The Sparrowhawk Companion (6 page)

Imagine it: If the American Revolution had failed—if Britain had suppressed the revolt of her colonies against tyranny, or if George Washington had succumbed to temptation to become George the First, the American king, as many wished him to—would not have the interminable warfare between rival powers continued well into the nineteenth century? The French Revolution, which may not have happened without the example of the American, was followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon, whose quest for empire led to a clash with Britain, a clash that did not end until 1815 and Waterloo.

But, Hugo can be forgiven his exclusionary pride in France. It would be churlish and presumptuous to belabor it. He was as much a patriot as he was a novelist. His evaluation of France’s history is not off the mark. At the beginning of that same chapter, where he comments on how men viewed the Convention, he writes: “One has a strange feeling: aversion to the great. One sees the abysses without seeing the sublimities. Thus was the Convention judged at first. It was examined by nearsighted men
when it was made to be contemplated by eagles.”
³

Hugo died in 1885, and as his country mourned his passing, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, a gift from a friendly and grateful France, was being erected in New York Harbor. It is almost as though France were making a present to America of the soul of her greatest patriot and novelist.

“To a Romanticist, a background is a background, not a theme. His vision is always focused on man—on the fundamentals of man’s nature, on those problems and aspects of his character which apply to any age and any country.”
⁴
The British-American politics and culture of the eighteenth century are thus a background to the principal heroes of
Sparrowhawk
, but the ideas and principles that moved them are ageless, as applicable in that century as they are in this one. If the men who made the Revolution possible had not been “real,” there would have been no Revolution. It is such “reality” that I wished to make credible and “real,” as “visible” and credible as Hugo’s heroes were to him.

Sparrowhawk
is an “envelope” of ideas, of principles, of men acting on those ideas and principles. It fills a gap in American literature about why the American Revolution happened, and presents the caliber of men who made it possible. It is about their discovery, in the characters of Jack Frake, Hugh Kenrick, and in a handful of other minor heroes, of ideas that were compatible with their existence as men who thought and acted for their own sakes and own reasons, and not from duty or loyalty to the Crown.

There have been numerous novels set in the pre-Revolutionary period. Most of them are little more than costume dramas. Their characters are twentieth–century men, imposters wearing eighteenth-century apparel, transported to a century alien to them in spirit, stature, and action. They are too recognizable and so not credible. If one is searching for a clue to why the men of the Revolution did what they did and thought what they thought, it is exasperating or confusing to encounter in fiction the kinds of men one is familiar with in one’s own time, men to whom the Founders’ moral stature, intelligence, and capacity for action are impossible.

Likewise incredible are those novels in which the primary characters
are unrealized abstractions that expound the ideas of the Revolution. One wants to like them, or praise them, but their unreality prohibits their concretization, and as a consequence, the ideas and events of the Revolution also remain unreal and one develops no affection for them.

Cimourdain, Gauvain, Lantenac—the giants who move
Ninety-Three
, are credible, arresting, convincing characters integrated in a three-way conflict rarely matched in literature in the plotting and climax of the novel (except by Rand herself in
We the Living
,
The Fountainhead
, and
Atlas Shrugged
). All three could be said to be uncompromisingly idealistic and moved solely by their ideals: Lantenac, the ruthless royalist, by his vision of a restored monarchy; Cimourdain and Gauvain, the dedicated republicans, by opposing spirits of the Revolution.

But, as Rand noted in her introduction, Hugo was not able to imbue his giants with credible, convincing intellects. “His fire, his eloquence, his emotional power seemed to desert him when he had to deal with theoretical subjects.”
⁵
Thus, the political dialogue between these three seems flat and stale when compared with the rest of the novel (although that dialogue is in another literary galaxy when compared with what passes for modern political discourse, in fiction and in real life). Given Hugo’s less-than-grand polemics in the novel that were responsible for a momentous event (including the acerbic, yet oddly vapid exchanges between Marat, Danton, and Robespierre earlier in the novel), and he understood the French Revolution at least as well as did its actual provocateurs, it is little wonder that the French Revolution failed.

One task in writing the
Sparrowhawk
novels was to project the growth of the ideas behind the Revolution in its heroes, to make the ideas as real and credible as the heroes. This meant introducing the principal heroes, Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick, at a period of their lives when ideas would have an almost immediate influence on them, and when their hold on their own lives and identities as independent beings was most crucial. Because they refuse to surrender those things, they are able to proceed, step by step, to each stage of maturation to become independent, self-contained men.

That task complemented the task of rendering all the characters, especially Frake and Kenrick, credible representatives of the ideas they
represented or expounded, and to bring those ideas to life, as well. The degree to which readers of the series have expressed an emotional attachment (or revulsion) to these characters, is a measure of the success in making those characters real. To elicit an emotional, personal response to a character in a reader is also a measure of how convincing that character is. It reveals another thing, as well: the character of the reader himself.

Hugo wrote about the Convention: “These were all tragedies begun by giants and finished by dwarfs.”
⁶
Elsewhere, he observed: “When greatness is a crime, it is a sign of the reign of the little.”
⁷

America today is being finished off by such dwarfs, in philosophy, in politics, in the arts, and especially in literature. The dwarfs are nearsighted and wish to reduce everyone to their epistemological state and to share their subjectivist or nihilistic metaphysics. They assert that since none of the Founders was “perfect”—since Washington and Jefferson and Patrick Henry owned slaves, for example—then America is flawed, if not founded on fraud, fabrication, or myth, and so the ideas that inspired its origins are therefore dishonest, invalid, or arbitrary, and may be discarded.

This is the modern method of argumentation and persuasion: to attack the ideas by attacking the man, and presumably discredit the ideas as well as the man. It could be called refutation through irrelevancies. Most modern readers are inured to such circuitous sleights-of-mind, otherwise known as sophistry, having encountered little else in their education, in politics, or in the press.

It is such dishonesty and nearsightedness, promulgated by those intellectual dwarfs, especially in our universities, that I wished to correct and banish by offering an epic of giants (chiefly to preserve my own sanity, and as a vehicle of justice to the men of the Revolution), by arming a reader with an eagle’s perspective on the Revolution, to inculcate a vision of man not possible in the choking swamp fog of modern culture.
Sparrowhawk
, a novel written in an age when such epics are disdained by the intellectual and literary establishment, has enjoyed a success measured by its enthusiastic reception by a reading public desperate for relief from modern subjectivism and in search of reason, a success
that renders the odds against the novel’s appearance and value irrelevant. That success has been personally encouraging and gratifying.

The series is, to borrow the title of a Terence Rattigan play about another hero, my “bequest to the nation.” It was my “mistress” for thirteen years; I denied it nothing and devoted most of my conscious hours to researching and writing it.
Book Six: War
was finished in the spring of 2005. It has been difficult to begin another literary project, such as a third Roaring Twenties detective novel, my having completed the first two novels of that genre before beginning
Sparrowhawk
. Researching and recreating the 1920’s served as training to investigate and recreate the eighteenth century.

Sparrowhawk
is my fourth series, for a total of fifteen novels.
Sparrowhawk
itself is over two thousand pages or some seven million words in length. When I create a hero, I cannot let him go until I have developed him to his fullest. And when I reach that point, then his story is complete. There will be no further Merritt Fury or Chess Hanrahan adventures or cases; perhaps there will be a third Cyrus Skeen novel, ending, appropriately, with the stock market crash of 1929.

by Edward Cline

Someone may ask about
Sparrowhawk
: If one of my purposes were to recreate a world of heroes and the era that saw the birth of the United States, how can one create one’s own world in a historical novel, when one’s characters must conform to the historical record?

The answer is: When there is no historical record for them to conform to. Moreover, the question is asked on the premise that it is impossible to recreate a historical period and also write a Romantic novel in which the characters exercise volition and can choose and pursue their values in that period. It certainly is an achievable literary goal, and
Sparrowhawk
sets no precedent in this regard. Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas (père) and other nineteenth–century novelists and playwrights did it without risking the charge that they rewrote history.

And, there is a certain irrelevancy to the question. One doesn’t choose to write a Romantic-historical novel solely to recreate a particular period. One may as well write a history. If the period is important to one’s fiction-writing purposes—and certainly the pre-Revolutionary period in the American colonies and Britain was integral to mine—then the characters one creates must be able to act freely in it, just as they should in a story set in one’s own time.

In writing
Sparrowhawk
, it was important for me to heed and respect the historical record, because my characters are depicted as contributing to some of the events of the time. In recreating the events in the Virginia General Assembly and the House of Commons, for example, it was crucial that they be portrayed objectively and in character. This meant availing myself of the extant records and journals of both institutions.

And in those records and journals I discovered significant gaps. Of course, there were no such members of the Commons as Dogmael Jones and Henoch Pannell, no rotten boroughs as Swansditch and Canovan. On this side of the Atlantic, there was no such county as Queen Anne in Virginia, and no burgesses by the names of Hugh Kenrick and Edgar Cullis to represent it in the General Assembly. The boroughs, county, and characters are all pure creations.

But, it was not a journalistic, naturalistic novel I wished to write. The gaps in the historical record made it easier for me to recreate the culture and politics of the period in Romantic terms, and to fill those gaps with my story. As Ayn Rand noted in her Introduction to Hugo’s
Ninety-Three
, “To a Romanticist, a background is just a background, not a theme. His vision is always focused on man—on the fundamentals of man’s nature, on those problems and aspects of his character which apply to any age and any country.”
¹
A background is similar to a theatrical setting, a stage on which men may think and act in a plotted story. The props, the costumes, the lighting, and so on, are all a means of establishing time and place, merely “special effects” subsumed by the story. (Today, special effects in film and on the stage are becoming the dominant focus, at the expense of the story, when there is one.)

While the records of Parliament in
Sparrowhawk
’s period are abundant (though still incomplete), there is a paucity of records of the General Assembly, and what exists of them is colorless and dry, thick with the yawn-inducing minutiæ of mundane, unimportant issues. On the other hand, in reading the accounts of the debates in Parliament on the Stamp Act, one encounters a startling mix of eloquence and rude manners, unbridled passion and sly connivance.

Where the record was incomplete, I relied on secondary sources, such as diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts to reconstruct events.
Even then, I had to fall back on my deductive powers and imagination when the records were lacking or so vague or sketchy as to be useless. For example, the numbers of the
Virginia Gazette
, published in Williamsburg, that might have reported what actually happened in the General Assembly in May 1765 when Patrick Henry introduced his Resolves, are missing. Furthermore, I found that I had to write Henry’s “Cæsar had his Brutus” speech, because there is no written record of it, only memorable fragments recalled by men years after the event.