Read Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction Online
Authors: Robert J. Begiebing
Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction (26 page)
Why did you choose Daniel Sanborn as the point-of-view character? Was the story always told from his perspective? Mistress Coffin is told from two viewpoints, while Allegra Fullerton is narrated in the first person. What are the challenges and benefits of various point-of-view strategies?
I vary points of view among novels, and sometimes within novels, for a number of reasons. First, I like the variety; anything that makes a long process (like writing a trilogy over a decade) less tedious and more fun is good. The next issue then is what point of view (or points of view) is best for the taleâboth overall and at a particular narrative moment? Once you ask that question, the writer's desire for variety begins to serve the story. These are always judgment calls and only the readers (and reviewers) know whether you've succeeded, made the right choices for them, too. Now we get to this particular book. Sanborn. Why him? Well, I wanted Rebecca to remain as mysterious as she could be (without getting melodramatic, that is), so, seeing her from the outside contributes to retaining her mystery and strangeness. Then, Sanborn is also an artist, a particular kind of accomplished, schooled, commercial artist. As such, he is something of Rebecca's opposite. He is a little too dull, too conventional (to say the least), and perhaps represents most of us when we are confronted by visionaries, geniuses, prodigies, or true artists and their work. He feels a degree of confusion, destabilization; his comfortable attitudes and mind-set have been challenged; he is a little threatened, yet fascinated. In short, he becomes rather unhinged by Rebecca, and it doesn't help that he is also, ultimately, falling in love. His voice and viewpoint were the point of view I found, mercifully, from the very start of the first draft. Sometimes you get lucky. Every now and then a little gift.
You mention in the autobiographical profile some of the themes that you feel tie these three novels together: the circumstances of women, the role of class, the dangers of religious fanaticism, etc. Why do these particular themes resonate for you as a writer, and as a person?
That's a hard one. “Only his shrink knows for sure”? I may be the last to know. But there is something, I suppose, to the saying, “It's a historical novel about the present. ”First of all, the themes have to resonate for me and for readers, I hope, because the issues they raise are with us todayâin different forms, different degrees, different guises, perhaps, but still with us. Then, I have my obsessions. How does one escape them? I hope my readers share a few of them, at least. I hope readers think some of my own obsessions are still important to us all. If readers see no relevance to themselves and their world, I expect they won't read for long. On the other hand, I bank on readers' continuing interest in the foreign country of the past. Like all travel, there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in discovery, in difference, in the beauties and adventures of someplace new.
You have said that you enjoy writing historical fiction because you find the research involved stimulating. Now that you have completed this trilogy, do you think that you will continue to work in an historical mode?
I don't know. Since finishing this novel I've been fooling around with some short pieces. And I've been working on and off since 1993 on a novel set in postâWorld War II America, largely in the Berkshires, but I haven't been able to make that one work yet. Maybe I can't write about the twentieth century. Wouldn't that be a ridiculous handicap for a writer? I do know that I don't want to write about contemporary suburbanites or urbanites up to their nostrils in angst. I just get bored with it. History, particularly New England history, for some reason, still interests me. So maybe I will return to the past. It's actually kind of pleasant, having just spent more than a decade on a trilogy, not to have a big new project under way at the moment. But I've never gone for long without an idea for a new book.
I wrote
Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction
to complete a New England historical trilogy that began with
The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin,
set in seventeenth-century New Hampshire, and
The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton,
set in nineteenth-century New England and Italy. When I was looking for my next novel project, I realized that there was not only a similar New England setting in my two previous novels, there were recurring themes. The historical circumstances of women, the enormous influence of social and economic hierarchies on people's lives, the conflict between the desire for self-expression and the pressures of conformity, the perils of religious fanaticism, the overwhelming yet confining temptations of material wealth (the American Dream?), and so on, all seemed to gather my interest. These themes, I realized, were essential to understanding our formative, early American experience between 1648 and 1850. But I had yet to fill in a huge gap: pre-Revolutionary America during that most revolutionary eighteenth century.
The eighteenth century had always left my overheated imagination a little cold, at least in comparison to the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But I was aware of a deficiency in my understanding and in my New England narratives. Then, by good fortune, I happened to attend, with my wife and in-laws, a series of summer lectures at the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion and the Portsmouth Historical Society. The people of the colonial province of New Hampshire, beginning in 1741, started to fascinate me, and it is people (characters), finally, who make a novel. Thus began my two years of research into the people of eighteenth-century Portsmouth and New Hampshireâtheir houses and accoutrements; their reports and maps; the records of their wars, governing bodies, and personal joys and fears. And there were others to enlighten meâearly travelers to the province and later historians.
I gradually began to see that I could, with a third novel, tie the two previous novels together through common themes, genealogical and economic lineages, and the historical settings. More than that, I could develop another central thread introduced in
Allegra Fullerton:
the complex, ambiguous role of the artist in the New World. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that this mysterious creature, the artistâin her desire for independence, for creative fulfillment in conflict with the imperatives of social and aesthetic orthodoxiesâis a metaphor for us all, for our secret, innermost, rebellious selves. Once I found my way to Rebecca Wentworth (my artful American prodigy) and Daniel Sanborn (my academy-trained British portraitist), I was off once again on yet another journey into the useable past.