Taking soundings
When I first set out to write a novel about vaudeville at the turn of the 20th century I found little advice on methodology. Each novelist, it seems, hacks his own route through the wilderness of history. The research process for historical fiction is private; sparks are often kindled years before formal work begins. Sometimes it's ideas that set us off: Annabel Lyon has talked about her long research for The Golden Mean and The Sweet Girl—beginning, although she did not realize it at the time, with her philosophy degree and Aristotle's Poetics. Sometimes it's landscape: Fred Stenson, whose novels The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo are splendid examples of deep research into place, gave me a piece of good counsel when I was setting out on The Little Shadows: “Don’t let the research get too far ahead of the writing. Use the gems as you find them.”
For me, the gems lie in the sound of the period, the words they used. Language holds ideas—it may even be that ideas cannot be held too far in advance of the language to express them, that vocabulary must be quickly invented. In an interview in Puritan Magazine, Guy Vanderhaeghe talks about authenticity of voice, discussing The Last Crossing: “When reading bad historical fiction what often struck me was how the characters often sounded ludicrous, wrong. Queen Boudicca in a metal brassiere, talking like Andrea Dworkin.”
To achieve the vocabulary of the period, I read the words of the period, in fiction, essays, poetry—and particularly the ordinary, intimate language of letters and diaries. The same reading gives entry to social codes, mores and religious thought, subtly or blatantly delivered. How we say things informs, codifies and limits how we are able to think. Until the vocabulary of women’s rights was painfully bashed out, it was literally unthinkable for many people, male and female, that a woman ought to be able to vote. It seems the limits that language puts on our thinking are very often related to who is human, Us, and who (that Other) is not.
Vaudeville language was slangy, expansive, ornate, funny—even ridiculous; the language of an upright sea captain and his wife in 1910 will have an entirely different diction and social code. Fluency and linguistic class markers reveal and betray our origins, our current position, our ambitions; the exercise of a refined woman teaching a savage child not just to climb stairs but to speak and read English is an interesting aspect of Miss Ladd’s story.
The long program of reading I’ve embarked on for The Difference starts within the period, from the seagoing books of Joseph Conrad (particularly his novellas The Shadow Line, Youth and Within the Tides), Jack London, Somerset Maugham, Melville’s Redburn and Stephen Crane’s Men, Women and Boats; my list includes period novels that address practical problems of sailing, like Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, Buchan’s The Island of Sheep, and Forester’s The African Queen; and ranges into the larger picture of sea-routes and navigation (Along the Clipper Way by Francis Chichester, and Sailing Alone Around the World, by Nova Scotia’s Captain Joshua Slocum).
Letters are invaluable for novelists—no other source captures the quotidian life so well, even letters which would have been boring in their day. The letters Miss Ladd’s mother wrote to her father while on her voyages have been collected in Quite a Curiosity: the Sea Letters of Grace Ladd, edited by Louise Nichols. Donal Baird’s Women at Sea in the Age of Sail was one of the books that set me on to recalling Miss Ladd’s stories. There is also a satisfying wealth of edited diaries, not only from seafaring women but from their children, like P.B. Albee’s Letters From Sea, 1882-1901: Joanna and Lincoln Colcord's Seafaring Childhood, and Catherine Petroski’s A Bride's Passage, Susan Hathorn's Year Under Sail.
And that’s only a fragmentary list… I’d better get back to reading.
One thought on “Taking soundings”
Wonderful post and close to my heart. Period language places us in the here and now of then and there and eases us into a sense of place.
This works with two elements; that the language is English and the linguistic time period is close to our own.
As you know, my novel is set in sixteenth century New Spain where the protagonist, Gaspar Yanga is an African slave that escapes to establish the first free palenque in the Northern Hemisphere.
Written in first person narrative, I wonder what your thoughts are about narrative which would obviously not be spoken in the language written.
To write in Middle English would not only alienate the reader but also me! Moreover, in reality, the freed slaves would be speaking in their language and signing in order to communicate. How would this be best described in a way both true to the time but not so foreign that ailienates?
In the language of Shadows, have a spiffy time. 🙂