Very nice blog post by Michael K. Reynolds on the ways that
one can interface fiction and history. He offers three possibilities – The Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Strategy (“if your lead character is Winston Churchill in the
early 1940’s, you are going to have a difficult time with it not being
swallowed up by World War II themes. However; if you shift your lead character to a young man from India who happened
to immigrate to England at the onset of the war, then this can take on a much
different path”), The Monet Approach (“the idea that blurred detailing can
actually provide a powerful and succinct image”), and The Character Pigeon (“use
a minor character (or characters) to carry the weight of the prevalent, but
non-centric theme. That way you’re not ignoring it, but you’re freeing your
lead characters to swim in the main waters of your story”).
It started me thinking about some of the ways I’ve dealt
with history in my own work. In my most recent, Nick and Jake, the era – and the
specific year, 1953 – are central to the story. Bringing Nick Carraway and Jake
Barnes into 1953 was important in that it gave a new perspective on the seminal
characters of a key period in American literature, but it was also important in
that it gave a new perspective on that year.
But for all that history was important, we still had to play
fast and loose with a few odd details. The overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in
Iran, which was the first CIA exercise in overthrowing the government of
another country, changed the history of
the Middle East irrevocably, and not the way the CIA expected it to.
We wrote Nick and Jake partly in response to the Bush
administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy, resulted in America having and then
losing the sympathy and support of international opinion. We were struck by how
much this mirrored the 1950s, when America went from being the country that had
saved the world from the Nazis, to being The Ugly American. The thing that made
the Iran coup so devastatingly successful was that no one believed the
Americans would ever do such a thing. So it was a perfect metaphor for us.
But it had happened in the fall of 1953, and the action of
Nick and Jake is in the spring of 1953. But it was too good for our plot to
leave out…so we moved it up a few months.
Our ingénue moves to
New York from the Midwest and undergoes some significant changes. Where would
she stay in the big city, a young, innocent girl? Why, the Martha Washington
Hotel for Women. And nothing says Martha Washington Hotel for women in the 50s
like Valley of the Dolls. Only trouble is, no one really remembers, or cares
about, the characters in Valley of the Dolls any more. Not that that would have
bothered us so much, except that we didn’t remember or care about the
characters either. Jacqueline Susann, the novel’s author, interested us as a
colorful character and a symbol of a certain literary/political zeitgeist. Only
trouble there was, unlike her characters, Jackie Susann was over fifty,
married, and living a totally different life from that of her characters. This
might have bothered us more than it did, if we hadn’t discovered it only after
we had begun writing her into the book. By the time we knew that she wasn’t
really one of her characters, we liked her too much to let her go. So we shaved
thirty years off her age – historically inaccurate, but that’s really the time
and place she’s associated with.
Here’s a character we pulled from history out of necessity.
When we went to do the audio dramatization of Nick and Jake, we were fortunate
enough to have Valerie Plame Wilson offer to play a role, but there was no role
for her. Who was important in the politics and cultural politics of 1953? Clare
Boothe Luce! She was perfect for the story, and perfect for Valerie – and of
course, since Valerie was playing her, we twisted history a little and made her
an undercover CIA agent. And who’s to say she wasn’t?
More on history, and other historical novels, next time.
