the literary life HISTORICAL FICTIONilluminates the history of history,
which is both an empirical and inter-
pretive enterprise. As she says, history
in the time of the ancients was con-
sidered a literary art, with invented
speeches par for the course. It was not
until the nineteenth century that his-
tory became firmly based on “the cult
of the fact.” Conversely, Lepore notes,
eighteenth-century novels—Daniel
Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela—were often
called “histories” and “pretended that
they were true.”
In her interview with Larissa Mac-
Farquhar, Mantel claims that she will
not include anything in her novels
that is contradicted by the historical
record: “If I were to distort something
just to make it more convenient or
dramatic, I would feel I’d failed as a
writer.... You should be drawing the
drama out of real life, not putting it
there, like icing on a cake.” I abide by
that same rule. If Louis C. Tiffany
dynamited the breakwater in front
of his Long Island estate on June 16,
1916, that’s the date it must happen
in my novel. However, to complicate
matters, in The Peacock Feast, I have
both fictional and historical charac-
ters. When Anna Freud is in conver-
sation with my character, Prudence,
who is invented, obviously I’ve had to
imagine that conversation. That said, I
felt obligated to depict all of my char-
acters who once lived according to my
most honest understanding of them.Kline: I feel a little differently. While
I’ve chosen in my recent novels to tell
stories within the constraints of his-
torical facts, I don’t think novelists
have a responsibility to be historically
accurate. I think novels are novels,
and nonfiction is nonfiction, and fic-
tion writers—people who make stuff
up—can do whatever they choose.
Some readers are under the impression
that the train in Colson Whitehead’s
Underground Railroad was real. Whatresponsibility does he have to his
readers to explain that it’s not a real
train; it’s a metaphor? None. Lincoln in
the Bardo is a ghost story; readers will
have to undertake further research if
they want to tease fact from fiction. I
need to allow myself the freedom in my
own mind for flights of fancy. Maybe
in my next novel.Gornick: Several of the writers we’ve
discussed cite Aristotle about the dif-
ference between the historian and
the poet—which, in this context, I
think, includes all imaginative writ-
ers. As Wood sums it up, “The for-
mer describes what happened, and the
latter what might happen.” Looked
at through that lens, it seems that as
novelists we are tasked with navigat-
ing our way between respecting what
historians have shown us about the
past and defending the freedom to
imagine—both what never happened,
and what might have happened but was
never recorded.37 POETS & WRITERS^