The Sparrowhawk Companion (4 page)

In that sense,
Sparrowhawk
is not “realistic.” Its time frame is not “here and now,” but centuries ago, before our time, although the rational values its characters hold and fight for are indubitably applicable to any reader with a measure of self-esteem living today.
Sparrowhawk
is an epic and, from particular perspectives, also an allegory on our own times, a celebratory reminder of our glorious past, and a reprimand to those who would prefer that we forget it.

* * *

Among the various themes present in the series,
Sparrowhawk
is also about
Hyperborea
, that is, about the crucial role of art in one’s life. The fictive novel, whose full title is
Hyperborea: or, the Adventures of Drury Trantham, Shipwrecked Merchant in the Unexplored Northern Regions
, gives Jack and Hugh an idea or vision of a moral ideal in the character of Drury Trantham. Although they move themselves, and become sculptors of their own souls,
Hyperborea
both affirms their vision of life and accelerates their development as heroes in their own right. The details of that novel I intentionally left sketchy; they were not important. What was important was what Jack and Hugh did about living up to the spirit of the novel. Jack and Hugh are already moral men when they first encounter
Hyperborea
—Jack, when he is a member of a band of smugglers who defy the Crown on principle; Hugh, as a member of the aristocracy when he violates one of its most oppressive customs and cannot concede the transgression.

Drury Trantham, the hero of
Hyperborea
, sailing on his renegade ship, the
Greyhound
, is Redmagne’s romanticized projection of his own life as an outlaw. Trantham discovers a “utopia” that is limited only by Redmagne’s imagination. Where is Hyperborea? According to the
Smaller Classical Dictionary
, it was a land of “perpetual sunshine, beyond the north wind.” Hyperborea’s name is comprised of the Greek
huper
, or extreme, and
boreios
, or northern.

“It’s a wonderful story,” Redmagne tells Jack one evening, “about a land much like our own, but where there are no kings, no customs men, and no caves…No kings! Can you imagine it? No kings, and so no need for all the varieties of Danegeld! It’s an allegory, you see, because Hyperborea was once in thrall to another kingdom, the kingdom of Hypocrisia. But Hyperborea threw off its bondage, and became a happy land, a great land, a prosperous land. Suppose—Oh! Wild imagination!—suppose our colonies in America did such a thing?…What an
outlandish miracle that would be! Perhaps too far-fetched!”
⁵

He goes on to tell Jack, whom he will draft in the task of copying out the manuscript of his completed novel, that the Hyperboreans are a “race guided by nothing but reason…Drury Trantham elects to stay with them…because he finds nothing impossible and everything wonderful about them. They live on an island in the frigid climes, but their greatness warms the earth and makes it habitable.”

But
, what
is Hyperborea? It is America, an idea and a place they—Redmagne, Skelly, Glorious Swain, Jack Frake, and others in the story—can only imagine and project from the uncorrupted, unvanquished cores of their souls. The spirit of what they think is possible is best captured in a memorable line uttered by Greta Garbo in
Queen Christina
: “One can feel nostalgia for places one has never seen.” Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick, however, while they initially can only imagine the possible, later help to create it and live to see it.

I invented a novel that both Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick could be moved by. That was
Hyperborea
. No other actual novel of the period did that job. It is a kind of
The Fountainhead
for them, a work of art that said “Yes” to their characters and values. And
Hyperborea
’s own story had to be thematically integrated in the story. An outlaw writes it, and an aristocrat envisions its possibilities. And both Jack and Hugh eventually come to Hyperborea, or America, and emulate some of the principal events in the novel. At the same time, the novel had to be of the period, with a story that anticipates the Romantic novel of the nineteenth century. Neither Jack nor Hugh could find inspiration in any of the Naturalist novels of the period, such as
Tom Jones
or
The Vicar of Wakefield.

The novel and its hero serve to unify Jack’s and Hugh’s relationships between them and with other characters. Jack idolizes Redmagne and Skelly, for they are both moral men of action who become outlaws because they will not submit to fiat authority. Hugh admires the daring freethinkers of the Society of the Pippin; their wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and vitality match his own. It is an important plot development that Jack and Hugh encounter the novel after they have made crucial decisions in their lives: Jack, after he has joined the smuggling gang
and grasps the reason why its members choose to be outlaws; Hugh, after he refuses to apologize for neglecting to bow to the Duke of Cumberland. Redmagne’s novel affirms the importance of those decisions.

How can the heroes in such fiction have the attribute of volition when the important events in such fiction are a matter of record? How could they contribute to such events? Should historical events or a particular period serve as a background to one’s story, or be integrated into the conflict of one’s characters? Is it proper to portray historical figures in those events (such as Jefferson or Washington); that is, to put words into their mouths and actions in their careers, and if so, how should they be characterized or
not
characterized?

The answer to the first two questions is:
Integration
of plot and character. Someday I will pen my own essay on the subject of historical fiction. For the time being, I would refer anyone to Rand’s
The Art of Fiction
, and
The Romantic Manifesto
, in addition to
Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Anthem”
and
Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living
.”

The liberties with which some novelists and film directors have taken with the portrayals of historic personages have intrigued, troubled, or baffled me. The portrayals largely have been bizarrely gratuitous, or forgettably superficial, or memorably malicious. Rarely have such portrayals been accurate. Two instances in film come to mind:
Amadeus
and Peter Shaffer’s unwarranted “feet of clay” characterizations of Mozart and Antonio Salieri, and the portrayal of genius as inexplicably subjective and irrational; versus
Khartoum
, in which the portrayal of General Charles Gordon as a religiously motivated man in conflict with the Mahdi, a Muslim jihadist of the nineteenth century, was proper and credible.

I think there is a single rule that would govern the proper portrayal of a historic personage in fiction: that it should not contradict or exaggerate the known about that personage, whether the known is good or bad, especially if a writer can grasp, delineate, and dramatize a personage’s fundamental character. Thus, in
Sparrowhawk
, George Grenville, author of the Stamp Act in 1765, by all written accounts of his words and actions, can be portrayed as a scheming manipulator who overstepped his brief stay as prime minister in his quest for power and
fame. William Pitt can be portrayed as a moody, enigmatic vessel of tragic contradictions. Patrick Henry can be portrayed as a passionate advocate of liberty. And Thomas Jefferson’s portrayal from
Book Three: Caxton
to the end of the series can chart his progress and maturation from a law student contemplating a stable career as an attorney to an intellectually and politically active patriot.

* * *

Although the American Revolution has been the subject of fiction, it is the war of 1776–1781 that has been the focus of most novelists. The period preceding the war has been largely neglected in terms of dramatizing its fundamental character. It is that period I chose as a setting for the conflicts in
Sparrowhawk
. One important attribute of a credible dramatization of the causes of the American Revolution is the creation of the characters of the men who made it possible, of the intellectual and moral caliber of such men who subscribed to those ideas and acted on them. The men must match the ideas. Crucial to that task was creating characters who were distinct individuals, and not mere hollow vehicles of the ideas that moved men in that time.

I began researching the pre-Revolutionary period in late 1992, when I was living and working in Palo Alto, California. By then
First Prize
and
Whisper the Guns
had been published (1988 and 1992 respectively). And by then I had written nine novels—detective and suspense novels in three separate series—only two titles of which had been published, and a miscellany of nonfiction—book reviews, guest editorials, and the like.

However, I had always wanted to write something about the Revolution, but did not want to settle for the standard costume drama. My detective and suspense novels were, in a sense, mere training to write this series. Nor was I satisfied that novels such as Cooper’s
The
Last of the Mohicans
set in the pre-Revolutionary period did justice to the period (not that Cooper and other novelists intended that; they were merely writing adventure stories). It was my conviction that a great
vacuum existed in American literature that dealt with the founding of the United States. Britain, France, Spain, and other countries had their “national” literatures. But the United States did not.

Nor was I content with the comparatively fewer novels that were set in the period, such as
Citizen Tom Paine
and
Oliver Wiswell
, and which were written by leftists or writers demonstrably ignorant of the period. They were what I would call “surfacy”; that is, superficial and not credible. Most of them treated such concepts as “liberty” and “freedom” as floating abstractions. What I wanted to do was write a novel that dealt with the ideas that moved the men of that period, and to dramatize the moral and intellectual caliber of the men who were passionately moved by those ideas.

One thing that convinced me I was ready in 1992 was the most recent remake of James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans
. I was appalled by not only how the director turned Cooper’s story around, but by how little time, about five seconds, was devoted to the conflict between Britain’s imperial interests and the colonials. There is much more of that in the novel.

Did I know I was writing an epic? In the beginning, not quite. But by the time I was finished with
Jack Frake
, I knew it was going to be an epic—had to be an epic. And when I surveyed American literature, I saw that there was nothing (except for Ayn Rand’s novels) in it that attempted to capture the American character and perspective on life in their most fundamental terms, nothing that portrayed men as distinct individuals governed by reason. It was a glory that had rarely been recognized, rarely addressed in fiction.

I had originally conceived of the project as a two-volume novel. But as I finished
Book One: Jack Frake
, I saw that it was going to be much, much longer, if I were going to properly handle all the themes and subplots and reach the end and resolutions I had already worked out. And by that time I was completely immersed in the period—grasping the politics, the culture, the standard of living, the manners, customs, and traditions—and mastering all the elements to recreate the British-American culture and politics that existed then.

Also, at that time, I hadn’t the least hope that the novels would ever
find a publisher and see the light of day. Publishing standards were declining, and so was literacy. I had difficulty finding an agent to represent my relatively inoffensive detective and suspense novels, never mind a multivolume historical novel. But, I didn’t care. This story had to be told, the novel written, completed, and made real, regardless of personal cost. It was an exercise in preserving my own sanity, to bring the story into existence.

One task I mastered was writing in spoken and written eighteenthcentury British English, on different levels. Then I learned how to scale that language back for modern readers. In a novel of ideas, dialogue is more important than physical action and is actually action of a sort; it makes important physical action possible and far more effective and memorable. I love writing dialogue; it can be just as telling as action.

Music plays an important role in the series. Music, especially nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century classical music, has always fed my imagination, as do, to a lesser extent, film scores composed according to the rules of classical composition.

It is probably a universal truism that what others hear in classical music is not what inspired its composers, and my response to a particular symphony or concerto would not necessarily have much in common with what it evokes emotionally in someone else. My favorite pieces are scores to stories of my own invention. The classical music of the eighteenth century little appealed to me before I began researching
Sparrowhawk
. But as I listened to more of it, in search of music that might move Jack and Hugh, and also to grasp the character of the best music of the period, I acquired a taste and found roles for much of what the period had to offer, including many “folk” melodies, some of which, such as “Hugh O’Donnell” and “Brian Boru,” Etáin plays on her harp during a Caxton concert.

The three composers who offered the most material for the story were Georg F. Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Antonio Vivaldi. Two compositions by Handel and Scarlatti became personal “anthems” of Jack and Hugh, and both are played by Etáin: “See, the conquering hero comes” from Handel’s
Judas Maccabæus
, and the Recitativo and Andante from Scarlatti’s “Cantata pastorale per la nativitá di nostro signore Gesu Cristo” (“A pastoral cantata on the nativity of Jesus Christ”).
These selections have nothing to do with their religious origins; the elevated spirits they celebrate evoke the core souls of Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick. Vivaldi’s “Echo Concerto for Two Violins” (RV535) and his Cello Concerto (RV413) also provided thematic substance.