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.
