J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Ian Mortimer

Authentic Headless Women Revisited, Now With Extra Tortured Cats

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The middle of August, so lots going on, almost none of it seriously work-related – lawns to mow, places to visit, etc. As an ex-teacher of many years’ drudgery service, I still have the mindset that August is pretty sacrosanct, even though that imperative doesn’t really work for writers. Even so, I suspect that many readers of this blog will already be ensconced on beaches or at poolsides, and my ramblings about naval history or the seventeenth century are, quite rightly, unlikely to be high on their list of priorities. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that this week, I’m reblogging a post from the very early days of this blog, albeit one that explains my throwaway remark in last week’s post about ‘headless women’ on book covers. Now, given that we seem to live in an age when many people believe that references to ‘cats’ eyes’ being removed mean – wait for it – that real cats are being tortured, with the result that one council has decided to rename them ‘road studs’ rather than telling the poor little snowflakes in question to grow up and get over it, I suppose it’s incumbent on me to clarify that I didn’t mean that book covers show graphic images of real decapitated women. 

(Oh God, that I’ve lived to have to type that sentence…)

So let’s return to those innocent days in September 2012…

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I spent last weekend at the Historical Novel Society conference in London. This was a marvellous, invigorating occasion, with lots of great networking; it was particularly good to meet my fellow panellists in the ‘Ships Ahoy’ forum on nautical fiction, namely Linda Collison, Helen Hollick, Margaret Muir and Rick Spilman. The fact that the majority of speakers – and attendees – were women speaks volumes for the extent to which the genre has been transformed in recent years. Our five mini-talks covered a variety of issues; mine was on the vexed question of accuracy (see below) and about the need to show respect in one’s writing for the sea and those who sailed on it, a theme that others echoed. We received some stimulating questions, notably of the ‘where do I find information about…’ variety, and also had plenty of opportunity to bounce ideas around among ourselves. In a way, though, we thought that nautical historical fiction was a little bit on the margins of the conference; but then, pretty much everybody who isn’t writing about the Romans or the Tudors was saying pretty much exactly the same thing.

I don’t propose to go through who said what in each session. Instead, I thought I’d highlight just one or two of the main themes that emerged, and perhaps the biggest of them was the perennial debate about accuracy and authenticity in writing historical fiction. In a nutshell – to what extent should a historical novelist aim for accuracy? Is it possible not to be entirely accurate but to remain ‘authentic’ to a period? Can accuracy and authenticity actually be counter-productive if taken too far, and besides, how do we define them? After all, Wolf Hall has been praised to the heights for its ‘authenticity’ – but a generation is now growing up that thinks Thomas Cromwell was a nice guy. I liked Ian Mortimer’s concept called ‘Celia Brayfield’s Barbed Wire’: she was reviewing a Catherine Cookson book in which the principal characters had to negotiate a barbed wire fence in 1896, couldn’t believe it was in use at the time, and by the time she’d checked and found that it was, the spell had been broken. As Ian says, ‘in historical fiction, accuracy and authenticity are not necessarily desirable’. Several of the speakers also adopted this line, which agrees with my own thinking, namely that altering facts to fit a narrative is fine; after all, in Gentleman Captain I moved the date of Easter 1662  and wasn’t subsequently inundated by protest letters from outraged theologians and chronologists. (As I said in my talk, though, I draw the line at altering the sequence of events during real battles, although obviously I’ll insert Matthew Quinton and a fictional ship in place of a real one; those who fought, suffered and died in those battles deserve that respect.) As several panellists said, historians can be sniffy about historical novelists’ willingness to change things around, but as a historian myself, I think this ‘holier than thou’ attitude rests on very weak foundations. Historians interpret the past and ‘change things’ by deciding to include or omit particular facts from their accounts; the idea that they are objective, detached analysts of the past is frankly risible, as historians usually have their own personal or political agendas. If anything, historical novelists are simply much more up front about what they do: as Emma Darwin put it, ‘We make things up. Get over it’.

There was also much discussion of the stunning lack of imagination in cover designs for historical fiction. This can be summed up pretty succinctly: if it’s for a male audience, stick a sword on it; if it’s for a female audience, give it a headless woman in a nice dress. Now I don’t know a lot about art, and I know even less about marketing, but it seems to me that the acronym ‘USP’ is rendered pretty meaningless if every book ends up looking pretty much the same as every other one. (I’m just glad that my own publishers have been much more imaginative with the covers of the Quinton series, which has always been intended for both male and female readers.) Having said that, I suppose nautical fiction falls into the same trap to some extent. After all, when was the last time you saw a naval historical novel without a ship on the cover?

Anyway, the net effect of my attendance at the conference is that I’m now brimming with ideas for future books galore: I particularly like the potential of a plot that involves teenage wizards battling teenage vampires before engaging in torrid bondage sex with the gladiators who guard the Holy Grail. (Still working on that one – 2017 ed.) Before I move on to develop that, though, I need to start the detailed plot construction for ‘Quinton 5’, provisionally titled The Battle of All the Ages and based around the remarkable Four Days’ Battle of 1666. This means that next week, I’ll be going through my usual process at the outset of a new book, namely locking myself away in a cottage for a week so that I don’t drive Wendy nuts as I bounce ideas (and, possibly, myself) off the walls. So I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to blog next Monday – much will depend on whether or not I have a mobile broadband signal, on whether I have any time to spare from ‘blue skies thinking’ if I do, and on whether or not my brain will have been fried by spending too much time in May and June 1666. In case I don’t make it, though, you can find another helping of me on the wonderful Hoyden and Firebrands blog, where I’m this week’s guest blogger!

Happy New History?

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First, a very Happy New Year to all! The next few months will be particularly exciting, with The Mountain of Gold being published in North America on 31 January followed by The Blast That Tears The Skies in the UK on 13 March (also the publication date of the UK trade paperback of Mountain of Gold). Meanwhile I’ll be hard at work writing ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and continuing the research for Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. I’ll be using this blog to build up to the two publication dates by providing some new insights into the plots and historical contexts of both books, and there’ll also be some exciting news about the first Quinton ‘prequel’, Ensign Royal. Watch this space, and my Twitter and Facebook accounts, for further information!

Meanwhile, I’ve recently been reading two particularly thought-provoking books, Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England and Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms: A History of Half-Forgotten Europe. Both have really struck chords with me, and in my opinion, they express truths that really should be taken into account during the current (and rather fractious) debate over the place of History in the English National Curriculum. Essentially, Mortimer’s thesis is that historians are limited and often deceived by their concentration on the extant sources; that they have become obsessed with the analysis of those sources, rather than with the greater truths that lie beyond them; and that ‘primary sources’ are often just as distorted and partial as secondary ones. (I know one historian, a leading authority in his field despite having no formal training, who simply refuses to read secondary sources, stubbornly insisting on working solely from the original manuscripts alone – thereby missing all the insights and broader contexts that can be gleaned from wide reading and also entirely disregarding the vital point made by Mortimer and others that primary sources themselves mark the end of a process, i.e. they are often a reporting of an event that has taken place and are thus immediately subject to selective memory, skewed perspectives, omission, etc.)

As Mortimer writes in The Time Traveller’s Guide,

Academic historians cannot discuss the past itself; they can only discuss evidence and   the questions arising from that evidence…If Medieval England is treated as dead and buried, what one can say about it is strictly limited by the questions arising from the evidence. However, if treated as a living place, the only limits are the experience of the author and his perception of the requirements, interests and curiosity of his readers.

I’m definitely with Mortimer on this. In fact, being able to recreate a living, vibrant past is one of the liberating things about writing historical fiction after spending so many years within the constraints of academic history; it was also something I tried to do in my most recent non-fiction book, Blood of Kings: The Stuarts, The Ruthvens and The Gowrie Conspiracy, where I took a ‘virtual history’ line which argued that the threat to the life of King James Stuart at Gowrie House, Perth, on 5 August 1600, and the potential consequences of his death on that day, were far more important to British history than those of the over-hyped ‘Gunpowder Plot’ five years later.

Norman Davies, meanwhile, makes a similar and equally important point in Vanished Kingdoms, where he also argues that despite the platitudes trotted out in schools and the press, many of the books on which historians depend are often less reliable than the information available on the Internet, including the much-derided Wikipedia.

Historians and their publishers spend inordinate time and energy retailing the history of everything that they take to be powerful, prominent and impressive…Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist…Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards….Our mental maps are thus invariably deformed. Our brains can only form a picture from the data that circulates at any given time; and the available data is created by present-day powers, by prevailing fashions and by accepted wisdom. If we continue to neglect other areas of the past, the blank spaces in our minds are reinforced, and we pile more and more knowledge into those compartments of which we are already aware. Partial knowledge becomes ever more partial, and ignorance becomes self-perpetuating.

Essentially, both writers are making the point that our view of the past is badly skewed by artificial boundaries of our own creation, and these desperately limited mindsets are all too apparent in the debate over History in schools. During my many years as a teacher, I taught hundreds of young people to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of primary and secondary sources as this was the principal hoop through which they had to jump to achieve success at GCSE, the most utterly pointless set of examinations imposed on young people by any advanced society; yet all the while, I knew deep down that most of the ‘rules’ which students were expected to master ‘because that’s how historians work’ were either grossly over-simplified or just downright wrong. (My feelings upon the subject might have revealed themselves when I devised and taught the mnemonic BADCRAP as a way of remembering the principles of source analysis; ‘B’ stood for ‘bias’, but I forget what the other letters represented. Perhaps surprisingly, I received no complaints from students or parents with delicate sensibilities during the many years in which I used this system – but then, the exam results that BADCRAP consistently obtained probably insulated me against criticism!)

But those who advocate less emphasis on such a skills-based approach to History are in danger of falling into the trap identified by Norman Davies. Why study an overwhelming diet of British history, when the days of ‘Britain’ as we know it might be numbered if the Scots decide in favour of independence? Why the ongoing obsession with the Tudors and the Nazis, when the seventeenth century (OK, I declare an interest) and Chinese history are arguably more interesting and more ‘relevant’, that dreadful killer word which dominates the entire debate about young people’s interest, or lack of it, in History? So it seems to me that both sides of the debate on school History are trapped within indefensible ideological straitjackets – the one advocating a set of ‘skills’ which perpetuate the delusion that historians exist primarily to analyse sources, rather than to recreate a vision of the past as a living, vital place, the other advocating narratives based on the unthinking assumptions that certain countries, individuals and time periods are innately more important and worth studying than others. Come to think of it, BADCRAP seems like a pretty apposite description of the entire state of the debate.

 

History and Fiction

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I thought I’d take a brief break from my accounts of ‘the real gentlemen captains’ to give my impressions of last week’s conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London, Novel Approaches: From Academic History to Historical Fiction, which continues this week in virtual form. First of all it was great fun, and it was good to meet and to listen to other people with similar enthusiasms to my own – although it was somewhat disconcerting to enter the hall and discover that roughly 80-90% of the delegates were female (one of them asked me at lunchtime if I was feeling outnumbered, which I definitely was!). It was particularly interesting to hear from others with a similar background to my own, i.e. people who started out as academic historians and then crossed over to write historical fiction, notably Alison Weir and Ian Mortimer. There was much discussion of the need to be ‘authentic’, but not entire agreement on what’s meant by ‘authenticity’; some authors clearly go to enormous lengths to ensure that there are no factual anachronisms in their work and that they comply entirely with the known historical record, while others (such as Mortimer, when writing fiction under his alias James Forrester) prefer to be ‘authentic’ in a broader way, to the sense and atmosphere of the period. I’m firmly in the latter camp, but this might be because authors like Mortimer and myself, who have been steeped in academic research on our periods for well over twenty years, possibly have a more instinctive feel for that atmosphere (and for the language of the time, etc) than someone researching a period from scratch, who might be more anxious to avoid making even minor factual errors, to alter the chronology, or to take liberties – up to a point – with the known life stories of real people. From an entertainment viewpoint, undoubtedly the highlight of the conference for me was the contribution by the literary agent Peter Straus, who emphasised the continuing primacy of word of mouth as the best means of promoting a book, the importance of luck (notably lacking in the case of the US edition of The Instance of the Fingerpost, published in the week that Diana died), the notion of the Booker Prize-winning formula (‘myth, love and history’, a la A S Byatt) and the lack of omniscience of publishers; hence the horrified initial reaction of the sales and marketing department to C J Sansum’s stunningly successful Shardlake series, namely ‘hunchbacks don’t sell’ (presumably forgetting what Shakespeare did with Richard III).

However, I think the main thing I took away from the conference was the increased acceptance from all parties that academic history and historical fiction aren’t two sides of a great divide, but are both staging posts in a spectrum – and both, indeed, are simplifications to a greater or lesser degree. Academic history used to like to see itself as a disinterested pursuit of truth; as Simon Schama put it, historians are ‘party poopers’, demolishing the widely accepted myths that the public is comfortable with. (Perhaps therefore historical novelists are ‘party animals’, perpetuating the myths – e.g. Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker with ‘mud, blood and donkeys’ in World War I – and dealing with those things that historians dare not touch because they lie beyond the boundaries of the sources, such as people’s emotions, such big issues as loyalties and beliefs, and the ‘what ifs’ of history). However, as several speakers stressed, academic history itself is increasingly seen as a fictive concept: historians select and interpret their material with greater or lesser degrees of subjectivity, while even ‘primary sources’ aren’t the beginning of a process but the end of one. They are the recording of an event that has already taken place, and are thus themselves subject to selection and subjectivity, rather like modern TV or newspaper reporting; or as Arthur Marwick used to put it, ‘history’ is actually the artificial construct, the prism, through which we study the totality which was ‘the past’, only a minute fraction of which we can ever recreate. I think this realisation that history and fiction aren’t really so far apart after all reflects the fact that academic history, once remarkably hierarchical and even snobbish, has become rather more tolerant and inclusive in the last 15-20 years or so. When I started work on my doctorate in the early 1980s there was a definite ‘pecking order’, with political and religious history at the top – the former, for my period, dominated by such titans as Sir Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and Hugh Trevor-Roper, all of whom I encountered at once time or another. (In Trevor-Roper’s case, this involved knocking him off his bike when rushing to his lecture; as far as I know, the trauma he might have suffered from my carelessness has never been advanced as a possible cause of his subsequent faux pas in authenticating the Hitler diaries.) Economic history was tolerated, social history was mainstream thanks to the likes of Hobsbawm and Thompson but was still not entirely respectable, while naval history was regarded very much as an unfashionable and insignificant backwater (although then probably still more ‘mainstream’ than gender and race history, etc).

Thus I was something of an exotic beast at Oxford historical seminars in the mid-1980s, although the tide was already turning. Indeed, the very fact that I was taken on as a DPhil student by Gerald Aylmer, one of the most eminent political historians of the day, has been used in a recent study of the progress of naval history as proof that things were changing. Now there is a chair in naval history at King’s College, London; a naval historian holds a fellowship of All Souls; Cambridge runs a maritime history workshop; and the numbers of those studying naval history at such institutions as King’s, Greenwich and Exeter probably run into hundreds. So maybe I’ll live to see a professorship in historical fiction at Oxford, but perhaps we’ll only be certain that all the barriers really have come down when David Starkey writes a sex-filled Tudor bodice ripper (ideally with a black protagonist) or Niall Ferguson succeeds Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver as the author of the next Bond novel, in which Q gives Bond six really ‘killer apps’. But I won’t hold my breath.