Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction (25 page)

No. Only while working on novel number three in the early stages did I realize I could tie the two previously published novels together with this one, the “middle narrative” of an historical trilogy set from roughly the 1630s to 1850. From that point on, I was working within a degree of restriction, in the same sense almost that one is limited while working within a particular genre or poetic form. But often the restrictions, the demands of the form, or the series, or in this case a trilogy, challenge you in a new way. These demands might even result in a better, tighter book. I hope that's the case here. The reader will have to judge. I've wondered myself how many rather daunting series were started with the whole series in mind: Anthony Powell's twelve-part A Dance to the Music of Time? Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels? Trollope's Barsetshire series? And so on. And, of course, Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales were not planned as a series or published in order. Finally, in 1850, Cooper published a new edition of the five novels, in chronological order this time.

Well, this new one confirmed that I had to keep returning to the past to serve my muse, and that I had to keep returning to certain themes to serve myself. I guess I proved myself to be as monomaniacal as many of the authors I admire. I did gain a new sense of how the themes that interest me sweep broadly across early American history, and for the most part resonate for us still today. I think I also learned something about the flexibility of “historical fiction.” I was able to employ (and enjoyed employing) a number of different genres along the way within the larger genre of historical fiction—mystery and crime novel, artist novel, epistolary novel, coming-of-age novel, business novel, the picaresque novel, the quest tale, and so on.

I can only write about the past by immersing myself in the period I am writing about—largely through continual reading and thinking and fantasizing about the place and time and characters. This is a process that takes years (usually three to five) for each narrative. The insights I gained are, I hope, explicit in the texts, and to list them here would probably seem reductive or a little too pat. What one discovers most, I think, is the deep and lasting foundations (the continuity) of human nature over time—our foibles and our accomplishments; our folly and our intelligence; our greed, lust, and spiritual hunger. Maybe everything changes around us, but I believe more than ever that we don't change much in our deepest selves. Nor in our secret selves.

I did come to appreciate (not so much an insight) the sheer difficulty of survival with all the natural forces arrayed against one before industrialized humanity developed the technologies (and the culture of convenience) most of us take for granted today. That seems an obvious point, but only by living vicariously as I did in these former times could I really begin to appreciate it, or should I say “feel it.” What I came to feel is something like the hovering presence of death that we all sort of know about but that these earlier generations lived with very differently and immediately. “In life we are in the midst of death” had absolute, real meaning once upon a time; it was not just one saying among many in a perfunctory religious service.

I think my problem was that I came to the eighteenth century through my literary training, mostly. I was young when I studied the eighteenth century in Britain and seemed to find the literature a bit chilly and dry, with a few exceptions like Stern, Swift, or Fielding. I came to know it as a time of conventionalized forms and rules and “neoclassicism. ”Those endless couplets, for example, as if some demonic machine were cranking them out. Of course neo-anything is going to be a lame spin-off of the original. And then there's that Age of Reason brag—the perhaps arrogant foundations of modern science, technology, capitalism, and so on. I had a prejudice, in short. But slowly I became aware of countercurrents in the century itself—the radical foundations of Western democratic revolutions, the visionary artists like Blake and Smart, the challenges to the old, essentially feudalistic, order from young Wordsworth and Thelwall, to name a couple. But America, for all our desperate aping of the British gentry among our rising classes, was another world indeed. Pre-Revolutionary America had its own Age of Reason, to be sure, but it was also here, across the pond, a time and place of romantic richness, irrational behavior and violence, wild-man capitalism and adventurism, religious enthusiasms, and almost continual warfare on the seas and in the wilderness, a time (like all times) filled with drunkards, politicians, prostitutes, and other obstreperous folk.

Researching this novel was faster than researching the previous two in the series. I think I'm getting better at it, more efficient, and I'm learning as I go along. I've developed my immersion process and refined it. I'm better now at picking out essential sources and telling details than I was when I started the trilogy. To name even the most useful books and articles would be a tedious exercise for me and for the reader, but there were some highlights I might point out. The archives of the Portsmouth Athenaeum, the Strawbery Banke Museum, the American Antiquarian Society, and the University of New Hampshire's Special Collections Department were indispensable. Mostly, these resources provided original sources of the period (published and unpublished) and a few data-based studies by modern experts. Diaries and journals are very helpful, such as those of James Birket, Andrew Burnaby, Alexander Hamilton, and Timothy Walker, who all saw eighteenth-century New England and Portsmouth and gave us glimpses of them. If I had to pick a single most-helpful source it would probably be the New Hampshire Provincial Papers for the 1740s—a published version of the court/legislative activity, day by day. This is a remarkable window into the doings and concerns, large and small, of the people and leaders of coastal New Hampshire and the immediate interior communities. But I also had to research the costume, the art, the military and militia, the taverns and byways, the business practices, and the religious beliefs and frenzies of our forebears. The research is, literally, endless, but one finally stops when the narrative is itself apparently “done.” Or at least that's the way I work. I write the story while I'm researching the story, and the research doesn't stop until the story (much revised) feels “finished” to me.

Portsmouth was a significant commercial colonial seaport and the provincial capital with its first royal governor during the 1740s and 1750s. It was in the network of Europe's vast Atlantic trade circle at the time—fish, timber, rum, slaves, etc. During the decade my story covers the town had roughly 3,000 residents, growing up to 5,000 residents, and a considerable transient population beyond that, as did all seaports. (Compare Boston, which had economic troubles during this decade, at nearly 20,000 residents.) But Portsmouth was intimately connected by economics and politics to all the surrounding towns—a huge population base.

Well, the frontier and its juxtaposition to the urban center was inspiring because the two ways of life demonstrate the reality of the colonies as they evolved from a “wilderness” filled with natural resources toward a nation of great power in the world. But more to the point, the frontier seemed to suit my tale of love, art, betrayal, and ambition. The newer (but by the 1740s not really “primitive”) settlements to the west (those still east of the Merrimac River) became the locale for my exiled child-artist, the place of her maturing, the dangerous zone of the Indian wars, the area that even then was being so thoroughly exploited for financial return that my “little visionary,” Rebecca, could hardly not remark on the destruction in a few of her paintings.

I try to avoid having the more famous historical figures be main characters in my novels. It sets one up for having pasteboard characters pop up mouthing famous words, as if in a bad Masterpiece Theatre costume drama. But I do use the famous and obscure from history as supporting characters and as minor characters. In this instance there are just a couple out front, so to speak: John Smibert, the major Boston painter who came with Bishop Berkeley from England, and Arthur Browne, minister to the Anglican church in Portsmouth. These two were not only in fact there at the time, but my protagonists (Sanborn and Rebecca) could hardly have avoided them, given my story. In both cases I decided to use them because we have diaries and biographies of these men and a lot is known about them. This might increase the authenticity of the novel—of the imagined characters and action happening at that time and place. The “real” characters also give an important point of view on the conflicts and dangers the main characters face. I try to keep their consciousness and words true to what I've learned about them. Numerous other real people are referred to in varying degrees, or their family names used: Robert Feke, William Pepperrell, Governor Wentworth, Reverend Gilman, and so on. But my central characters are imagined, often from composites of people uncovered in my research. One example of a middling character's provenance: Captain Carlyle is in part modeled upon (or initially inspired by) one Captain John McNeil of Hillsborough—a six-foot, six-inch powerhouse who tossed a rival tavernkeeper through a window.

The painters in my stories are more or less stand-ins for individuals laboring in any of the arts. They just happen to be painters. We probably don't need another novel about a writer. Still, think about it: Can any person be stranger than that creature the artist? What is this desire to create art, to create it against all the forces of a culture that doesn't reward it or even want it? And this seems especially true in America where our artists—in nearly all media—have been and are now more than ever oddballs out. That's what jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan meant when he was asked in an interview why so many jazz musicians left America for Paris, or Rome, or Copenhagen, or wherever: In Europe, they love art and esteem the artist, he explained. In America, it is the businessman and the sports/entertainment celebrity we esteem. Mulligan spoke of how an Italian man came up to him one night and asked why this was so. It was a question the musician couldn't answer, beyond to say it just was so. For these and other reasons, artists of all kinds interest me, and not only because I'm a frustrated musician myself. And I've always sort of seen the artist as a stand-in for anybody who feels at odds with his or her culture. Some days I wonder if that might not be most of us. But then another day something happens and I get cynical again and figure we're by now a nation of robots programmed to consume.

I've grown more interested in the visual arts as I grow older. My daughters studied painting and drawing, and that caught my attention. I took a course in American art preparing for Allegra Fullerton. I research art history for my novels. I go to art museums now and feel moved by what I see in ways I never did before: if the art is good, if the art is an expression of something other than the artist's ego or some dry-but-hip theory about art or politics. I don't have any favorites, really. But I gravitate toward beauty, evidence of real dedication, and great skill. That means I often spend time, once again, with artifacts previous to the twentieth century. But from the period I'm writing about in this novel, in America in the eighteenth century, I doubt anybody outdid Copley.

Allegra and Rebecca are both individuals, women, struggling against the roles set for them in their time and place, their cultures. Mistress Coffin was also a woman out of her time and place, and perhaps that is why she was murdered; she made herself vulnerable by her boldness and difference, so to speak. I guess it's time for me to stop writing about women, though. I don't want to become a one-note novelist.

Yes. There's been a considerable amount of work done on early portrait painters, even in Portsmouth, but many are still nameless to us. Most of the “names” came later: like Copley and Joseph Blackburn (who made it to Portsmouth). Joseph Badger was about in the 1740s but his work is notoriously naïve and literal. John Greenwood was in America between 1745 and 1752. And Robert Feke, an American rather than a Brit, was active very much during the time of Sanborn's Portsmouth adventures, but he never made it this far north, apparently. More specifically, Carolyn Singer's work on Portsmouth painters, if I have these numbers right, shows about fourteen surviving portraits from 1701–1725 in Portsmouth, mostly of merchants and their families. Clergymen, military officers, and physicians figure in also. Men and women were painted roughly in equal numbers. Thirty-six Portsmouth portraits from 1726–1750 survive. Blackburn signed his later, but most are unsigned. After 1750 the itinerant amateurs increased e-class patrons), Karen Calvert's research reports. When I started, I had Blackburn in mind as my rough model, but I made Sanborn younger and got him into the busy port nearly a decade earlier. Such is the license of a fiction writer.