Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [1]
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summer, reference librarian Jack Bales was completing the final chapter of his biography of the novelist Kenneth Roberts, dealing with the author's last book, Boon Island. At the same time, I was searching archives in London and St. Petersburg to reconstruct the career of Captain John Deane, a British officer who served in the Russian fleet in the era of Peter the Great. Though I had found Deane's service records and materials about his later activities, I was perplexed about his early life until I discovered the Captain's account of his shipwreck at Boon Island, Maine, in 1710.
I had read Roberts's novel and knew Bales's work. In the fall I brought up the intersection of our research. We immediately realized the value of a collaboration and embarked upon the project that has resulted in the production of this unique collection of the original narratives, scholarly essays, and historical fiction.
RICHARD WARNER
FREDERICKSBURG, VIRGINIA
SEPTEMBER 1995
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GOING TO THE SOURCES FOR HISTORICAL AND LITERARY EXPLANATION
Philip N. Cronenwett
The line between historical events, historical fact, and historical fiction never has been clear. Often it has been seen as a Maginot Linean impregnable wall that clearly defines and separates truth from fancy. As we all know, the Maginot Line was not impermeable. Defining historical fiction and setting it off from "history" presents some interesting problems. Charles T. Wood, in a provocative essay on the beginnings of historical fiction, has suggested that "neither historians nor literary critics have ever precisely defined the boundary separating history from historical fiction." 1 He further suggests that, from the seventeenth century to the present, the genre of historical fiction grew to uphold larger historical truths, that the lessons and the nature of the human condition remain the province of writers of fiction.2 Finally, Wood suggests that new critical theories, borrowed from literary studies, are offering new interpretive tools. "If such theories prevail, the distinction between history and historical fiction will again become one less of kind than of degree."3
Definition is paramount. One recent student of the genre has used the terms nonfiction novel, factual fiction, documentary novel, pseudofactual novel, and historical novel4 to attempt to define, or perhaps confine, the novel that uses fact as a basis for
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its plot, characterization, and background. The question is not a new one. Henry James, W. D. Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and John Dos Passos, novelists firmly rooted in the canon of American literature, all wrote historical fiction. But, are they considered historical novelists?
What makes an historical novel? What makes it valuable? Is it believable? Do we accept the story as true? Or do we accept it simply as fiction? Thinking back to Herodotus and Thucydides, both blurred the lines between fact and fiction simply to make the story more complete and more readable. And, writers of historical fiction often provide great insight into historical events. Both James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms understood the importance of the frontier and wrote about it at length long before Frederick Jackson Turner enunciated his thesis. Thus, the fiction presaged the theory.
There are, I think, two kinds of historical fiction in the broadest sense. The first takes a generalized event or a series of events and places characters and stories within them. C. S. Forester's "Hornblower" series, a vastly popular set of novels, has taught a generation more about the naval history of the Napoleonic era and the psychology of command than we, as historians, could ever hope to do.
The second kind of historical fiction is that practiced by Kenneth Roberts. A very specific event, with known characters, plot, and outcome, is fictionalized, often with a reason. In Boon Island Roberts wanted to write an allegory of good and evil, with Americanism