Cabbage, Goat or Wolf?

Or how to balance fact and fiction in a historical novel

Forget Dante’s circles, when I get to hell I know that it will be arranged like the aisles of a supermarket. There the damned will be forced to seek the ineffable in rows of garish packages, under harsh strip lighting, to the jangle of bad pop and store announcements.

I’m writing from France where the first item on the holiday agenda was a trip to the supermarket to stock the rented kitchen. I girded myself for the plunge into Carrefour and halted inside the first set of glass doors, facing a large bookcase bearing the message that books are for sharing so take one and leave one . . . Yes please!

Abandoning my trolley I scanned the titles, lots of Belva Plain and Virginia Andrews, and Gone with the Wind (in translation), some children’s books and Un Couple de Tragedie: Le Duc et La Duchesse d’Alencon by Marguerite Bourcet.

I had never heard of the book, its protagonists or author but was drawn to it by its cover. Neatly protected by baking parchment this was of the old style, thick, creamy, the title printed in red and black, no eye-catching illustration, author photo or insincere puffs. The pages had been cut but otherwise the book, published in 1951, was pristine.

 The Sophie-Charlotte, Duchesse d’Alencon was the sister of the Empress Elisabeth (Sissi) of Austria, and the Duc a scion of the troubled French monarchy. Sophie-Charlotte died in a fire at a charity bazaar, telling those who tried to save her to help others first. Captivated by this self-sacrifice, Bourcet set about tracing the arc of a life that led to such an end. She became so enamoured of her subjects and their love story that she almost forgot the political upheavals of the era. Writing in the late 1930s, however, she felt similar cold winds of change around her and determined to paint an honest portrait of these people. How to do this was the problem, should it be history, hagiography, biography or a novel?

For a long time I pondered the intractable problem of the cabbage, the goat or the wolf until, despairing of a solution, I threw together in a somewhat adventurous hotch-potch, the wolf, the cabbage and the goat . . .        [My translation]

Well, one woman’s hotch-potch is another woman’s experiment. Tucking the tragic couple into my pocket, I whirled my trolley through the infernal aisles, plucking random items from the shelves as I went.

The previous weekend I had attended a panel discussion on the historical novel at the International Dublin Writers’ Festival. Bourcet’s words chimed with those of the panellists, Maybelle Wallis, Catherine Kullman, Anne Frehill, Derville Murphy, Maria McDonald and CS Lakin, whose chosen eras range from Ireland in times of famine and revolution, to Regency England and the American frontier. Some revel in the manners and mores of another time, others in drawing out hidden or neglected aspects of that period. They all do meticulous research, occasionally working from the life of a real person, at other times inventing the characters de novo.

 Over the past year or so I have been grappling with the cabbage, goat and wolf conundrum as I debate how to present a historical character who fascinates me. Do I put him in modern dress or keep him in his place? If the latter, what’s my angle? This last question seems to me the key one. As with any novel, a successful historical one must find a line into the narrative which compels the reader. The difference in the historical version is, on the one hand, doing good research, while on the other, not wearing that research on your sleeve.

From Robert Graves to Robert Harris, and more recently Madeline Miller, the Romans have provided rich material for novelists. Perhaps the further back in time one goes the more liberty there is to invent and at the same time shed light on contemporary life. As we come closer to our own time the licence may be curtailed.

Notwithstanding, in his recent novel, Act of Oblivion, about the hunt for the last of the regicides who signed the death warrant for Charles I, Harris invents a pursuer, Naylor, saying that there must have been someone like him. Naylor of course also adds dramatic tension to the narrative. Likewise, for dramatic purposes, Joseph O’Connor in My Father’s House changes the name of the Nazi commander in occupied Rome, who is pursuing the real life priest, Hugh O’Flaherty. This gives him more creative freedom. Hilary Mantel, in her account of prominent actors in the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, uses the actual words of her protagonists, drawn from speeches and letters, in all but their intimate scenes.

Inventing, embellishing, dramatizing, how far is too far to go in reimagining the past? There are no hard and fast rules but according to the novelists who spoke at the Writers’ Festival it is essential to render that world accurately, not least to head off the readers who delight in pointing out inaccuracies. The characters can be wholly or partially invented as long as they remain true to their station. Truth and fact are different things. Human nature does not change over time. We are born, we love, we suffer, we die. Within the genre of historical fiction are sub-genres of thriller, psychological novel, romance, the what-if of alternative history, and those novels that redress an imbalance in the conventional narrative, giving voice to the marginalised and the colonised.  

Bourcet, who was born in France in 1899, died in 1938, a year before her best-selling novel Un Couple de Tragédie was published. She was already a well-established writer, having won the prestigious Prix d’Académie in 1931. The life of the Duchess, raised in an unconventional household in Bavaria, briefly engaged to her cousin King Ludwig II (he of the castle-building mania and obsession with Wagner), forced to live with her husband in chilly exile in Scotland, prey to depression and extreme religious scruples is fascinating. As she recounts this biography Bourcet discusses how to cast her characters according to the different phases of their lives and experience.

How is the hero of a novel made? To tell the truth, and we know it all too well, French novelists are in the habit of presenting their characters fully formed, ripe for tragedy. It is not unusual for English novelists – particularly those of the last century – in lifting their Jane Eyres and David Copperfields from the cradle, to enumerate all the strata laid down, year on year, in their souls, and which shape their personalities when the moment of crisis occurs in the story.  [My translation]

So she proceeds through a beguiling mix of personal commentary, historical research, interviews and biographical sensitivity. When her couple’s life is good she yields to the purple prose of romance but brings herself up short, with regret, to explain the intrusion of complex political reversals on their happiness. The beauty of Bourcet’s book is that, in teasing out the reasons for her interest in her characters, she also discloses much of herself. She is an amiable, erudite and astute companion. To my surprise I have not yet tracked down an English translation of the book (which might be a prompt for me to do it). 

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History or fiction or both together, what do you prefer? Is historical fiction a hotch-potch or a happy invention that brings other times, places and people to life?

Apologies for the lack of images in this post - the wifi connection is very slow here!