction of the end of democracy!)

As a teacher and scholar of literacy, I am much more interested (as I think we all are) in how to achieve a marriage of the various kinds of orality and literacy - a marriage which is rooted in what our students are actually doing now and what they will be expected to do in the future - than in figuring out who or what to blame.


So I sent that to my department. We'll see if they fire me. :)

Political (in)correctness - or - Get Out of My Head, You

There was a cool panel at the HNS conference last week about whether and how authors should go about writing characters of a different gender/race/creed than their own. One person decried the "political correctness" of insisting that authors keep within their own gender/ethnic boundaries - a phrase I'm always suspicious of, since it never seems to mean exactly the same thing to any two people anywhere. Someone else suggested it was more of a marketing issue - editors want to make sure their target demographics are reached, and not "offended."

As an atheist (arguably a minority in the U.S.), I've read some atheist characters in fiction who were clearly NOT created by authors who shared these views, and who were reduced to shallow stereotypes that reflected the prejudices and misperceptions of the person typing. Personally offensive, sure - but far more important than that, it contributes to an overall climate of intolerance and misunderstanding. That's far more dangerous than just hurting my little old feelings.


Many of the analogies being tossed around at the panel were theater-based, about actors playing characters that transgress the physical boundaries of the actor, etc. Yet when I ask the question "So how do you feel about a white actor playing Othello?" I often am met with a long pause, followed by the ubiquitous, "Well, it would depend on the actor."

It certainly would. And in fiction, it depends on the author. When the intent is to seriously get inside the mind of an "Other" character and render him/her sympathetic (as in "believable," not nececssarily "nice"), that I can respect. If the intent is darker, however subconsciously, then you have problems.

Some case studies (and, incidentally, the first two are books I wish I'd written):

--Gone With the Wind - Good book? Certainly. Racist? Absolutely; the slaves enjoyed their slavery so much that they were very sad
when the mean Yankees came and forced freedom on them, etc.
So sayeth the white southern lady.

--Memoirs of a Geisha (double-winner that bends both race and gender)
- Western Cinderella story that did not play well at all in Japan (the
movie resoundingly flopped there as well).

--A nameless book that I am embarrassed to admit that I read in high
school (not histfic), in which a 50something white male convinces a
young African-American woman that she really does have a big chip on
her shoulder and this whole "racism" thing is really pretty much all in
her mind. Yeeerrrgghh. And then they have sex.


For better or for worse, we KNOW that histfic readers often take imaginative recreations as gospel truth. I can't feel that asking authors to think more carefully and explicitly about the ideology of their work doesn't seem like such a horrendous thing. For me there's a huge difference between a serious, sympathetic white Othello and a minstrel show.

But then, as my friends like to point out, I'm a godless heathen bleeding heart atheist liberal who hates all things good and righteous. And I'll be on a panel with you if you want to address this at the HNS conference in 2011. Takers?

Blogging about Blogging

Wow! I'm in a blog! (Not this one.) Barbara Vey of "Beyond Her Book" included a photo of us at the Historical Novel Society conference this weekend on her blog at Publisher's Weekly. That's me on the left, having an ok hair day.

As you can probably tell from the title, I plan for this blog to be a place where I talk about fiction (historical and otherwise) that I wish I'd written. So far my contribution to world literature has been my dissertation. If you're dying to know more about the history of writing technologies, from clay and quills to word processors and wikis, go here. If you're a normal person, however, you probably just want to hear about the fun stuff.

I got to talk with Chris Gortner, aka C.W. Gortner, author of The Last Queen, who I've seen at previous conferences but who always seemed kind of scary to me. He's not scary at all up close. He has a great story of his road to success (pubication by a major house and strong sales after 13 years of rejections!!), and is kind and encouraging to bright-eyed youngish hopefuls like me. Plus he has nice handwriting.

Juliet Waldron and I always have a good time at the HNS conference; she wrote Mozart's Wife, which I wish I had written. She, in turn, tells me I look like Lauren Bacall. So it's a mutually fulfilling friendship.

AND I got to hang with my favorite author, Margaret George, who was one of our keynote speakers. I got to know Margaret many years ago when, in a fit of adolescent geekiness, I wrote her a fan letter and she actually wrote back. We've had a long-distance sort of friendship ever since, punctuated by a lunch or postcard here and there. She's awesome in person - very down-to-earth, funny, and eager to talk with anyone who shares her passion for historical writing.

One other great thing about conferences: I now know tons of secrets. Juicy, delicious secrets. And no, I'm not telling them here.