Carol L. Wright

Issue 76, Spring 2024

Literary Learnings

Truman Capote’s Unanswered Prayers

If you, like many, watched the recent FX mini-series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, you saw a depiction of one of the mid-twentieth century’s best known American writers, Truman Capote (nee Truman Persons). He was born in New Orleans in 1924, abandoned at the age of four by his father, and intermittently sent to live with his alcoholic mother’s relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. A young tomboy, Nelle Harper Lee, lived in Capote’s new hometown, and although she was two years younger than Capote, they shared an interest in writing and, what Lee later called, the “common anguish”[i] of troubled childhoods. (Lee’s mother suffered from what is now believed to be bipolar disorder.)[ii] The pair remained close into adulthood despite Capote’s mother moving with him and her new husband, Jose Garcia Capote, to New York City in 1932. But in looking back on his youth, he said, “My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.”[iii]

As an adult, Capote was short in stature (cited as 5’3” or 5’4”, depending on the source), with a high-pitched voice and idiosyncratic personality. He was an acute observer of life, with sharp recall of all he had observed. He laid out the wounds of his childhood in his writing. His first novel, the quasi-autobiographical Other Voices, Other Rooms,[iv]was published in 1948 to critical acclaim and included a character modeled after Harper Lee.[v] He followed that with several other novellas, short stories, and novels, eventually publishing a novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s,[vi] in 1958 which was made into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn in 1961.

He was hailed as a genius, and as his celebrity inflated, so did his image as an ostentatious gay man, a heavy-drinking partygoer with a self-destructive streak. He savored the spotlight and inveigled himself into New York society, befriending a cadre of New York socialites, his “Swans,” and learning their scandalous secrets. Among his society intimates were several of the most prominent women in the city, including Lee Bouvier Radziwill (sister to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), Barbara “Babe” Paley (wife of media mogul William Paley), Gloria Guinness (formerly known as Countess Gloria von Fürstenberg-Herdringen), and showgirl and radio actress Ann Woodward (who was suspected of murdering her wealthy husband). To be a Swan, one had to be rich, beautiful, and amusing to Capote. And Capote was amusing to them. He was flamboyant, selfish, and outrageous. His wealth paled in comparison to theirs,[vii] but with such wealthy friends, he lived a lavish lifestyle.

Seeing Capote’s early success, Harper Lee moved to New York in 1949 to write and work in a variety of day jobs. In 1960, she published her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which included a character, Dill Harris, who was modeled after Capote. It spent 98 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award before being made into a movie starring Gregory Peck in 1962. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning three.[viii]

From the authors’ depictions of each other, one could believe that Harper Lee was the stronger and braver of the pair, while Capote was the reserved, fragile one who needed protecting. Perhaps that is why, soon after sending her manuscript to her publisher, Lee followed Capote to Kansas to help him to research what he dubbed his “nonfiction novel” about the brutal 1959 home invasion and murder of a farm family.[ix] She spoke with witnesses who related better to the small-town Lee than to the odd New Yorker Capote. With the help of her 150 pages of notes, Capote wrote what became perhaps his most memorable book, In Cold Blood, published in 1966. Despite the literary license Capote was said to have employed, the book pioneered the modern True Crime genre and was made into a 1967 movie, which was nominated for four Academy Awards.[x] His deviations from fact bothered Lee, but Capote was an unequaled fabricator. She later wrote to a friend, “I don’t know if you understood this about him, but his compulsive lying was like this: If you said, ‘Did you know JFK was shot?’ He’d easily answer, ‘Yes, I was driving the car he was riding in.’”[xi]

In his self-centered fashion, he failed to acknowledge Lee’s contributions to the book. Lee would later be quoted as saying that it was Capote’s drinking and misery that ended their friendship, but it appears jealousy played a large role. She is reported to have said, “I was his oldest friend, and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold. He nursed his envy for more than 20 years [until his death].”[xii]

But Lee was not the only loved one whom Truman used badly. His long-time lover, Jack Dunphy, a writer and Broadway dancer/actor, was ten years older than Capote and was reserved where Capote was extroverted. They withstood these differences by living in separate homes. Capote knew his many affairs and drug and alcohol excesses strained their relationship, yet he expected to be forgiven and loved, even when he was unloving and unlovable.[xiii] Eventually Dunphy found it too difficult to stand by and watch Capote’s self-destructive tendencies take him over.

Meanwhile, Capote lived in a social whirl. He hosted an extravagant “Black and White Ball” in the Plaza Hotel in 1966. Invitations were so sought after that some A-listers who were not invited crashed the party. Some were publicly and humiliatingly expelled by Capote for daring to come.

By the 1970s, Capote’s life had become a carousel of nights at Studio 54, lunches at the posh “La Cote Basque” restaurant with his Swans, appearances on television talk shows, excessive drinking, smoking, and drug abuse, all leading to time in rehab, only to go around again. But, as a writer, he knew he needed a new publication to sell. Until In Cold Blood, Capote had written fiction based on his own life’s observations and experiences. Without Harper Lee there to help him research another nonfiction book, he reverted to his previous process. And what he knew and had observed was the lives of his Swans.

He signed a contract with Random House for what he boasted would be his masterpiece titled “Answered Prayers.” But now living a life of dissipation, he missed deadline after deadline. After some time, critics began questioning whether the book was even real, so Capote decided to prove that it was. In November 1975, his story, “La Cote Basque 1965,” appeared in Esquire magazine. The characters and events were ill-concealed. Despite Capote’s assurances that his Swans were “too dumb” to “know who they are” in the story,[xiv] they and all of New York society recognized themselves. Because of Capote’s betrayal of their trust, the Swans excised him from their social circle.

Once again, Capote expected to be forgiven, loved, protected. But, alas, his sins caught up with him. While he continued to tell his few remaining friends he was making great progress on “Answered Prayers,” he found it difficult to remain sober. By 1984, his health failing, Capote left New York to work on his novel in California as a guest of Joanne Carson (an ex-wife of The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson). While there, he died at age 59 of liver disease and drug intoxication.[xv] He had never reconciled with Harper Lee nor the Swans, and, while they had drifted apart, he left most of his estate to Jack Dunphy.[xvi]

The lonely child had died a lonely man. And despite his protestations, his “masterpiece” was never completed.[xvii] As he once said, “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”[xviii]

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[i] https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/harper-lee-truman-capote-friendship-jealously

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/truman-capote

[iv] This novel is full of angst, with the only bit of light being the character of Idabel Thompson who was a fictionalized version of his childhood friend, Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee returned the favor by basing the character of Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on Capote.

[v] https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/harper-lee-truman-capote-friendship-jealously

[vi] Holly Golightly, Capote’s heroine, was modeled after Carol Matthau’s personality. Capote had met and befriended her at age 13. https://matthau.com/carol/biography.html

[vii] https://www.distractify.com/p/truman-capote-net-worth-at-death#:~:text=Truman%20Capote%27s%20net%20worth%20at%20the%20time%20of,creation%20of%20an%20annual%20prize%20in%20literary%20criticism.%22

[viii]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Lee

[ix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutter_family_murders

[x] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Cold_Blood

[xi] https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/harper-lee-truman-capote-friendship-jealously

[xii] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/arts/in-harper-lees-letters-books-fame-and-a-lying-capote.html#:~:text=Ms.%20Lee%20wrote%20that%20Mr.%20Capote%E2%80%99s%20drinking,and%20misery%20soured%20their%20friendship.%20Jealousy%20ended%20it.

[xiii] Leamer, Laurence, Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, Putnam (2021).

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] https://www.distractify.com/p/truman-capote-net-worth-at-death#:~:text=Truman%20Capote%27s%20net%20worth%20at%20the%20time%20of,creation%20of%20an%20annual%20prize%20in%20literary%20criticism.%22

[xvi] https://www.distractify.com/p/truman-capote-net-worth-at-death#:~:text=Truman%20Capote%27s%20net%20worth%20at%20the%20time%20of,creation%20of%20an%20annual%20prize%20in%20literary%20criticism.%22; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dunphy#:~:text=Though%20they%20drifted%20more%20and%20more%20apart%20in,Capote%20had%20separate%20houses%20in%20Sagaponack%2C%20New%20York.

[xvii] For a more complete biography see Gerald Clarke’s Capote: A Biography, Simon and Schuster (1988). Films about Truman Capote include Capote (2005) starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Infamous (2006) with Toby Jones and Daniel Craig. Feud: Capote vs. the Swans from FX can be streamed on FXNOW, Hulu, and other streaming services.

[xviii] https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/truman-capote

Issue 72, Spring 2023

Literary Learnings

Rewriting Children's Classics

A couple of years ago, you might have heard that the estate of Theodore Geisel, known to generations of children around the world as Dr. Seuss, had decided to withdraw some of his books from further publication. Among them was his first, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published in 1937.  In case you missed the several articles announcing this change, the reason was simple: elements in each book “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”1

Some decried this move as a product of “cancel culture,” while others viewed it as a way to make his work more inclusive and keep Dr. Seuss relevant after a period of declining popularity among such advocates of children’s books as the National Education Association.2

Dr. Seuss’s books still enjoy a wide readership, but they are far from the only beloved children’s classics that have undergone scrutiny from an evolving, diverse culture.  

Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885, makes frequent use of the N-word. While the language depicted was a true reflection of what his main character would have used in the setting of the pre-Civil War South, it was controversial from the start. It has popped on and off banned-book lists ever since—despite, or perhaps because of, it offering an opportunity to explore themes of freedom and enslavement.3

In 2018, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name was removed from the American Library Association’s award for children’s literature because “her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward Indigenous people and people of color that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities.”4 The Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association answered that “the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, though encumbered with the perspectives of racism that were representative of her time and place, also includes overwhelmingly positive contributions to children’s literature that have touched generations past and will reach into the future.”5 (It should be noted that the ALA never suggested banning her books.)

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan uses a racial slur and stereotypes to describe indigenous people in Neverland, but it remains in print. Nancy Drew mysteries, while originally depicting an independent 16-year-old girl in the more overtly racist 1930s, evolved by the late 1950s into a more submissive girl of 18, making her more culturally acceptable in the pre-Second Wave Feminist era. And, these later rewrites had her living in a less diverse (and therefore less overtly racist) community.6 Yet, her original texts were republished in 1991 with what we would now call a “trigger warning,” saying: the “racial and social stereotyping” contained in them might make a reader “extremely uncomfortable” and cause a reaction “in the modern reader that was not felt by the reader of the times.”7

The problems are not always about racial prejudice or stereotypes. Nearly all children’s literature through the mid-twentieth century depicted girls and women in narrowly defined social roles. LGBTQIA+ characters either didn’t exist in literature or were made a point of shame or derision.

Today, Roald Dahl’s publisher has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite some of his books to remove such words as “ugly” or “fat” among many other changes. According to the publisher, “it’s not unusual to review the language.”8 The average reader, though, might expect the review to be focused more on such details as modernizing spelling.

So, should classic children’s books be edited, updated, or removed from the market because they reflect social norms of a past, more racist, more sexist, and less inclusive culture? Or should the fact that they offer a window into past cultural norms give us an opportunity to discuss how society has progressed without forgetting the legacy of past discrimination?

Surely, there are many worthwhile lessons we can learn, and teach our children, through the medium of classic literature. Reading a book together that contains cultural or racial references that we consider inappropriate today, gives a caregiver an opportunity to explore with a child the reasons we reject such language or depictions, and that this was not always so. It allows for a discussion of historical context as well as respecting others and our shared humanity. These are good things that can come out of reading a banned or disparaged book.

But not every story time is also lesson time, nor is every book that offers a lesson the best choice for a child to read by themselves. Sometimes we want to nestle in with our kids to enjoy an easy, heart-warming, or fun read, or to offer our kids books that don’t need context or explanations for them to read independently. For the latter, perhaps rewritten classics are preferred.

Some adults would rather we allow our children to remain ignorant of past prejudices, arguing that showing a character they identify with as being, among other things, racist, can normalize it. Others want to protect children from feeling bad about atrocities of the past or about themselves. But ignoring prejudice does not eliminate its legacy. And, in context, children are able to understand that they are not responsible for the past. With a caring adult to help, the originals of the classics offer children a chance to enlarge their world view and, one hopes, to improve society in the years to come.

1https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56250658

2Ibid.

3 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/banned-adventures-huckleberry-finn/

4 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/laura-ingalls-wilder-s-name-removed-prestigious-award-over-dated-n886491

5 https://www.liwlra.org/laura-influence/liwlra-response-to-the-renaming-of-the-ala-laura-ingalls-wilder-award/

6 https://electricliterature.com/the-not-so-hidden-racism-of-nancy-drew/

7 Ibid.

8 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/18/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-to-remove-language-deemed-offensive

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Issue 68, Spring 2022

Literary Learnings

Jane Austen and Marriage

Jane Austen (1775-1817), arguably the most famous author of England’s Regency Era (1811-1820), has only grown in popularity in the more than two centuries that have followed. During those few years, Austen published four full novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Two more were published in 1817 following her untimely death at the age of 41: Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Instead of focusing on Britain’s near-constant wars with France and the United States, Austen’s novels depict the social and economic realities of life of an English country village. She was part of the English middle class—possessing no titles or great wealth, but part of a family well off enough to pay others to handle the drudgery of life. One of eight children (6 boys and 2 girls), she received a good education for a woman of that age and showed an early interest in writing.

While Austen never married, she, like other single women of the period, remained with her parents. Even as a successful author, she did not earn enough to live independently. If an unmarried woman had no family and was sufficiently educated, she could work as a governess or a lady’s companion—jobs that paid poorly, granted no job security, and were not highly regarded. (This was the presumed fate of Jane Fairfax in Emma eliciting the sympathy of some, but not all, of the other characters.)

If a woman lacked education, her options were fewer still. Unless she inherited a substantial sum, she could very well fall out of the genteel class and become a maid, shop girl, or even a farm worker. Gasp! As Jane said in a letter written in 1816, “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.” Therefore, by necessity, an advantageous marriage was the goal for nearly all young women, without much regard for romantic love.

It is no wonder that each of Austen’s novels ends with the heroine’s engagement to a stable man—offering her heroines financial security and a measure of social status without having to delve into the realities of married life. In early19th century England, marriage did not ensure bliss. Wives might expect to give birth at an average rate of about one child every two years during their fertility—so long as they were not one of the all-too-frequent women who died in childbirth. Even worse, up to one-third of those children did not live past their fifth birthday.

According to common law, the husband and wife were considered one person—and the husband was the one. Wives had no control over property, including anything they owned prior to marriage, could not keep their own wages, and had no right to sign a contract. While men could divorce their wives, an unhappy wife found it extremely difficult to divorce her husband. If she ever chose to leave a husband, she had to leave her property and her children behind. Children were considered the property of the father. Society would lay the blame for an unsuccessful marriage on the wife, marking her as a pariah and further limiting her options for supporting herself. The patriarchy was alive and well.

All of Austen’s novels reflect this reality. In Northanger Abbey, Austen compares marriage to dancing, saying “You will allow, that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal.” So, to attract the right sort of mate, young women were expected to have attained many “accomplishments,” as she describes in Pride and Prejudice:

“It is amazing to me,” said [Mr.] Bingley, “how young ladies have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are. . . . They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one [sic] who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time without being informed that she was very accomplished.”

Grooming daughters to be accomplished benefitted not only the young women, but their families. As Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet, never known for tact, said of a hoped-for beau for her eldest daughter: “Now, there will be a great marriage! And, you know, that will throw the girls into the path of other rich men.”

Also in Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas, the best friend of heroine Elizabeth Bennet, understood this harsh reality. She readily accepted an offer of marriage from Mr. Collins, a man the heroine had previously (and emphatically) rejected. Elizabeth saw him as a “conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man” with whom, she was convinced, Charlotte could never be happy. Charlotte’s view, however, was more practical:

“I’m not romantic, you know; I never was. I only ask a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connection, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.”

Practicality over passion appears in Persuasion, wherein the heroine, Anne Eliot, was persuaded by a family friend to decline the proposal of a young navy man she loved, because he lacked wealth. In this case, however, Anne also refused a subsequent offer of marriage to a wealthy man because her heart still belonged to the man who had since gone to sea for many years. When the sailor finally returned, having made his fortune, his heart was still Anne’s and, after many missteps, they got back together for their happy ending.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish Austen’s practical maiden from a fortune hunter. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, accompanies family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Allen, to Bath. Isabella Thorpe, mistakenly believing the Allens to be wealthy, cultivated a friendship with Catherine to “throw her in the path” of Catherine’s supposedly rich brother, James Morland to whom she was swiftly engaged. Poor James was unceremoniously dumped, however, when Isabella learned he was not as rich as she thought.

The difference between Isabella Thorpe and Anne Eliot appears to be that one married for love, while the other sought only wealth. But even Anne did not marry the poor man she loved. Austen, often called a feminist, appears to warn that a woman should use her head in deciding her future and whom to love.

This is never expressed more clearly than in Mansfield Park. Mrs. Price, the mother of the novel’s heroine Fanny Price, married a working-class man for love. They proceeded to have more children than they could afford, which led to them sending Fanny to live with one of Mrs. Price’s sisters, Lady Bertram. This fortunate sister had married a man with a title who provided her a life of luxury—a life she mostly spent in a drug-induced stupor, coddling her pug dog, and neglecting her four children. Neither love nor money alone was enough to ensure happiness.  

Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s first novel, delineates this theme of combining love and more practical concerns when marrying even more clearly. The younger sister, Marianne Dashwood, gets swept away by passion for an unworthy man and ends up with a broken heart. The elder, Elinor Dashwood, falls in love with a man set to inherit a fortune, but who has already become engaged to a fortune hunter.  She also ends up with a broken heart. But it doesn’t end there. Austen always offers her heroines a happy ending. Marianne, sadder but wiser, eventually weds a man who offers her true affection as well as wealth and security. The object of Elinor’s love is disinherited and then dumped by the fortune-hunter, thus clearing the way for him to marry Elinor. He becomes a clergyman and the sisters, we suppose, live happily ever after.

Only one of Austen’s heroines has no need of a man to support her. Emma Woodhouse, the heroine in Austen’s fourth novel, lacked neither wealth nor status. In discussion with her friend, Harriet Smith, Emma said:

“I am not only, not going to be married, at present, but have very little intention of ever marrying at all. . . . I have none of the inducements of women to marry. . . . Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want. . . .”

Of course, even Emma falls in love with a good man and changes her views on marriage.

The romances in Austen’s novels still resonate with readers today, but I think there is more to her popularity than just a happy-ever-after tale. Twenty-first century women live a life Austen might envy. There are myriad options open to them, with or without marriage. They have more control over the number of children they will bear, can acquire education, hold professional positions, manage their own affairs, and, in the US, have been voting for more than a century. So, what is it about those stories of societal oppression that keeps modern women reading, watching, and adapting these six novels?

If asked, today’s married women say they married for love, but also used their heads. Since the 1960s, the age at which people commit to their first marriage has risen almost a decade. Young couples, attracted by love, prepare for a long-term commitment. They establish themselves in their careers. Some jointly invest in a home before tying the knot. They consider whether or when they might want to have children. They take their futures into their own hands—and, we hope, live happily ever after. Just as an Austen heroine was meant to live.

Issue 63, Winter 2021

Literary Learnings

A Trip Through Time-Travel Literature

The new year gives us an opportunity to think about the passage of time. But what exactly is time?

Most of us do not even try to understand Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension. Still, anyone who has driven an unknown route to an unfamiliar destination and back again knows that the way to it feels longer than the trip back home, even though the distance traveled is the same. It’s axiomatic that doing a tedious task seems to take forever (unless you’re on a tight deadline), but “time flies when we’re having fun.”

How we perceive time, according to a 2017 study, might even depend on what language we speak. English speakers think of time as a distance (a short time), while Spanish speakers perceive it as a size (a small time). See https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170502112607.htm.

So, with all these elements affecting our perception of time, is it any wonder that the human imagination has long pondered the possibility of time travel? Is the attempt of ancient prophets to see into the future so very different from trying to visit it?  And isn’t the experience of reading an old or historical novel similar to visiting that time period, if only as an observer?

Time travel fiction has been with us for centuries. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, written by Irish author Samuel Madden in 1733—during the reign of King George II of Great Britain—purports to reveal letters written by a Twentieth Century British King George VI. (In fact, the twentieth century did have a King George VI, Queen Elizabeth II’s father, but we’re pretty sure he didn’t write the letters.)

By the nineteenth century, such classics as Rip Van Winkle, A Christmas Carol, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court employed time travel of one sort or another, with a supernatural cause or while unconscious. After all, while asleep, we can travel wherever or whenever our subconscious takes us. Perhaps the first mechanical or science-based, time-travel story was “The Clock That Went Backward,” by Edward Page Mitchell, first published anonymously in the New York Sun, in 1881. In this short work, two boys discover an old clock with hands that run counterclockwise, turning back time as it goes.

Later, H.G. Wells’ so-called “scientific romances” included The Time Machine, published in 1895. Despite its title, Wells’ novella is more social commentary than science. In it, an inventor creates a time machine (with no specifics of theory or mechanics shared with the reader). He traveled hundreds of millennia into a future world inhabited by two human species: the Eloi, a soft, child-like race, and the Morlocks, a more brutish, ape-like human. The inventor decides that these two races are the inevitable result of the growing wealth and class disparity in late nineteenth century England. The privileged class, he reasoned, would become more helpless and dependent on the working class to keep the machinery of civilization operating. Wells might have been influenced by American author Edward Bellamy’s Marxist time-travel novel Looking Backward, published in 1888, which idealized a socialist system in America in the year 2000 over the abuses of the unfettered capitalism of Bellamy’s time. That novel is credited with helping to spark many of the reforms of the turn-of-the-century Progressive Era.

Today’s time-travel fiction spans both supernatural and science-based time travel. Some of the former include Jack Finney’s Time and Again and its sequel From Time to Time, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, Stephen King’s 11/22/63, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. In each of these, there is no scientific explanation as to why time travel occurs, but each lays out the process by which it happens.

In Finney’s novels, time travel is more a mental exercise than a trick of physics. One must dress in the period to which they wish to travel and surround themselves only with things that could be present in their target time. Then, as if by magic, they emerge into that time period. The hero, New York ad executive Simon Morely, not only travels back and forth through time, he falls in love in the earlier time period with a woman long dead in his own time. Now what? Read it and see.

In Diana Gabaldon’s world, a time traveler passes through ancient standing stones in the Scottish Highlands and moves from post-World War II to early 1700s Scotland. And, once again, the traveler, army nurse Claire Randall, falls in love. It’s with Jaime Fraser from the earlier time, even though she is already married in the twentieth century. In her many sequels, Gabaldon introduces other travelers and other standing stones that also serve as portals. But travelers must pay for the trip with a gem—and their destination might not always be where they expect to go.

Stephen King uses a time portal of a different sort—a “rabbit hole” in the murky backroom of a diner. This wormhole theory of time travel is common, but King makes his more interesting because the traveler who steps through it always appears at the same place and time: Lisbon Falls, Maine, on September 9, 1958, at 11:58 a.m. Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, uses the “rabbit hole” to go back in time hoping to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. Because he arrives years before the event, he ages several years before he can attempt to save the president. Whether he does or not is . . . well, you really ought to read it!

In Octavia Butler’s version, the main character, Dana Franklin, experiences vertigo as she is drawn back to an earlier time to save a distant ancestor whenever he finds himself in mortal peril—which he does with alarming frequency. She can only return to her own time when she feels herself to be in mortal peril. This can take weeks or months, but when she returns to her own era, only hours or days have passed. The story is complicated by Dana being a Black woman from the 1970s transported to antebellum Maryland. The ancestor who needs saving is a white boy growing up in a plantation-owning family that enslaves her during her visits to their time.

The authors of these books do not attempt to explain the travel in scientific terms. It is up to the reader to suspend disbelief long enough to accept that if characters follow the rules laid out, they can slip into another time.

Science-assisted time travel (as opposed to relying on the supernatural or a conveniently placed worm hole) appears in Connie Willis’ Oxford Time Travel series, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, Michael Crichton’s Timeline, and Gregory Benford’s Timescape.

Connie Willis set her series in the mid-twenty-first century when historians use a “net” to visit many different time periods in the past. This series includes the novels Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout, and All Clear, and the short story “Fire Watch.” All are highly recommended, but Doomsday Book makes exceptional pandemic reading.

In Audrey Niffenegger’s novel, a man travels uncontrollably through time due to a rare genetic defect, visiting his wife in random order throughout her youth and adulthood. Michael Crichton wrote about historical researchers traveling back to medieval France to rescue their time-travelling professor using a machine based on a fiction-friendly version of quantum physics. Gregory Benford, meanwhile, wrote in 1980 about scientists in the late 1990s sending a message to the early 1960s to help avoid an environmental disaster. Benford relies on still-theoretical, faster-than-light tachyon particles to carry the message.

One thing all time travel stories have in common, whether using magic or a machine, is that each author gives us firm rules about the way time travel works in their fictional setting. What does a traveler need to do to make time travel work—if they can control it at all? How can they get back? Do they age at the same rate in the alternate time period, or do they return at the same age as when they left? Can a change in the past result in a change in the present?

Time-travel fiction is rife with paradoxes. Is there a butterfly effect that will destroy humanity because of a small change to the past? Can you kill your own grandfather before he meets your grandmother, thus making it impossible for you to be born and live to kill your grandfather? In Benford’s work, if scientists are successful in sending their message to the 1960s and their world is saved, would they still send the message in the 1990s? And if they didn’t, would their world be destroyed? Or, as Willis’ characters hypothesize, does the space-time continuum preserve itself and prevent tampering that could severely alter the future? Chat rooms are full of discussions of such incongruities.

H.G. Wells notwithstanding, the majority of time-travel fiction involves travel to the past. A surprising number of them include travel to a specific time period: November, 1963. Stephen King makes no secret about that in 11/22/63, but it is also addressed in Benford’s Timescape, Stanley Shapiro’s A Time to Remember, and many others. The Kennedy assassination was such a horrific, watershed event that undoing it is bound to have an impact on the time that follows, but is it always for the better? We will undoubtedly see similar time-travel fiction, trying to undo 9/11 or perhaps prevent the Covid-19 pandemic. Great crises call for great remedies.

But what about travel to the future? There are many older novels that have tried to predict the future with limited success. Historical settings are easier to research, better known to readers, and require less invention than creating an unknown future. Perhaps that is why peering into the future is a staple of dystopian novelists, while time-travel sci-fi more often sticks to the past.

I have listed only a few of myriad time-travel novels. Everyone has their favorites, and I shouldn’t conclude this without acknowledging the giants: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Philip K. Dick, Madeleine L’Engle, Robert Heinlein, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, and (for one of our BWG members) Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But don’t overlook the many other time-travel stories available from mid-list authors whose talents are only now being recognized. And remember, just because the Vulcan High Command declared time travel to be impossible in the twenty-second century, it didn’t prevent every Star Trek captain from romping through time in every one of the franchise’s series.

So, is time travel really possible? I guess only time will tell.

~

Issue 60, Spring 2020

Literary Learning

Listen, my children, and you shall hear . . .

April always takes me back to my childhood in Acton, Massachusetts, right next door to Concord (pronounced more like “conquered” than like “concorde”). Growing up there imbues a child with both a sense of history and an appreciation of literature.

Concord is famously the home of many legendary authors including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), William Ellery Channing (1818-1901), Louisa May Alcott (1832-88), and Harriet Lothrop, who wrote as Margaret Sidney, (1844-1924). Even today, well-known authors are drawn there, including Doris Kearns Goodwin, Alan Lightman, and Gregory Maguire. What a wonderful place to grow up. Writers can, as we know, make us see the world in new ways.

Equally ingrained in the culture of the area is its history. There, kids don’t get a “Spring Break” from school. Instead they get a February vacation (the week including Presidents Day) and April vacation (the week including Patriots’ Day.)

What is Patriots’ Day, you ask? It is the commemoration of the Battles of Lexington and Concord—events with local celebrations that rival or exceed Independence Day. Over time, those battles have been the inspiration for many of the region’s poets, not least of whom was lyric poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) who immortalized the “midnight ride of Paul Revere” in his poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere

On the 18th of April, in Seventy-five:

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year. . . .

That’s 1775, when British General Thomas Gage, who commanded the British troops occupying Boston,  ordered 700 Redcoats to scour the countryside for the radical leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock, rumored to be staying thirteen miles away in Lexington, and to discover the location of stores of munitions and supplies for local militias, rumored to be hidden in Concord, seven miles farther on.

Colonial spies learned of Gage’s orders and planned to warn Adams, Hancock, and the surrounding towns. That night, two lanterns were hung in the steeple of the Old North Church, signaling the route British troops would take out of Boston.

“One if by land, and two if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country-folk to be up and to arm.” . . .

And they were. In Middlesex County towns, Minutemen—so named because they were ready to rise to arms on a minute’s notice—were alerted not just by Paul Revere but by William Dawes, who took a different route out of Boston to avoid the risk of both of them being captured at once.

It was one by the village clock,

When he galloped into Lexington. . . .

Revere and Dawes met at Lexington, arriving about a half hour apart, and warned Adams and Hancock who quickly departed. The two couriers then set out for Concord. Fortunately for history, they were joined by Dr. Samuel Prescott who was out late, returning home to Concord after a courting visit with a young lady in Lexington.

Just as the sky began to lighten on the morning of April 19, an advance party of British troops, led by Major John Pitcairn, arrived in Lexington. A militia of seventy-seven armed colonists stood on the town green. They faced each other down, both sides having been ordered not to fire. Pitcairn ordered the colonists to disperse, and they began to do so. Then a shot rang out. Its source is unknown, but its effect was that the British opened fire, killing seven Minutemen. One mortally wounded patriot crawled home from the green, only to die on his doorstep.

It was two by the village clock,

When he came to the bridge in Concord town. . . .

Despite Longfellow’s heroic telling, before Revere could reach Concord, he was arrested by the British and held for questioning before being released hours later. Dawes and Prescott eluded the British, but Dawes lost his horse and walked back to Lexington. It was Prescott who, knowing the terrain, was able to get through to alert the patriots in Concord. He then traveled on to Acton while his brother, Abel, alerted other towns. 

And one was safe and asleep in his bed

Who at the bridge would be first to fall,

Who that day would be lying dead,

Pierced by a British musket-ball.

Captain Isaac Davis, the captain of the Acton Minutemen, had been preparing his land for spring planting and left his plow in his field the evening before. After hearing the alarm, at least thirty of his force of forty Minutemen (including a young drummer and fifer) mustered there. Besides being a farmer, Davis was a metal worker who had fashioned bayonets for his militiamen. They were ready for close combat if need be. In the early morning hours of April 19, they marched with their arms along a nearly seven-mile trail (now followed each Patriots’ Day by local residents, scouts, and history buffs) to the home of Major John Buttrick of the Concord militia. The Buttrick farm served as the meeting place for the approximately 400 Minutemen from various towns who had responded to the call. Between the Buttrick home and the center of Concord a half mile away, flowed the narrow Concord River spanned by a wooden bridge.

By eight o’clock, the British arrived in Concord. Frustrated by not being able to find the stash of weapons and supplies, they went into houses, dragged out furniture, wooden bowls, and anything else flammable, and created a bonfire on the village green. The Minutemen saw smoke rising above the bare trees and feared the British would set the entire town afire.

The Minutemen advanced toward the bridge to cross with orders not to fire unless fired upon. Captain Davis volunteered his men for the front line because they had bayonets, saying, “I haven’t a man who is afraid to go.”

A small company of the British forces had crossed the bridge as the colonists approached. Seeing the combined militia making chase, the British retreated back across the bridge, prying up some of its planks to delay the Minutemen's crossing. Once across the bridge, the British turned and fired on the undaunted Minutemen. Isaac Davis and another young Acton Minuteman, Abner Hosmer, fell—the first to die at the Battle of Concord. 

But instead of turning and scattering as they had in Lexington, the assembled militias held their positions. Captain Buttrick shouted, "Fire, fellow soldiers, for God's sake fire!" They fired on the British--the first time colonists had fired a shot for liberty. It was the British who turned and ran.

You know the rest. In the books you have read,

How the British Regulars fired and fled,—

How the farmers gave them ball for ball,

From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,

Chasing the red-coats down the lane,

Then crossing the fields to emerge again

Under the trees at the turn of the road,

And only pausing to fire and load.

Longfellow put it well. The British, never expecting armed resistance, reassembled and marched in formation back to Boston. The colonists pursued them, shooting from behind trees and stone walls. When the day was over, forty-nine colonists had died, but they had killed 73 soldiers of the finest army in the world. 

More importantly, the Revolutionary War had begun.

Longfellow was not the only poet of his generation inspired by these events. Concord resident Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Concord Hymn,” a portion of which is inscribed on the base of a statue of a Minuteman which stands at the Old North Bridge.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

Both poets highlight the heroic acts of the colonists, heaping immortal praise on those who fought to free Americans from the yoke of the tyranny of King George III. But there is a portion of one more poem, by the lesser-known poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), that struck me the hardest the first time I visited the Old North Bridge as a young girl—so much so that I memorized it that day. It’s not on the tall Minuteman monument erected in 1875 that sits on the colonists’ side of the bridge, nor the obelisk erected in 1836 and placed on the other side of the river to commemorate the battle. Rather it is engraved on a slate slab attached to a stone wall on the town side of the bridge. Overlooked by most tourists, it is flanked by two small British flags. It marks the grave of two unnamed British soldiers who died at that bridge, far from their homes, on April 19, 1775.

They came three thousand miles, and died,

To keep the Past upon its throne:

Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,

Their English mother made her moan. 

Standing there, a chill ran through me as I read it. I then realized that the Minutemen weren’t the only patriots in that battle. That there are two sides to every conflict, and it is good to remember that both deserve to be understood.

Writers can, after all, make us see the world in new ways.