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Chapter 3 Historical Novelists at Work George Garrett and Anthony Burgess I n 1953, when graceful, belletristic essay-writing flourished and popular historical fiction and fiction-biographies provided ordinary readers with a window into the past, a writer for the Sewanee Review named Andrew Nelson Lytle compared the historian and the historical novelist: both must do the research necessary to recover manners and customs, codes, public and private disciplines, all those habits and rituals which make up a pattern of culture. But the novelist must go further than the historian. He is not in search of principles and causes but of people. He must become the research; like Alice must walk through the looking glass of time and be there, where strange manners are no longer strange but familiar, at least acceptable. He metamorphoses the pastness of the past into the moving present. The reader becomes the witness. He is there; he sees; he tastes; he smells—if the author succeeds. This involves all the technical knowledge and vision which goes into the making of any good novel; but when the fiction assumes the past, it places an extra burden upon the artist. And this pressure makes another value which raises the sense of contemporaneity to a higher power: you have not only the illusion of the present, but the past permeates the immediacy of this illusion; the fictive personalities take on a certain clairvoyance; the action a double meaning, as if the actors while performing disclose the essential 49 50 Constructing a World meaning of their time, even of all time (this is possible). This is literary irony at a high level, an irony that restores vitality to tradition—the past is not dead but alive; the contemporary scene then seems merely one division of an accumulation of the segments of time, wherein live people act out their private destinies in the context of a common destiny which is their history. (411-12) George Garrett, a southern writer who was a graduate student in the 1950s, may well have read this essay; Anthony Burgess, who was a civil servant teaching and writing in Malaya at the time, probably did not. Lytle’s eloquent injunctions regarding what the historical novelist “must do” seem to speak directly to and about the work of these two remarkably prolific writers, whose historical fiction constitutes only a small part of their collected written works, yet who together have brought the age of Shakespeare and Marlowe and Raleigh to life as few other novelists can claim to have done. This pairing is inspired in part by some curious echoes and convergences . George Garrett started writing a biography of Raleigh as his doctoral dissertation in the early 1950s, but found that so many good biographies of his subject had appeared in recent years that he turned to fiction instead. He began writing Death of the Fox in 1964, the same year that Anthony Burgess produced his provocative novel about Shakespeare’s early life, Nothing Like the Sun, “composed somewhat hurriedly to celebrate in 1964 the quartercentenary of his birth” (9). Garrett’s enormous and encyclopedic Raleigh novel was finally finished in 1970, the year Burgess published his short biographical study Shakespeare. (A comparison of the biography with Nothing Like the Sun reveals the historical fiction writer at work, transmuting fragments of fact into fictional gold). Burgess relates in the author’s note to A Dead Man in Deptford that he hadn’t initially set out to write about Shakespeare, however, for his university thesis dealt with Christopher Marlowe. He never finished his thesis, for, as he observed wryly, after quoting Doctor Faustus’s line “I’ll burn my books. Ah Mephistophilis!”, “the Luftwaffe was to burn my books and even my thesis.” Over fifty years later, at the end of a long career, he finally wrote the Marlowe novel which he had “determined some day to write during the dark hours of the Battle of Britain” (271). A Dead Man in Deptford appeared in 1993, shortly after Garrett’s Marlowe novel Entered from the Sun was published in 1990. These years saw a flourishing of Marlowe books, including Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe and Judith Cook’s The Slicing Edge of Death: Who Killed Christopher Marlowe? Both Burgess and Cook acknowledge the influence of The Reckoning, a fascinating investigation of the mystery of Marlowe’s death that blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, particularly in the way evidence is pieced...

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