We get letters...

I have been cleaning up my filing system, throwing things out, perusing old manuscripts, rereading letters sent and received.

Most writers are familiar with weird correspondence, simply because there are so many weird people out there.

I submit, for your consideration, a letter sent to my English publisher by one Dominic Pickin, of Brighton. It is dated October 9, 2000. It was then forwarded to me, and I have cherished it in secret for more than ten years.

But that was selfish of me.

So here we go. My transcription is faithful, misspellings and all:


Dear sir or madam, to whom it may concern.

Re Stephen O'Sheas book The perfect heresy.

The general thrust of his argument seems to be if you're sympathetic to the Cathar position your a fool, a crank or even a Nazi. This is reminisent of a point of view I've often heard in nightclubs when a woman declines a mans offer of sex and he says to his mates 'she's a Lesbian' Could you please refrain from giving a platform to appologists for genocide. Thanks.

Yours sincerely

Dominic Pickin

How to dine alone

So my new book on a revolt against the Inquisition in medieval France is in the final throes of readying itself for a readership rivaling Lady Gaga’s fan base in numbers. Or thereabouts.

New York e-mails regularly with slings-and-arrows queries about such-and-such a passage, such-and-such a quote. As the story concerns fourteenth-century monks hurling insults at each other from various pulpits and ox carts, thereby causing burghers and burghesses to run over the cobblestones in joyous riot, à la – take your pick – Pamplona or Vancouver, there is a lot of colorful language and overheated rhetoric from the men in the dresses. And their references have to be nailed down, identified, explained, as required in any book of non-fiction histoprose.

A young person of my acquaintance came over for dinner last night. She admired my goldfish, my air-conditioning unit, my attempts to keep squalor at bay. Then she saw my desk. On it sat my computer and an edition of the Holy Bible.

Nothing else.

She looked at me. “What’s with that?”

“It’s for the book,” I said, unthinking. “I’m doing a lot of fact-checking.”

Horror crept across her beautiful Blue-State features. Her gaze darted nervously about the room, as if looking for carry-on bags packed for the Rapture.

“Fact… checking?!”

I then knew what it was like to be damned.

Singin' in the Rain

We are drowning in New England today. Whither the slush of yesteryear?

The madman is still at large in Tripoli, the fool hangs on in Madison, the ferret prances in Paris. What to do with such a day?

I give you William, ninth Duke of Aquitaine, the man who put the beat in the twelfth century. Just in case we thought the cosmic funk was our own invention:


Poème sur Pur Néant

Je ferai vers sur pur néant
Ne sera sur moi ni sur autre gent
Ne sera sur amour ni sur jeunesse
Ni sur rien autre ;
Je lai composé en dormant
Sur mon cheval

Ne sais quelle heure fus né
Ne suis allègre ni irrité
Ne suis étranger ni privé
Et n’en puis mais,
Qu’ainsi fus de nuit doté par les féés
Sur un haut puy.

Ne sais quand je suis endormi
Ni quand je veille, si l’on me le dit
À peu ne m’est le cœur parti
D’un deuil poignant
Et n’en fais pas plus cas que d’une souris
Par saint Martial.

Malade suis et me crois mourir
Et rien n’en sais plus que n’en entends dire,
Médecin querrai à mon plaisir
Et ne sais quel
Bon il sera s’il me peut guérir
Mais non si mon mal empire.

J’ai une amie, ne sais qui c’est ;
Jamais ne la vis, sur ma foi
Rien ne m’a fait qui me plaît, ni me pèse
Ni ne m’en chaut,
Que jamais n’y eut Normands ni Français
En mon hôtel.

Jamais ne la vis et je l’aime fort
Jamais ne me fit droit ni me fit tort
Quand je ne la vois, bien en fais mon plaisir
Et ne l’estime pas plus qu’un coq
Car j’en sais une plus belle et plus gentille
Et qui vaut bien plus.

J’ai fait ce poème, ne sais sur quoi
Et le transmettrai à celui
Qui le transmettra à autrui
Là-bas vers l’Anjou,
Qui le transmettra de son côté
À quelqu’un d’autre.

James Frey, Revisited

Here’s a suggestion. Anybody who bought Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope should wrap them up and put them in the mail.

Here’s where you send the package:

The White House; 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue; Washington, DC 20500.

Include a note asking for your money back. The author can afford it. Say the books were advertised as non-fiction, when they clearly are not.

Failing that, you might try the publisher. Hardcover for both books is Crown. Paperback is Three Rivers. Mass market paper for Audacity is Vintage. All are imprints of Random House.

Random House; 1745 Broadway; New York NY 10019.

You may also want to go into your local boxstore and ask that they reshelve the books properly, in the fiction section. If the clerks balk, tell them it’s easy: Make a space between Joyce Carol Oates and Sean O’Casey and put the books there.

Where they belong.

All Quiet

About fifteen years ago, I published a book on the First World War entitled Back to the Front. As today is the momentous anniversary of its conclusion in 1918, let’s recall what went on in during its last days. At the time, after four years of hell, everyone referred to the conflict as The War To End All Wars.

Right.

Anyway, here is what I wrote:

“The Allied attacks then came in quick succession, forcing the German warlords to scramble to send their ever-depleting number of reinforcements to help manage an orderly retreat. On August 20, the French attacked again on the Aisne; the following day the British hit north of Albert. By the time the Americans went into action at St. Mihiel the Germans had retreated in Picardy once again to the Hindenburg Line. Even that could not be held. The Belgians and the British finally broke through at Ypres, as the Americans pressed up in the Argonne in late September. Soon every Allied army was attacking as the German army slowly backed its way through Belgium and northern France.

“At home, imperial Germany began to fall apart. The autocratic government and the privations of wartime could be endured no longer. Riots broke out, sailors mutinied, and a new liberal chancellor was appointed to work real reforms with the Reichstag. Ludendorff resigned his post on October 27 – and would remain in obscurity until 1923, when he participated in Hitler’s failed beer-hall putsch in Munich. In early November, 1918, the Second Reich finally collapsed under the pressure of mounting chaos, and the Kaiser, forced to abdicate, fled to the Netherlands. The newly constituted republic consented to the Allied terms for surrender and the armistice was signed in Field-Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in a clearing of the Compiègne forest. The papers were initialed in the early hours of November 11, 1918. A few seconds before eleven o’clock that same morning, one observer with the South African troops in Flanders saw a German machine-gunner fire off a scorching hail of bullets toward their trenches. At the stroke of eleven, the gunner stood up, made a deep bow, turned around, and walked away.

“The war was over. Princip’s bullet had caused some 67 million men to don uniforms and go to fight. One in every six of these men was killed. Of the remainder, approximately half were wounded. On the Western Front alone, more than 4 million had died in their ditches.”

Make it stop

Yesterday I visited a book boxstore out in the burbs. We all know the type: a Starbucks counter, rows and rows of Justin Bieber cds and dvds, lots of candles and calendars, and, in the corner grudgingly given over to books, the department devoted to Medieval Inquisition one one-millionth the size of the section labelled Teen Paranormal Romance.

Actually, I just made up one of the book departments – there was no section devoted to Medieval Inquisition. But you knew that already.

The store is designed so that its large front windows look out onto a parking lot the size of Lake Erie. Relieving the vista somewhat are five wide columns, separating the floor-to-ceiling windows. Inside the store, these columns are adorned with large and very splendid replications of book covers of five American classics, one to a column.

So we have: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Thoreau’s Walden, Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and…

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Excuse me? Is it just me, or does anyone sane think that Rand’s vomitus of ill-digested pop Nietzschean schlock qualifies as an American classic? Yes, there are Randians among us and a few have done useful things (like invent Wikipedia), but the majority are boys who never got over having their first woodie. I’m looking at you, Alan Greenspan, and your Tea Party pals. I read Atlas Shrugged as a teen, and while it made me mean and nasty for a couple of weeks as I struggled to unleash my inner Fonzie, eventually I reverted to the non-sociopathic norm.

So why does the corporation that runs the bookstore rank Rand along with Thoreau? Is it to establish a he-said, she-said equivalence, somewhat like pairing Abraham Lincoln with Sarah Palin? Is Rand there to up the female quotient? So Rand is the superior to Dickinson, Ferber, Wharton, Highsmith, Morrison? Is it a sop to screw-you capitalism, a hint that Mockingbird’s takedown of Jim Crow in no way reflects the corporation’s view that the big bad govimint should never step on people’s prejudices, a view most recently on display in the campaign of Ayn’s lunatic namesake, Rand Paul? Or is it a reflection of sales volume? If so, where’s Danielle Steele?

Maybe it’s all about rugged individualism. John Galt = Henry David Thoreau = Atticus Finch = Jay Gatsby = George Milton and Lennie Small… No, that’s not right.

Maybe, just maybe, the people in the corporation who made the selection actually believe that Ayn Rand was a great thinker and a wonderful writer.

If that's the case, they should stick to Teen Paranormal Romance.

Read it and weep

For those of you lucky enough to be living in the center of the universe (i.e., Rhode Island), please make note of what should be a diverting event to be held by the ACLU at the Providence Athenæum on Friday, Sept. 24, from 5 to 7 p.m. Writers resident in this seaside paradise, including the no-baloney Rosemary Mahoney, the fearless Adam Braver, and the neither-of-the-above myself, will be reading excerpts from classics that various beetle-browed bigots and other assorted scaredy-cats have tried to ban from schoolrooms, libraries and bookstores over the years. The event is part of the ACLU’s consciousness-raising Banned Books Week, an annual effort to underscore the importance of the First Amendment. Readings will be brief and varied, followed by a discussion, then further discussion over drinks, methinks. There is no cover charge, rope line, or bouncer involved, so please feel free to breeze by a week from Friday.

Freelance Hall of Famer

True story. I heard it from the protagonist just the other day. For reasons that will become obvious, I have changed his name and the setting a bit.

So this guy is sitting at his desk one fine weekday morning a few months back, working on an article for a magazine. He’s got it all, house in the country, wife and kids. He works at home, gets lots of magazine gigs, and has a spacious ground-floor office looking out onto a verdant, rolling lawn.

Only this morning he sees a figure on the lawn, hesitating, a man in some kind of uniform. He flits past the window, twice, three times.

My friend goes out to the porch. The man is there. He is clearly on the defensive, almost cowering.

The intruder speaks. “Are you… are you… Joe Blow?”

“Yes. What do you want?”

He tentatively reaches out and hands my friend an envelope.

“From your wife’s divorce attorney.”

“What?!”

“You’re being served papers for divorce.”

My friend looks at the packet in his hand, dumbfounded. He looks back up at the stranger and says the first thing that comes into his mind.

“What? Am I supposed to tip you?”

The man relaxes, allows himself a smile.

“Well at least you’re taking it with a sense of humor. That’s a first for me.”

Eyes fixed in disbelief on the papers, my friend says reflexively, “So how does it usually go?”

The man, as if unburdened, launches into several tales of woe, about how he’s met by hostility, outrage, profanity, how suddenly everything is somehow his fault, how he’s to blame for the break-up of the marriage.

My friend listens, absently, but lets the man go on, automatically interjecting the usual encouragements to continue.

But at last he can take no more. There’s that package in his hand. After about ten minutes on the porch, the stranger leaves.

My friend takes to bed. He stays there for a long time, the door closed, the lights off. No one bothers him.

The sun sets, then rises, then sets again, then rises… or maybe it doesn’t. He’s lost track of time.

Part of him is utterly surprised and confused, but, he realizes at last, another part of him is not confused in the least.

He gets up and calls the guy who served the papers. They meet for coffee.

Then he comes home, sits down at his desk and types up a a pitch letter.

About how tough it is on a sensitive person to be a court officer serving papers on divorcing people. And maybe he could find a touchy-feely repo man and include him in the piece. What do you think? 3500 words?

He hits the send button on his e-mail to various editors.

By day’s end he gets a bite. He has sold the article.

It’s Thursday.

He was served the papers on Tuesday.

Avoid to the Wise

“I hear that writers…” the bartender paused… “develop avoidance strategies. So that you don’t actually have to sit down and write.”

I lifted my glass and made an expansive gesture that took in the dark room.

She smiled. “But that’s so clichéd.”

True, it is sort of an old stand-by, the sozzled scribe with his pint of plain. And I had noticed that, recently, I have developed some entirely new strategies. Procrastination is the mother of invention. And who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

Let me share ten of my latest batch, fresh from the Oven of Avoidance:

1) Spending a ridiculous amount of time at the farmers’ market looking for the Platonic Ideal of a tomato.

2) Watching flashmob dance videos from start to finish, then re-watching them.

3) Googling old obsessions like Tonya Harding to see what they’re up to these days.

4) Hand-drying the dishes, instead of just leaving them to dry in the rack.

5) Reading junk mail. Actually reading it.

6) Looking out the window and theorizing about new, green ways of creating electricity. For example, if we could somehow hook up a lightweight portable generator to the swishing ponytail of that young woman jogger out there… you get the picture.

7) Taking free-trial online Arabic lessons.

8) Renting and watching movies set in the Middle Ages.

9) Riding, tending, oiling, cleaning a bicycle.

10) Blogging about avoidance strategies.

Dialectic 101

Writing is hard because you have to think.

Writing is easy bcs u dont haf 2 txt msg evry 5 fkn secs.

Writing is hard because you have to make decisions.

Writing is easy because you don’t have to listen to a colleague complain about his girfriend.

Writing is hard because you have to figure out what to leave out and what to leave in.

Writing is easy because you don’t have to pretend to be interested in whatever your boss is saying.

Writing is hard because you always have to sacrifice your favorite phrase since it invariably screws up the paragraph.

Writing is easy because you don’t have to hear about someone’s expensive car repairs.

Writing is hard because you wonder if anyone is ever going to read the damn thing.

Writing is easy because you get to turn off the telephone.

Writing is hard because you miss people.

Why Do You Write Books?!

Writer’s Block. So what do you do when you get stuck? When the phrases dry up, the words go away, the pixels get the pox?

In my case, I look at the Etruscan Babe-a-licious hanging on my wall and implore her help. But it’s not working, it’s too hot in here, and too hot outside.

So, for no one’s sake but my own, I might as well tell another story, this one tying together Baudelaire’s contribution to this blog, that girl glimpsed on the Paris metro twenty-five years ago, and my current predicament.

About six years ago, while researching for Sea of Faith, I traveled to easternmost Turkey to survey the battlefield of Manzikert, where a decisive clash occurred in 1071 between Byzantine and Seljuk armies. I walked a hilltop overlooking the vast plain, trying to imagine the scene. At the foot of the hill stood a Kurdish village where cinderblock dwellings were interspersed with tall mounds of dung drying for use as winter fuel. The plain, even in the warm weather, looked cold and forbidding.

That evening, while poking around the ruined fortress of Manzikert (now called Malazgirt), my companions and I were approached by two plainclothes policemen: one an avuncular fellow with the requisite Turkish moustache; the other, younger, tall and trim, clean-shaven, silent, with silver eyes and a smile of pure malice. Clearly, he had just walked out of Midnight Express. After an extended conversation, they left us alone, disappearing back in the dusk toward their car.

Dung, battle, winter phantoms, intimations of nastiness – not a banner day.

One of my companions was Turkey’s most prominent woman archeologist, who had kindly agreed to fly me with me from Istanbul to be my guide in this remote region. The other was our driver, a young Arab man from Antakya (history’s Antioch), that sliver of the Arab Middle East that belongs, absurdly, to Turkey rather than to Syria.

Sensing my down mood, the next morning the archeologist suggested we travel to the shores of Lake Van, about twenty miles away and check out a medieval Seljuk graveyard she knew of. Smart cookie: the place was, indeed, magical, its hundreds and hundreds of eight- and nine-foot-tall gravestones covered in elaborate calligraphy, hewn from purple volcanic rock and now standing like forgotten sentinels in a grassy, untended downland. A snow-capped mountain range to the north closed off the perspective; Mount Ararat loomed just over the horizon.

Moods much restored, we pulled away from the graveyard and bumped along the road to the east and the Iranian border. Within a few miles, there was a handmade sign pointing right, to a dirt road leading down to the shore of Lake Van. The sign read, in Turkish, Ottoman Fortress.

My archeologist friend furrowed her brow. She and her colleagues had done an extensive cataloguing of Anatolia’s archeological sites and she was unaware of this castle.

So we took the bait.

Down and down we went, soon confronting a massive wall of fortifications through which an opening had been punched. Then an opening of another wall, of different dimensions and material, and then another. There was stone and rubble littering the ground. “This is not just Ottoman,” said the archeologist with a tremor of excitement. “A lot of people have been this way.”

The road ended at a lakeside village that consisted of four cube-like stone houses that had been constructed from spolia, that is, from the surrounding archeological debris: mismatched blocks of stone from the different fortifications, fragments of pediments, even what looked like a stone arm bent at the elbow, doubtless once part of some classical statuary.

Alongside this wonderful stone hamlet rose a very old mosque, looking quite dilapidated and neglected. “Now this might be Ottoman!” she said.

We peered through the latticework of a locked wooden door into the murky interior, speculating on whether the sanctuary was still in use. Suddenly, from behind us, came the sound of shouting.

We wheeled around to see an imam approaching. He was old and infirm and, of course, blind. I reflexively assumed he was expressing his outrage that an infidel – ie., me – was sullying the precincts of this holy place. But then both my companions burst out laughing.

As the driver chatted amiably with the imam, the archeologist explained: “He said: ‘Why are you looking at this dusty old ruin when the mulberries are ripe? Go up on the roof and get me some!’”

We clambered atop the old dome and from a retaining wall on a slope alongside the structure there grew a profusion of mulberry bushes. We set about harvesting them, feasting on them, their dark juice covering our hands and chins. We laughed a lot.

When we had descended and given the imam his share, we asked him if he had water for us to wash off the juice. He nodded toward the village.

Through the hanging beads in the doorway of the first house, we spied a group of perhaps five or six women, all clad in brilliantly colorful robes, sitting on the floor.

From a discreet distance, my companions asked if there was a well nearby.

Almost immediately, a slender young woman emerged through the beads shouldering an earthenware jug. She was dressed in green and orange robes, her face veiled. She motioned for us to stand to one side.

We watched her as she set off swaying along a pathway to the lake. There was a slight breeze whispering, the sunlight was wan and pleasant, and on a far-off island in the pale lake we could make out the tawny ruins of a medieval Armenian monastery.

The three of us smiled at each other, contented in the moment.

The girl returned with the water, motioned for us to squat so that she could pour it out directly from the jug.

We obeyed and she lowered the earthenware vessel from her shoulder and tipped it. As she did this, her veil slipped.

Now you know what I’m going to say next, right? Baudelaire, the metro… but there is something more here.

She was absolutely exquisite. Sixteen or seventeen, going on eternity. We’ve all seen The Afghan Girl, but this Kurdish girl almost defies description. Just her eyes… they seemed as dark and purple as the Seljuk stone. Only they flashed.

The water splashed on our hands and the three of us looked up at her, transfixed. When she had finished and had one hand free, she gave a hint of smile, modestly acknowledging the consternation she had caused, then readjusted the veil over her face and slipped back through the beaded curtain.

We were shell-shocked. Silent, still squatting, frozen in place.

It was the woman, of course, who first found her voice. The two men had been turned to stone.

“Why do I give lectures in Istanbul?!” the archeologist said heatedly. “Why?! We should all just move here!”

I could say nothing.

She turned to me.

“Why do you write books?!”

Roger Moore to the Rescue?

Someone once told me that Umberto Eco had said something to the effect: “If anyone in the audience asks you a question about the Knights Templar, you can immediately deduct 10 points from his I.Q.”

I wish I had never heard that line. It has poisoned more than one reading for me, when I’m going on about the Cathars or the Crusades – and then someone perfectly reasonable asks the inevitable Templar question. I silently curse Eco for saying something so mean and memorable.

Of course, he exorcised his inner Templar by writing Foucault’s Pendulum, an intellectual parlor-game of a novel in which three bored editors dredge up the effluvium of 600 years of esoteric conspiracy theory and postulate some grand Templar Plan of world domination that is swallowed whole by talentless, credulous writers. Eco’s playful, leviathan of a book – think Dan Brown with an education.

Now it just so happens that I, at last, am obliged to write about the Templars. I have successfully avoided the topic, aside from little excursions with them in the Crusader chapter of Sea of Faith. To be more specific, I have to write about the elimination of the Templars. This event is to Cathar-Mary Magdalene-Freemason-Templar conspiracy theorists what the Big Bang is to the universe.

I’m somewhat daunted; it’s akin to writing something new about Dealey Plaza and the grassy knoll. For those unfamiliar with the tale: on Friday, October 13^th, 1307, every Templar knight in France was arrested. They were subsequently tortured, many of them executed. The charges laid against them were the usual medieval suspects: sorcery, sodomy, heresy, etc. The order was disbanded, their vast wealth appropriated by the king.

Ahh, yes, but was every Templar ensnared? And why were they arrested? What were they hiding? After all, hadn’t they lived for a century on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? You see what I mean – to take that course is to court madness. Or end up as Nicolas Cage in National Treasure.

But the event itself is interesting. It is distinctly unmedieval, such a large and coordinated dragnet. To find another example of such finely tuned state terror one would have to time-travel to the Saint Bartholomew Day’s Massacre (August 24, 1572) or, using Godwin’s Law, to Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938).

And therein lies my salvation, I think. I shall talk not about the Templars but about the organization men who orchestrated their demise. The main guy is William of Nogaret, a steely political operative who makes Karl Rove and Lee Atwater look like Boy Scouts. And, better still, Nogaret was the king’s point man in dealing with the hero of my story, Bernard Délicieux.

The curse of the Templars has been lifted.

The Fill-in-the-Blank Monologues

Is anyone out there interested in a subject for a doctoral dissertation? I have one: “The Use of Rape as Local Color in Historical Novels.”

It occurred to me on my just completed road trip to and from Canada while listening to Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt. To establish the evil of the bad guys and the ferocity of the the day, in the first few pages we are given a) a disgusting rape in a London stable, then b) a gigantic gang-bang of nuns in the French town of Soissons. Having posited that bit of nastiness, as a sort of throat-clearing narrative device, the book then goes on to its true subject: longbow technology and the effect, graphically described again and again and again, of a steel-tipped arrow ripping through eyes, throats and various internal organs, followed by pole-axe blows to the brain.

All very medievally well and good, I suppose, but why the rape overture if the author is clearly interested more in gore and merrie olde England? He drops the lurid sex stuff for the remaining 95% of the book. So, could rape be to the historical novel what a subject sentence is to the middle-school paragraph?

Author Michael Baldwin’s treatment of my friends the Cathars, helpfully entitled The Rape of Oc, opens with a bravura fifty or so pages of torture, mutilation and rapine. This then is one horrific extreme – cinema’s equivalent would be Monica Bellucci’s infamous scene in Irreversible – but there are all sorts of other examples in medieval potboilers.

Let’s just take one: Ken Follett. That’s not a name normally associated with this type of unseemliness. Follett has written two books set in the Middle Ages, The Pillars of the Earth (which I have not read but will doubtless watch on cable, medieval junkie that I am) and World Without End. The latter I reviewed for the LA Times (it’s on my website), and in that review I demurely wrote that Follett has a “flair for non-consensual sex scenes [that] borders on the distressing.” I wish I had said more, for in fact Follett uses rape whenever the action flags a little. It’s like a recurring thunderstorm, or a twister touching down every eighty pages or so (the novel is over a thousand pages long). I suspect that he could not get away with this if it were not a well-established, almost expected device in novels set in medieval times.

You say the Middle Ages were like that. Well, perhaps, but there are fine modern medieval novels that do not resort to prurience and sexual violence. Not all authors are like the guys on the couch hitting the scene selection button on their dvd of Irreversible.

Barry Unsworth, ever reliable historical novelist, doesn’t do it. Neither did Hans Koning, whose slim and gracious A Walk With Love and Death (1961), remains one of the most memorable fictional evocations of the Middle Ages (The other, from 1946, which I mentioned in that same Follett review, is Zoe Oldenburg’s The World Is Not Enough). Koning, in fact, does a fairly splendid job at consensual coupling scenes, countering the notion that all medieval sex has to involve daggers, mailed fists and torn undergarments. You have to wonder whether all the rape writers, like my pizza-sharing friend from an earlier post on this blog (“Lost in Translation”), have even heard of courtly love.

So, here are some questions that must be addressed by the doctoral candidate:

Is this device more prevalent in the work of male writers?

On which page of the opening is it most likely to occur? (Statistical analysis required)

Is it an Anglo phenomenon, or does it crop up in the literature of other cultures?

And finally:

Why are so many of the predators priests?

Ahh… but here, you say, we are leaving the realm of historical fiction…

Bridge Work

In 1963, a supremely silly movie called It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World had a group of comically competitive treasure-hunters searching for a cache of $350,000 that they all knew lay buried under a “big W”. What was that “W”? We, in the audience, saw long before the characters that the letter was formed (totally inane spoiler alert) by four very tall, conveniently slanted, palm trees.

Giggles were meant to be induced by this in-your-face dramatic irony. The characters run around a town and repeatedly fail to see what we, the viewers, can see plainly.

Happens all the time.

As visitors from the website may know, I am currently working on a book of medieval history. The action takes place in and around the year 1300, in Carcassonne, France. Now, the primary duty of a writer, long before anything else, is to produce something readable. Duh. And for a writer of non-fiction for a general readership, it’s got to be somehow compelling, to keep the reader interested even as she or he is being informed.

You can’t just list the facts, memo style, and expect anyone to stay awake.

I recently went back to an early chapter of the draft manuscript and saw that I had done just that. It was awful. A succession of snoring paragraphs.

My humiliation was heightened by the fact that the material was interesting. What I needed to convey was that my hero, a fellow named Bernard Délicieux, had to contend with three types of people who would not have been around, say, 100 years earlier. He had, in other words, to deal with the changed circumstances of the year 1300.

These people were: i) obstreperous, literate, seditious, take-no-shit townspeople and traders ii) fanatical, ferociously intelligent inquisitors drawn from the Dominican and Franciscan orders of friars iii) unscrupulous, hyperliterate, anticlerical, litigious, Karl-Rovian operatives of the French king.

What I had done resembled the paragraph above (with slightly more formal language, of course). I’d dutifully taken each group in its turn, talked about the year of such-and-such being founded, given names of particular famous individuals with brief bio squibs, recited facts and factoids, quoted a few primary and secondary sources… the usual.

And it read like a shopping list. I am interested enough in the subject to write a book about it, but even I couldn’t stomach it.

I spent a few days staring at my fish tank, cooking a little, reading books for other chapters, looking at notes, talking to myself, drinking beer, going on very long bike rides.

The rides at least got me away from the apartment. I leave my building then cross a bridge spanning an expressway. A brief moment in a park, then over another bridge, adjacent to an noisy interstate bridge crossing an estuary. The trail continues along the east side of a bay. There are different stretches to which I have given my own private names – Hill of Death, Riverside Drive, Fallopian Straightaway, Voldemort’s Cottage, Milf Alley, etc. – but my favorite part of the ride is The Bridges of Hungover Fishermen. This is in Warren, Rhode Island – two broad, successive pedestrian bridges over the two mouths of a divided inlet. There is always a congregation of all types of people with their fishing poles (and some of them are definitely hungover) on these bridges, casually chatting as out in the bay about a zillion sailboats lie at anchor.

I usually stop there and take in the scene. Man, I like those bridges.

There’s movement, there’s life.

It feels like a narrative, I thought, even though it isn’t one.

Bing! The big W.

Back at the books, I reread about the great come-together event of the year 1300: the Jubilee held in Rome. People from all over Europe came to it. Hundreds of thousands.

And if they came from the north, as my French friends of Bernard had to have done, on arriving in Rome they would have crossed… a bridge.

The Ponte St. Angelo.

Several chroniclers mention it -- the crowds and the very unmedieval traffic cops making everyone coming and going keep to the correct side of the bridge.

Dante, for god’s sake, satirizes it in the Inferno, having pimps and whores imitate the pilgrims to Rome by keeping up pedestrian discipline on a bridge… in Hell.

Jubilee, Dante, everyone there, the year 1300, traders, friars, king’s men, movement, life, a narrative that is not a narrative…

I tore up the chapter and made everyone cross that bridge. The same serial introductions are made, but they are now placed in a context, a historical true-to-life context where there are sights and smells and sounds. With the feeling of a narrative.

And I have Dante to back me up.

You don’t get that in a memo.

(Now, let's just hope it works.)

The World Moves on a Woman's Ship

It is a commonplace of dissing the Middle Ages to state that we moderns would be more at home with a citizen of ancient Rome than with a European of the twelfth or thirteenth century. We’d have more to talk about, we’d be more alike. We could relate. In a landmark work of scholarship, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his Autumn of the Middle Ages (a 1924 book called The Waning of the Middle Ages on its American publication in 1949) argued that medieval man was, indeed, different from us, given at any moment to unbidden accesses of tears, sudden cruelties, childlike enthusiasms and the like. And God wasn’t his co-pilot; He was alongside before and after the journey, too. Always.

That may be true. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I know it to be true.

Why? Because I have actually seen the Middle Ages.

This requires explanation, no?

I’m not talking here about seeing people living in pre-industrial conditions (which I have seen in subSaharan Africa) or enjoying out-of-time sacred hospitality to the stranger who must be honored (accorded to me by farmers on the border of Turkey and Iran), I’m talking about glimpsing the Middle Ages… the European Middle Ages. Okay, perhaps the Reformation era, or the Early Modern, but let’s not quibble.

So let us tell this correctly: For one of my summer trips back from my freelance home in France to my childhood home in Canada, I found out about a Polish ocean liner, the Stefan Batory, that went from Gdynia to London to Rotterdam to Montreal. This was shortly before the walls of Cold War came down. I boarded at Tilbury Docks in London.

The 250 or so passengers were a diverse lot. About half were Poles emigrating to North America. Then there was a large contingent of aimless curiosity-seekers like myself. Just as large was the group of people who dared not speak its name: the fear-of-flying crew. It took only a few conversations to suss this out: “When we dock in Montreal, we’ll jump right on the Amtrak to New York, then take the train the next day to LA. Best way to travel.” Or: “From Montreal we take the train to Windsor, get a cab across to Detroit, then a Greyhound to Cincinnati.” Other passengers were unclassifiable, like my berth mate, Albert, an Englishman somewhere between 55 and 90 years old. In the morning he looked the latter, but by night as he was rejuvenated, pommaded to the max, cutting the rug with any available lady.

But this isn’t about middle age, it’s about the Middle Ages.

The most striking contingent of passengers were about 80 or so Amish women. Ten matronly chaperones and the rest very young women from about 16 to 20 years of age. They wore the bonnets and the long dresses. They traveled in packs. They were inscrutable. Passing a score of so of them on the deck, I said lamely, “I hope we don’t hit an iceberg,” and then they looked at each other, paused, then burst into delighted applause.

Try as I might I couldn’t connect. I tried to detach the prettiest one from the pack (I know, I know… ), but no luck, no way. At last I learned from a chaperone, in stilted English, that they were from Pennsylvania and had just toured the ancestral places of their faith, as a sort of Anabaptist Grand Tour before settling down for good. It was pretty obvious… they were the future of their community. To put it more harshly and more medievally, the ovaries.

That anachronistic thought crossed my mind, but I didn’t get the impression of having bumped into anything that unusual, or having time-travelled. The Amish girls faded into the background as other events occurred: whales putting on a show mid-Atlantic; smelling the pines of Newfoundland before seeing land on the horizon; a Polish tall ship (on its return from a regatta at Quebec City) emerging majestically from the fog in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as the Batory’s Polish crew and passengers went berserk; and upstream from Rivière du Loup on the St. Lawrence, the south shore lighting up in fireworks and music to salute the homecoming of a tearful young Québécoise widow on board (her mother, her traveling companion, had secretly alerted us all to the surprise in store for her daughter).

At last we got to Montreal. As tugboats fussed and lines were played out, I saw them on the dock, just beyond the customs shed. The Amish men.

Let’s stop here for a second. I have seen reunions. As a boy, it was an early summer ritual to go to Montreal’s Dorval (now Pierre Trudeau) Airport to welcome visiting aunties and uncles off the plane from Shannon. These reunions were always warm, witty and talkative to the point of over-Irishness. But I remember seeing crowds of other people greeting their relatives (this was when airports were human) arriving on planes from Lisbon, Rome, Athens and Tel Aviv: the drama, the big-fat-Greek-wedding, the mezzogiorno, the is-that-you-Esther-or-am-I-dead? theatrics and shouting and squealing and tears. I was embarrassed by it all, but a little bit jealous, too.

But at least it was something I understood, that I could identify, the gestures, the hugging…

The Amish men barrelled straight out of time. They were tearing the beards. Literally tearing at them, removing clumps of hair with two hands. Their horses reared. Some of the men were stomping the ground. Not hillbilly stomping, but jumping up in the air and landing with a two-footed stomp, again and again and again and again. I think one may have been eating his hat.

The girls lined the rails. They were crying. No, they were weeping. For joy. Unadulterated, unmediated, unmodern. Not only that, there was a weird trilling sound emanating from them. Not like the ululations of Arab women, but more like a panicked group of starlings. It was as unmissable as the antics of their menfolk were compelling.

The curiosity-seekers, the fear-of-flying crowd, the Polish immigrants, we all looked at each other. We were, at last, all in the same boat: nobody had ever seen anything like it. Because we had, up until that moment, all lived in the twentieth century.

And now, for a brief, far too brief, quarter-hour, we were living in Huizinga country.

I try to remember that moment when writing about the Middle Ages.

Jumping Le Shark

One of life’s small pleasures can be had by spending time in a good French-language bookstore. Banished are the scented candles, the tchotchkes, the tables groaning with self-help manuals, the blurb-spattered covers, the weird gothic-romance lettering, the garish, the loud, the overeager.

In their place, a certain quiet sobriety. Francophone booksellers often stock their shelves by collections. Not very user-friendly, but pleasing to the eye. Thus there are books identical in format, often in subdued colors and graphically austere, grouped together on floor-to-ceiling shelving, and the visitor passes chromatically from Flon to Flammarion, Actes Sud to Balland, 10/18 to Hachette.

One of the most familiar sights is Gallimard’s Folio collection (If you ever took a French lit course in college, you have at least one of these). Simple white paperbacks, with a reproduced artwork on the front, and a short paragraph excerpt from the book on the back, the Folio collection covers the last two hundred years of fiction, in a reassuring, no-nonsense, canonical way. There is no Oprah book club endorsement, no log-rolling blurb by a friend of the author, no breathless suggestion about perfect beach reading or ideal Christmas gifts. Just the text.

Recently I was drawn to the Folio wall in Ottawa’s excellent Librairie du Soleil. A fine expanse of white, with hundreds of titles and authors running from bottom to top (French publishing convention holds, illogically, that the words on a book spine have to be read from the bottom up). In the wall of white, a few books were turned, cover out, to attract attention.

One such was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; in French, Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent.

And then one of life’s small pleasures just got smaller.

The cover showed the name and title above a Romantic painting. But the art had been obliterated half-way down by a garish yellow rectangle – not a paper banner wrapped around the book, but printed directly over the illustration. And what did it say?

Le roman préféré de Bella et d’Edward.

That is: “Bella’s and Edward’s favorite novel."

Twilight, indeed.

Repeat. After. Who?

Let’s say you’re writing a story of the seventeenth century, in which, say, Lord Horace Throgbottom loses his right pinkie finger in a Maltese bordello.

If you’re a fiction writer, you might first describe the incident then come back to it later: on your second go round you describe milord’s surprise (or delight), then later the thoughts going through the lovely Lucinda’s mind as she sinks her pearly whites into the soft knuckle, then, even later, the opinion of the guttering candle to witness the scene. Or any other variant of the event, repeated and reinforced.

If you’re a writer in academe, you first question the authenticity of the anecdote, then, having established its plausibility – though not its actual occurrence – through exhaustive cross-checking of the archival material, you might trace instances of digital severance back to… say, the Assyrians, or whoever supplied the first recorded example, according to your graduate students’ research, of such a punishment (or reward), then go on to question the cultural matrix in which Lucinda grew up, its relation to the power structure obtaining in the early modern sex trade, and then perhaps the possible subtextual meaning of this proto-castration in light of Maltese powerlessness in the face of English imperialism. And, for heaven’s and tenure’s sake, what about that old Sardinian gypsy folk song, recovered in the 1920s, with its use of the archaic word for cuticle?

Which is all very fine. Both approaches, that is.

If, however, you are a writer of non-fiction for a general educated audience, you are allowed to tell the story once. You can place it wherever you want and frame it however you want – how this mutilation foiled Lord Horace’s and his twin brother’s shared career as confidence men, for example – but the important thing to retain here is purely formal. You can tell it only once.

The academic can digress, the fiction writer can repeat, but the non-fiction writer can do neither. Writing non-fiction is somewhat like being in a decaying relationship, where one partner says to another, “But you’ve told me that already!” (This, or a variant of this, has been the most frequent editor’s irruption on any book-length manuscript I have handed in). There is impatience with repetition in non-fiction. More accurately, abhorrence.

Why?

Because the compact between reader and writer is contracted over a point of view. If the reader has been told something in a certain narrative way, he or she does not want it to be retold in a different way. What the reader wants is security, not the suspicion that the tale he or she is investing so much time in reading is something that the writer has doubts about. It is non-fiction. Now, the writer may not have doubts about the tale being told (which, I believe, is the sign of a bad writer, and bad thinker), but in no case must the creator of the narrative back out of the project. Yes, there is Creative Non-Fiction, Fiction Posing as Non-Fiction (I’m smiling at you, James Frey), Non-Fiction Posing as Fiction, but what I’m talking about here is the meat-and-potatoes of historical non-fiction narratives for trade publishing.

The challenge, then, for this kind of writer, is to make the story memorable, so that the reader, who might spend weeks intermittently reading the book, recalls Throgbottom’s forlorn finger when the volume is picked up again. By all means, refer or allude to the story (“Like the famous pinkie spat into a Valletta brazier, the Ottoman sultan had lost control, etc. etc.”), but never repeat it. Make sure on your first, and only chance, that you do not blow it. Overdramatization – “like an artery torn from the Sacred Heart of Jesus” – and understatement – “still, he was left with nine others” – are both traps to be avoided, but that is the joy and torment of getting it right.

Fiction is altogether different. As a genre, it is even more concerned with point of view, but I would say that it also addresses the sub- or irrational parts of the mind – the soul, to borrow an archaic cuticle. Non-fiction is basically Apollonian, with a few jazzy sensory things thrown in to captivate. Its success, or failure, resides in the skill and the honesty and the integrity of the writer. But fiction aims to penetrate, or envelop; at its best, it leads us to believe that it is reproducing the way we apprehend, with all the sloppiness and repetitiveness that that implies. I think, in fact, that no good fiction can be produced without the judicious use of redundacy – somewhat like music. I think the hardest thing for a novelist and short-story writer (we’re talking about good ones, of course) is to figure out when and where to repeat, and how. But they have to.

With non-fiction, you are spared that choice. Or should I say that option? Or that decision?

Or something else?