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Truth And Fiction

March 2023
1min read


Asking what historians think of historical novelists is like asking cows what they think of butchers. Of course they won’t like them. They see brash amateurs, accountable to no standards of scholarship, invading their field and exploiting their body of work.

Historical novels are never written for historians. Is the sportswriter’s history of the game written for the coaches? It is historians who write for historical novelists, among others. Historical novelists’ purposes, you see, differ from historians', though they both start with the same material.

Novelists lay down a warp of history which is as painfully correct as their honor requires. They fling a shuttle across that warp, carrying brilliant silks in and out—homey furniture, fury, symbolic gestures, rain. These silks often snag—on a fixed date, an embarrassing bigotry of that culture, a household utensil not yet invented. Laboriously a tapestry is woven. Why? So that you can swim in another culture, as Professor Smoler says of Patrick O’Brian, when that writer re-creates the “intellectual and moral universe of [two] Enlightenment gentlemen.” So you can live another life, as another person, in another time.

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Stories published from "April 1993"

Authored by: Wayne Fields

THIS SPRING, THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY OF JEFFERSON’S BIRTH, RESTORATION BEGINS ON POPLAR FOREST, WHICH HE ONCE CALLED “THE BEST DWELLING HOUSE IN THE STATE, EXCEPT THAT OF MONTICELLO.” WHILE THE WORK PROGESSES, THE HOUSE IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, AND ITS GHOSTLY EMPTINESS HEIGHTENS THE SENSE IF ITS ORIGINAL OCCUPANT.

Authored by: The Editors

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The Songs of Cole Porter

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