SOURCE: Taber, Ronald W. “Vardis Fisher: New Directions for the Historical Novel.” Western American Literature 1, no. 4 (winter 1967): 285-96.

[In the following essay, Taber asserts that the works of Fisher were at the forefront of efforts to free the historical novel from its ties to romantic literature, paving the way for greater realism and historical accuracy.]

The terms “romance” and “historical novel” were, for a long time, practically synonymous, as novelist MacKinlay Kantor has noted.¹ There had long been murmurs of protest against the romantic and prudish historical novel, but nineteenth century tradition continued to influence the historical novel until the 1930's produced novelists, such as Kantor and Vardis Fisher, who were determined to portray the past realistically. American historical novelists began to feel the need to tell the truth about history, convinced that the novel could elucidate and extend man's knowledge better than the works of professional historians. No one was more in the forefront of this new movement to demand truth and historical accuracy in the American historical novel than Vardis Fisher.

To understand Fisher's illumination of historical truth through fiction, it is necessary to investigate two aspects of his approach to historical fiction: his philosophy and his methodology. Fisher's philosophy of literature, although by no means new, is not generally popular in current “art for art's sake” literary circles. But, in helping to create what E. E. Leisy calls a possible “fourth form” of the historical novel “which appears to be developing into a favorite,”² Fisher's methodology has coincided remarkably with that advocated by some of the world's most original historical thinkers. The combination of Fisher's philosophy and methodology has resulted in a different kind of historical novel.

Fisher's objective is to understand man, who he is, why he is as he is, and what his motivations and capabilities are. He has, therefore, chosen to write about the past, not merely to explain the facts of a historical period, but, because the past is so intimately connected with the present, to aid contemporary man in his quest for self-knowledge. Fisher developed the idea that the past is intimately connected to the present after writing the “Vridar Hunter” tetralogy, in which he had tried to discover answers to his questions about man through an autobiographical probing of his early years. Fisher decided that the answers he was seeking were not to be found in a single individual, and he began to speculate that perhaps nothing short of the whole course of history, which reveals the development of man, would suffice in the understanding of an individual. Fisher came to believe that the mind of the past has developed a vast “variety and richness” of symbols “which still shape and direct all of us in ways we never suspect.” Fisher concludes, however, that the past is not benign; it constitutes a “standing menace to us and our civilization.”³ Fisher believes that the historical novel can help man to consciously realize how the terrible harm, as well as the good, of the past has affected the psychological and moral health of both society and the individual. It is because he believes that man's ability to rise above his present situation is related to his knowledge of the past which created those circumstances, that Fisher has become a historical novelist.

It is, therefore, an intense interest in the present that leads Fisher to investigate and write about the past. He states: “Understanding what is necessary to say about the part of today that yesterday is exactly the novelist's task. It is a task that still defeats us.”⁴ Fisher's philosophy of literature as a useful agent in the development and enlightening of mankind is expressed in his introduction to Orphans in Gethsemane:

I stand on this, that if mankind is ever to build a civilization worthy of that devotion which it seems richly endowed to give, it will first have to accept in full light of its mind and soul the historical facts of its past, and the mutilations and perversions which its hostility to those facts has made upon its spirit. Only in the forces, ideas, and traditions that have produced it, and are the essence of its being, can mankind find its sanctions and powers; but we must hope that it need not forever cherish, because of fear and ignorance, the atavism in these forces, ideas and traditions, or continue to be so much an expression of their will, once the necessity in their origins is understood and respected.⁵

While realizing that man's knowledge is limited and imperfect, Fisher nevertheless emphasizes the need for man's pursuing truth as he is best able to know it. The test of a historical novelist, according to Fisher, is the degree to which he is able to leave his own world and enter the world he is determined to portray without either losing touch with “the stuff that made us” or “mistaking our self-protective illusions for truths.”⁶ Because the goal of the novelist is to understand what is usually disguised or imperfectly known, the novelist must, if he is to “know” a period of his past, consult the best authorities and shift and weigh their words as a critical historian would. Then he must recreate the thoughts of his characters based only upon what is necessitated by the best verifiable evidence. Fisher's devotion to the factual historical novel is perhaps the best reflection of his dedication to seeking truth. By insisting that the historical novel has a serious purpose, he has created a new concept of fiction and a new task for the historical novelist—careful, painstaking research and a cultural immersion into aspects of the past that are still a very real part of man today.

How does this method vary from that advocated by the more traditional historical novelists? The closer conjunction between history and fiction caused alarm among some novelists. Hervey Allen, for example, noted “that lately all creative literature, but especially the historical novel, has been subjected to evaluation on the basis of something that it cannot convey; that is literal, objective, unadulterated material and fact.” Allen felt that “the historical novelist's real difficulty is, in fact, how to avoid the direct use of raw materials.” Whereas Fisher was writing novels which had been researched with the skill and accuracy of a Ph.D. dissertation, Allen protested that:

the direct, objective reporting of facts, or the importing of source material into a historical novel, essentially as it is listed in history, is ruinous to fiction. No real people, no raw facts, can be literally introduced without having them appear with all the awkwardness of intruders from another sphere. That that sphere is reality makes them seem all the more unreal in the world of imagination.

Allen claimed that the historical novel was justified on its ability to create an “illusion of the past” and that it was not legitimate for the novel to recreate actual historical incidents. As for readers and critics who feel that they have been cheated or hoaxed by inaccurate historical novels, they “have no excuse for complaining because the book was labeled fiction.” Allen runs exactly counter to Fisher's approach and philosophy by declaring that “history and the historical novel differ in aim, and are therefore different kinds of books, different art forms. They belong in separate literary categories and are not subject to the same critical strictures.”⁷

Despite Allen's protest, the methodology which Fisher has employed in writing the historical novel lends itself to being criticized with the same techniques as those used in history. The new historical novel can be criticized with the same strictures because it is constructed by methods similar to those used by historians. The most apparent meeting place between the construction of history and the new historical novel is between British historian R. G. Collingwood's a priori method of reconstructing history and Vardis Fisher's recreative, factual, historical novel. Both Fisher and Collingwood insist that a broad social science approach to gathering historical evidence is necessary. As Fisher has said, “Trying to portray a complex human being was pretty simple until recently, for the reason that it was not known that he was complex. The illuminations of the social sciences have made it depressingly clear that people are not what people used to think they were.”⁸ In preparing for a novel about primitive man, Fisher did intensive reading in the fields of comparative religions, archaeology, anthropology, music, medicine, geography, climate, customs, clothes, languages, superstitions, and origins. These explorations in the social sciences, which have proved so useful to historians, provide knowledge which can help in the development of intuitive insights or, as Fisher says, allow “our insights to feed more on knowledge and less on caprice.”⁹

Although it has not been universally accepted and only rarely admitted by twentieth century historians, “the exercise of ‘intuition,’” as historian H. Stuart Hughes wrote, is at least as important to the historian as his sureness of touch in documentary interpretation.”¹⁰ In the quest for scientific objectivity, however, historians in this century have left a gap—an intuition gap—in the writing of history. Collingwood's methodology is a plea for correction of this problem which, although ignored by the historian, is being heeded by the new historical novelist. The exercise of intuition, however, does not mean the abandonment of historical data. Collingwood's explanation of his a priori method of writing imaginative history seems to agree with that employed by Fisher in the writing of his novels. Collingwood argued that with his system

the historian's picture of his subject, whether that subject be a sequence of events or a past state of things, thus appears as a web of imaginative [re]construction stretched between certain fixed points provided by the statements of his authorities; and if these points are frequent enough and the threads spun from each to the next are constructed with due care, always by the a priori imagination and never by merely arbitrary fancy, the whole picture is constantly verified by appeal to these data, and runs little risk of losing touch with the reality which it represents.¹¹

It must be remembered that these “fixed points” are not necessarily testimony, but are selected, by the historian, on the basis of evidence. Evidence may be artifacts, the contributions of the social sciences, or inference drawn from a critical analysis of testimony.

Collingwood's philosophy seems to rest on the premise that there is a relationship between action and thought—that is, if an historical character acts in a certain manner, he must have thought certain ideas which motivated that action. These thoughts, according to Collingwood, may be discovered by the use of the historical imagination, and since history is the story of man's thought, only by knowing the thought of the past can the historian reconstruct history. In other words, Collingwood believes that by using the a priori or necessary historical imagination, one can discover the thought of an historical figure as revealed in the rational pattern of his actions, and thereby discover why something happened. In view of Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on the unconscious, “irrational” behavior of man, Collingwood's belief that man must be studied as a rational creature has been challenged. Modern psychology has, however, largely rejected the study of the unconscious because of its immeasurability. The behaviorists have chosen to view man's actions as a series of stimulus-response (SR) chains which were produced as a result of reinforcement in the environment. Actions which appear irrational (apparent irrationality only implies a lack of understanding on the observer's part), can be understood within the SR context as provided by the historical actor's environment. If the agent is viewed from the point of the SR context of his environment, the agent's actions will appear, to the investigator, to be rational for his time and circumstance. If the historian or novelist can retroject himself into the time and circumstance of the historic figure, he will discover the “rational” behavior of that figure. Thus irrationality becomes a problem only to the historian who views the past from his vantage point in the present, rather than reconstructing and re-thinking the past as the modern historical novelist and the intuitively recreative historian do.

The key word in Collingwood's methodology, and in Fisher's, is “reconstruction,” or in historian Carl Becker's terms, “imaginative recreation.” The goal of the older historical novelists was to construct the past, or to “create an illusion of the past.” The new approach in historical fiction is to reconstruct the factual part rather than attempting to produce an illusion. To do this, according to Fisher, the writer “if he is to be serious and an artist, will have to try to get inside the minds, souls, habits, superstitions, fears, and ignorance of his people; and then, further, inside the minds and souls of a few of them, as individuals, apart and unique.” If the novelist wants to portray the past as it actually was, says Fisher, “he will have to put aside practically all his views, beliefs, values, and nearly all his knowledge. He will have to strip off, as it were—strip down and go back, culturally naked, to a primitive time of life.”¹² Similarly, Collingwood believes that the historian must remember that there is an inside as well as an outside of any historical event, and by re-enacting the act of thought required for an event the historian can know what the historical agent was thinking.¹³ The portrayal of the past can destroy the artist's own personality, says Fisher, because “in his thoughts, reading, dreams, and above all in the searching of himself, he must learn how to project himself into that woman, that man.”¹⁴ As Herbert Butterfield, the British scholar who was a pioneer in the attempt to discover the relationship between history and the historical novel, explains:

The virtue and power of the novelist's depiction of men, is not that he observes perpetually and arranges data, but that he enters into the experiences of others, he runs his life into the mould of their lives, he can put himself into their place … because his experience is not entirely and merely his own.¹⁵

One of the best examples of Fisher's philosophy and methodology at work is his novel of the epic Lewis and Clark expedition entitled Tale of Valor.¹⁶ Fisher tells the story of the expedition with no contrivance that distorts the picture of what actually took place. By using the R. G. Thwaites edition of the Journals of Lewis and Clark, consulting the best authorities on the expedition, and traveling most of the route personally, Fisher laid the groundwork of knowledge—the points of fact between which he would interpolate and intuit—that allowed him to write a novel which is at once good history and good literature. It is the kind of historical novel which must receive the highest compliment because it is true to its time, and it is a staggering reminder that history is about human beings.

Vardis Fisher's approach can best be illuminated by comparing Tale of Valor with other novels about the Lewis and Clark expedition. Although the expedition is the greatest chapter in the exploration of the continental United States and represents the beginning of a one-hundred year expansion boom which symbolizes American progress not only in the nineteenth century but also in the twentieth, no historical novel before 1958 successfully captured the spirit or importance of this momentous epic of American history. From Emerson Hough's wildly inaccurate fairy tale The Magnificent Adventure to Della Gould Emmons' Sacajawea of the Shoshones, novelists have described, in their attempts to create romance, situations which had no basis in fact, and, more damning, were implausible. Perhaps the most interesting result of the mythmaking novelists has been their effect upon the knowledge of the expedition possessed by readers and historians alike. Myths such as Meriwether Lewis' romance with Theodosia Burr Alston, apparently invented by Emerson Hough and taken for fact by Lewis' biographer C. M. Wilson, and the Sacajawea myth, invented by Mrs. E. E. Dye in Conquest and stated as fact by most historians in this century, have tended to obscure both the story and the meaning of the expedition.

To elucidate the contention that the myths pervert and obscure history and thus defeat the novelist's purpose, one can compare Donald Culross Peattie's Forward the Nation, described by E. E. Leisy as true to fact because it used “only actual events and real characters,” to Tale of Valor. In his foreword, Peattie claims “that the events of this narrative are all true,” and that he invented no “happening, individual, locality, trait, or property. All were provided by the unimpeachable reports of eye-witnesses, and the official records of the United States government.”¹⁷ After this boast, which no historian could make, he disclaims the honor and “obligations” of the historian. It is well that he did because, despite his claim to documentation, he failed to fulfill the historian's obligation of criticizing and evaluating his sources. He apparently believed, for instance, that the Sacajawea story was the most important part of the expedition, and he therefore begins and ends the novel with her life story as told by Grace Hebard in her notoriously untrustworthy biography of Sacajawea. In so doing, Peattie not only perverts the character of this savage Indian child, but by throwing the focus of the book upon her and claiming that she was the real guide and savior of the expedition, he also makes her the strong character of the party. Peattie's Sacajawea could denounce her husband-master Charbonneau in terms that make Lewis and Clark look like weak figures. One can see then that if the historical novel is to be disassociated from romance, sentiment, and myth, the novelist will have to apply the techniques of historical criticism to his sources. The novelist, if he wishes to be objective and elucidate a period of history, must combine scholarship with art. Before he can claim to have written only fact, or that which is necessitated by fact, and to have given the reader a true picture of the past, the novelist must duly criticize all the available evidence.

Granted that Peattie was misled by the sources he chose, how could he have avoided perpetuating the myths? For the novelist as well as the historian, knowing the inside of an event is as important as knowing the outside. If Peattie had attempted to retroject himself into the time, culture, and situation of Sacajawea, would she have been a sixteen-year-old woman just having her first child, or would she, having been passed from man to man from the time of her capture as a child, have been much younger? Would she in her old age after leading Lewis and Clark into her land (and thus betraying her people) make the following speech, which sounds more like a Daughter of the American Revolution than a Shoshone? “Listen instead to the white men. I have known them long and long. Theirs is a great nation, the greatest. It marches always forward, in ways of peace and plenty. I have seen this.”¹⁸ This speech by an Indian in the 1880's when official United States policy seemed to be to eradicate the Indian is scarcely plausible. Could this Indian woman, who was a child when she was dragged from her home region, be “the guiding feather upon this arrow into the unknown,” as Peattie describes her?¹⁹ If Peattie had projected himself into her situation and mind and understood the horrible confusion she must have felt in trying to remember her homeland, which was across hundreds of miles of unmapped territory that she had never seen before, he could never have described her as a guide. Only sheer arbitrary fancy could have caused Peattie to write that Sacajawea threatened to kill her husband-master if he ever touched her again and tell him that “you are the droppings of a coyote. You have not the courage of a rabbit. You are as stupid as a toad, as feeble as a maggot.”²⁰ It is this kind of novel that shows a lack of historical insight and a view of history from the present rather than from the past. This genre of historical novel will perpetuate and create myth because it views a historical period through the events that have happened since. In Peattie's case, as in the case of most novelists of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the event through which he looked in describing Sacajawea was the woman suffrage movement.²¹

What does it mean to be a historical novelist within the context of Fisher's philosophy and methodology? In the concrete terms of Tale of Valor, it means that all available evidence must be studied, criticized, and absorbed. In telling Sacajawea's story it meant relegating her to the role of primitive child, slave of her husband, proving in only a few instances of any value to the expedition. Fisher's fascination with Sacajawea was limited to the foreword where he explained why he had to portray her as a child possibly “no more than thirteen or fourteen” when she joined the party. This, according to Fisher, makes her part (however small) “all the more remarkable.” It has always been Fisher's contention that the true story is most powerful and, if the myths and legends are discarded, the record itself, if not more dramatic, is more meaningful if man is to know what man has done and can do. Fisher, therefore, told the story of the expedition from the vantage point of the men who were most involved and most responsible for its success. This makes the novel an American story of man's struggle to overcome the physical obstacles to the growth of an infant nation that was to become the most powerful on earth. It is the leaders and men of the expedition, rather than an Indian maid with a supernatural instinct for direction, that forms the real tale of the greatest expedition in American history. Fisher was the first novelist to grasp that fact and make use of it.

The story is not disqualified as a novel because it was built so closely upon the known facts. Tale of Valor, because it is an imaginative reconstruction, was able to go beyond the stark historical record and explain the character of several members of the expedition in a manner which was impossible for romantic historical novelists because, having failed to criticize their evidence, they could not separate fact from fancy. It is good history because the novelist was able to do a better job of integrating the mass of data available than the historian. Perhaps the real value of the factual historical novel is its author's ability to retroject himself into the past and grasp the meaning of huge amounts of data by delineating personality and thought as expressed in action. Historians would have to write separate biographies of each of the expedition members to explain their actions because it would require an elaborately documented investigation of the background which formed the character and personality of each expedition figure. When the collected biographies are completed, moreover, the historian can give the reader no more assurance that he has correctly interpreted his data than can the factual, recreative historical novelist. The character of Meriwether Lewis as delineated in Tale of Valor, for example, was substantiated only by Richard Dillon's biography of Lewis.²² It is to Dillon's and Fisher's credit that their interpretation of Lewis' character is generally in agreement. In the case of Sacajawea, there has been no historical work approaching an adequate explanation of the woman that will compare to Tale of Valor, although historians, such as DeVoto, have hinted darkly that the commonly held picture of her is faulty.

Hervey Allen's claim that the historical novel is not subject to the critical strictures of history is still unanswered in this discussion. Does the reader have the right to demand scholarship and historical accuracy from the historical novelist? Helen Cam, a Harvard professor of literature, explains that “if we are to take the historical novel seriously as a form of literature ancillary to the study of history, we have a right to apply exacting standards to it. It may be a hybrid … but we are surely entitled to demand that a historical novel be both good literature and good history.”²³ The historical novelist must have a respect for history so that he not only adheres to the facts established by research but also portrays his characters within the climate of the historical context. Cam believes that

The historical novelist with a proper respect for history has a very stiff task before him; not only must his facts and his concrete details be consistent with those established by research; but the atmosphere must be in accordance with what is known of the mental and emotional climate of the place and period. It is by striking a false note here that one distinguishes the writer who has “got up” his subject, however painstakingly, from the one who has really soaked himself in it.²⁴

Can Fisher's novel be called a “new historical novel”? E. E. Leisy said that it “may characterize a fourth form.” This study of Fisher has demonstrated that it is another form. It is perhaps a non-fiction novel in the sense that it must be historically, culturally, and psychologically accurate to fulfil the demands of its purpose. Fisher's fiction has attempted to demonstrate that man's potential to achieve a better civilization can be displayed only by discarding the myths which show the past of man as something other than it really was. “History,” said R. G. Collingwood, “is ‘for’ human self-knowledge. … It teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”²⁵ By strictly adhering to fact, the new form of the historical novel can play a greater part in the study of history because the artist can enrich and amplify man's knowledge of the past. As Herbert Butterfield says, history and fiction “can grow into one another, each making the other more powerful.”²⁶ This is the accomplishment of Vardis Fisher.

Notes

1. MacKinlay Kantor, Irving Stone, and John O'Hara, Three Views of the Novel (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), p. 36.

2. Ernest E. Leisy, The American Historical Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), p. 19.

3. Vardis Fisher, Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him and Other Essays (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1963), p. 83; hereinafter referred to as Essays.

4. Ibid.

5. Vardis Fisher, Orphans in Gethsemane (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960), “A Word to the Reader.”

6. Fisher, Essays, p. 82.

7. Hervey Allen, “History and the Novel,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXXIII (February, 1944), 119-120.

8. Fisher, Essays, p. 98.

9. Ibid., p. 88.

10. H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 65.

11. R. R. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 242.

12. Fisher, Essays, p. 96.

13. Collingwood, p. 288.

14. Fisher, Essays, p. 100.

15. Herbert Butterfield, The Historical Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), p. 111.

16. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1958.

17. Donald Culross Peattie, Forward the Nation (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1942), “Foreword.”

18. Ibid., p. 270.

19. Ibid., p. 122.

20. Ibid., p. 126.

21. See Ronald W. Taber, “Sacajawea and the Suffragettes,” in the January, 1967, issue of Pacific Northwest Quarterly for an explanation of how the leaders of the woman suffrage movement created and used the Sacajawea myth to promote passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

22. Richard Dillon, Meriwether Lewis (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1965).

23. Helen Cam, Historical Novels (London: The Historical Association, 1961), p. 9.

24. Ibid., p. 8.

25. Collingwood, p. 10.

26. Butterfield, p. 7.

Editor's Note: A paper presented in the Western Americana and Folklore Section of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Meeting, October 14, 1966, at the University of Utah.