History in Hindsight

This post is a pick-up from an entry at another website of mine from Good Friday, a couple days ago. Originally, I didn’t see it as having an audience here because I don’t want to overdo the archaeology of my own work and past personal experience. But looking back is part of the process of using insights past in new ways that illuminate the present and the challenges of the future. So I rethought the placement and offer it here without apologies.

The one day a year devoted entirely to death.

Got to wondering, what’s the single deadest thing in our culture right now? Deader even than journalism, the fine arts, literature, music in every genre, and the scientific method. My own answer is history. I’ve read and studied a lot of history, both in school and as an avocation. As an elementary school kid, I saved a Sunday supplement that put color pics of all 35 Presidents on one sheet of newsprint and I memorized the order. Before college I got AP credit in both American and European history. In college I was an English major, but because of obvious overlaps I could have taken my degree in history just as easily. My electives included a year’s worth of Chinese and Japanese history, a year-long art history course nicknamed “Darkness at Noon,” and semester-long courses in Roman history, Reconstruction after the Civil War, and a lit course not coincidentally named “The Age of Johnson.” My emphasis on the cultural accomplishments of the 19th and 20th centuries covered the great writers, poets, artists, and architects whose lives were intertwined with the world events of their times. I even had a course with Barry Fell, the controversial scholar who researched the possibility that Vikings discovered America before Columbus. After college I kept reading about World War II in particular (factual narratives mostly), as well as a wide range of works by anthropologists and archaeologists. My favorite historians were Barbara Tuchman, William Manchester, and William Shirer, reading and rereading two notable works by each of them.

My travels have taken in a lot of historical landmarks, including numerous Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, the cemeteries of Normandy, and domiciles of the great from Mount Vernon to Malmaison, Versailles, and Fontainebleau, as well as solemn tours of Ford’s Theater, Stonewall Jackson’s deathbed in the Wilderness, the Tower of London, and the exact location on Lake Como where the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress were put on ignominious display like Bonnie and Clyde.

An additional source that used to put curious people onto the study of history as history was the historical novel, which built audiences for readers and also moviegoers. Movies and TV shows based on real historical people and events tended to be adapted from novels and their more entertainment-oriented cousins called historical romances. I wrote the following post at the original Instapunk.com 20-some years after TBB because I was trying to share what already looked like a lost genre.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

My Favorite Historical Novels

It's not how far you're willing to go. It's how

much you can control when you go there.

TRY SECEDING FROM THE MEDIA. Call it more procrastination of my self-appointed assignment, but responses to my Secession post have reminded me of a service I might offer to those who are as anxious to avoid the daily news as I am. One way to avoid assault by our infantile media is to turn them off and curl up with a good book.

So I'm offering a short list of my favorite historical novels. It's definitely not a "Best" list, since my knowledge of the genre is quite limited. I just have some books I've read and liked, which is to say I got something from reading them that lasted beyond the moment I read the last page and closed the cover.

They're not all great literature, though some are. What they have in common is that they deal with real moments in history and attempt to portray those moments without resorting to the "close encounters of the most convenient kind" approach employed by pop writers like Herman Wouk and John Jakes.

The list consists of five books by various writers and one writer who gave me five more books. Here goes:

Andersonville by McKinlay Kantor.

The story of the infamous Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia. A giant stockade guarded by teens and old men and equipped with almost no facilities enabling of life. Filth so extreme that a cut in the morning could lead to death in the afternoon. Yet the characters are so riveting that you're able to wade through it as if it were a page-turner. Not all your favorite characters survive. The pain is made real. It's the book I thought of when I first saw the set piece in The Good, The Bad & The Ugly about the doomed Union commander who died content in the knowledge the bridge his men had been dying for was blown to smithereens.

P.S. I read much later an account of the writing, a siege that made a personal connection with me, because I've been there. The hero of the account, incidentally, was a Doberman named Lobo, who made the writer write when he thought he could write no more. Lobo, cursed with sight hound genes, died tragically the way sight hounds often do, when an ignorant veterinarian gave him the wrong anesthetic. Well, that's neither here nor there. The book stands on its own.

Burr by Gore Vidal

Surprised? Even evil men can have one good book in them. This is Gore Vidal's. 

He's helped no end by the fact that Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson's vice president, is one of the most spectacular villains of American history, the man who created the first constitutional crisis in a presidential election, the man who shot Alexander Hamilton to death in a duel, the man who betrayed his country in a wild scheme to become emperor of Mexico, and the man who was suspected of having a long-term incestuous relationship with his own daughter. All this is squarely in Vidal's wheelhouse. The result is a kind of American homage to the Roman historian/gossip Suetonius (the source of Robert Graves's I Claudius), a malicious inside-baseball skewering of the personal foibles of almost all the founding fathers. It's hilarious, obviously suspect by its own context, and a clear confirmation of the dictum that real life can be stranger than fiction. 

The first time I ever realized that the early years of our country might have been wicked fun, not just a drudgery of symbols and moving statuary.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

I know they maybe tried to make you read it at some point and you probably resisted. The language can be off-putting, remote from our time. But that's part of the value now. This is what it was like to fight in the Civil War. Fear, horror, cowardice, and courage intermingled in a zone where a wound could land you in a surgeon's tent equipped with a bone saw and not much else. It's not that long and it IS a time machine. If you feel the need of one about now.

Mila 18 by Leon Uris

The story of the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, from which Israel was most likely born. Children with Molotov cocktails battling SS tanks and winning. There's a good deal of soap opera too, but the narrative never strays far from the plight of those imprisoned within a walled city inside a city without much help from anywhere, while the deportation trains leave for points unknown carrying away all those who cannot fight and will never be heard from again. It reads like a thriller, but it's no fantasy.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The French Revolution and the Terror. Yes, there's abundant Dickensian sentimentality and plot coincidences galore, but it drives inexorably to the most vivid depiction yet created of the Guillotine and the frenzy -- and the frigid calm -- of the peasants' revenge against the monarchy and life itself. It is the hero's severed head which delivers the concluding apostrophe (contrary to the sanitized clip above). Many books have famous beginnings or endings. This one has both: "It was the best of times...", "It is a far far better thing I do..." Beat that.

Kenneth Roberts

Here's a précis of his historical novels from Wiki:

Roberts' historical fiction often focused on rehabilitating unpopular persons and causes in American history. A key character in Arundel and Rabble in Arms is American officer and eventual traitor Benedict Arnold, with Roberts focusing on Arnold's expedition to Quebec and the Battle of Quebec in the first novel and the Battle of Valcour Island, the Saratoga campaign and the Battles of Saratoga in the second. Meanwhile, the hero of Northwest Passage was Major Robert Rogers and his company Rogers' Rangers, although Rogers fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War. Oliver Wiswell focuses on a Loyalist officer during the American Revolution and covers the entire war, from famous events such as the Siege of Boston, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the New York and New Jersey campaign through the Battle of Fort Washington, and the Franco-American alliance, to less-remembered events such as the Convention Army, the exodus to Kentucky County, the Siege of Ninety-Six, and the resettlement of the United Empire Loyalists, as well as providing a later look at both a dissolute Rogers and a frustrated Arnold among the British.

I haven't read Arundel, but I've read the rest. I recommend them.

Northwest Passage

A rip-roaring adventure story. Major Robert Rogers invents guerilla warfare and then, betrayed by his British commanders, single-handedly brings his men alive through hundreds of miles of wilderness to safety. And he's also a bum, a drunk, a deadbeat, and a cad. Like many heroes. Something to remember about now.

Rabble in Arms

By the end you can almost understand why Benedict Arnold turned coat from blue to red. He, too, was a great heroic figure. What changed him? He stopped believing his country had the leadership to win and survive its own corruption and small-minded politics. Hmmm.

Oliver Wiswell

What it was like to be a Tory during the Revolution. For more, read my comment on it in the previous post.

Lydia Bailey

How the United States lost Haiti when Haiti wanted us. Once again, small men in high places. Outstanding.

Boon Island.

Not sure it qualifies as an historical novel, but it's one of the best survival stories I've read, so it's here too.

Obviously, I like Kenneth Roberts. But don't feel bad if you don't. My wife informs me she just can't read his stuff. And she's read the entire oeuvre of Dostoyevsky, which I simply can't do. So read what appeals to you. I'm not instructing, just offering alternatives to the 24/7 nonsense of the news.

posted at   1:02 pm  by  RL 

There were others I could have mentioned but I was trying not to confuse works like those above with the more fanciful narratives of writers like Dumas, who had no compunctions about changing history in service to plot, melodrama, and romance.

By then, though, my distinctions no longer mattered. The whole genre was already dead, killed off by florid works like Gone With the Wind, mostly written by women in love with love.

In fact, I already had the proof that my fears were correct and my own generation and subsequent were learning next to nothing of history.

The following extract is from The Boomer Bible’s Book of Psayings:

Yes, it was intended as a test (note the absence of  ICR links for any dates), and my principal co-creator of the Boomer Bible website had a golden opportunity to test it on high school age students he was teaching in a private, tuition-paying, and well regarded Christian school. His subject was religion, but he had broad latitude about how he taught his students. He gave them the dates on the list and asked them to do the best they could to identify the significance of as many dates as they could in one hour of class time. This was around the turn of the century, I believe.

The results were dismal. Worse than dismal. To salve their feelings he graded their performance on the basis of just four dates, including 1492, 1776, 1860, and 1945. Only two students got more than two of them right on this basis. They knew nothing. 

Why we’ve reached the point that 25 years later, I was able to write the following posts at Instapunk Returns with high confidence…

Justifying Violent Preemption of Trump Ivy-League Style

The Real List of Worst Presidents

I’ve linked the latter in replies at Threads and Substack sites in strings of comments unanimously agreeing on Trump as the worst President in history. I am routinely and confidently scorned as insane when I do.

History is dead. There is a very good chance we are too. I doubt that a majority of Congress  could come anywhere near passing my date test.  To them, history is something to aim staffers at in search of useful anecdotes and fictions about a past nobody remembers from life or learning.

Not trying to be a downer. But if today isn’t a day to ponder death, what is?