Present Palpable Intimate

James Wood, the critic, in his New Yorker appraisal (July 5, 2010) of David Mitchell ("The Floating Library:  What can't the novelist David Mitchell do?") quotes Henry James:

"If Conrad's great master, Henry James, was right when he said that the novel should press down on "the present palpable intimate" (he used the triad to distinguish the role of the living novel from that of the historical novel), then Mitchell's new book...."

(read to find out)

The point for me, right now, is Present Palpable Intimate and whether or not it can be achieved in an historical novel.  I believe it can, or at least, in my own work, I have fought for that.  In Flow, in Dangerous Neighbors, in a work now in progress, the quest has been to scrub away the sepia, to make the then feel now, to make it essential and current. 


That, in any case, has been the quest.

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Historical Fiction

So there I was, on the train, after a day of work on my historical novel. I had the latest New Yorker on my lap, was reading back to front, as I do, was all caught up in the Updike critique of Andrew Sean Greer's new "The Story of a Marriage," when I came upon this quoted bit from none other than Henry James, who was writing (Updike tells us) to Sarah Orne Jewett:

"You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like—the real thing is almost impossible to do, & in its essence the whole effect is nought.... You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman,—or rather fifty—whose own thinking was intensely-otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force—& even then it's all humbug."

Humbug? I thought. Oh my. Please, after all this time and work, don't tell me that.

The key, I've always thought, to historical fiction, is to live it in your mind as if it is happening right now. To not let a single speck of dust layer down upon the story. To achieve the essential urgency.

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