From 17. –19. February 2001, a symposium on „War and Britishness“ was held at the University of Tübingen, Germany. During the symposium, Julian Rathbone gave an author’s reading and discussed his work with the participants.On this page you can read through the discussion and listen to it. You can also download the text as a document if you click here (right click,save as), or listen to it you click here.
| "[W]hen one writes a history novel, one is writing fiction. In other words, like all fiction it is likely to be a pack of lies" |
Julian Rathbone:
I'll just say a few words before I let you ask me questions. Just some general thoughts about writing history novels or historical novels, whatever you like to call them. The first thing which is fairly obvious but needs to be said is that when one writes a history novel, one is writing fiction. In other words, like all fiction it is likely to be a pack of lies. Some of the reasons for this I expressed in a very short introduction I wrote to a short story. This short story appeared in an anthology of mystery stories set in the past celebrating the works of Ellis Peters, an English novelist who wrote history crime with the medieval monk Cadfael as a detective. A lot of writers were asked to contribute to this anthology and I was one of them, and we were also asked to contribute a very short introduction. "All historical fiction including mystery stories invariably betrays and portrays the time it was written in as much or more than it accurately represents the time in which it is set. This is (a) inevitable and (b) generally not acknowledged. No matter how we will do our research, we experience our sources through 20th century sensibilities. One cannot for instance experience the piece of coarse worsted as worn by a medieval peasant. Awareness of Marks and Spencer lingerie remains indelibly at the back of the mind, and elsewhere. This is just as true where we consider works of fiction written in the past but adapted or dramatised, or even more so when we read modern sequels to say Jane Austen’s Emma or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. No amount of care with historical reconstructions of costumes, manners, etiquette, horses, carriages and the rest can hide the fact that we are looking at or reading a construct made by a contemporary mind for contemporary consumption. All this is all right if one accepts that a historical fiction is a straightforward commercial venture designed to sell to a substantial and paying audience, a product it will enjoy and from which it may even learn something about our times here and now. But let us not imagine that historical fiction helps us to understand the real Jane Austen or the real 19th century. Historical fiction reflects the way we are now far more than the way we were then."
Of course a lot of actual history, serious history, suffers from the same
failing, if it is a failing. All history has an agenda: in English
history writing in the 19th century this was the justification of a
hegemony the Whig interpretation of British history
supported the act of settlement of
the 1780`s and the rule of the oligarchy. Later history writing became
justification of imperialism the
bringing of a superior civilisation to benighted
races, races without a history as we thought the white men’s burden which in
turn led to a justification sometimes of racialism.
History may also be written in order to support or justify intellectual theories or positions such as dialectical materialism or, on the other side, the triumph of global capitalism and the end of history.
What is the sort of agenda that a
historical novelist may have for setting his fiction in a historical past?
Well as I have suggested his first agenda is probably to make money.
People buy popular fiction good or bad according to genre preferences. Some
like crime, fantasy, science fiction, romance, some even buy literary novels
and some like history novels. Most of what I have written has been crime
fiction, but the three historicals that I have written have done better than
any of the crime ones, so it is not surprising
I am now writing a fourth historical novel.
| "And the underline theme of nearly all of that stuff was the goodness of being British." |
But
one does have more serious agenda. Both often not entirely conscious. The
conscious level it might be broadly political, philosophical to set forth a
view a point of view. But more likely one is using history to work out
personal obsessions. My own concerns when I have been writing about the past
have their bases in accidents of my upbringing. They’ve combined because of
these two large themes which are big for me, big for many of my nationality and big for
many of my generation and big for this conference. The two themes being war
and Britishness. I was four in 1939 and 10 in 1945, for three of those years I
did not see my father. My mother and I followed the war’s progress on big
maps with flags. We went to the
cinema probably twice a week and saw probably a hundred or more newsreels and propaganda films. Fictional films that were often even more propaganda than
those made by the government. And we listened to wireless bulletins maybe two
or three times a day. All this had a huge effect on people of my age. It was
worse in many ways than being brought up by the Jesuits. You know what the
Jesuits say: "Give me a child at seven and I will give you the man." Well
seven was the age when all that was happening to me.
And
the underlying theme of nearly all of that stuff was the goodness of being
British. One crucial, one symptomatic moment which is still often repeated in
the English media and which I think I saw when it was originally shown,
sums up an awful lot of all this: It was a newsreel of the king, King George
VI , visiting the working-class East End of London shortly after a bomb had actually hit Buckingham Palace. And an Eastender working-class women
shouting out: "You are a good king" and to which he answered "And you
are a good people."
All
this left its mark. Something I try to understand,
work through, accept, reject in my historical works. It wasn’t till some
time that I began to really try to analyse what was going on in my head that I
developed a certain obsession which at school developed through various other
things into a almost passionate obsession with the Duke of Wellington
which in
many ways considering the rest of my intellectual make-up is extremely
unlikely in that he was probably the most reactionary Prime Minister that
England had ever had and a very, very strong upholder of
the old regime of the way things were and so on. Although he had a pragmatic
good sense as well which allowed him to encourage Catholic emancipation in
Ireland and withdraw his opposition to the great Reform Bills of 1832. Out of this obsession I wrote Joseph which has a hero, an antihero, who
is a coward, a schemer, a conman and is in some ways in 
the book contrasted
with the Duke. Possibly I was expressing through this antihero my own guilt,
for not being part of the war, being too young for it. And some of this
carries on into Harold and The Last English King. But there I also began to
develop an interest in what Britishness is, what I think of as Britishness and
more specifically Englishness. As you know
the United Kingdom is becoming marginally and slowly less United, and suddenly
it seems to be important to speak of oneself as being English as well as
British or instead of being British. You must understand that these obsession
that I am talking about are only a part - possibly a minor part - of what Georg
Lukács calls "intellectual Physiognomy" my intellectual Physiognomy .
Apart from being a war-loving patriot I am in my daily life a pacifist, a
libertarian anarchist, an
anti-imperialist, a socialist and a not too-well informed Marxist.
So I understood that you were interested in talking to me about the
sources for The Last English King,
and
I think what I have been trying to say in this introduction is that the so-called actual history that is in
The Last English King does indeed come from
history books. But a very eclectic and very serendipitous selection of history books. Obviously the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
but apart from that one or two serious histories Dorothy Thompson
Stenton’s History of
Anglo Saxon England (Anglo-Saxon
England Frank
M. Stenton Paperback - 812
pages 3rd Ed (31 May, 2001))
and so on. And an awful lot of semi-popular history with titles as
"Decisive Battles on British Soil" or "Daily Life in Anglo Saxon Times". I also reread or read some Anglo Saxon
poetry. There are chunks of Beowulf in The Last English King presented as
a dream
that Walt has. There is also a bit of The Seafarer in it. But in short because I am a fiction writer and not a historian the real sources
are the same as for any
fiction writer, poet, dramatist: they are my inner life. History is to me what
imagery or verse form might be to a poet. It is the scaffolding within which
the structure is built or,
at best, the best bricks and water which gives it form. Don’t ask
me too much about my Anglo Saxon sources. I won’t be able to tell you more
than I have already.
The Discussion
Questions:
1.
Q:
What
led you to the idea to write the novel from the point of view of one of the
bodyguards or Housecarls of King Harold?
Rathbone:
I
already mentioned Georg
Lukács. I read The History novel - I actually refused
to read it until I had written Joseph because I didn’t want
him to influence me too much - but one of the important things he says
about history novels is that your central character should not be the major
character in history but should be minor characters who have seen the major
characters to some extent from the outside. I also wanted a framework to set
the book in, and Walt and his running away from Hastings and his travels
through Europe and Asia Minor gave me
a framework as he comes to terms through his travels with what has happened to
him.
2.
Q: Could the final sentence “Winter lay ahead” be taken as a reminiscent of the 12th and early 13th century myth of the Norman yoke?
Rathbone: Yes, except that I slightly take exception to your term „myth“ This was one of the things that did surprise me the more I read about the period and the immediate years and century or so after it. And, I think, gave me a clue – whether it is a valid one or not, it is not really for me to say – but a clue, as to what the British character is, that, I think, out of the Norman Conquest came this extraordinary divide. The Norman were, well, there were only probably about eight to ten thousand of them in a population which I think was over a million. They had to ruthlessly put down several revolts and uprisings, very ruthlessly. They took on board, they were forced to, a whole sort of cadre of collaborators of people who were prepared to go along with them and who became absorbed into their culture. Its English law continued to be written in Latin and Norman-French until, I do not think any of it was written in English until about 1350, which is a long time – three hundred years. The first English king who spoke English as a first language and considered himself to be English, rather than Angevin-French, was Henry V., which is another one hundred years later. So, yes, this was a winter for the Anglo-Saxons. And, I think, as I said, I put in the thought purely as a very personal thesis, I have no means of seriously backing it, but I think, what I still do see is a very deep divide in British culture. The root of a notorious class consciousness, class systems and so on goes back to this period; and what has remained throughout English literature and English history is two traditions.
3.
Q: Are all the allusions to Edward's homosexuality entirely fictitious?
Rathbone:
That is interesting. The first indication that I had of it -
and I wish I could remember the exact phrase, which I cannot - was
actually in Stenton’s Anglo Saxon Enland; which, in just one
sentence says something like „he was always more friendly with men than
women“ or something of this sort. And then, of course there is the fact that
he never had children and it is likely that his marriage was not fulfilled.
And of course, it is something that no source clearly says and now of course
there is absolutely no proof of it, whatsoever. But there is just enough sort
of shadowing around to justify doing it.
4.
Q:
Did he in fact actually have such good relationship with Tostig?
Rathbone:
Yes, he did. Tostig was a close companion through his early years as king.
5.
Q: Why is the book called “The Last English King” and not “The Last Anglo-Saxon King”
Rathbone:
In sense it is a joke. At the time I was writing it there was a lot of, well,
the English Royal Family was going through a period of really quite marked
unpopularity...and it became quite a common thing to refer to them as „this
German family“, that rules us. This made one realise
that William the Conqueror was not English. This is where you run into trouble
as to how you define „Englishness.“ Or,
what is „The English“. But certainly, after the Norman dynasty when they became the Angevin-Plantagenets they were a French family. And after
that, half-French..., some Welsh, after that Scottish, after that German and
so on. So that was one justification. I will tell you the story I told last
night. This October I went to a re-enactment of the battle of Hastings. And
there was a vast crowd, actually more people in the crowd, than there had been
at the battle. And a couple of thousand of
actual participants, it was quite an impressive occasion. But there was
as usual one of these characters for the public address system, who was
telling you what was happening, and trying to get you to applaud and join in.
And every time he mentioned Harold, everybody cheered, and every time he
mentioned William everybody booed – these fourteen thousand people. And,
eventually he said: „You must not boo William, he was English as well, he
was part of what became English“, everybody booed him then. So, whether you
take the term as an accurate term or not, it is certainly one that has appeal with a lot of people.
6.
Q:
We were talking yesterday about identity and the process of identifying and
characterising the enemy. And it is quite interesting comparing what you are
saying about English identity with the Scots. Well it is a cliché
to say that Scots are much surer about who they are than the English are about who they
are, but it does suggest that one of the reasons why the Scots are surer
about who they are is because they have a very clearly identified enemy; in
England that is very much more mixed up, as I think your description of
cheering Harold and booing William suggests.
Rathbone:
Yes, I think in so far as there is an English identity separate from the
Scots or the Welsh or the Irish, I would locate it in the English working
classes: the non-Norman, non-official, non-acceptable, or accepted, side of
Englishness. And I think their enemy has always been the bosses, which,
broadly speaking, is what the Norman became or created.
7.
Q:
The book has an introductory note about the anachronisms. And I think part
of the joys of reading the book is tracing the anachronisms. Could you tell us
something about those?
Rathbone:
Yes. It started as joke, and remains a joke. There
are frequent half-lines and so on from later poetry, particularly Shakespeare
and later than that. It became after a time I begun to ask myself why I was
doing this. And I think it is possibly a symptom of incipient old age that one
feels, that time is not necessarily an arrow, that it is more a
sort of a
knotted string, which you can pull pieces out of. It is a cliché
that the past
is present in the present, or creates the present. I began to have the feeling,
that the present exists in the past, so I began to play with this idea. It
became a bit of a joke with my editor who spotted most of the Shakespeare and
allowed me to keep some of them and bade me to take some of them out. But I am
afraid, he did not know Yeats. When Walt asks Quint „What are all these
buildings for?“ in Byzantium, and he answers „They are monuments to their
own magnificence“. That got left in.
8.
Q:
The editor actually wanted you to take out some of them?
Rathbone:
He thought I was overdoing it a bit. But it is something I continue to do.
There are elements of it in „Joseph“, not many, but some. And there are
some in the book that just came out, The Kings of Albion.
9.
Q:
I do have another question about the sources. Most sources are Norman
sources and we do have a rather Norman view of the whole conquest. How
important was it for you to shift the view to an English view and make it a
little bit more patriotic for the English?
Rathbone:
Well, that is the whole point. I have to confess, well, it is now four years
since I wrote the book, and if somebody is constantly writing books and moving
from one book to another, and they are all rather different from each other,
like an actor learns a part, I tend to forget it as soon as I finish it. But
one thing that did come across, the more I read about it, was that all the
earliest sources, up to about 1120 or so, were Norman and were clearly biased
and written as propaganda to quite a large extent. You then did begin to get
people here and there, chroniclers here and there recording events, now forty,
fifty or sixty years old, putting a completely different slant on it. And of
course the contemporary, I mean modern, historian tends always to favour that
which is closest to the event. And so the Norman sources continue to be
accepted as being the true ones, or likely to be truer than the ones that were
written up to a hundred years later. Having got over that and realised that
some historians do think that the later sources might be the more accurate
ones and that supported what I already wanted to believe.
10.
Q:
In your short introduction you said that your book is influenced by present
day notions. And how do Women play a role in your book?
Rathbone: I think, fairly inevitably, they do not play a very great role in „The Last English King“, simply because I could not find any that did. In my other work, particularly the so-called straight novels, as opposed to crime novels, but also in crime novels, I hope I am a paid-up „feminist new man“, whatever.
11.
Q:
I think you already touched on this point, but for historians the question
of objectivity is of course always a big problem. And do you as a writer of
fiction find that a problem as well, or do you just say „this is a problem
that does not really concern me, because I am after all writing fiction“?
Rathbone:
Yes, I think, that is more or less the case. If I am dealing with a theme,
like gender or whatever, then I hope I am not following blind prejudice...I am
taking what I take to be an objective view; but I doubt that it is. But,
broadly speaking, I think that is a historian’s problem, not a novelist’s.
12.
Q:
Taking into consideration what you said earlier about the many influences on a
history novel of our present time and of several personal experiences, would
you say that you would have been able to write „The Last English King“ in
the same way, say, thirty years ago?
Rathbone:
I think thirty years is probably just about the margin.Thirty years ago I was
intellectually more or less the person than I am now. Probably fifty years ago,
when I would only have been sixteen anyway, I was much more influenced by the
things that surrounded me. It obviously would have been a different book but I
would have written from much the same sort of stand point. As far as pastiche
and post-modern is concerned, yes it is,... I am never very sure what
„post-modern“ means, but there is certainly
a lot of pastiche
in it. And I use pastiche in a lot in other books
that I have written, which I enjoy doing,... possibly self-indulgent, you
might say.
...
13.
Q:
Reading your novel, I was struck by the amount of detail which has gone into
it from the Bayeux Tapestry. And I remember a very, very minor scene which
occurs just before the taking of the oath, where Duke William recommends to
Harold and Walt that they go and see the embroidery in the monastery. What led
you to this introduction of the
embroidery?
Rathbone:
I do not know. Again, it was a bit of a joke. One of the underlying themes is
the destruction that the Norman carried out on Anglo-Saxon civilisation,
particularly in terms of actual artefacts; tapestry, gold work, sculpture,
illumination and so on were either destroyed or shipped off to France. And one
of the things that I came across just simply was the standard of Anglo-Saxon
actual tapestries with embroidery, and here is everybody going on about this
wonderful needlework, which is basically really rather simple and naive and
cartoonish.