Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 142

Writing the Villain

Before I wander off down the dark paths of villainy, I want to thank those of you who joined me at my signing last weekend at Page One Books.  I really enjoyed myself.  If you had to miss – or didn’t get quite enough – I hope you’ll join me 7:00 p.m. this Thursday at UNM where I’ll be giving a talk entitled “The Mythic Impulse: Why Fantasy Speaks to Our Souls” followed by a Q&A.  It’s in the Honors Center and open to the public.  More details are available on my Facebook page and under Appearances on my website.

Not Just Heroes

Now for villains…  Last week I wandered on about why I don’t enjoy reading a book (or watching a show) in which a major protagonist is a villain.   This week, I’d like to talk about how I go about writing villains.  A complex, convincing villain can make or break a book.  Having that villain’s point of view is also important, especially in a certain type of story.

Just because I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing, let me define a couple of terms, okay?

Last week I offered a definition of villain that left out abstractions like “evil” and focused on specific qualities. Villains care more about their own gain than what will happen to anyone else around them.  They do serious harm, not to be abstractly “evil,” but because the end result will benefit themselves.  They have allies and associates, but rarely friends (because a friend is someone whose benefit or happiness is important).  Even when his or her acts may seem virtuous,  a villain’s acts ultimately benefit the doer, not those  ostensibly done for.

An antagonist is somewhat different.  If the protagonist is the character who represents the main thrust of the action in the book, the antagonist is the character who opposes those actions.  An antagonist may not be nearly as nasty as a villain.  He or she (or they) may have many admirable qualities and just be on the “wrong” side.  The Comments last week addressed the difference between an antagonist and a villain in some depth, so I’m going to restrain myself from wandering down that path and get to the point several  people have asked me since last week:  How do you write such great villains?

I know I write good villains.  If I didn’t, I wouldn’t get e-mails from readers yelling  at me for doing such horrible things to my characters.  One memorable e-mail informed me that I couldn’t put off onto Lady Melina from “The Wolf Books” what she did to young Citrine because I created Melina and so it was me who did it…

Wow!  By that logic, I also eat raw rabbit guts and walk around in public without my clothes on, as my “heroic” (or at least anti-heroic) Firekeeper does.

 

However, this leads nicely to the first trick to writing good villains.  Accept that, although various people are going to wonder how you manage to come up with such twisted and ugly material, the characters who perform those acts are not you.  You’ll have to accept that some readers are going to wonder just what perversities you practice in your spare time, but letting the dark side out is part of the cost of being a writer.

(Aside: Some of the nicest people I’ve met write Horror.  Ellen Datlow, one of the finest editors in the Horror field, is an intelligent and eloquent lady.  Maybe there’s something to be said about coming to terms with the dark.)

Another element in writing good villains is accepting that they don’t think they are villains.  In their version of the story, they’re – if not heroes – simply people with the good sense to do what is necessary to achieve their goals.  As Steve (S.M.) Stirling frequently puts it: “No one wakes up in the morning and says ‘I think I’m going to be evil today.’”  Even Hitler convinced himself he was doing what he was doing for the greater good.

Recently, Jim and I have been re-watching a bunch of classic animated Disney movies.  To me, the reason the Lady Tremaine in Cinderella is so much more terrifying than Malificent in Sleeping Beauty is because Lady Tremaine is intelligently malicious when pursuing those actions that serve her goals.   (In this case, promoting the welfare of her two daughters over that of her stepdaughter.)  Malificent, by contrast, lightly talks of “evil” and uses a minor social slight as an excuse to pursue this nebulous abstract.  She may turn into a dragon and have orc-like henchmen, but she’s much less frightening.

(Aside: It’s particularly interesting to contrast these two characters because they were voiced by the same actress.  She also provided the physical type on which both were modeled.)

Happily, we’re not likely to meet a Malificent in our lives. I find myself terrified of Lady Tremaine because I’ve already met variations on her – and am likely to do so again.  Because this is the type of villain who scares me, it’s also the type I write, even if I find immersing myself into that point of view highly distasteful.

There’s a scene in my novel Changer in which the Changer has an eye extracted while he is awake and completely conscious of what is going on.  That scene had to be in the book and from his point of view.  I hated writing it – I wrote around it for as long as possible – but in the end, I dove in.  In Five Odd Honors, the third “Breaking the Wall” book, young Flying Claw is methodically tortured.  Again, I hated writing this scene, but it had to be there.  To write it well, I had to go into the twisted insanity of those for whom this was a sensible and reasonable approach to their goals.  I had to get across that, to them, Flying Claw was the unreasonable one.

Scary stuff.

So why write from the villain’s point of view or with an understanding of why they do what they do?  Why go into those places?  Isn’t the end result enough?

Once upon a time, I thought this was the case.  I enjoy classic mystery novels.  In those, you rarely know who did the murder or why the murder was done until the end of the book.   When I wrote my first several published novels – the first two of which were from a first person point of view – the mystery approach was my model.

After my second novel, Marks of Our Brothers, came out, author Mike (Michael A.) Stackpole said to me something along these lines: “I liked it, but I think it would have been stronger if you also provided something of the other side’s point of view.”

My initial reaction was to disagree.  The novel was told from a first person point of view.  How could I introduce someone else’s without that introduction seeming forced?  Also – thinking about those mysteries again – wouldn’t knowing what “the bad guys” were up to “give away” the plot?

Since then, I’ve come to understand what Mike was saying.  I’ve noticed how tense I get when a read a novel that provides what the “bad guys” are thinking  and planning.  David Weber is very good at using this technique.  I remember being on the edge of my seat as I read an Honor Harrington novel wherein we the reader knew that the enemy had developed a new surveillance technology that invalidated a bunch of the tactics that Honor and her associates were going to use.  How many ships would be destroyed, how many lives lost, before they discovered this and took countermeasures?

Would I write Marks of Our Brothers differently today?  Probably so.

You don’t need to make a villain a point of view character to use their perspective effectively.  What’s important is making certain that the reader understands that the villain thinks of himself or herself as following a reasonable, intelligent, and sensible course of action.  However, sometimes, dipping into how the other side thinks is valuable, even compelling.

So, what sorts of villains scare you?  Which do you like to write about?  To read about?  Are they the same or different?  Do you find a Minion of Evil fascinating or clichéd?  Where do you wander when darkness is needed?

TT: A King by the Bard Maligned

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Just page back and hear why I think it’s not possible to make a villain into a hero.  Then come and join me and Alan as we take a look at a good man transformed by Shakespeare into a villain.

Oh!  I’ll be doing a signing at Page One Books on Saturday (November 16th) at 3:00 pm.  I hope some of you will be able to drop by.  I’ll probably read from Treecat Wars and certainly take questions about just about anything.

JANE: When I read Josephine Tey’s excellent novel, The Daughter of Time, I was shocked to realize how horribly Shakespeare had maligned King Richard III in his play, The Tragedy of Richard the Third. I even felt a touch guilty.  Shakespeare makes Richard III such a compelling villain that the play is among the most powerful of his early works. And, of course, I’d believed all the lies…

My Kingdom for More Horsepower!

ALAN: I only recently read Josephine Tey’s novel. My perception of Richard was coloured by what I learned of him in school, which itself was probably much influenced by Shakespeare.

JANE: Shakespeare shouldn’t take all the blame.  According to The Riverside Shakespeare, by the time Shakespeare sat down to write his play, he was drawing on a tradition over a hundred years old.  Interestingly, one of the works that was most influential on Shakespeare was written by a science fiction writer.

ALAN: Who are you referring to here? Nobody springs immediately to my mind…

JANE:   Maybe it would have helped if I’d said this SF writer was also a Catholic saint.  The author of the work that perhaps did the most – after Shakespeare’s play, that is – to destroy Richard III’s reputation was the History of King Richard the Third written by Thomas More.  (Catholics may be familiar with him as Saint Thomas More.)

ALAN: Oh! Of course!

JANE: More was also an early science fiction writer.  He wrote Utopia, which not only gave the English language a new word, but provided some very interesting world-building, as More sought to eliminate those qualities (such as valuing gold) that he felt led to a multitude of human failings.

Shakespeare clearly drew heavily on More’s History of King Richard the Third.  Given More’s later prominence, it’s likely the original work would have survived to continue blackening Richard III.  However, Shakespeare’s play with its compelling drama – after the Henry IV, Part One, it was Shakespeare’s most reprinted work – certainly brought More’s version of the king to the masses.

ALAN: And it certainly cemented one (possibly biased) view of the events firmly into the popular culture. Once something like that takes root, it’s almost impossible to overturn.

JANE:  Ah, the power of pop culture…

Tey’s The Daughter of Time would be a remarkable novel, even if it didn’t provide a treat for history buffs.  There are few novels where a normally active protagonist is forced to solve the “case” from a hospital bed.  And, of course, since the novel has a contemporary setting (contemporary at the time it was written, that is), Alan Grant faces a very cold case indeed.

Since I think Tey’s novel can hold up even if one knows in advance the conclusion the detective will reach, let’s take a look at the historical realities.  You’re a Yorkshireman and therefore probably sympathize with Richard III.  Why don’t you weigh in?

ALAN: In many ways, of course, Richard III was my king, given that he was of the house of York. My history lessons at school certainly emphasised his evil reputation, but I well recall my history teacher going out of his way to tell us that the stories about Richard III were just that – stories, with no real evidence other than hearsay to back them up.

Anyway – this is the historical background. But beware, it gets very confusing; there are a plethora of Richards and Edwards involved in it all, so hang onto your hat and take a deep breath.

JANE: Hat tied on securely.  (I had to get one.  I don’t usually wear a hat inside.)  Notebook in hand to record Richards and Edwards.  Go for it!

ALAN: After Henry VI was defeated at the Battle of Tewkesbury, the house of Lancaster was in complete disarray. The Yorkist king Edward IV took the throne.

Edward IV was the eldest son of an earlier Richard, the third Duke of York. It was this earlier Richard who had been Lord Protector of England during one of Henry VI’s periods of catatonia. However this earlier Richard died in battle against Henry VI, which is why his son Edward IV took the throne after the Yorkist armies destroyed the house of Lancaster.

JANE: (scribbling busily): Edward, son of Richard, former Lord Protector…

ALAN: Edward IV had a younger brother Richard, named after his father. This Richard’s official title was Duke of Gloucester. I’m not sure if he ever officially inherited the title Duke of York, (though he was definitely known as Richard of York; note the absence of the word Duke in that phrase). In terms of power and influence, he was certainly Duke of York in all but name because Edward IV appointed him to head the Council of the North, thus giving Richard control over the entire north of England. The city of York became Richard’s power base. By all accounts, Richard administered his mini-realm very well indeed and he was a popular figure, well liked and respected.

JANE: (still scribbling): Okay.  Richard, son of Richard, brother of Edward.  Duke of Gloucester.  Also known as Richard of York, even though he wasn’t the duke.

You know… A lot of problems would be solved if the English kings were more creative – or at least more consistent – in their names.

Go on…

ALAN: (taking a deep breath): When Edward IV died, his son and heir, also called Edward, became (in theory at least) King Edward V. However Edward V was only twelve years old. His Uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, leader of the Council of the North, was appointed Lord Protector of the realm until the child would be old enough to inherit the throne. The young Edward and his nine-year-old brother Richard (yes, another Richard who also briefly held the title Duke of York) were held in protective custody in the Tower of London.

Still with me?

JANE: Arrggh…  Okay.  Edward, son of Richard, names his sons Edward and Richard…  Richard, son of Richard, uncle of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, but not Duke of York (that’s nephew Richard and father Richard) gets the title Lord Protector.

No wonder Edward V and Duke Richard became  famous as the Princes in the Tower…  It’s a lot easier to remember, even if one of them was apparently a king, not a prince, and the other was a duke, as well as being a prince.

ALAN: By George, you’ve got it!

Wouldn’t it have been much less confusing if some of these people had been called George, though that might have forced a renumbering of some later kings…

Anyway, after some murky machinations, probably at Richard’s instigation, the church deemed Edward IV’s marriage to have been invalid. The young princes, Edward and Richard, were declared bastards and were therefore unable to inherit the throne. That meant their Uncle Richard (Edward IV’s brother) was clearly the legitimate king, and so he was crowned Richard III on the 6th July 1483. The young princes were never seen again.

JANE: Ah…  Although Shakespeare leaves no doubt – and indeed has a heart-breaking scene in his play built around their deaths – there is some question as to exactly who was responsible for their murders.

ALAN: And that’s where Richard’s evil reputation comes from, of course. Even though the times were cruel and hard, the murder of two young and innocent children was seen as unnecessarily cruel. It’s easy to blame Richard for the deaths. Had the children lived, they could have become the focus of a rebellion against Richard when they grew up. There were plenty of historical precedents. So he certainly had both the motive and the opportunity. But did he do it? I like to think not, though again the evidence is only circumstantial. When he was leader of the Council of the North, he proved himself to be an honourable man. Would he really have changed his character that much after he inherited the throne?

But it’s all moot, because Richard was king for only two years. Henry Tudor, whose mother was the illegitimate great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, rebelled against Richard and defeated him at the Battle of Bosworth.

JANE: Whoa…  Clarification is needed for those who are only familiar with Shakespeare’s version.   In the play, Henry is referred to as “Richmond,” after his title “Earl of Richmond.”

We’ll get back to Henry Tudor in a bit…

In Shakespeare’s play, Richard III is slain by Richmond who, although not yet crowned Henry VII, proclaims that: “We will unite the White Rose and the Red.”  The end of Richard III is not only the end of a reign, but of a long and bloody war.

ALAN: After his death at the Battle of Bosworth, Richard was buried and lost to history until, in 2013, his body was found during the excavation of what is now a car park in the city of Leicester.

It was clear that he’d been interred with some pomp and ceremony. They strangled his favourite Rolls Royce and buried the body with him to keep him company in the afterlife. Richard was an early supporter of the internal combustion engine and he deployed a whole regiment of tanks at the Battle of Bosworth. Unfortunately, they were rather underpowered and had little influence on the outcome of the battle. I’m sure things would have been quite different if they had been equipped with bigger engines. They are the reason for Richard’s famous words during the battle, “Horsepower! Horsepower! My kingdom for more horsepower!”

Shakespeare used the quote in his play but, as he so often did, he got the words a bit wrong…

JANE: Alan, I think all these princes who are really kings and dukes and the plethora of Edwards and Richards is making you lose your mind.  I’m almost afraid to mention it, but you did promise to inform us about Richard III’s contribution to physics.

ALAN: Ah yes – and this time I’m not making it up. Generations of British children have been taught the order of the colours of the spectrum of visible light by using the initial letters of the mnemonic: Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).

JANE: American children – at least this one – learned Roy G. Biv.  Your version is more fun.

Going back to where we started, Josephine Tey is not the only artist or historian to try to clear Richard III’s reputation.  I have cassette tape called The Faerie Shaman by Gwydion which contains “The Ballad of Richard III.”  In addition to providing history set to dulcimer music – an interesting thing in itself – the refrain provides the provocative twist that, although Henry of Richmond is commonly thought of as Welsh, he could make as much a claim to being French.  Perhaps we can touch upon that next time, as we look at King Henry VII.

Villains as Heroes?

Life is just too short to spend with people you don’t like or care about.

Assorted Villains

I find this is true when reading, as well as in real life.  Maybe it’s even more true when reading than in real life.  That came home to me last week when, with great reluctance, I gave up on Jonathan Stroud’s bestselling “Bartimaeus” trilogy.  The books had been recommended to me by Yvonne, the same friend who had recommended Maggie Stiefvater’s  The Raven Boys, which I’d really liked, so I started with cheerful anticipation.

The opening was pretty good:  light, sardonic narration from the point of view of the djinn for whom the series is named.  Jim, passing through the kitchen where I was listening as I worked on preparing dinner, commented: “That sounds good.  I may need to listen next.”  By the end of the book, he’d changed his mind.  I’m more stubborn.  The writing was good and strong.  The characters were well-developed.  The plots…  Well, a bit predictable, but that alone won’t stop me.

I finished book one (The Amulet of Samarkand) and started book two (The Golem’s Eye).  Two years had passed in the lives of the characters.  Despite the tremendously dramatic and eye-opening events at the end of book one, the protagonist, Nathaniel, had not changed at all.  No.  He had.  All his worst traits were intensified.  Many of his better traits had vanished.    The book introduced a new character, Kitty, for whom I initially had some hopes, since she was involved in a rebellion against the system that had created creeps like Nathaniel.

Since I can’t do so without  huge amounts of spoilers, I won’t go into all the reasons that I gave up on Kitty and her allies as well.  Suffice to say, I quit.  The Amulet of Sammarkand hadn’t given me a lot of hope that anyone would change in an interesting or provocative fashion in the course of The Golem’s Eye.

When Jim and I were talking about the books, I finally came up with a shorthand explanation for why they didn’t work for me.  “They were like the Harry Potter novels told from the point of view of Draco Malfoy.”

Since then,  I’ve been trying to figure out why I couldn’t finish.  After all, some of my favorite characters in fantasy fiction would be classified as anti-heroes rather than heroes.  Corwin of Amber and his brothers (with the possible exception of Julian) are definitely anti-heroes.  Elric of Melnibone.  Definitely an anti-hero.  Actually, most of Zelazny and Moorcock’s protagonists are anti-heroes, rather than heroes.   Poul Andersen wrote many a hero, but my favorite of his characters is Nicholas van Rijn, “The Man who Counts” – a definite anti-hero.  Even many of my own characters are closer to anti-heroes than heroes.

A few weeks ago, when we were talking about dystopias, I noted that anti-heroes are hard to define.  I’ll give the definition I used there: an anti-hero behaves in a recognizably heroic fashion in some sense, but does not embrace the idealized concept of how a hero should behave.  (If you want more detail, see WW “Dystopias and Anti-Heroes,” 8-21-13.)

That’s when it hit me.  Draco Malfoy is neither a hero or an anti-hero.  He’s a villain, pure and simple – and that’s how J.K. Rowlings casts him in her novels.

The definitions of “villain” are many and various.  Let me make myself clear on the sort of villain I mean – a definition that leaves out abstracts like “evil” and focuses on qualities.  Villains care more about their own gain than what will happen to anyone else around them.  They do serious harm not to be abstractly “evil,” but because the end result will benefit themselves.  They have allies and associates, but rarely friends, (because a friend is someone whose benefit or happiness is important).  Even when their acts may seem virtuous, under the surface, a villain’s acts ultimately benefit the doer, not those  ostensibly done for.

Let’s go back to Draco Malfoy.  He has some family loyalty, but that’s about his only redeeming feature.  He has allies and lackeys, but not friends.  He’s a coward, because his own skin matters more than anyone else’s.  He’s a cheat, because his own gain matters more than honesty.  He’s alternately a bully and a sycophant.  A book told from the villain’s point of view simply doesn’t interest me.

I loved John Gardner’s novel Grendel, which retells the Beowulf Saga from the point of view of the monster but, although Grendel remains a monster in that he’s big and slimy and carnivorous and all, there’s no calculated malice to him.  In some ways, he’s almost an innocent.  He wants to eat the nice squishy humans and can’t understand why they’re so rough on him.  It’s Beowulf who becomes the villain in this variation of the tale.   He’s relentless, tracking down the monster, even after the monster has retreated.

Would I like to invite Grendel to dinner?  No.  Am I sympathetic enough to him that I would like to be his dinner?  Again, no.  But I found that John Gardner made me understand his point of view.  This was not the case with Nathaniel.

Like Draco Malfoy, Nathaniel is so invested in the abusive system in which he lives that he ignores how flawed it is – even when, as in the events at the close of The Amulet of Samarkand, his own trials should have awakened him to its flaws.  He thrives on a system of slavery and torture.  He lies and weasels to justify getting what he wants.  He has no friends, only more or less reliable allies.  Maybe Nathaniel changed his mind by the end of the series but, as I said at the start, life is just too short to spend with people you don’t like or care about.

By weird coincidence, as I was writing this piece, I received an e-mail from someone responding to my request in last week’s Wandering for topics that readers would like to hear me wander on about.  The very first topic on her list shocked me by being perfectly in key with the subject I was already musing over.  I quote:  “How have villains changed with the times?  Culturally, anti-heroes are very popular.  How’s that different from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s in science fiction and fantasy?  How does that relate to current events of the time?”

I’ll offer this as a start.  How have villains changed?  They haven’t.  What has changed is that some writers or creators of television series or movies think that by making a villain a protagonist they’re doing something daring and creative.  Why are anti-heroes popular?  As we discussed earlier, they’ve always been popular, in part because they push limits but still get the job done.  What’s different is that some people don’t seem to see the difference between an anti-hero and a villain.  Even when you make a villain a protagonist, that doesn’t make the villain a hero, except in the most facile linguistic sense.

Why the change?  (Or, I’ll add, the new fascination with villains?)  How does it relate to current events?

There I have no idea.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

TT: A King Insane, a Maiden’s Reign

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Page back one and learn why I don’t think authors are important.  Well…  There’s a bit more to it than that!  Then come back and join me and Alan as we continue our cheerful adventure through the realms of the Henries.

JANE: Last time you mentioned that King Henry VI was insane.  Is that based in fact or just bad press?

Lady Knights

ALAN: Oh it’s definitely factual, and well documented. Henry suffered from bouts of depression and instability throughout his reign. In 1453, following the loss of Bordeaux to the French, Henry slipped into a depression so profound that he completely lost touch with his surroundings. He even failed to respond to the birth of his own son! During this period, the Duke of York was appointed Lord Protector of England, which was definitely an indirect cause of the Wars of the Roses, since it gave York much political influence.

Also, during the Battle of St Albans, which secured Henry’s release from captivity and marked the start of his second reign, he was recorded as singing and laughing and generally paying no attention whatsoever to what was going on all around him!

JANE: Ouch!  Sounds like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, but with a more factual basis.

One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about these Tangents on the Henries is figuring out where other historical events fit into the puzzle.  I was thrilled to realize that Henry VI is the “King Henry” whose depredations caused Joan of Arc to rise to glory.

ALAN: Ah, poor Joan. At the age of 12 she saw a vision of Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret. They urged her to drive the English out of France. She later said that she cried when they left her, because they were so beautiful. Through a combination of family influence and a lucky guess (she predicted the defeat of a French army at Orléans), she managed to get an audience with the French king. She persuaded him to allow her to travel with the army and to wear the equipment of a knight. She had a huge effect on the morale of the French, inspiring them with her religious fervour and turning the tide of the war.

JANE: And also, incidentally, inspiring a lot of literature.  Perhaps the most famous piece is George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.

I think in some sense the popular fantasy motif of the lady knight – dealt with by writers as diverse as Tamora Pierce and Jo Walton – owes a lot to Joan of Arc.

ALAN: And, going perhaps from the sublime to the ridiculous, maybe she was also the inspiration behind Esther Friesner’s delightfully titled anthology, Chicks in Chainmail.

JANE: That’s a bizarrely wonderful suggestion…  But back to Joan.

ALAN: Joan was eventually captured by the English in 1430. Her enormous influence on the French forces was of great concern to the English and they quickly organised a show trial to get her out of the picture. Because of the religious inspiration of her campaign, they tried her for heresy. Rather to their surprise, she presented a subtle and cleverly argued defence, skilfully avoiding several theological traps that the prosecution laid for her. Some of the dialogue in George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan is actually taken verbatim from the transcript of her trial. Shaw felt that he was unable to improve on the perfection of her own words.

JANE: I didn’t know that about Shaw’s using the transcript.  That’s wonderful!

ALAN: But of course the verdict was never in doubt. Joan was found guilty and condemned to death. She was burned at the stake on 30th May 1431. After the fire died down, the English raked back the ashes to expose her charred corpse so that nobody could claim that she had escaped her fate. Then, so as to prevent the collection of holy relics, they burned her body twice more, reducing it to ashes which they scattered in the river Seine from a bridge with the rather odd name of Mathilda.

JANE: As in the English empress we discussed a few weeks ago?  What a peculiar coincidence!

Shakespeare did not treat Joan – referred to as Joan de Pucelle in my text – well.

ALAN: Oh, I don’t know. She has her moment in the sun… Joan La Pucelle (in my texts) is highly praised by the Dauphin, the French crown prince.

“La Pucelle” is French for “The Maid” (or more colloquially, “The Virgin”) and the Dauphin pours praise upon her, comparing her to figures from classical literature:

“Divinest creature, Astrea’s daughter…”

Astrea was the goddess of justice and innocence who eventually ascended to heaven where she lived among the stars in the constellation of Virgo.

On the other hand, Shakespeare also has the Dauphin say:

“A statlier pyramid to her I’ll rear / Than Rhodope’s…”

This is somewhat ironic given that in Greek legend, Rhodopis was an Egyptian prostitute who used her immoral earnings to build the Pyramid of Menkure. She must have been enormously talented between the sheets to have funded such a project! This is hardly a tactful reference to make about the virginal Joan, so maybe Shakespeare was indeed deliberately praising her with faint (or perhaps not so faint) damns by putting these words in the Dauphin’s mouth.

JANE: I really don’t think the mention of Rhodopis is “ironic.”  I think it’s meant to show that the Dauphin’s admiration is as much for her beauty and sexuality as for her saintly qualities.

I agree that, in Shakespeare’s play, in the scenes wherein Joan is introduced, her miraculous powers are proven beyond a doubt.  She knows that another man is standing in for the “Dolphin” (an early rendering of the French “dauphin”).  Then she defeats the Dolphin in single combat.  However, her saintly influence is put in doubt when the Dolphin immediately begins to lust after her.  (To her credit, she does refuse him.)

After the victory at Orleance, the Dolphin proclaims Joan France’s saint.  However, England’s Talbot – the character with whom Shakespeare’s audience would have sympathized – refers to her as “that witch, that damned sorceress,” also as “Foul fiend of France, and hag of all despite,/ Encompass’d with thy lustful paramours!”  The insults just keep piling up, each more elaborate than the last.

Later in the play, Joan calls upon supernatural forces that are far from saintly, including the “Monarch of the North” – a title for the Devil.  In other words, far from the subtle and intelligent heroine of history, Shakespeare leaves no doubt at all the France’s champion is a witch of the blackest order.  Trying to forestall her execution, Joan first claims saintly powers.  When this doesn’t work, she switches tactics, claiming to be pregnant.  (A pregnant woman was often freed from execution.)  It’s one of Shakespeare’s ugliest bits of character assassination.

ALAN: Ugly, yes. But also quite understandable from the English point of view. Every side in every war vilifies the opposing army – and the English are particularly prone to doing it. Shakespeare himself seemed really to enjoy piling insult upon insult to all and sundry. He makes villains out of the nicest people.

JANE:  Amusingly, Shakespeare wasn’t done with Henry VI once he’d killed him off in the plays.  Henry’s dead body and his ghost appear in the play Richard III…

ALAN: That’s not as farfetched as it might seem at first glance. Henry had a very busy post mortem career. Did you know that he was almost canonized as a saint?

JANE: I had no idea…  Do tell!

ALAN: A lot of posthumous miracles were attributed to the king. He raised a plague victim from the dead as she was being sewn into her shroud, and he intervened in the execution by hanging of a man unjustly accused of sheep stealing. Apparently, he placed his hand between the rope and the man’s neck, thus keeping him alive. He was long regarded informally as a saint, and eventually formal canonisation proceedings were initiated, but unfortunately Henry VIII’s break with the Roman church put a stop to the process.

JANE: So an insane king almost became a saint, and historians have spent centuries trying to argue that the saint was insane.  (I’ve read arguments of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.)

You know, I can’t resist a tangent off our tangent.  How do you feel about discussing a king whose role in Shakespeare’s drama was at the heart of a superlative mystery novel and was featured in a “filk” song?

ALAN: Oh yes! I think I know who you mean. He’s the king whose death made an enormous contribution to physics.

JANE: I’m going to wait to next time to ask you just how that one works!

What’s Really Important

Authors aren’t really important.

This past week, I finished a novel that had been separately recommended to me by two friends.  (Thank you, Sally. Thank you, Yvonne.)  Because these days my time to sit and read has been limited, I’ve been binging on audio books.   When I found my library had the book in question as an audio book, I downloaded the MP3 file.

A Bookish Person

I liked this novel well enough to recommend it to my pen pal Paul Dellinger in the letter I wrote him last week.  I thought he might particularly enjoy it because the setting is a fictional town in the Virginia mountains where we both have lived.  (He still does, actually.)    My letter said something like: “The novel’s called The Raven Boys.  Because I downloaded it as an MP3 audio file from my library, I can’t remember the author’s name.”

Later that weekend, I recommended the same book to some friends who share my liking for good fantasy.  Again, I gave the title. As they were scrawling away in their various digital note-things, Tori said, “Who’s the author?”  I felt a bit sheepish as I said, “I can’t remember, but then authors aren’t really important.”

Funny statement, I suppose,  coming from an author, but on some level I think it’s true.  On other levels, it’s completely untrue.

Before I get into why, let me tell you the name of the author of The Raven Boys.  It’s Maggie Stiefvater.  The book is the first in “The Raven Cycle,” but I can assure you that this novel, at least, stands on its own.  I’ll be reading the next one, too.

Coincidentally, as I was thinking about the relative importance of authors, I opened the latest issue of Smithsonian magazine to  a short article in which Mark Strand discussed a photograph of Walt Whitman.  The article begins with a telling thought:

“When we look at photographs of authors, especially of famous authors, we scan their faces, hoping to find some connection between the way they look and their work….  Even if we have numerous photographs of a single author, as we do of Whitman, it would be impossible to find that revealing feature or gesture that would establish the connection we seek.”

Oh, boy…  If that’s why people look at photographs of authors, about the only thing you’re going to learn from photos of this author is that somewhere along the way she became pretty darn camera shy.  (I suspect that happened about age eight, when I started wearing glasses and suffered a major crisis of self-image.)  Anyhow, even the best, most recent, photos are just frozen images of a fragment of a moment in time.

And why is the author important anyhow?  Isn’t it the work that’s important?  On one of my copies of the collected poems and plays of T.S. Eliot, the author stares out almost defiantly, as if challenging the reader to find a connection between him and the complex works within. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” had a huge impact on me when I read it sometime during my undergraduate college years.  In it, Eliot argues for his Impersonal theory of poetry.  A complex discussion ends with: “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”

I loved my professors of Modern Lit at Fordham .  The enthusiasm they instilled in me is largely the reason I went on to graduate school.  However, we read a lot of author / poet biography, along with the actual stories and poems.  Sometimes, even back then, I wanted to say “Can’t we leave the lives of Yeats and Eliot and Auden and all the rest out of it?  If Joyce’s work is only interesting because of the veiled autobiography in it, well then, why don’t we just read a biography of him without wading through the padding?”  I’m not saying that cultural context for a piece isn’t important.  Far from it!  But surely the author shouldn’t become more important than the work.

So when is the author important?  I think the author is most important if you want to find other works by that author.  As I have mentioned elsewhere, I never realized that the same guy wrote The Chronicles of Amber, which I loved, and Lord of Light, ditto, until I finally moved into an apartment big enough to hold bookshelves in which I could arrange my fiction in alphabetical order.  When I did, I started in on the other books by that author – one Roger Zelazny – as quickly as I could find them.  I discovered I’d already read a lot of them.  But, well, the author hadn’t been important, just the story.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m not thrilled that there are readers of my fiction who have liked what I write well enough to take the time to read the non-fiction I write in these weekly wanderings.  Actually, I’m  so pleased that I’m a little sorry I can’t live up to my characters.  I’ve run with wolves, but I’m not Firekeeper.  I’ve commanded a spaceship, but only in a game.   I’ve done archeology, but never found that buried pyramid.  I am a myth, but not a god.

What I am is a storyteller.  And one thing that’s made me pretty sure of is that it’s the stories that are important, not the author.

I’ve had fun talking with authors about their work.  A couple weeks ago, I shared with you my enthusiasm about finally getting to ask Tim Powers questions about the sources and allusions in various of his novels.  But I don’t think I asked Tim anything about Tim.

So, when do you find the author important?   Would you rather have a discussion about a book with the author present or absent?  If you could ask this author a question, what would it be

TT: A War by Any Other Name

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Go back one to learn why you should not open your door this Halloween to anyone clad in yellow… especially if they are wearing a mask.  Then join me and Alan as we take a look at Henry VI and the war with the most beautiful name ever.

JANE: So, Alan, last time you mentioned that Henry VI managed to be king twice. How did he do that? And does that make him Henry VI and Henry VII?

Alan’s Coloring Book

ALAN: No, he was Henry VI both times. He inherited the throne in 1422 when his father, Henry V, died. The young Henry was only nine months old when he became king and therefore a council of regents ruled in his name until he reached his majority.

JANE: What age was considered majority back then?  Do you know?

ALAN: It varied. In theory it was twenty-one but in practice it could be much earlier. Henry was officially declared of age in 1437, when he was sixteen years old.

Henry, who was of the house of Lancaster, was strongly opposed by the Yorkist branch of the family during his reign, and on 4th March 1461 a Yorkist army deposed and imprisoned him. Edward of York was then crowned as Edward IV.

JANE: Wait…  Don’t you mean Eddard of Stark?  Oh, wait…  That’s Game of Thrones.

ALAN: Indeed it is. George R. R. Martin has never made any secret of the fact that his magnum opus was greatly influenced by the political upheavals of this period and I got strange sensations of deja vu when I started reading it…

JANE: Going back to the real war, rather than its skiffy offshoot, I’m curious about something.  Regents ruled for Henry VI from when he was nine months old until he was 16 years old.   Presumably they were also Lancastrians.  Did they get into conflict with the Yorkists or did the Yorkist faction wait patiently until Henry VI took the throne?

ALAN: It’s not quite that clear cut. The regency council was dominated by Henry’s uncles, so obviously they had a vested interest in keeping power within the immediate family. However the family was large and had many branches. The Duke of York also had a legitimate claim to power – the houses of York and Lancaster were both offshoots of the Plantagenet line. Political differences, particularly over the conduct of the war in France, eventually forced them into armed conflict with each other. But really you can’t go far wrong by thinking of the Lancastrian / Yorkist conflict as just a family squabble writ large.

JANE: And those are the worst!

ALAN: After Henry was deposed, Lancastrian resistance continued and, in 1470, Edward was forced into exile.  Henry was released from captivity and returned to the throne. Unfortunately, Henry’s second reign lasted less than six months. The Yorkist forces rallied and defeated Henry’s armies at Tewkesbury on 4th May 1471. Henry was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Edward IV was crowned again (so he, too, was twice the king of England) and Henry died less than a month later. The rumour was that Edward had ordered him to be killed.

JANE: Obviously, the 4th day of the month was not Henry’s lucky day. Wasn’t all this to’ing and fro’ing between Lancaster and York known as the War of the Roses?  A lovely name for a nasty conflict…

ALAN: Indeed it was: the Red Rose of Lancashire versus the White Rose of Yorkshire, a bitter dispute that is still alive and well today. I was born in Yorkshire and so I owe my allegiance to the White Rose. These days, our patriotic fervour tends to manifest itself in trans-Penine cricket matches. There was a time when only people who were actually born in the county were allowed to play for the Yorkshire cricket team, so as to stop infiltration by those nasty Lancastrians. That rule has been relaxed in recent years, presumably because the Lacastrians, who had no such rule and who recruited their cricket players far and wide, gave us far too many good thrashings!

JANE: Do the jerseys or whatever it is the cricket players wear have roses on them?

ALAN: It comes and goes as fashions do, but certainly it’s not unheard of. I vividly remember as a small child at school drawing roses on white paper, and not being allowed to colour them in. They had to stay white!

JANE: I love that!

Sadly for the stage, Shakespeare decided to deal with the events surrounding the War of the Roses when he was relatively new as a playwright.  There are three plays about Henry VI and the events of his reign.  However, for years there was a great deal of resistance among both scholars and admirers of the Bard to even admit that he wrote the first of the “Henry VI” plays.  Various eighteenth century editors flat out refused to admit Shakespeare could have written it.

I wonder, what does Asimov say about the play Henry  VI, Part I?

ALAN: In his Guide to Shakespeare, the Good Doctor points out that some critics have suggested that Shakespeare didn’t actually write the play at all, but instead patched up and polished an already existing work by somebody else. He also points out that in 1592 one Robert Greene wrote a savage satire which appears to be largely directed at Shakespeare and again the claim has been made that perhaps Greene was the original author of the play and he objected to Shakespeare’s changes, as temperamental authors are wont to do.

JANE: My academic sources also mention Greene’s A Groatsworth of Wit.  It’s marvellously snarky and I cannot resist quoting it for you:

“an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a player’s hide supposes he is well able to bombast out blank verse as the rest of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totem, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”

The reference to “Shake-scene” makes it pretty clear who Greene was attacking, although some of those who desperately wish that the Bard had not “nodded” (as even does Homer), argue Greene was simply referring to Shakespeare the actor, not the playwright.

In any case, the result of later scholarship too detailed to go into here reluctantly gives Shakespeare the credit – or blame – for this play.

ALAN: Oh, that stings! What a bitter man Robert Greene must have been.

Of course we can’t leave the subject of Henry VI without at least mentioning the elephant in the room.

JANE: Ooh!  Elephants!  That’s the best part of history.  What’s this one?

ALAN: Henry’s periodic episodes of insanity.

JANE: That’s a big elephant…  We’d better save it for next time.  I’d also like to chat about where one of France’s most famous warriors fits into Henry VI’s tale.

Ripples from Yellow

I’m not sure when I realized The King in Yellow was a real book.  I first became aware of the title from references in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries.  Since The King in Yellow was often mentioned in company with the Necronomicon and other fictional works (as opposed to “works of fiction”) that contained between their pages Dark Secrets, the Merest Knowledge of Which Would Drive the Reader Insane,  for many years I thought The King in Yellow wasn’t a “real” book.

King in Yellow and Friend

Eventually, I learned that I was both right and wrong.  The King in Yellow  is both the title of a purely fictional play (the Merest Glimpse of Which – especially the events in the second act – Will Drive a Reader Insane) and the title of a short story collection by Robert W. Chambers.  Chambers used the play as an element around which he developed various stories, much as Lovecraft would later use the Necronomicon.

In honor of Halloween, I decided that I would finally read The King in Yellow.   When I started the first story, “The Repairer of Reputations,”  it seemed that the author had gotten his history twisted around.  First, I noticed that the name of the President of the U.S. didn’t match any in my memory, but that’s a fairly typical device in contemporary fiction of any era.  Winthrop was close enough to “Wilson,” I thought it might be a stand-in.

Then the narrator mentioned a war with Germany, but this war had apparently  started over the Samoan Islands.   That certainly wasn’t the first World War that I knew.  And what was this about a German invasion of New Jersey?  I quickly flipped to the copyright page to discover that the collection had been published in 1895.   Suddenly, the opening line “Toward the end of 1920” which had seemed delightfully old-fashioned and historical, changed the story into futuristic science fiction!  How incredibly cool!  I was so excited, I ended up reading the first several pages aloud to Jim for our mutual amusement.

I was also surprised to learn how early the collection had been published.  From the references in Lovecraft, even once I learned The King in Yellow existed, I’d assumed that Lovecraft and Chambers were contemporaries.  This error was reinforced by the cover blurb from Lovecraft on my edition: “Achieves notable heights of cosmic fear.”  Blurbs are usually provided by contemporaries.  Those that are not usually use words like “influential” or “landmark” or something else that clue the reader in that the book is a re-release.

However,  Lovecraft did the bulk of his work in the 1920’s and 1930’s – the future setting of Chamber’s work.  I found that unintentional twist oddly appealing.

What’s fascinating about The King in Yellow is that elements in it migrate from author to author,  rather like beads strung on a peculiar necklace indebted to non-Euclidean geometry.  Robert W. Chambers took several of the terms he uses – Carcosa, Hali, Hastur – from the works of Ambrose Bierce.   He expanded this cast of characters (or cosmology; in some cases it’s not clear whether a person or place is being referred to) to include Aldones, Camilla, Cassilda, Carcosa, and Naotabla.

These, in turn, were picked up by other authors, not always in a horror/supernatural thriller context  as one might expect.  Marion Zimmer Bradley mined The King in Yellow for numerous names for her popular “Darkover” books.   There is no actual connection, but the fact that she used many of these names for shadowy figures of the nearly forgotten pre-human history of the planet added a certain resonance.  I can’t recall if I encountered these names first in the works of Lovecraft and his associates or in those of Bradley, but their recurrence between books added a creepy echo to the stories, as if they both drew upon a definite past history forgotten in all but names.

Other authors have continued to make reference to The King in Yellow, adding to the sense that it’s real and out there somewhere, if you can just find the right heap of books in the right old bookstore.  More beads on that non-Euclidean necklace.

I’ve finished the “Reclaimer of Reputations” and am about to move on to “The Mask.”  The  epigraph, a quotation from the play The King in Yellow,  is promising.  I shall share it here:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?

Cassilda: Indeed, it’s time.  We all have laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask?  No mask?

Sounds promising…  I do wonder though, what lies behind the Pallid Mask?  What is the significance of the Yellow Sign?

My doorbell is ringing…  Wait!  The person outside is robed in yellow and wears a mask!  And I’ve just remembered.  It’s a day early for Halloween…

TT: Hal into Henry

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Page back one for news about the re-release of “Servant of Death” and some reminiscences about author Fred Saberhagen.  Then come back and join me and Alan as we sort through the true and false about one of England’s most famous kings.

JANE: So, was Prince Hal, the young man who would become King Henry V, the rogue that Shakespeare made him out to be?   Did he hang out at the Boar’s Head Tavern with Falstaff, Mistress Quickly, and the other low lives?

Hal’s Medkit

ALAN: It seems unlikely. From the age of twelve, young Henry was very busy fighting his father’s battles. He simply didn’t have time to debauch himself. In his early teens, he led an army against the Welsh rebellion of Owen Glendower. And in 1403, when he was only sixteen years old, he joined his father in the Battle of Shrewsbury where he was severely wounded.

JANE: Wounded?  How?

ALAN: He was shot in the face with an arrow – shades of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 where it is claimed that the English King Harold died from an arrow in the eye, thus losing England to William the Conqueror.

JANE: Face with an arrow?  Brrr…  Yet Prince Hal didn’t die of his wounds.  Lucky for him – and apparently for England.

ALAN: His wound was initially treated with honey, which has antiseptic properties. A special tool was designed to unscrew the broken arrow shaft from his face and the resulting heavily-bleeding wound was flushed with white wine. The wound was then packed with wads of flax soaked in bread, honey and turpentine oil. Every two days, the wads were withdrawn and replaced with smaller ones to encourage the wound to close. After twenty days, the healing was complete.  It must have been excruciatingly painful and Henry was left with permanent scars.

JANE: I found myself shivering in sympathy just reading your description!

There’s a lovely book about the medicinal properties of honey and other useful medical treatments now fallen out of use: Honey, Mud, Maggots, and other Medical Marvels by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein.  I quite enjoyed it.  Also,  it’s the sort of resource that’s very useful for writers who want to add a little spice to their low-tech medical treatments.

I wonder where the legends originated that Henry V was a rogue in his youth.

ALAN: It’s hard to know where he found the time! The Encyclopedia Britannica says that stories of his dissipation have been traced back to within 20 years of Henry’s death and so cannot be completely dismissed – but it gives no references. The Britannica article then goes on to claim (again, with no evidence) that doubtless the Elizabethan playwrights greatly exaggerated this aspect of Henry’s character.

In 1813, one Alexander Luders published a biography of Henry V in which he made the interesting suggestion that if Henry really had been a dissipated youth it was undoubtedly because he spent all his time hanging around with soldiers. “..[his associates] were probably military men, whose habits frequently lead them to dissipation.”

Perhaps it was all just a bit of an urban legend.

JANE:  Believe it or not, the thought about hanging around with soldiers occurred to me before you got to Mr. Luders’ explanation.  I say we should take it as fact!

But returning to our young hero…  Did the crowned king live up to his youthful heroics?

ALAN: When his father died, Prince Hal was declared king.  He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 9th April 1413 during a terrible snowstorm. Opinions were divided as to whether or not this was a good omen.

He then spent most of his reign fighting the French…

JANE: Those battles were at the heart of Shakespeare’s play, The Life of Henry the Fifth, although the time period was so tightly telescoped that Shakespeare – through the Chorus – actually apologizes to the audience for the liberties he took with time.  As we’ve noted elsewhere, this sort of apology was not typical of the Bard at all, which I find interesting.

ALAN: I don’t know how else Shakespeare could have solved the technical problem he was faced with, though like you I do find it fascinating that felt he needed to apologise to his audience. Perhaps he felt a little guilty…

In all his battles, Henry proved to be a brilliant military tactician but he was definitely no humanitarian. At the battle of Agincourt he ordered all the French prisoners to be killed. Many of them were high-ranking nobles who could have been ransomed. But nevertheless they were all killed.

JANE: Shakespeare deals with the killing of the French prisoners, although only in two lines and within the context of battle.  King Henry is very aware his army is sick and weak.  Therefore, the prisoners must die because there are not enough soldiers to guard them.

ALAN: A few years later during the siege of Rouen, the city authorities were unable to feed the population, and so they forced the women and children to leave the city in the belief that Henry would let them pass through his lines unmolested. However, Henry refused to allow them passage and the women and children starved to death in the ditches that surrounded the town.

JANE: Nasty…  But, of course, the town was also at fault, since they made no effort to reclaim their own people, nor did they negotiate their passage in advance.  It’s a situation that shows neither side as particularly heroic, since Rouen would have been using existing supplies to keep their own military alive and vital.  In turning the women and children loose, they were effectively adding to their ability to maintain the siege.  Henry would have been aware of this.

Although in his play Shakespeare was clearly trying to show Henry V in his brightest, most heroic light, still the atrocities of war are not completely ignored.  The speech King Henry gives before the gates of Harflew is chilling in how it offers the details of what happens in a sacked city, and even more chilling in that the guilt for those atrocities is passed on to the residents of Harflew – making it, in a sense, their “fault” if their old people are horribly murdered, their women raped, and all the rest.  No wonder they surrendered!

ALAN: I think we have another spelling thing here – all my references have Harfleur, rather than Harflew.  (Again, Harfleur is the modern spelling).

JANE: Since I’m referencing Shakespeare, not history, I believe I shall retain his spelling.  Adds color – and confusion!

ALAN: Quite right too!

Henry V has one of Shakespeare’s most stirring and brilliantly written speeches in it. The words that he puts into Henry’s mouth just before the battle of Agincourt on Saint Crispin’s day never fail to put a lump in my throat. The speech is so famous that it has become something of a cliche in its own right. Nevertheless, I still find it incredibly moving.

JANE: I agree…  One does not need to be British or even of English descent to find it a powerful exhortation.  Shakespeare knew his stuff…  “The fewer men, the greater share of honor./ By God’s will, I pray thee not wish one man more” and “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/ For he to-day that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother, be he ne’er so vile.”

I must restrain myself or I’ll just go back and transcribe the whole thing…

ALAN: I recently saw a TV programme where the British historian Simon Schama suggested that this speech was a deliberate attempt to flatter Elizabeth by drawing parallels with her own speech at Tilbury before the English fleet set off to fight the Spanish Armada – yet another example of Shakespeare ingratiating himself!

JANE: Okay…  A fine playwright and one who knew on what side his bread was buttered…  If he meant to flatter, Elizabeth certainly would have been.

ALAN: In many respects, Henry V was an absent king. The military campaigns in France were always his primary concern. But nevertheless he regarded himself as very much an English king. He insisted on using English as his primary language in both his private correspondence and in his military despatches. He also insisted that all official government papers be written in English. In doing this he broke with a 350-year-old tradition. Ever since the Norman Conquest in 1066, French had been the language of officialdom, but from now on it would be the English language that would predominate. In retrospect, this is probably his most noteworthy accomplishment.

JANE: Henry’s choice makes sense.  How could he spend his life fighting the French, yet give their language dominance?

Maybe he would have made more of a cultural impact, but didn’t he die very young?

ALAN: Henry died of dysentery in 1422 at the Chateau of Vicennes near Paris in the midst of another military campaign in France. He was only 36 years old.

JANE: Even when I first read the play, that would have seemed very young.  Now, as my hair silvers, he seems too young not only to die, but to have achieved so much.

The next of our Henries is, of course, VI…  Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays about his reign, so I’m guessing we’ll have a considerable amount to talk about.

ALAN: Ah yes. Henry VI. The man who was King of England. Twice.

JANE: Cool!  Let’s do it!

Me, Fred Saberhagen, and “Servant of Death”

Last week ended on a high note when Josh Gentry of Snackreads.com e-mailed me and Joan Saberhagen to let us know that “Servant of Death,” the story I wrote in collaboration with Fred Saberhagen, is now newly available as a $1.99 Snackread.   You can find it at: http://www.snackreads.com/products-page/product-category/servant-of-death/

Cool Cover by Jennifer Gentry

“Servant of Death” joins my own “Hamlet Revisited” and Fred’s “Mr. Jester” as part of Snackread’s expanding line of short fiction released as inexpensive e-books with classy covers.  You can check out their full selection at www.snackreads.com.

Although since Through Wolf’s Eyes hit it big, I’ve usually been classified as a fantasy writer, I’ve always written both science fiction and fantasy.  Nor has my SF always drawn on the softer social sciences.  I enjoy the chance to blow up a space ship or explore mysterious planets.  Happily, even after my novels became more likely to be fantasy than SF, invitations from anthologies gave me ample opportunities to write SF.

When I was approached to contribute a story for the anthology Man vs. Machine, Fred Saberhagen’s iconic Berserker novels immediately came to mind.  I decided to ask the anthology’s editor, John Helfers, if he’d be open to a collaboration.  John was enthusiastic.

Now for the tough part – asking Fred if he wanted to play with me in his classic universe.  At the time I was asking, Fred had published over forty novels, written numerous short stories, edited anthologies, and designed games.   I had eighteen published novels and over fifty short stories, so I wasn’t exactly a beginner but still…

I have a confession to make.  When I moved to New Mexico and Roger Zelazny wanted to introduce me to his friends, the only one I was nervous about meeting was Fred Saberhagen.  I’d read works by George R.R. Martin, Suzy McKee Charnas,  Melinda Snodgrass, and others in the New Mexico gang…  I’d even taught Walter Jon Williams’ novel Hardwired in my SF class and thought it was among the best of the cyberpunk pieces I’d read.

But it was Fred Saberhagen who awed me.  I loved his novel, Mask of the Sun.  I’d spent a lot of time with Berserkers and Swords.  His An Old Friend of the Family was one of the few vampire novels I actually liked.  And, of course, I’d read Roger’s two collaborations with Fred: Coils and The Black Throne.

Roger insisted I had nothing to be nervous about, that Fred and Joan were lovely people.  Still, as we walked up the pathway and through the arch to their front door, I was indeed nervous.  I had no reason to be.  Fred and Joan were welcoming.  Both Fred and Roger could be quiet in larger groups, but were quite chatty with each other.  And Joan proved to be one of those people who is a vibrant force of nature.  Over the next year, I grew very fond of them both and was grateful when they opened their home for the memorial we held when Roger died.  After Roger’s death, Jim and I continued to meet up with Fred and Joan for lunch or dinner.  But, friends or not, I was still nervous about asking Fred if he wanted to write a story with me.

About the time I had the invitation to contribute to Man vs Machine, David and Sharon Weber came to visit me and Jim in New Mexico.  We took the Webers over to visit with Fred and Joan  – with whom they had hit if off on earlier visits.  While the others were chatting, I drew Joan aside and explained that I wondered if Fred might like to write a Berserker story with me.  I told her how I was very shy about asking because, not only was Fred “Mr. Berserker” (and so it seemed incredible cheek to ask to write in his universe), I’d also admired Fred’s work for a long time.

Joan, however, didn’t seem to think I was out of line.  She sang out: “Freddy!  Jane has a question for you.”  When Fred joined us, I hoped Joan would let me off the hook and do my asking for me.  She just smiled encouragingly.  Grabbing my courage in both hands, I managed to fumble out my request.  Fred considered for a moment, then nodded.  “That could be fun.  You’re a good writer.”

When we left with the Webers some hours later, I was both walking on air and terrified I’d screw up.  Over the next few weeks, I re-read a bunch of Berserker stories.  I came up with a list of questions and suggestions for Fred.  Then we arranged to get together at the Saberhagens’ house.

Fred and I went into the dining room and started trading ideas, while Jim and Joan retired to the living room and chatted.   I scribbled a bunch of notes in the spiral notebook I’d brought along.  Eventually, Fred and I settled on writing a stand-alone sequel to Fred’s novel Berserker Man.  “Servant of Death”  is the result of our shared ideas and his complex universe…

Fred died near the time “Servant of Death” was released.   More than ever, I was happy I’d screwed up my courage and asked him if he wanted to write with me because, if I’d waited, we wouldn’t have had a chance.  Later, Joan would invite me to write another story set in one of Fred’s universes, that of the novel Mask of the Sun for the landmark anthology, Golden Reflections.  My story is called “Like the Rain.”  I’m very fond of it.  I’ll admit, as I put my ideas together, I imagined myself back at the table with Fred, spiral notebook between us on the table.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy “Servant of Death.”  I also hope you also take the opportunity to read other of Fred’s novels and stories.  Joan has devoted the last several years to making sure as many of Fred’s works as possible are available as good quality e-books.   Take advantage of what’s out there.   I’m sure that among Fred’s varied and various works you’ll find plenty to enjoy…

TT: Henry IV, Part 2

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Page back one and take a look at how I decide if a story is a car crash or not.  Then come back and join me and Alan as we steal a title from Shakespeare and have more fun with the Henries.

JANE: Henry IV certainly picked a difficult way to become king.  Was his reign supported by his subjects?

Prince Harry and Lord Hotspur

ALAN: For much of his reign, Henry found himself fighting battles the length and breadth of England as various factions disputed his claim to lead them. The Welshman Owen Glendower saw this as the perfect excuse to throw off the English yoke and, in the far north of the country, Henry Percy (“Hotspur”), the Earl of Northumberland, tried three times to overthrow the king.

JANE: So, basically, Henry didn’t have a very easy time of it.  I suppose once you’ve shown that the status quo can be upset, other people decide they might as well have a chance at unsettling your claim.

ALAN: Henry’s problems weren’t helped by the fact that he developed an illness which his contemporaries referred to as leprosy. Nobody is quite sure what the illness actually was (suggestions range from leprosy, through syphilis to psoriasis) but it was definitely disfiguring.  He also suffered several acute attacks of what might have been epilepsy or possibly some sort of cardiovascular problem. He died of his illnesses in 1413.

JANE: A disfiguring illness would be a problem for a ruler even today.  Weakness is not permissible.  In a day and age where such illnesses were often taken as a sign of God’s displeasure, “leprosy” and epilepsy both would have been seen as God’s punishment for slaying God’s anointed monarch.

As you mentioned earlier, Henry planned to free the Holy Land from the “infidel.”  If he had succeeded, that would have gone a long way to redeeming his reputation.  Wasn’t there a prophecy that Henry would die in Jerusalem?

ALAN: Yes, there was. Henry always assumed that this meant he would die gloriously in battle on his avowed crusade to free the Holy Land. In reality, he died in the Jerusalem Chamber of the house of the Abbot of Westminster.  Holinshed records the prophecy, but he might well have inserted it after the fact for dramatic purposes, and Shakespeare, of course, fell on the idea with glad cries of glee because it perfectly suited his play!

JANE: For those of you who aren’t either history or literature buffs, Holinshed’s Chronicles were a widely circulated “history” of the English monarchy.  Shakespeare drew so heavily upon it that scholars have made careers out of showing where Holinshed must have been Shakespeare’s source because the play perpetuates errors that (as far as anyone knows) only occur in Holinshed.

As Alan said, Shakespeare, for whom a good bit of drama always ruled over historic accuracy, uses the element of the crusade and this misunderstood prophecy to good effect.  At the end of Richard II, the new King Henry IV promises to make his journey to the Holy Land.  In Henry IV, Part 2, the dying king asks the name of the room into which he is being carried.  Hearing it is called Jerusalem, he accepts his fate with kingly fortitude: “It hath been prophesied to me many years,/I should not die but in Jerusalem,/ Which vainly I suppos’d the Holy Land,/But bear me to that chamber, there I’ll lie,/ In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.”

ALAN: Bill the Bard was quite notorious for preferring drama over history. My favourite example is “the Scottish play” which we studied in minute detail at school. Almost nothing in it resembles the actual history of which he was writing. James VI (of Scotland) had just inherited the English throne and Shakespeare’s play is deliberately stuffed with Jamesian references and parallels. James was a great patron of the theatre and Shakespeare wanted to ingratiate himself with the new monarch. Who can blame him?

JANE: Absolutely, although one sub-set of the plays are commonly called Shakespeare’s “Histories,” that’s only to differentiate them from his Comedies and Tragedies.  In reality, the Swan of Avon never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

The two plays about Henry IV are among of the best examples of this.  One of the greatest liberties the Bard took was with the ages of the characters.  King Henry is presented as not only infirm, but old.  He was actually only 46 when he died.  However, having a king teetering on the brink of the grave added tension to plot elements dealing with his wayward heir.

ALAN: Oh, he did that all the time. In reality, the Scottish King Duncan was a reckless and very unpopular young man, but in the play Shakespeare has him as a well-loved and kind old man so as to make Macbeth’s crime seem that much more horrible.

JANE: You’re right about Macbeth being widely varied from its historical sources!

Another bit of age juggling takes place with Prince Harry and Hotspur.  In the plays they are presented as roughly the same age.  In reality, they were roughly a generation apart.  This provides better parallels between the two characters, leading an ignorant reader of the plays (as I certainly was in my first encounter) to wonder why Harry can’t live up to Hotspur’s example.  If the disparity in age had been preserved, the reader’s (or playgoer’s) reaction would be more like “Hey, give the kid a chance to grow up before comparing him to Hotspur.”

Shakespeare also compressed the time between the four great military conflicts of Henry’s reign.

ALAN: I presume you mean the so-called Abbot’s conspiracy (1399), the Percy Revolt (1401), Scrope’s  Rebellion (1405), and the Northumberland uprising of 1408? Mind you, since the Percies were ringleaders in the last three uprisings, I’m not sure it makes any sense to differentiate them. I tend to think of all three of them as just The Percy Rebellion, so it can be argued that what Shakespeare did with them was quite sensible.

JANE: Excellent point.  The Abbot’s conspiracy is used at the end of Richard II to show how much more decisive a ruler Henry IV is when compared to the king he has deposed.

The Battle of Shrewsbury (which was part of the Percy Revolt) actually occurred four years after Henry IV took the throne.  However, Shakespeare has the king state he had only been “twelve month” on the throne when the revolt begins and the battle follows with nice, dramatic promptitude.

ALAN: There he goes, bending time to dramatic purposes again!

JANE: In Shakespeare’s version of events, Henry IV, Part II concludes with the newly crowned Henry V putting all his bad friends and loose living decisively behind him.  Was the real Henry V such an angel?

ALAN: Ah! Now thereby hangs a tale…