Reenacting an Early American Life: Fiction as History

Foreword

“Invention”? In works of history? Hmmm.

The question sends him on a memory trip. When first drawn to History as a young student so long ago, he would not have understood. Careful re-portage on the past: that was its point, and also its limit. Invention was for fiction writers, for novelists and poets. The difference seemed clear and fundamental.

But as he moved along—became a history major in college, and then a graduate student—things looked more complicated. For a time he wavered. He would hold the line against anything obviously fictional, but he began to think that invention of a sort might enter into history work, after all.

This wasn’t yet widely acknowledged. In some quarters the old standard prevailed: just the facts, invention begone! However, currents of change were stirring, as “new histories” hatched on several sides. His own most important mentors, and their own most important works, were inventive to the core. He got that now, and took the cue. From here on he would aim for whatever inventions history work allowed—not to say, required.

In truth, these matters came clear to him only with the passage of time.

But eventually, when looking back across several decades, he could see three main expressions of his wish to invent. In his days as a young historian, his focus was cross-disciplinary linkage, “applying” theory and practice borrowed from the social sciences (psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology) to matters historical. In his middle years, he had turned to the very different possibilities of narrative. And now, as a further (final?) stage, he feels drawn to fictional representation. Even that once-firm boundary seems no longer to hold.

What he offers below is an example of fictional history. (Which is a little different from historical fiction, but he’ll leave that for another time.) It’s an invented datum, something that might have been written by an actual person who lived and died three centuries ago.

But first: a brief biographical sketch of its (putative) author:

Adonijah Bidwell was born in 1715 at Hartford, in the colony of Connecticut. His lineage was solidly “Puritan,” reaching back to the founding generation of immigrant New Englanders. His father, a merchant, was lost at sea when he was a child. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents in Hartford. He attended, and graduated from, Yale College. He taught school for a few years while training for the ministry. In his mid-thirties he became pastor of the First Congregational Church of Tyringham, Massachusetts, a farming village in the Berkshire hills. There he remained until his death in 1783.

Nothing especially distinguished his life and career; he was the very model of a country pastor. He presided at countless baptisms, weddings, and funerals, preached more than a thousand sermons, and tended to the everyday spiritual needs of his parishioners. Unlike his more eminent colleagues in the ministry, he committed nothing to print. He built and occupied a good-sized “saltbox” house, which has stood through the centuries and is at present a local museum.

There is reason to think that he kept a diary; but if so, it hasn’t survived. It can, however, be imagined—through close reading of actual diaries kept by other clergy of the same era, and then with a kind of transposition.¹

In the document that follows, some events, and many phrases and sentences, have been lifted directly from those sources. Shape, substance, diction, and tone are kept faithful to the period. The names used are those of early Tyringham families. There are two sections, each covering a single week. The first represents the young Bidwell, two years into his pastorate, the second, timed for three decades later on, his elderly self.

First section: april 24–30, 1752

24 (Mon.) . . . Unseasonably warm. A.M. We ploughed ye north field. Hired neighbor Jackson’s Negro man Scipio to help.² John Kellogg lent his yoke of oxen. I went to Asa Allen for flax seed. Toward noon (being earnestly sent for) went to see Mrs. Esther Brewer, who was very...