HISTORY AND FICTION

In late 2006, two Australian historians (Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen) published essays in which they suggested that “Grenville sees her novel as a work of history”. This suggestion is incorrect, but it was presented forcefully by historians who are widely respected, so I felt it was necessary to reply.

“I'm a great admirer of Inga Clendinnen's writing and found The History Question full of the insights and thoughtfulness that characterise all her work. She spends some time discussing The Secret River, and I'm glad of the opportunity to make a few comments about that aspect of her essay.

Clendinnen isn't the only historian to think that I regard The Secret River as history, and that I claim for it the authority of history: Mark McKenna (mentioned by Clendinnen in her essay) led the charge a few months ago. Clendinnen paraphrases McKenna's argument when she says, “Grenville discovered she could write history after all. The novel is a serious attempt to do history… Grenville sees her novel as a work of history…” Although Clendinnen gives no source for this claim, it could well have come from McKenna's piece, so in this reply I'll refer to his essay as well as hers.

Both McKenna's essay and Clendinnen's quote me as claiming to have written history - and in fact to have written better history than historians. However, the quotes that they use have been narrowly selected, taken out of context, and truncated. They don't represent what I actually think. But, like Chinese Whispers, those “quotes” are now being quoted by others - and for this reason I'd like to put the record straight.

Here it is in plain words: I don't think The Secret River is history - it's a work of fiction. Like much fiction, it had its beginnings in the world, but those beginnings have been adapted and altered to various degrees for the sake of the fiction.

“One of my ancestors gave me the basis for certain details in the early life of William Thornhill, and other characters share some qualities with historical figures. All the people within these pages, however, are works of fiction.

In the course of research I consulted countless documents… and adapted them for my imaginative purposes. Readers of, for example, the Old Bailey transcripts for 1806, and the Governor's dispatches from early Sydney, may recognise a few lines. I acknowledge with gratitude the work of others in making such resources available to a writer of fiction.”

Whenever possible I based events in the book on recorded historical events, adapting and changing them as necessary. Thornhill's first meeting with the Aboriginal people on the Hawkesbury is based on a similar incident involving the first Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip. The incident in which Captain McCallum fails to ambush a group of Aboriginal people is based on many accounts of similar failures by the military. The Proclamation which gives settlers permission to shoot Aboriginal people is taken verbatim from Governor Macquarie's Proclamation of 1816. The massacre scene is based on eyewitness accounts of the Waterloo Creek killings in 1838.

It was important to me that the incidents and characters were solidly based on history, but as a novelist I drew on these historical sources loosely, as a starting-point for the work of the imagination. The final events and characters meld many historical references together - they're fiction, but they're based on fact.”

I'm sorry that my adaptation of historical sources has caused Inga Clendinnen to “flinch” - but it's what fiction writers do: take the world and modify it. I've always made it clear, though, that I have modified it. I've spelled out my awareness that I'm writing fiction, not history.

Of course, it would have been simpler to answer all questions about The Secret River in the way Clendinnen describes Peter Carey doing when interviewed about The True History of the Kelly Gang: by saying flatly, unanswerably: “I made it up.”

But I was interested in trying to do something a little more nuanced than that: to acknowledge the complex relationship, backwards and forwards across an invisible line, between the world of fiction and the world inhabited by living people. In talking about the book in public, I was trying to describe my own journey around that line.

There are plenty of easily-accessible sources, then, for historians to consult in order to find out what I thought I was doing in The Secret River. But these aren't the sources Clendinnen or McKenna has chosen to quote. Instead, they use a few newspaper stories and a radio interview.

First, the context of these interviews: readers (and thus interviewers for book pages and programmes) are interested in the fiction-making process and often want to know “where do you get your ideas?” For a historical novel, they also want to know “how much of it is based on fact?” In other words, the context of my remarks was always that of a writer of fiction answering the question “how did you write this novel?” My answer was that I wasn't writing history, but I wasn't inventing incidents and details out of thin air, either.

In interviews I explained, much as I did on my website quoted above, that I'd taken events from the historical record and shifted their time and place, and that I'd ascribed to one man things that were actually done by another man. I told audiences the different dates, I spelled out the different locations. I made it clear that I'd used the historical record, but that I'd freely adapted it for my purposes, and that although many of the events I describe “really happened”, they didn't happen to a man called William Thornhill in 1816, because he's a fictional construction. In dozens of interviews I was scrupulous in making a distinction between what's described in the historical record and how I'd departed from it.

One of these interviews was with Ramona Koval, in a programme quoted by Clendinnen. I talked about the “experiential research” I did in order to write The Secret River, and how I used empathy - “What would I have done in that situation?” - to try to construct characters. Clendinnen suggests that this is very poor history, because “Grenville would not have been Grenville in that situation.”

I agree - this would be poor history indeed. But these weren't the comments of someone claiming to be doing history and describing how she went about historical research. The context for my remarks about empathy was that Koval had asked me to read a passage from the novel, which included mention of “thole-pins” (an old form of rowlocks). Our conversation began with her inviting me to talk about that aspect of the novel: “I think anybody listening to that must be particularly impressed with the language and the technicalities of the work of the lighterman turned sailor, I suppose, in the colonies. How did you find these ways to express this kind of work?” In other words, this wasn't a question about how to write history: it was a question to a novelist about how she'd written her work of fiction. The context of my remarks about empathy - to which Clendinnen takes such exception - wasn't that of someone explaining how they did history, but someone explaining how they did fiction.

A significant limitation of interviews as a reliable source for debate is that interviews are made on the run. Even politicians, those masters of the one-liner, have been known to get it wrong under those conditions. How much more will writers, who often became writers in the first place because they're not particularly quick on their feet?

Clendinnen (and McKenna before her) quotes from the same radio interview, in which I used the now-infamous “stepladder” image. Their reading of this extract is that I'm claiming a superiority for fiction over history: that fiction is “further up the ladder.”

As her final question that day, with the ABC clock sweeping towards the end of our time in our separate studios, Ramona asked me: “So where would you put your book, finally, if you were laying out books on the history wars? Whereabouts would you slot yours?”

With Windschuttle and Reynolds - the massacre denialists and the massacre acknowledgers - in the front of my mind, I answered: “Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars. [The website transcript of this is “looking down on the history wars” but the audio is clearly “at” - a small but significant distinction.] I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they've got themselves into these polarised positions, and that's fine, I think that's what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other. But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, [emphasis in original audio] and say there is another way to understand it. …That's what I hope this book will be. It stands outside that polarised conflict and says look, this is a problem we really need, as a nation, to come to grips with. The historians are doing their thing, but let me as a novelist come to it in a different way, which is the way of empathising and imaginative understanding of those difficult events. Basically to think, well, what would I have done in that situation, and what sort of a person would that make me?”

Written down and read in cold blood, and without the extra dimension given by tone of voice, this certainly ain't Einstein. But I think it's clear that the stepladder image wasn't being used to imply superiority. The concept I was reaching for was to do with being different from the historians, perched up high on a removed vantage-point where I could watch, but not be involved. My book - because it's a novel - is outside the “history wars”, irrelevant to them. As a novelist, I'm just an interested onlooker who made the mistake of climbing a stepladder rather than a couple of fruit-boxes to get a good view.

I think that comes through pretty unmistakably, but I recognise that the stepladder image might be seen to contain an ambiguity I didn't intend. If I'd been quietly sitting at my desk writing (and then revising at leisure) for Quarterly Essay, I'd have used a different one. However, there's no chance to revise on air.

The fact that this quickly-grabbed image is the one that's being used again and again by historians indicates that this is the only support they can muster for their claim that I think fiction is superior to history. It strikes me as a pretty flimsy support for such a large claim.

In his essay “Writing the Past”, Mark McKenna seems to have been the one to initiate the idea that I claim to be writing history rather than fiction - an idea that Clendinnen then extends. In support of this argument McKenna quotes the “stepladder” image from the Ramona Kovall interview, plus a few stories written for daily newspapers. These are feature pieces and news stories by journalists incorporating brief quotes or paraphrased remarks from me. They're not verbatim transcripts, they don't contain extended quotes, and I didn't see them before publication.

However, these sketchy and partial quotes and paraphrases are the only evidence that McKenna has produced for his claim that I think my novel is history. This is the claim that Clendinnen repeats when she says “Grenville sees her novel as a work of history”. Those newspaper stories are being asked to bear a burden for which they were never intended - to accurately represent my views on a complex subject.

This is by no means to criticise those journalists or their stories. It's to recognise the limitation of the form itself and its context as an ephemeral piece for a daily paper. The problem is not in the pieces themselves, but in the fact that they've been used inappropriately - they've been taken uncritically, at face value, as authoritative evidence.

Much more accurate, considered material was easily available - for example the long piece on my website. I'm surprised that historians are basing such an important argument on these newspaper stories while other sources - ones that give a very different view - are being ignored.

I've also been surprised by the scornful, mocking tone of the historians' discussions of The Secret River. Historians have every right to doubt the value of historical fiction, and to dislike any particular example of it. But personalising the discussion seems to go beyond a fruitful debate about the roles of history and fiction.

I recently heard an interview with Amanda Lohrey in which she mentioned her dislike for historical fiction because it's “bogus”, and next day I read Henry James' comments in a similar vein, as quoted by Clendinnen. I share much of their distrust of historical fiction and am as uncomfortable as they are with the sleight-0f-hand used by the historical novelist.

In fact, The Secret River started life not as a historical novel but as a book of non-fiction -I'd planned a kind of loose biography of my convict ancestor. When I realised - for various reasons and with some dismay - that I was writing a historical novel, I came up with a way of reconciling myself to my uneasiness about that genre. I decided to write a second book to accompany the novel: one in which I'd show where the history ended and the fiction began in The Secret River - a record of the writing process, and of the thinking that lay behind it. Rather than hiding behind the sleight-of-hand of the novelist, I'd try to make the process transparent (in the same way I later attempted to do in interviews). So, concurrently with the novel, I worked on that second book, which has now been published: Searching for the Secret River.

It's a book in which I've tried to explore something of what happens when the novelist's imagination works on the world around them - a world which includes history and historical sources. Readers often ask novelists “is your work autobiographical?” and most novelists hate the question because the answer can be both yes and no. Teasing out the nuances of the yes-ness and the no-ness is a complicated business. In Searching for the Secret River, I've tried to do a similar kind of teasing-out about sources, and to acknowledge both my debt to history (and historians) and the ways I've departed from it, and why.

Clendinnen opens her chapter on The Secret River with the image of history and fiction jogging along together on adjacent tracks in an amicable way. Now, she says, novelists “have been doing their best to bump historians off the track.” I've never wished to challenge historians' right to their track, and I've always assumed that their footing on it was, in any case, unshakably secure.

In my view, novelists are just doing what we've always done - taking aspects of the world and turning them into stories - and are taking up much the same space on the tracks that we always have. There are many and varied tracks back into the past, and my feeling is that there's plenty of room on them for all of us.”

History and Fiction