Excellence for me feels like that ever-receding shore towards which we just keep paddling.   It’s a big, and intimidating, subject.   I’d like to narrow it down so I’m not left just quoting the most obvious bromides.  You know: to thine own self be true, or buy low, sell high.    So I’m going to talk about excellence as I understand it when it comes to constructing a specific kind of literary fiction: fiction that’s based on history and/or public fact.

I’ve always been interested in what reviewers have delicately called “persistently unusual subjects,” and lately, I have to report, it’s gotten worse.   My most recent collection features stories about Aeschylus at Marathon, the executioner in charge of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, Nazi explorers on the hunt for the Yeti, reactor engineers during the catastrophe at Chernobyl, and first female cosmonaut in space.   Most of those stories are part of an enlarging group my agent calls the libel cycle: stories with real figures as their narrator-protagonists, figures like John Ashcroft, or the bass player John Entwistle of the Who, or William Beebe, the inventor of the bathysphere.  

As my father, who’s always on the lookout for litigation, might say – and has said -- Why do I do that?

Such writing – though it’s certainly not history, or non-fiction – delivers many of the pleasures of both, and has its uses, when it comes to enhancing the kind of insights that those disciplines can deliver.  A historian recently enthused to me about the fiction writer’s freedom to speculate, and to infer: the way a meticulously researched and intensely empathetic novel like Michael Shaara’s The Rebel Angels or Jim Crace’s Quarantine might provide more of a visceral understanding of the battle of Gettsyburg, or a mystic’s life in the desert in the 1st century AD, than any number of more traditional histories, with their obligatory continual acknowledgments of the own limitations, even could.  

I’m interested in how this kind of writing enhances a fiction writer’s possibilities.   One reason writers are attracted to historical and/or non-fictional material is because it’s a way of enlarging one’s contact with the world.   It’s a way of staying in touch with wonder, and so, with pleasure.  With play.    With the passionate engagement that we all manage, as children.  

But it’s also a way of enlarging the arena of a one’s autobiographical obsessions.  Of expanding that element in an artist’s work that proscribes his or her choices.   It’s a way of complicating our experience, and the relationship between our imagination and what we can enlist from our memories.

It’s also a way of acknowledging the importance of letting the world teach us.   The novelist Emile Zola, to understand the lives of coal miners, descended into the mines of Anzin to research his novel Germinal.  150 feet below ground he witnessed an enormous workhorse, a Percheron, pulling a sled through a tunnel.    He asked how they got the animal into the mine each day.   At first they thought he was joking.   Then they straightened him out.   They told him: that horse comes down here once, when he’s barely more than a foal, still able to fit in the buckets that bring us down here.   That horse grows up down here.   He grows blind down here from lack of light.   He hauls coal down here until he can’t haul anymore, and then he dies down here, and his bones are buried down here.” 

That’s a metaphor for – and an enforced empathetic understanding of – the miners’ lives that the world taught Zola, and to which he had to be receptive, in order to write a novel as excellent as he then wrote.  

Well, sure, Jim, you say, a little peevishly.  That’s easy for Zola, but what about someone who’s not a certified Great Writer, or Great Artist? 
A writer’s first worry when working with historical or real events is the issue of authority, as in, where do I get off writing about that?   Well, the good and the bad news is, where do you get off writing about anything?   Where do you get off writing about someone of a different gender?   A different person?   Where do you get off writing about yourself, from twenty years ago?  

Writers shouldn’t lose sight of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility.  And they need to take heart from that chutzpah, as well.   The whole project of literature – of the arts themselves -- is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination.   Why were we given something as amazing as imagination, if we’re not going to use it?

Literature that deals with history the most effectively – and I’m thinking of luminous works like Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian or Marta Morazzoni’s The Invention of Truth – seems to understand that, first, fiction about real events needs to respect the facts, and second, as our politicians have taught us, facts are malleable things.  The trick, it seems, is to do everything possible to honor the first point as one understands it, while taking full advantage of the second to shape one’s material into something aesthetically beautiful.

Allan Gurganus once said that it was the writer’s job to take the world personally.   When I first read about The Who or John Ashcroft, I found myself reading receptively, reading in a way that energized not only my imagination but also my emotions.   And in writing about those figures, I found myself starting to construct a combination of what I intuited about them and what I projected onto them.   And if I hadn’t found some odd and plangent emotional resonances with what I discovered about them, I couldn’t have written literary fiction about them. 

The situation might best rendered as a Venn diagram:  if one sphere is the experience of being a gay silent filmmaker in Weimar Germany – say, having lived the life of F.W. Murnau, the director of Nosferatu and Sunrise and The Last Laugh, about whom I wrote a novel – and the other sphere is the experience of the artist’s, then it’s that sliver of overlap – mostly of crucial emotional agendas and conflicts, and not so much life experiences – that creates the connection that allows everything else to be accessed, at least in the imagination.

When the process succeeds, those people from history or life with whom the writer is working turn into personae: figures who both are and are not that actual public figure.   What’s been uncovered is a shared emotional genealogy that research has helped the writer more fully explore.   Which makes sense, given that, as others have pointed out, when we write literary fiction, we send ourselves as far into another human being as we can, and then we come back with a sensation that both is and is not our own, but more complicated, now. 

And here’s the happy paradox:  such distancing seems to enable a new – and often startlingly unexpected – version of emotional honesty and intimacy to be generated within the work.   As Oscar Wilde put it, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own persona.   Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.”   The famous 19th century art critic John Ruskin said much the same thing in a remark that serves as an epigraph for Marta Morazzoni’s novel, and from which her title derives:  “We can imagine falsities, we can compose falsehoods, but only truth can be invented.” 

In other words, this Song of Everyone Else that we seem to be composing when we write about such historical figures or real people in the right way in fact evolves into a distinctive Song of Ourselves.   People who are suspicious of such methods – and who only allow themselves to be really moved by stories that they suspect to be directly autobiographical in their events, as if all literature aspired to the condition of the memoir – mistakenly equate a plain style or a narrative seemingly drawn wholly from memory with sincerity or honesty.   Which is a little like saying that vanilla ice cream is more sincere than melon gelato. 

And since I’m quoting, here’s a quote from Robert Frost.   “Give us immedicable woes,” Frost said.  “Woes that nothing can be done for – woes flat and final.   And then to play.  The play’s the thing.   Play’s the thing.   All virtue in ‘as if.’”

One of the reasons we write literature is because, as the previously mentioned Allan Gurganus once put it, there’s nothing more profound than imagining other people’s lives, and nothing less profound.   The favor of doing that might be the best we can do for each other.   And the arts educate us in that ability.   They educate us in our emotions.   We have to give ourselves over to other people no matter how inconvenient or costly or intimidating that process might seem to be.  Because that’s the only way we can renew ourselves.

In turning over our imaginations, as writers, to those distant and initially alien sensibilities, we’re continually giving ourselves away, in both senses of the phrase.   And continually gathering others into us, in a way that Walt Whitman wrote about more eloquently, but would surely recognize.

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