A Very Fine Line

One of the Amazon discussion threads that I began following a couple of weeks ago started with the plaintive question – is it possible to libel historical characters, especially those who are long-dead? The discussion rambled down some interesting by-ways or at least by-ways of interest to that relative handful of us who construct historical fiction for fun or profit. How do you deal with having painted a historical figure in an unflattering light? What about the descendents of that person – should the writer have some regard for their feelings? How far can you go when the historical record is sketchy, in filling out an incident or defining a personality? Can you, as one of my military-blog mentors used to say – just make s**t up? It’s all in the interests of telling a cracking good story, you know – with suspense, heroes and heroines, villains and all, and to be honest there are historical personalities who – to put the best face on it – were not exactly material for Good Citizen (or Mom or Dad) of the Year. Some of them were absolutely slimy gits; the problem is not so much with them, actually, as the originator of the Amazon thread pointed out. What about historical characters who are in the main seen as honorable or even heroic figures, but who might have had a bit of a dark side to them, who are recorded (in documentation of varying degrees of historical authority) as having done or said something a bit disreputable? How ought that to be explored, ethically, by the creator of an historical fiction tale? Thanks to the appalling way that history is taught in schools these days, it’s appears likely that most people pick up what they think they know about history from popular culture, from television, movies and historical novels. Since we who play some tiny part in forming the public’s perception of historical events and personages, shouldn’t we also take some responsibility, by lingering meaningfully in the neighborhood of verifiable historical facts when we construct our own stories?

There are two ways around this dilemma – the first by having some reasonably accurate justification, some historical evidence for the angle that you are using, something beside your own whim. The trouble with that is that oftentimes there is just not enough known for sure about an event or person. We must take that little as a spider building a web does, casting small threads of story from one firm support to another, filling in all those details that the historical sources do not or can not supply. And we would have had to do that in any case – for it is up to the storyteller to fill in all the telling and vivid details, when the actual historical record has left to us just a brief outline of events and a sprinkling of odd facts. Sometimes that record barely offers enough to get a sense of who a person was, how they thought, reacted, and talked. As an example, the character of Doctor Townsend, in my first historical “To Truckee’s Trail”; the verified facts were relatively thin on the ground, no character sketches by contemporaries save for a small reminiscence by his brother-in-law some fifty years later, no existing diary, no personal letters that I could find, no biography, just a single daguerreotype and a couple of facts: his age, the fact that he was a qualified doctor and an educated man, a Mason and among the things that he and his wife carried in their wagon to California was a box of books, his very own library. Among Dr. Townsend’s personal library was a copy of “Lord Chesterfield’s Letters” – not a particular surprise, for it was a best seller in its day. I bought and read a copy of it myself, and went about working out what sort of man would he have been, to have gone West in the early 1840s and appreciated that particular book. Perhaps I came very close to the essential truth of Doctor Townsend, and perhaps I missed by a mile, but at least I have some defensible basis for the way I ‘wrote’ him. In the case of the villainous J.P. Waldrip, of the Adelsverein Trilogy, there are even fewer established historical facts known about him – practically none of them favorable – but again, all of them could be marshaled in my defense and in justification for ‘writing’ him the way I did. Even though I made up some of the most telling details, and painted him as pretty much a vicious psychopath, his own record during the Civil War in the Hill Country tends to suggest that he was indeed a brazen and murderous bully. My portrayal of him as a sadistic nutcase is merely icing on an already established slab of historical cake, although if any of his descendents are in search of him, I do own up to feeling a bit apologetic – one cannot pick one’s ancestors, and in the case of J.P. Waldrip, there doesn’t seem to be much for his present-day descendents to take pride in.

Historical figures, of the sort who tend to have popular historical novels written about them, like the Tudors and various specimens of similar Euro-nobility, are much better known. But with them, the hopeful novelist has an embarrassment of riches and a whole new set of constraints and problems. In such cases, there are a wealth of accounts of dramatic events, interpretations of same, and partisans. Historians, readers and partisans will have their own favored interpretation. In putting another interpretation out there, sympathetic or not, a writer of historical fiction is taking on all of those who do not share their own particular take. One of the other writers confessed to feeling rather weary of it all – the sniping, the criticism and the necessity of having to defend how one had ‘written’ a historical character, over and over again. I like to think I have escaped that particular trap by writing about relatively obscure events and unknown characters, or putting made-up characters as participants in well-known historical events, leaving me only a bare handful of potentially unhappy historians and authors to placate.

After the topic was completely ventilated and pretty well examined from every angle, we did reach one fairly firm conclusion – and that to defend your story, your work and your research by adding a note, at the beginning or at the end, outlining your sources and research which went into your story. While it is not technically and legally possible for a writer of historical fiction brought up on charges in a court of law for libeling a historical figure, to us it seemed rather unfair to pick on someone who being long-dead cannot defend themselves – although there would be historians and partisans who would have a go. Most importantly, the consensus in the thread was that it would be at least polite to explain to unwary readers those elements of it which were based on established fact, and where you had deviated from those facts in creating created interesting characters, plot-lines, or incidents in your story. If you have a particular villain, or have attributed something dark to an otherwise honorable historical figure, than it may be even more important to explain why you ‘wrote’ the character that way to your readers. If you respect your readers, and even more – respect history and your own story-telling ability, it seems like adding this kind of note is simply the decent and professional thing to do.

Celia Hayes

Author – To Truckee’s Trail, The Adelsverein Trilogy

www.celiahayes.com