A Reader's Companion

A Reader’s Companion to the Novel ALEMETH with Commentary by the Author in Which Particular Attention is Given to What is Real and What is Not jwcarvin © 2017 WARNING This Reader’s Companion is meant to be read after the novel, Alemeth, is read. It contains plot spoilers and other information which may detract from appreciation of the novel. i ii Introduction I am intrigued by the past for the reason William Faulkner gave: that it is not, really, even past. It not only shaped us to be who we are; it is, in a real sense, who we are, and we can never escape its grasp. I am also intrigued by the challenge of reconstructing it. Understanding what is real about it, and what is not, is almost the same thing as understanding ourselves, and nearly as hard. As Gordon Falkner points out in Chapter 67, we’re on a steamboat of present time: after we’ve gone a few feet upriver, the murky bottom will never be as it was when we first passed through it. Even as I write, pieces of evidence are settling behind me, and not (I hasten to point out) as they first lay. What should I expect to find when I turn back to examine them, stirring things up again as I do? Can I keep my own perspective, all my assumptions and biases, from affecting what I see? Reconstructing the past necessarily involves an effort to separate fact from fiction. But as Don Doyle writes in his wonderful book, Faulkner’s County,1 “historians are among the first to admit that the distinction between fact and fiction is hardly clear cut.” The best historians sometimes get things wrong. Meanwhile, and perhaps not as obviously, good fiction writers often get things right. In writing Alemeth, I faced this in multiple ways. Every piece of evidence raised more questions and every inference drawn was a signpost to what it claimed was the truth. I’m sure I got much wrong. But after getting to know a character a bit, I’d start speculating, suppose that he might have done something – thinking, as I did so, that I was writing fiction – only to learn, through later research, that he had done it. James and Mary Ann Brown, for example, were very wealthy; Presbyterians traditionally had a reputation for considering education important; Mary Ann Brown had gone to school back in Connecticut and had originally gone to work for Colonel Brown as a teacher to his children. That much was suggested by research. Since they had a home in Oxford, I started to plan story lines that had them heavily involved with the University that got its start there. It seemed like fiction at the time. Only later did I discover that Colonel Brown was not only interested in the school, but one of its first Trustees. We don’t know what we don’t know. And the difficulty of distinguishing between history and fiction is, in the end, one of Alemeth’s main themes. The fiction writer is advised to “write what he knows,” to “let his characters tell him what they would do” so that they “come to life” and “become real.” The biographer, meanwhile, has to speculate, has to form hypotheses in the effort to understand his “real” subject’s psyche, but inevitably gets some of it wrong. As Gordon says to Howard at page 192, “A living, breathing human being can’t be reduced to a few words; why should we think a dead one any easier?” More broadly, however, it isn’t only writers of fiction and history that have difficulty distinguishing between these two processes, and between the reliability of their outcomes. The more I researched, the more I saw characters who faced the same difficulties understanding their 1 Doyle, Don, Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha, University of North Carolina Press, 2001 3 world as I did. Fact and fiction, I decided, are practically twins; Clio and Calliope are easily confused, for those who live as much as for those who write. My subjects lived in an age of great discoveries and inventions – the cotton gin, friction matches, soil fertilization, photography, railroads, germ theory, Darwinian evolution, astronomy, weaponry, medicine, and – most importantly – the revolutionary notion that God may not have intended people of color to be the white man’s slaves after all. These people were among the privileged, the well-educated, the well-informed. Especially around the University, they were impressed with their own understanding of science, touting the discoveries and accomplishments of their day, but blind to the fact that even in their great centers of learning, error ran rampant. What they believed was as much a function of tradition and rationalization as of science, on everything from spiritualism and proper wedding attire to the apparent justice of slavery. Their difficulty distinguishing between fact and fiction was remarkable; they possessed a gargantuan capacity for error. One of the final edits before the book went to press was the removal of an illustration I had composed as a frontispiece. I imagined the figure on the dock was Alemeth (or me, as his chronicler). To me, the river suggested the flow of time through history; the leaves of trees represented all the paper (letters, newspaper articles, historical records) that has come down through time to become the scattered, fragile clues which people use as they try to reconstruct history. Like the mud at the river-bottom, the leaves above aren’t frozen in time, available for close inspection. The chronicler might stand beneath the tree as its leaves fall out of branches, clutch at them as they fall, try to learn from them, hoping to put them into a sensible order, to create a replica of the tree as it was. But the tree cannot be climbed. The branches are out of reach. The chronicler can’t see the branches from any anywhere but down below, can’t figure out which fallen leaf came from which branch or indeed whether any of them came from other trees altogether. All the while, the leaves are, one by one, becoming detached and being swept away by the wind. So there’s little left for the figure on the dock to do but sit and watch the tree – or the river, as it passes – unsure, even, which of the two he is looking at. 4 What the differences are between history and fiction others may know better than I. But in case it may be of interest to others, I’ve decided to try to sort out what I believe to be fact, and what I believe to be fiction, in Alemeth – to describe the leaves I collected, and how I went about trying to put them back together – despite the impossibility of getting them all back exactly as they were. By my count, if you count as a “character” anyone mentioned by name, there are twenty one entirely fictional characters in Alemeth – many of them slaves, entirely fictional in the sense that, slaves not being named in censuses prior to 1870, I had few names of slaves to draw upon. In contrast, there are well over two hundred (mostly white) historical characters, drawn from my effort to reconstruct history. They are “real” characters at least in the minimal sense that the their names were drawn from the Census or some other historical record, and the character I portray was consistent with the information in that source, and with any other source I could find, about that historical person. That limited, one-dimensional historicity applies to most of the characters only referred to once or twice; as to them, the rest is all fiction. As to those who appear more often, there has typically been much greater research, and more evidence found. Many might call these characters historical, and leave it at that – but for the reason Gordon keeps reminding us, to say that such a character is in any sense “real” is a pretty bold claim. Obviously, all the dialogue and interior monologues included in Alemeth are fictional Beyond that, I have attempted in what follows here to distinguish fact from fiction in the novel Alemeth more or less sequentially, by chapter. The dates given under the chapter numbers that follow are sometimes historically accurate, “known” to be the dates on which the events described actually occurred; sometimes they are hypothetical, especially if the events described are hypothetical. But as a whole, they may assist in trying to piece together what was real and what was not – an undertaking which perhaps the reader will be more successful at than I have been. I have striven to cite sources where I’ve been able to keep track of them, but sadly, my sources, too, sometimes fall from the tree before I can capture them, further hampering the effort to distinguish between what was “real” and what I only imagined. At the end of the day, I strongly suspect that most of what’s described below as historical really happened; and that most of the rest didn’t. But it’s only a good faith suspicion, and the reader is free to draw his own conclusions. 5 About Plot and Theme I was very pleased by the nice things written about Alemeth in Kirkus Reviews. After complimenting several aspects of the book as “masterful,” “sensitive,” “thoughtful,” “well- drawn,” etc., the reviewer had one criticism. He or she commented, “Frustratingly, the story fails to fully bloom into a coherent plot. It reads like a chronicle of successive events, leaving the reader to wonder what thematic thread binds it all.” This criticism did not completely surprise me.

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