Hi, Jo here, with a very accurate Cabbage Patch and memories of summer. Where did summer go?!?
Many thanks to Mary Jo for stepping in to do the Halloween blog when I was mired too deep in my deadline.
Today I have some musings about accuracy.
I think accuracy is a theme around here. We wenches tend sweat a lot about it behind the scenes and sometimes in the blog. But I think we all know (feel free to argue, Wenches) that accuracy and a great read aren't always the same thing. We all have things we know a lot about, whether it be Regency England, telescopes, quilting, firing guns, gerbils, or a million other things, and if we read a novel where the author gets it wrong, it's like a fork squealing across the plate. Puts us right off.
I can read over the occasional mistake, but if the error is fundamental to the story and/or is often present, then no, I just can't read the book, and sometimes it's very sad because it could have been such a good read. The style, the voice, the characters, the plot situations -- something is sucking me in, but that damned fork keeps squealing across the plate.
Two things have me thinking about this at the moment.
I'm going over the page proofs for next year's Lovers and Ladies, which has two of my old trad regencies in one trade paperback volume. (The Fortune Hunter and Deirdre and Don Juan.) There's more here.
This edition is typeset from the old books, so I haven't seen an edited manuscript this time around, but I'm reading the proofs, revisiting those stories for the first time in about 16 years. Blink.
And there are things wrong. Amy, the heroine of The Fortune Hunter, does not appear to be wearing a corset. This is pretty clear as she strips to the buff in the hero's kitchen after being caught in a downpour and falling in some farmyard muck. These days, that'd shoot them right to bed, wouldn't it, but in this case Harry is a perfect gentleman, and Amy arranges a sort of gown out of a blanket and towel. And you know, not only is it probably accurate for the time, but I like it. A lot of the tumbling into sex at the first opportunity seems plain tacky to me. But that's not the point.
So, no corset. Then, when it's clear she can't get home that night, he escorts her to the propriety of a nearby farm -- where the family is about to sit down to their main meal in the evening. No. Country style was still to have the main meal -- dinner -- in the middle of the day often even for the upper classes. In Town they'd dine later by this time because it fit better with the social whirl.
So two already, but it didn't seem to matter back then and I'm not sure it does today.
My first question is, assuming you the reader detect inaccuracies, when do they bother you and when don't they, and what makes the difference? After all, Shakespeare wasn't working overtime to get all the ancient history right as best I know.
My second is, why is it that sometimes we as readers get all twitchy about accuracy of fashion, dates, geography, etiquette and such while not seeming to care about accuracy of moral behaviour? Why is accuracy in one area important to us and not in others. It can apply in contemporaries, too. The characters can be and do the most unlikely things and we readers go along for the ride, but send that rid down the wrong street, or describe a building that was knocked down ten years ago and some will be up in arms. Do you have a take on that?
The next spark for this blog was when someone posted a link to Mark Twain's wonderful explosion of James Fennimore Cooper's writing.
http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html
I don't remember ever being a fan of Cooper's books, but my father thought they were ripping good yarns. When I posted the link elsewhere, quite a few people remembered how much they'd enjoyed the books. Yet, reading Twain, it's clear they are ridiculous. I'll copy one bit here because it had me laughing out loud. Of course this is Mark Twain. It's a scene in which some Indians try to steal from the people on a barge. (I've cut some. You can read the full tirade by following the link.)
"Cooper made the exit of that stream fifty feet wide, in the first place, for no particular reason; in the second place, he narrowed it to less than twenty to accommodate some Indians. He bends a “sapling” to the form of an arch over this narrow passage, and conceals six Indians in its foliage. They are “laying” for a settler’s scow or ark which is coming up the stream on its way to the lake; it is being hauled against the stiff current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the lake; its rate of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour. Cooper describes the ark, but pretty obscurely. In the matter of dimensions “it was little more than a modern canal-boat.” Let us guess, then, that it was about one hundred and forty feet long. It was of “greater breadth than common.” Let us guess, then, that it was about sixteen feet wide. ...
The ark is arriving at the stream’s exit now, whose width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to accommodate the Indians–say to eighteen. There is a foot to spare on each side of the boat. Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by? No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper’s Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them.
...The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family. It will take ...the ninety foot dwelling a minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do? It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it up, I believe. Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did.
Their chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he judged, he let go and dropped. And missed the house! That is actually what he did. He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow. It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have made the trip. The fault was Cooper’s, not his. ...
There still remained in the roost five Indians.
The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain what the five did–you would not be able to reason it out for yourself. No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it. Then No. 2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still farther astern of it. Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way astern of it. Then No. 4 jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away astern. Then even No. 5 made a jump for the boat–for he was a Cooper Indian. In the matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigarshop is not spacious."
I have to confess that I've occasionally indulged in a bit of similar deconstruction of modern novels, and even more so of movies! -- but only when the implausibilities, impossibilities and idiocies annoy me. I know I'm able to ignore such things if the story's good enough. And that is the mysterious quality we often can't even define.
Thus, as writers, we sometimes have to fudge, deceive, and even lie in the service of the story.
I've just sent in the final manuscript for A Lady's Secret. (The rake on the make and the nun on the run.) I'm sure there are errors in there. Despite my best efforts I never believe I've got everything right. I know there's some fudging. My research made it clear that by law Robin must have had three horses pulling his post chaise through northern France. As best I could tell there would still be only one postilion because my source specified that if there had to be four horses he would need two postilions. I couldn't figure out quite how the three horse system would work. I couldn't envision it. It didn't matter because I never describe it, but it bugged me, so mentally I made it two horses and only ever talked about "horses" and that's a fudge.
But there is one section that could be dissected as Twain dissects Cooper, if someone both cared and had a fine enough microscope. I took care to write it as precisely and accurately as I could -- but after tussling with it far too long accepted that it didn't work for the story. So I made it work for the story. I'm sure it was the right thing to do.
So there we are. Accuracy, from the reader's angle and the writer's angle. Do you have any comments?
Let's not pick apart any living writers, but if you have examples of wild absurdities and inaccuracies from older books that bug you, please share them. Jane Austen poked fun at the implausibiity of Mary Brunton's Self Control.
And BTW, if you haven't yet read Winter Fire (Christmas at Rothgar Abbey) it's out again -- third reissue, I think -- at $4.99. You can
read an excerpt here.
Jo