Asti hustvedt biography of albert
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Thanks to Historia Magazine editor Katherine Clements for including this on HWA’s website in autumn 2017.
TRADUCING THE PAST
Do you worry about misrepresenting historical figures?
“You faithless writer,” cry my characters, as I attribute to them words and attitudes they would renounce.
Tom Stoppard, in Travesties, took care to give Lenin only speeches that were historically attributed to him. But with his main character, Henry Carr, he was more daring. Carr’s fame (reported in Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce) rested on his quarrel with the great author over a pair of trousers he’d bought to play Algernon in Joyce’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
How surprised Stoppard was, after his play opened, to receive a letter from Carr’s widow. Thankfully, she was generous about any misrepresentation.
How would you feel if you received a letter from a relative of your character (especially if you’d portrayed them cavalierly and unflatteringly)?
If they’re dead, is it still libel?
I have made a prince behave like a cad. I’ve made a famous engineer unwitting accomplice to conspiracy. I’ve put an erotic memoirist at the heart of a network that would trouble Operation Yew Tree. Might their descendants demand restitution?
Top ten Traducements
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Necessary Fiction
Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their research for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Maud Casey writes about The Man Who Walked Away from Bloomsbury.
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My most recent novel is “inspired by” (in TV docudrama parlance) a 19th century French psychiatric case study. It required a lot of earnest research and a lot of crashing around. I like to think it’s always that way when a fiction writer is starting a conversation with a particular moment in history and with a particular historical figure, however obscure. Part hitting the books and part flailing around, with an emphasis on the latter.
It was Ian Hacking’s amazing book, Mad Travellers: On Transient Mental Illness that introduced me to the real Albert Dadas. Hacking’s book, which began as a series of lectures, describes—and this is a gross reduction of his nuanced take—the way a particular psychiatric diagnosis arises at a particular moment in history, for cultural, nationalistic, and social reasons. It features the case of Dadas as an example of a diagnosis that appeared and then disappeared. Dadas was the first diagnosed fugueur (which was the title of my novel until a friend gently suggested I should be able to pronounce the title
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Medical Muses: Fury as a societal condition
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