Kate Grenville
The Novelist as Barbarian
Many creative writers have used historical material in their work. Kate Grenville reflects on her own use of such material and on issues which this has raised. How important is historical accuracy to the creative process?
When Jill Roe said of history
"Getting it right means you can’t make it up", it was a reminder to
novelists like me that, although we might use history, we also have to respect
it. It’s all very well to play fast and loose with historical truths, but there
comes a point when you have to get it right, or try to at least.
As a novelist, my relationship
to history has always been pretty much the same relationship the Goths had to
Rome. ( Wait - was it Rome? Was it Goths?) History for a greedy novelist like
me is just one more place to pillage.
What we’re after, of course,
is stories, and we know that history is bulging with beauties. Having found
them, we then proceed to fiddle with them to make them the way we want them
to be, rather than the way they really were. We get it wrong, willfully and
knowingly.
But perhaps you could say
that the very flagrency of our "getting it wrong" points to the fact
that all stories even the history "story" are made. They have
an agenda, even if it’s an unconscious one. Perhaps there are many ways to get
it right.
The interesting parts of history
are probably always what’s not there. My own special area of interest about
what’s not in history is the women. As you would all know, by and large they’re
sadly absent from the historical record.
However, I’m lucky to be
the recipientcustodian, even, if that doesn’t sound too grandioseof a rich
oral history handed down from my mother, who got it from her mother and so on
back down the line. She’s told me family stories from every generation since
our family first came to Australiain the form of our wicked convict ancestor
Solomon Wiseman, in 1806. Sol is supposed to have murdered his wife, and turned
his daughterpregnant to the riding-masterout of the house to starve. (But
perhaps, the novelist in me thinks, she didn’t starve , but went on to have,
well, a story…) There was "Uncle Willie with the red hair" who was
"killed [by falling] off a horse when he was eighteen and broke his mother’s heart."
There was her own mother, in love with a Catholic boya love as unthinkable
as between a Montagu and a Capulet and was forced to marry a good Protestant
boy. You should see the look on her face in the wedding photos.
This oral history, handed
down in a series of formalised anecdotes from mother to daughter, leaving rich
areas for speculation in between is, I suspect, one of the things that’s made
me a novelist.
It was stories about the
Sydney eccentric Bea Miles that led me to write Lilian’s Story. Every Sydney
cabbie, even ones who couldn’t have been born when she was in her heyday,
have their Bea Miles story. Each one swears it was his taxi that she ripped
the door off, that it was he who made her take a bath in the Archibald Fountain.
They all own her history, they’ve made it by a sort of historical sleight-of-hand
their own. All I had to do, as a novelist, was to take some of those stories
and extrapolate from them, turning them to my own purposes. Those purposes probably
didn’t have too much to do with the 'real' Bea Miles. What I found
interesting in her story was not so much the real woman herself, but more the
idea that, in a time when women were supposed to be the passive objects in the
stories of men, she wrote her own story on the blank pages of her city.
Writing Lilian’s Story gave
me a taste for re-writing history for my own purposes. With Joan Makes History
I went the whole hog. It was supposed to be a parodic history of Australiaour history re-made in the image of the women rather than the men. I was indignant
with history, on behalf of all the women it belittled or by-passed. I thought
I agreed with Ford that history was bunk.
I came to mock history,
but stayed to pray. My epiphany albeit a humbling one, was reading
Manning Clark. Here was a historian not hiding behind a mask of "objectivity"
but being shamelessly personal. If I thought, in my ignorance, that I was going
to put the "story" back into "history" I had to recognise
that he had already done it, with a breadth of vision and depth of knowledge
no novelist could match.
Dark Places could function
as an example of history as smokescreen. This is a book about a man who violates
his daughtera subject almost too awful to look at straight-on. Setting the
story in the early decades of the twentieth century gave the writerand also the readerenough distance on the story to make it bearable, and
to let the larger theme be heard.
That book is about history
in another way too. The book is told in the voice of the violating father, and
what we hear his voice doing is willfully misreading the facts of the world
around him. He distorts everything he sees and hears so that he thinks he’s
justified in doing what he does. In a way the book is not so much about an individual
monster as about the idea of subjectivity of the dangerously seductive power
of distorted truth.
The Idea of Perfection is
about a little country town split down the middle on what you should do with
history. On one side are those who want to keep the crummy but picturesque old
Bent Bridge, and the tatty old bush quilts that everyone’s granny used to make.
On the other side are the ones who want to whack in a nice tidy concrete bridge
( no rot, no mess, see you right for years) and take the smelly old quilts to
the tip. In those circles there’s a kind of shame about history: its messiness,
its jumble of good and evil, nobility and pettinessin a word its human-ness.
They’re rightit is tricky, finding a way to live with history, to accommodate
its reality with the image we like to have of ourselves.
There’s a love story going
in the book between two people who, like the bridge and the old quilts, are
far from perfect middle-aged people with the usual amount of baggage they‘d
rather not have. ( For a while I thought the book might be called "Frumps
in Love" but my publisher talked me out of it. ) They’re burdened with
their own personal histories perhaps that’s why they both find their way to
defending the history they find in Karakarook, NSW, population 1734.
The frumps come to see that
the idea of perfection is a dangerous one. You’re better off just being human.
It’s the very fallibility of these twoall their historythat brings them
together. As Leonardo said about bridges, and which is also true of human relationships:
"An arch is two weaknesses that together make a strength".
The the bank manager’s wife
is taking the other tack. She was born pretty and has always been prettyuntil
now. Now she’s forty ( only just forty, she tells herself), and her history
is starting to show on her face, the way it does. But she’s not going to let
it. By sheer force of will she’s detemined to stop the slightest suspicion of
wrinkles ever appearing on her perfect face. She goes to grotesque lengths,
deciding, for example, to cut down on wrinkles by limiting her smiles. Two a
day seems perfectly adequate.
Well, Felicity Porcelline
can try, Canute-like, to hold back the tide of history on her face, but things
squashed down too hard tend finally to erupt in a nasty way. Poor old Felicity
comes to a sticky end.
Not long ago it was a shameful
thing to have a convict in your family tree, but things are different nowour history has moved so far that there’s now a kind of "convict-chic". I’m not
sure if this is any better than the urge to hide the "taint" in our
family trees.
I don’t know if there is
a story somewhere in Sol Wiseman, but my writing fingers are getting itchy to
try it out. I’ve always worked in a certain amount of chaoswriting bits and
pieces and putting them together in an exploratory way until a novel finally
emerges. But inside every slob is an obsessive waiting to get out. The Sol Wiseman
story may be the one where, finally, I get to live out what I think of as the
Card Index Fantasy. I’ll get myself organised. I’ll be orderly and systematic.
I’ll find out everything there is to know about Solomon Wiseman. I’ll write
it all on numbered index cards. Maybe I’ll even colour-code them.
In fact, of course, I suspect
I’ll do my usual smash-and-grab raid on history. I’ll research only until I
find something juicy, and then I’ll run off with it and turn it into something
else.
My justification for doing
this has always been that, in distorting the details of "real" history,
I was serving a larger goodgiving flesh and form to an idea. When I wrote
Lilian’s Story it seemed perfectly all right to invent for my character whatever
history would best dramatise my idea about women and their stories. So I invented
a monstrous father, and then went on to write his book as well as the book of
his daughter. From the tiny germ of truth sprang an entire family tree of fictions.
These fictions seemed to carry ideas that needed airing, seemed justifiable
because they made readers consider ideas they might not otherwise want to deal
with. One truth was distorted, but another was revealed.
Now I’m not so sure if this
is really justifiable. The trouble is that germ of truth at the root of the
fictional treedoes the novelist really have the right to take that and graft
fabrication onto it, so that the border between the invented and the real becomes
blurred?
Perhaps we should stick
to pure invention except that I suspect there’s no such thing. It’s real life,
and real history, that provides all the best ideas. Anything we can invent will
only be the palest imitation of the richness of reality.
I think all we as story-tellers
can do is to pay tribute to history and acknowledge it as the first great story.
And when we start to get too big for our boots we can remind ourselves that
history, and the recounting of history, will go on after our novels are forgotten.
In closing, I’d like to
thank you for the opportunity to be here today. It’s been fascinating to hear
historians talk about what they do. I’m full of awe and admiration. Thank you
all.
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