Re-Imagining the Past: An Interview with Leon Garfield

Leon Garfield, the noted author of mystery and adventure novels, and reteller of myths and stories from Shakespeare, is among England's most acclaimed writers of historical fiction for young adults. His books have been widely translated and he has won literary awards in the United States, Holland, Sweden, France, and England. Among his best known works are: Jack Holborn (1964), Devil-in-the-Fog (1966), Smith (1967), Black Jack (1969), The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1971), The Prisoners of September (1975), The House of Hanover: England in the Eighteenth Century (1976), The Pleasure Garden (1976), The Apprentices (1978), The Confidence Man (1978), The Night of the Comet (1979), John Diamond (1980), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1980, completion of Charles Dickens's novel), The House of Cards (1982), The Wedding Ghost (1984), Guilt and Gingerbread (1984), Shakespeare Stories (1985), The December Rose (1986), The Empty Sleeve (1988), and The Blewcoat Boy (1989). This interview took place in June 1989 at Leon Garfield's home in North London.

RN: Can you begin by telling me about your use of time in your fiction?

LG: I deliberately avoid dates because I try never to look back, but rather to look about me. I always take a very subjective view so that I'll only note those things that somebody living at that specific time would have noted. I don't want to clutter a story with unnecessary detail and I don't want to patronize my characters by looking back at them. Sometimes this presents difficulties. It means an awful lot of research if I've chosen a particular period. If I want somebody suffering from an incurable disease of that time, then I try to make it one that is still incurable so that you don't excite in your reader that feeling of, "Oh, if only they knew they had . . ." which immediately adopts a slightly patronizing attitude. Often you have to suppress what you actually know, and do it in a way that doesn't seem as though you're doing it, and you can only do that, I find, by being very subjective in your writing. When I wrote The Prisoners of September about the French Revolution, the account I gave of the storming of the Bastille, which was a newspaper account read by the schoolmaster, was the accepted one at the time. I know quite well it was hopelessly inaccurate, but then he couldn't possibly have known what was going on. Only a historian would have an overall view. And that has no part in the depiction of character, because nobody sits down to consider something as a whole when it's happening all around you.

RN: And also they only see through their own eyes.

LG: Yes, and by the next day, they'll have falsified it, not deliberately, but they won't remember the details.

RN: Why do you think you are drawn to the past?

LG: I suppose it's easier to come to terms with things when you can look back and see some sort of proportion. One's always exploring oneself—after all, writing is about trying to discover more and more about oneself—not consciously, of course. And in the course of exploring one's own fears and adventures, you always put them in the minds or the activities of your characters, again, not consciously, but inevitably. You've got nowhere else to turn to find out what people are like.

RN: In this connection, how do your early books compare with the later ones?

LG: Perhaps with the early ones I was learning how to write, and little by little freeing myself of the trappings of a consciously historical style. I worried much more then about detail. I suppose in the process of time I managed to absorb it, so that it's just part of my imagination now and I can use it much more freely than I ever could before. Before Jack Holborn, my first published book, I'd written about five books, all unsuccessful. Jack Holborn was my very first...