What I personally have found most difficult when ‘turning the pages’ from academic writing to fiction writing is transitioning from the expository style to the narrative style.
The specific challenge I’m going to focus on are my attempts to introduce a serious moral or ethical dilemma going well beyond any conflict experienced directly by the characters. While not strictly essential to the twists and turns of plot and character development, I’ve always wanted to suggest deeper social, historical, and political concerns. And I know I’ve failed, because thus far no reader, reviewer, literary agent, editor, critic, or friend has ever said “Gee Ian, what an interesting deep and profound issue you introduced in your novel!” Ok, so now you know how sensitive us late-onset novelists actually are!
I’m going to illustrate all this by summarizing the hoped-for deeper themes within the plots of four of my five novels. I do think it is rather predictable that retired academics assume they can write fiction, just like every celebrity, politician, or faded Hollywood star is convinced they can write a charming children’s book. But I swear I had had the idea for my first novel, Forgive Me My Trespasses, at least 10 years before I retired with time to write it. My idea was simple. I had seen media reports that Bill Clinton, after avoiding impeachment in 1999, was receiving counseling. And Monica Lewinsky was being treated for depression. I’d had 30 years’ experience of doing psychotherapy and I couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like to be the therapist for Bill Clinton, or for Monica Lewinsky? Could one, or even should one, help them cope with the shame and guilt, or with the opprobrium heaped upon them by society? At the time, an important new concept had emerged professionally, the idea of self-compassion—the need for clients to forgive themselves for their transgressions. Can there be any redemption for men of influence and achievement who had become caught up in sexual scandals and accusations of sexual impropriety: Ted Kennedy, Eliot Spitzer, Clarence Thomas, all appear, thinly disguised. Writing today I might have included Al Franken and Andrew Cuomo. The principal character, Professor Dave Gordon, is, of course, an academic clinical psychologist, teaching a graduate university class in psychotherapy. By a plausible set of circumstances he had in the past treated Monica as a client, and he uses this case study to teach about the treatment of guilt and shame, with various disastrous interpersonal consequences for him and the students. Thus the novel, which is essentially a satirical comedy about university life, has this very serious and complex underlying theme which would appear to be highly relevant in the age of the Me Too movement. Yet no reader has ever interpreted the book as relevant to the ethics of responding to and preventing sexual harassment.
Let me try a second example. My next novel, The Eye of Kuruman, is a love story set in Botswana and South Africa—write about what you know, yes? The protagonist is a young public health nurse who’s been sent into remote rural areas by the World Health Organization to improve women’s maternity health services. She’s torn between her love for two very different dynamic men—that is her main conflict in the story. But she is also wrestling with her desire to be accepted by the local people, as was her hero David Livingstone, and to introduce Western medical practices without being patronizing or undermining the authority of the traditional healers in the villages. I used the device of connecting her childhood reading about Dr. David Livingstone, who greatly respected and understood the people of Kuruman a hundred and fifty years earlier. He was a hopeless missionary, he only converted one person the whole time he was in Southern Africa, but he recognized—which I learned from closely reading his diaries–that customary African practices were no less meaningful than his “scientific” approach to medicine. But again, I failed to make that deeper theme recognizable.
Now I’m on this self-pitying roll, let me mention that novel number four, The First Village, is set in Roman Britain in 383 AD. Everyone who has read it describes it as a sort boys adventure story with Roman army deserters and Celtic warriors and a beautiful princess chasing each other around Wales. But the deeper question I’d hoped to explore was this. In that year, AD 383, after almost 400 hundred years of military occupation, an ambitious general pulled the entire Roman army out of Britain to march on Rome and establish himself as Emperor. Suddenly, a dominant colonial power was gone. What would the locals do, I wondered? There is no written historical record, and so I offered two scenarios— one in which the Christian domina of a Roman villa tries to protect the community by sharing her wealth and encouraging their agricultural self-sufficiency; and the other in which her intellectual son and high ranking military officer attempts to maintain civil order by elevating the local tribal chieftain to a kingship. I thought it presented a rather fascinating socio-political conundrum. Apparently I was alone!
So, now, in Singing Grass, which is a kind of psychological mystery, I again had a clinical psychologist, Richard Young, seeing an unusual and difficult client in therapy. The client’s name is Christopher Carson, and he bears an uncanny resemblance to the historic Christopher “Kit” Carson. Is the modern Christopher Carson experiencing vicarious guilt for the actions of his namesake? The key back story to the plot, therefore, had to be the violence and injustice imposed on the Native American nations during the western expansion. And lots of American readers have told me that they were not aware of many of the truly horrible massacres and acts of betrayal enacted by our national heroes, from George Washington to Kit Carson. But my own more fundamental moral question, and one I’d often puzzled over, was a bit different.
To save me from too much laborious research, I wrote to a number of distinguished academic historians and posed my question: Why did there appear to be no large-scale protests or political opposition to the decimation of the American Indians, such as was the case with the abolitionist movement against slavery? One historian kindly put me onto an excellent book called The White Man’s Indian, which summarizes the complex history of attitudes towards the indigenous people. And the answer, by the way, is essentially that there were no significant voices raised against the genocide. In order to be able to explore that deeper theme, I made Dr. Richard Young an immigrant from New Zealand, which allowed him to ask questions of actual Americans, in addition to being tormented by his weird client’s highly distressing stories of the past.
There are only two passages that addressed this deeper question. The first one I wrote directly, based on Richard becoming interested in the beautiful pottery of the Indian nations of the American Southwest, after he’d been given one exquisite piece when a graduate student in New York:
That was the beginning of Richard’s fascination–and of his clay pot and bowl collection. Good pieces signed by the artist are quite expensive and he’d had to be selective. Reg gave him helpful suggestions and guided his choices. And then, suddenly, and hurtfully, circumstances had brought him to the Southwest and the heartland of the artistry with which he had become so entranced.
All the roots of his current obsession were now entangled. The beauty of his pots had entwined itself with his growing understanding, as a foreigner, of the tragedy of the native peoples of the Americas. His wife, a creative artist, whose work he loved, had alerted him to the unique talents nurtured by the region and the strikingly different beauty of the indigenous artwork. The intermingled emotions cried out a simple question: How could the national diversities, the social complexities, and the artistic and creative accomplishments of millions of indigenous people have been so easily dismissed as worthless by the first European colonists? People who had complex political structures, like the Iroquois and the Incas, who had thriving communities like Casas Grandes and its closely related Chaco Canyon, and produced wonderful art and pottery and weaving, could be chased away, or massacred, or exterminated. How was that possible?
Fifty million people at the time of Columbus? Diverse cultures and nations stretching from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn. Dating back six thousand years. Muttering to himself was becoming a feature of the distress growing within him–triggered by a confusing and toxic client, Christopher bloody Carson.
And a bit later I tried to be more subtle by embedding Richard’s moral outrage within a conversation between him and Sharon. Sharon has been impatient with Richard’s growing obsession with horrific events she’d rather not think about, but then surprises him with a new insight. One evening he promises to pour her an amaretto with double thick cream and a dash of Kahlua if she’ll listen to his latest discovery–that the historical Kit Carson, after driving the Navajo out of their stronghold, Canyon de Chelly, had ordered their three thousand prized peach trees to be cut down.
“You know hon, as his last act, it seems to me, a psychologist always trying to understand human behavior, to be such a hateful, angry, act of wanton nastiness. The only possibly way to understand it is as a severe form of scorched earth policy—”
“Sure. That’s plausible, dear,” Sharon interrupted. “But let me offer something else—isn’t that why you’re talking to me, or are you just thinking out loud to yourself?”
“I’d love any thoughts you might have, truly.”
“Well, did I ever tell you one of my favorite courses at college was a history class on attitudes in America during the colonial era? We read a bunch of accounts from that time period and one of the things I remember the professor talking about—he was way passionate so it, like, stuck—was the early English settlers saw themselves as gentlemen farmers, which they thought created a classless society in which everybody could have a bit of land for themselves. Of course, this kinda ignored the fact other people were already on it.
“So,” Sharon continued, “my prof argued that in order to justify shoving them off the land, they had to depict Native Americans as wanderers, who didn’t really own anything and could just be pushed out of their tribal area because it wasn’t a permanent home. So the colonists had to portray the natives as hunters, not serious farmers, like them. If they were farmers, working the land, then they couldn’t justify displacing them quite so easily.
“Now, if the Navajo had thriving corn and beans and also wonderfully productive ancient orchards, that would challenge the narrative they were hunters who could just piss off and go hunt elsewhere.”
“Jesus,” Richard exclaimed, “ you must have paid a lot more attention to your professors than I ever did. But that’s fascinating. My only thought is they didn’t seem to need any damn justification for stealing the land.”
“Maybe most didn’t,” Sharon agreed, “ but there were some religious voices seeking to convince themselves what they were doing was OK in the sight of God. That’s why they kept on having to refer to the native people as ‘savages’—we did a couple of classes on that discourse as well. The fact you’re now telling me of the Navajo being good farmers and easily able to feed their people in addition to their great hunting prowess, must have been especially irksome to hostile white people. You’re the psychologist—don’t people particularly hate it when their deepest beliefs and prejudices are being challenged with evidence?”
Richard sat back and stared at his wife in admiration. Artists like her sometimes pretended their skills were in their visual creations and tend to denigrate their verbal and reasoning skills. But he’d come to appreciate through many different avenues, that Sharon was clever and wise and really understood people, without any formal training in psychology—maybe because of that, he thought ruefully.
“You’re amazing,” he said with feeling. “I adore you!”
Sharon smirked. “Can we please go to bed now? I was tired before the Amaretto and now I can barely keep my eyes open.”
Subtle, I was trying to be, but it’s about as subtle as a bowl of porridge. And once again I’ve had no comments from any reader that this socio-historical question is one that was worth exploring or was a plausible contributing factor to Richard’s eventual mental breakdown and hospitalization.
I do have some insight. As a professor you can tell people stuff. As a novelist you can’t be so direct. I still have to find a way of revealing truths about human nature, showing not telling, so that by the end of the story the reader will also have absorbed my attempts to explore deeper moral and ethical dilemmas that interest me. I’ve got to be much more careful never to preach or to try to be directly persuasive or let the characters pontificate. The action elements of the story have to carry any messages beyond the basic plot, and this is something I still have to learn to do. Or no come to think of it, I’m an academic—I can just end each chapter with a list of learning outcomes!
Thank you!