The freedom of the past
Alan Judd
The late Patrick O'Brian, author of the Aubrey/Maturin novels set in the Royal Navy
during the Napoleonic wars, became distinctly peppery if anyone suggested he was a historical novelist, It took teaspoons of Jane Austen comparisons to restore him to sweet reasonableness. Presumably, his aversion was due to his sense that some think of historical novels as a lowly subdivision of literature, excluded from the heights and depths of 'pure' imaginative fiction because inspired by characters and stories that existed.
This is based on the misconception that an author's imaginative recreation of the past differs from his recreation of the present or of a fantasy world. All imagined worlds take cues from the author's experience or reading (same thing). Temporal cues do not differ from any other kind because we have to imagine the past in the same way that we have to imagine anything else that is not before our eyes. Indeed, temporal cues may be liberating: O'Brian felt he had nothing to say to the contemporary world, whereas his imagined journeys through the past enabled him to get in all he wanted to say about human nature and experience. Similarly, Rose Tremain, speaking of her new novel, The Colour, says she finds the past imaginatively liberating because it frees her from the censorship of the present. She can write about an ethnic minority character in New Zealand less inhibitedly than if she wrote about one in contemporary Britain.
We do not, after all, regard Shakespeare's historical plays as somehow less created or important than his others, nor do we judge War and Peace a lesser work because of its historical settings and characters. Works of literature take their reality not from their relation, or lack of it, to actual historical events — any more than to geographical settings — but from the internal coherence and conviction of their imagined worlds.
There are, however, artistic and moral difficulties in setting fiction in history, and the more recent the past evoked, the greater the difficulty. Firstly, there's the difficulty evident in the recent televised reinvention of the lives of Burgess, Maclean and co. in Cambridge Spies, in which — to take just one example — the
reversal of the moral polarities of Philby's personality has attracted criticism. This is because that past is recent enough to appear to matter. A similar dramatisation of earlier Cambridge spies — Christopher Marlowe and his contemporaries — would probably get away with it because of our relative indifference to and ignorance of the issues. (There would, though, be the artistic problem of language: is it 'Prithee, Master Shakespeare' or 'Hi. Will'?)
Then there's the problem of rendering major historical figures without bathos: 'Whenever Nelson's amputated arm ached, he knew foul weather was coming. It ached now. He ordered the fleet to turn about and head for home. Would Emma be in?' One way round this is to present the action through the eyes of minor or invented characters, with the major characters as looming presences — the Rosencrantz and Guildenstem technique. I've partly done this in my novel about the last days of Kaiser Wilhelm II. which were spent in Holland under Nazi occupation. Much of the action is portrayed through the eyes of the Kaiser's young SS guard commander, though not all: we also go inside the Kaiser's head. I tried to meet this artistic challenge by making him Lear-like, in a minor key. But we don't go inside the head of his principal visitor, Himmler.
To do so would invoke a moral problem. Although I've played fast and loose with history (merging the events of 1940 and 1941, substituting Himmler for Goering — all confessed in an epilogue), the anti-Semitism that is a central theme of the book is a more delicate issue. The Kaiser's anti-Semitism — strident, inconsistent, conventional — is one thing, but Himmler's is in an altogether different league. as I have the Kaiser realise. The problem is that you could not successfully render the inwardness of Himmler without giving his evil the semblance of reasonableness, at least to himself. It's not true that to understand all is to forgive all, but a convincing artistic evocation always nudges its subject in the direction of acceptability. That's what art does: in the act of rendering, it seduces and persuades. Plato was right to be wary of the artist.
This applies in spades to the novel I might — or might not — do next. It would be the Bunker — Hitler's — in the ten days between his 56th birthday and his suicide. The first question is, should it be done at all? Might the fact of focussing on these awful, incomplete, evil people glamorise them, making them interesting in a way they weren't, and don't deserve? Would readers endure immersion in that cauldron of evil and madness, for which Macbeth is the only comparison? (And what might prolonged immersion do to the author?)
Yet the situation is so compelling. There's Hitler, a stooping, shuffling wreck with appalling halitosis, alternating between lethargy and rage, unable to sleep, reduced to trembling incoherence by the RAF's nightly bombing. There's Magda Goebbels — Lady Macbeth? — refusing offers of escape for herself and her six children, playing cards with the doctor she has asked to murder all her little ones. There's party-loving. 33-year-old Eva Braun, in the bunker against Hitler's orders, perhaps to continue her affair (for which there's some slight evidence) with her sister's SS husband. He attempts to desert, wants Eva to go with him, is caught, then shot, on Hitler's orders. An hour and a half later Hitler suddenly marries Eva. A day and a half later they're both dead. And as soon as the vegetarian, antihunting, anti-smoking tyrant puts a bullet through his brain, everyone in the bunker sits back and lights up. They couldn't do that until he'd gone. It's a wonderful novelistic touch.
But you need a moral focus. One of the junior staff, perhaps — they were all loyal but they weren't all monsters — or Eva's wronged sister, who was never there but could be for the novel. And you need some kind of resolution.
You need, in fact, William Shakespeare. That's the other problem.
Alan Judd's novel, The Kaiser's Last Kiss, is reviewed on the previous page.
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