Writing About History

Have been reading a lot recently, notably best selling 'award-winning' books alongside more obscure and gritty things. Really liked Andrew Miller's Pure (more of which later some time) and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles which was a highly readable guilty pleasure, plain and simple.

Am very much addicted to Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, great for an ex-Renaissance student and general history fanatic. I really like Mantel's quote that Cromwell... 'is a modern man, he was a great reformer, he was a revolutionary who had no recourse to a corpus of revolutionary doctrine, which is what makes him so extraordinary'... her point seems to imply that Thomas Cromwell's general adherance to the standards of the time is pertinent too, presenting an interesting and essentially humanised way of looking at an iconic historical figure.

Maybe I'm reading between the lines, but she seems to imply that these people do not set out to change the world, it's not an overblown Hollywood-style blast of ideology that does it, but rather a slow burning, self-motivated, self-interested, adaptability to the world, survival of the fittest kind of attitude. This is very interesting, and something I aim to convey in my own work, which like Mantel's, is pretty obsessed with exploring the humanised, personal stories of historical figures. Hopefully one day, I will like Mantel, be able to take sources contemporary to the time, write with a rigourous and absolute historical accuracy, yet also be able to creatively investigate the stories behind them.

Although for those who like to read too much into these things, it must be noted that Mantel likes to 'insist that the past be valued for its own, not as a rehearsal for the present. So when I'm writing about the economics of the 1530s and the glint in Cromwell's eye that is a welfare state, I am actually writing about the 1530s, I'm not just making a giant parable about events today. I think you see, that we have to honour and respect those people, they walked and talked just as we did. They're no less people because they happen to be dead. They were not a rehearsal for us, so we have to respect their stories in their own right.'

This is fascinating, and really relates to the discussions about historical interpretation, the reinterpretation of the past and its people, in Hollinghurt's The Strangers Child. I really hope that when I write about historical subjects, whether it might be Elizabeth Simcoe or the Glasgow Mill workers, I can like Mantel, avoid Brechtian placards saying what will happen next, and rather use the 'classic novelist's technique' and 'really go inside the consciousness of one person, seeing the world through one person's eyes'.

To put it simply, writing about history is to move past the knowledge that ultimately, the truth of the matter will never really be available to us. It is, as Mantel says, above all to be 'content with making a story that will stick...with putting pictures in your head, which cannot easily be got out again'. What a great thing to aim for.