Falling for Desmoulins

Letters

Vol. 14 No. 17 · 10 September 1992

From Leslie Wilson

P.N. Furbank’s criticisms of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety (LRB, 20 August) reminded me of Jane Austen’s Mr Collins flinching away from a novel he is offered and hiding behind a book of boring sermons instead. Because the meat of Furbank’s criticism is not that the book is a bad one – he spends a whole paragraph admitting that it is a very good one. What he objects to is that anyone should write an ‘entertainment’ about this theme. He doesn’t want the imagination to trespass on what he seems to regard as the exclusive territory of historians. So Furbank states that Hilary Mantel had no right to suggest that Camille Desmoulins might have had homosexual encountets, because he can’t find any suggestion of it in either of two biographies. But it is the business of the imagination and of the novelist to make the connections that the historians can’t allow themselves to make, to say to us ‘What if?’ It is also the business of the novelist to abolish the split between the personal and the public, to ‘humanise’ characters, as Furbank objects to Hilary Mantel humanising Robespierre. It is our job to point out that the political is always personal to someone or other, and generally to rather a lot of people. Besides, Furbank tries to have it both ways. He criticises Hilary Mantel for using her imagination and at the same time – in a series of bewildering intellectual contortions – praises other writers for quirkiness in their handling of the past. Nor does he turn his guns on Georg Büchner, whose Danton’s Death I studied as part of a highly conservative course in German literature about twenty years ago.

It certainly isn’t true to say that A Place of Greater Safety ‘reduces’ the events to the personal. The book is not the story of a clique, a cosy tale of Georges and Max and Camille, Lucile et al. From the first page of this gripping novel the larger issues are there, vital and structural. It reminded me of the Tolstoyan view of history, that history happens in spite of the efforts of individuals. I felt Robespierre was comparable to the figure of Kutuzov in War and Peace, a man who permits the inevitable. For Robespierre that meant that a whole generation, a whole world, and himself too, must be annihilated in order that the new world could be born. It is an appalling idea. Isn’t it a valid one to put forward in a novel, a challenging ‘What if?’ But Furbank feels that one cannot write a historical novel about the French Revolution because it is still with us, and has not been reduced to the ‘harmless, understood past’. It’s a very strange concept. I have just written a novel about a witch precisely because the topic was dangerous and misunderstood: it seems to me that Furbank hasn’t the foggiest idea of what a novel is doing.

In any case, history can’t be corralled in a nice pen where only approved personnel may go. It lies about on the lids of biscuit tins sneaks into the language, gets hung up as decorations in pubs. It even gets turned into Asterix cartoons. We never stop dealing with the past, and novels are certainly part of the process. It is ludicrous for Furbank to instruct us what we may or may not write novels about. He had better protect himself by clutching the book of sermons in front of his more vulnerable parts.

Leslie Wilson
Caversham, Reading

Vol. 14 No. 18 · 24 September 1992

From Gerald Long

Unfortunately it is not necessary to imagine Flaubert writing historical romance, in the sense to which P.N. Furbank refers (LRB, 20 August), nor to yearn for a novel on the Punic Wars: Salammbo fills both bills. It also supports Henry James’s view, since it is certainly an amazing tour de force, and just as certainly complete humbug. Worse, it is boring humbug, even if it tells us what to think about Hamilcar Barca. The historical novels of Alexandre Dumas may also be humbug, but they prove that a writer of genius can simplify back with complete success, and produce books which are popular, but not cheap. Even he failed with the Revolution: his novels of that period, the latter part of Joseph Balsamo, Ange Pitou and the saccharine Comtesse de Charny, are amongst his least successful. Anatole France caught the atmosphere of the Terror with Les Dieux ont soif, precisely because he chose a small canvas, and reduced its figures to the personal.

Balzac wrote historical novels. Was not Carlyle’s French Revolution a historical romance? Generalities about genre do not apply to genius.

The French Revolution was one of the most important events of recent European history, but to describe it as one of the most horrible events in history is an exaggeration of staggering magnitude. In terms of those killed, the Revolution could not compare with a battle of any size: Michelet recalled that the number executed in Paris during the whole of the Revolution did not make up one-fortieth part of the French and Russian troops killed in the Battle of Borodino before Moscow in 1812: figures vary according to source, but there were probably over seventy thousand dead in that extremely bloody encounter. There is no generally-accepted figure for the total number of victims of the Revolution. Between April 1793 and July 1794, the period of the Terror, the guillotine in Paris claimed 2625 lives. Even if the total for the whole of France and for the whole period were ten times that, it would barely exceed a reasonable-to-low estimate (say, twenty-five thousand) of Parisians summarily executed when government troops put down the rebellion of the Commune in 1871 – an event of which we rarely hear mention.

Since then. Hitler and Stalin have massacred on a scale undreamt of by past tyrants, but approached more recently by the Khmer Rouge. Every innocent victim of tyranny is one too many, but we should keep some sense of proportion, even in judging horrors.

Gerald Long
Paris

From P.N. Furbank

Leslie Wilson’s diatribe against my review of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety (Letters, 10 September) is sensibly argued, and all I feel like saying in answer to it is that it did not take me by surprise and was indeed the reaction I half-expected to provoke. I honestly tried to be generous towards Mantel’s novel, though I did not like it; and the remark I most stand by is the one that Wilson does not comment on: ‘Why does it all have to be so amusing?’ Ultimately, that is to say, my complaint was not about ‘truth’ but about tone.

P.N. Furbank
London NW5

Vol. 14 No. 20 · 22 October 1992

From Christopher Ricks

Henry James’s letter to Sarah Orne Jewett about the ‘historical novel’ was tellingly quoted – twenty lines of it – by P.N. Furbank in his review of Hilary Mantel (LRB, 20 August). ‘The case against the historical novel could hardly be better put.’ But what needs to be put right, after all these years and after Leon Edel’s repeated retailings, is the text of the letter: ‘You may multiply the little facts … as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as nought.’ Yet the ear can hear something wrong, there in the and of ‘and in its essence’. Sense demands that for essence we should read absence – and then this proves to be what the letter itself (in the Houghton Library) reads: ‘the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its absence the whole effect is as nought.’

Christopher Ricks
Oxford