April 4, 2007
Getting the Past Right in Fiction: A Talk with Bruce Olds Posted by Allen Barra at 12:10 PM EST Bruce Olds is one of the most acclaimed and intriguing of recent American novelists, a writer who has combined the techniques of postmodernist fiction with the traditional historical novel. Raising Holy Hell (1995) and Bucking The Tiger (2001) both examine the lives of notorious nineteenth-century Americans. His latest, The Moments Lost: A Midwest Pilgrim’s Progress, takes a more personal approach to American history. The protagonist, Franklyn Shiv, who writes about one of the most turbulent eras in American labor, was inspired by the life of Olds’s great-grandfather. I talked with him about all three of these books.
Your first two novels, Raising Holy Hell, about John Brown, and Bucking The Tiger, about Doc Holliday, fit uneasily into the category of historical fiction. I say uneasily because many of the techniques you used seem light years from the novels that get lumped into that category. In The Moments Lost, you also take historical themes in a new direction—but I'll get to that in a moment. What would you say your primary influences have been in both fiction and history?
I suspect my own influences go more to writing—to the use of language and the form that language assumes—than to either fiction or history per se. I always have read and still do read a lot of poetry. I’m quite hopeless when it comes to writing the stuff myself, haven’t the knack, but I’m tremendously drawn to the Poem, capital P, and its privileging of and sensitivity to language and form. In this respect I’m particularly fascinated by poetry that works with historical content, specifically American history. I reckon I’m what the academics would call a formalist on the fiction side, an Americanist on the historical.
That said, the first book I recall being truly excited by—this would have been in grammar school, seventh grade perhaps—was Ivanhoe. Which, looking back, makes almost too much sense. Later, at university, I briefly fell under the sway of the old New Journalists—Mailer, Wolfe, Breslin, Talese, McPhee, Murray Kempton, that crowd—until I discovered the meta-fictionists, William Gass in particular. I'm still a huge fan of his work. Sentence for sentence, I find its bravery galvanizing.
But perhaps the work that fuses all of these elements and influences most effectively for me is that of Paul Metcalf, Herman Melville's great-grandson, with whom I carried on a correspondence for some while before his death in 1999, and to whom I dedicated the second novel. Paul described his work as “the personal poetry of pure document,” and he had much to say about the relationship between poetry, prose, history, and fiction and the synergy to be exploited between them, which he likened—his words—to “the plunge of sex, accomplished with sexual energy, the focus of all one’s vitalities.”
Paul was an unapologetically subversive guy, which is why, perhaps, he seldom published in other than obscure and offbeat presses. My favorite quote of his is, “It is those of us who cannot untangle ourselves from the past who are really dangerous in the present because we hurl ourselves across the present with a language they cannot understand.” Isn’t that great? I agree, entirely.
You’ve referred to Raising Holy Hell and Bucking the Tiger as “fictional biographies.” The Moments Lost seems to draw heavily from the history of your own family, though Clarence Darrow, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, and the Wobblies all put in appearances. You’ve said that Franklyn Shiv, your protagonist, is inspired by your own great-grandfather; how does his life actually connect with the historical figures in the book?
I don't know if the story itself draws heavily from the history of my own family, but the impetus behind its writing certainly does, since my ancestors lived in the place (Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula) where and the time (the early twentieth century) when the story is set.
As my great-grandfather was killed in a mine cave-in in 1910 at the age of 37, three years before the strike, the character of Franklyn Shivs was not directly inspired by him. Rather, Shivs is based on an actual person, a newspaper reporter named Frank Shavs, about whom we have no more than a scant paragraph’s worth of historical information.
Which is to say that, in light of the book being 470 pages, Shivs is largely a fictional creation. If his life connects with anyone’s, his interior life I mean, I would imagine that it connects most closely with my own, albeit in ways about which I remain in the dark even now.
The only character in the book who was inspired in the way you are referring to, is the character I call “the Kid.” He’s my grandfather, at a similar age.
At the end of The Moments Lost, there’s a section called “Family Plot.” There are several pages from what appears to be your grandfather’s diary as well as an extract from a mine inspector’s report about your great grandfather’s death in a mine accident. I say “appears” because I was wondering if it was real or whether or not Bruce Olds the novelist was pulling a literary prank, the sort of thing Nabokov did with the open letter from the lawyer in Lolita that was actually written by Nabokov. I’m betting, by the way, that the diary and the report are real documents.
As a novelist, I have nothing but admiration for that sort of Nabokovian legerdemain when it is well done, but in this case you win. Those are real documents, save for some few emendations I chose to make for aesthetic reasons, none of which alter their meaning or truth. On the other hand, had I felt the aesthetic need to fabricate them of whole cloth, I would not have hesitated. There is historical fact and there is fictional truth, and while I wouldn’t presume to speak for others, the distinction between the two, in my opinion, is one that could use more blurring, not less.
It’s axiomatic that no one writes a historical novel unless he feels he has an objective view of the history he’s writing about. That’s not to say that any novelist can ever truly be objective, but that it was necessary for, say, Tolstoy or Sir Walter Scott, for that matter, to feel that he had achieved an overview that was essentially correct. But how does one stay objective when writing about one’s own ancestors? Your vision of your great-grandfather would have to be more of a fictional creation than, say, Big Bill Haywood or Clarence Darrow, wouldn’t it? Did it make you feel uneasy to reimagine the lives of your ancestors?
But I wasn't reimagining their lives as much as I was reimagining the cultural dynamics of their lives, their historical circumstances, the social and political and economic cross-currents at play in that place at that time. As I say, none of the characters in the book, save one, are based on my ancestors, and that one, in the context of the story, is a child.
That said, I don’t disagree that it never hurts to steep oneself in the historical facts of the matter, to do one’s homework, so to say. Not that all historical novelists feel this way. I recall William Styron remarking that he did just enough research in preparation for The Confessions of Nat Turner to trigger his imagination. That beyond that he was afraid he would know too much, that the facts would inhibit him, that the history would handcuff and tether him, leave him too earthbound.
Personally I am more comfortable knowing too much than not enough. When I toy with, or twist, or ignore, or flat violate the historical facts, I want and need to know that I am doing so for aesthetic reasons, with premeditation and malice aforethought.
Besides, a large part of the fun for me lies in doing the research. I really enjoy the spadework. At some point, of course, one is compelled to call a halt and get on with it, but if I can be faulted in this regard, it would be for over-researching, not its opposite.
A pretentious critic in the Los Angeles Times wrote of Bucking the Tiger, that Olds “lights a torch for American historical fiction.” Is that a tough mandate to live up to?
No, I don’t find it a tough mandate to live up to because I don’t interpret it as a mandate. The only mandate I subscribe to is to write the next sentence as well, as felicitously, as I am capable of writing it. Believe me, there is no tougher mandate in the world.
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