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Writing The Brothers Boswell ~ A Guest Post by Philip Baruth
When I got offered a copy of The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth by Sarah at Soho Press, I knew that this would be a great book for the Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club. I responded back that I would love a chance to read it and then make that our September selection. The Brothers Boswell was published this month and its author, Philip Baruth, graciously wrote a guest post for us. I hope that this makes you as excited as I am to read this novel!
Writing THE BROTHERS BOSWELL
I first read James Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763 when I was twenty-one. I was in college, plotting to be a writer and all the while telling my father I would go to law school. To my astonishment, Boswell was also 21 and a would-be writer, also pretending to be preparing for a career in the law. So I felt an immediate, electric kinship, across the centuries.
We didn’t mesh on everything, of course. Boswell trolled the brothels and associated with Dukes and Countesses, so I never reached as high or as low as he typically did. Still, I had the immediate and lasting impression that here was a character worth a novel, and two decades later I sat down to write it.
James Boswell
My thought was that I’d sketch the famous friendship between Johnson and Boswell from the inside, from Boswell’s point of view. In 1763, Johnson is the undisputed literary lion of England; Boswell is little more than a boy from a good Scottish family — not much in the way of a recommendation in London high society. Yet they become fast friends almost from the moment they meet. It seemed like a natural. Except that when I sat down to write, nothing came.
The problem, I think, was that I knew the Boswell-Johnson story far too well: I wrote about it for my Honors thesis as an undergraduate, and my Ph.D dissertation, and I’d published several articles on the topic for good measure. And of course Boswell’s London Journal describes that year in painstaking detail.
But I knew the key must lie in the London Journal itself, and so I sat down to read it for the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth time, determined to search the background for what I’d previously missed. And there, in a footnote to January 5 1763, it was: I’d forgotten that John Boswell, James’s younger brother, visited him in London for several weeks, following a brief bout of insanity at the end of 1762. I noticed something else as well — John appears almost not at all in Boswell’s journal entries, with the exception of a line like “Had tea with my brother John.” In most cases, that was the extent of the reference.
The more I thought about it the stranger that reticence seemed to me. Boswell wrote and thought a great deal about madness. It was a topic that consumed him, partially because a strain of melancholia ran through his own family, and his uncle had spent the last part of his life in a strait-waistcoat. Boswell asked everyone about madness, friends, strangers, even Johnson, in their first conversations. So here was a visitor fresh from the madhouse, and a brother no less — but almost complete silence from Boswell on the topic, silence from a man who happily recorded everything, from prostitutes to venereal disease.
Samuel Johnson
There was no avoiding the conclusion: Boswell wanted desperately to hide his brother’s madness, from London society, from the friends reading the manuscript pages of his journal, and mostly from himself. It was repression of a very high order.
From that point, the rest fell directly into place. John, in my novel, stumbles on the Journal and discovers how systematically he has been hidden away from the great and powerful by his brother, and that knowledge reactivates his madness. He is so jealous of James’s budding friendship with Johnson that he either begins or imagines his own deeper relationship with the author of the Dictionary. And when he cannot reconcile his brother’s London with his own, John acquires two golden pistols, and sets out to trap Boswell and Johnson, to force them to acknowledge the relationships they’ve kept secret from one another. A tangled web, admittedly, but one that made emotional sense.
And I could tell immediately that I’d hit on something, because suddenly the writing of the novel became great fun, something I looked forward to, rather than daily misery, which is always a good sign, of course.
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Thanks so much for stopping by, Philip!
If you would like to read more from Philip Baruth, why not check out his blog, Vermont Daily Briefing.
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TGIF With Vanina Marsot, Author of Foreign Tongue
Photo by David Wagreich
I absolutely loved Foreign Tongue by Vanina Marsot. So, when I opened my email a couple of weeks ago and saw a message from her, it made my day! In the midst of her returning to the United States from Paris, Vanina graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions. She even provided these lovely pictures of Paris.
I hope you enjoy the following Q&A as much as I did! TGIF everyone!
Literate Housewife: Vanina, I loved your novel! Thank you so much for taking the time to email me and answer my questions. This makes my day! Just like Anna, you’ve lived in both LA and Paris. What are your favorite spots in both cities? Are they places that tourists would know about or are they spots where natives go to avoid them?
Vanina Marsot: There are so many places I love in both cities. Even the touristy ones have their appeal, but here are some of my favorites.
In LA, I love the beach, from Venice to Malibu, though I’m usually wearing sunblock and a hat and long sleeves. I like the rare places in LA where you can walk: on Abbot Kinney in Venice, parts of Santa Monica, and tiny Larchmont Village. I love food adventures, such as taking four freeways over to Artesia for Indian puffy bread and curry at Woodlands, then desserts at India’s Sweets and Spices. I like Thai Town in Hollywood and Little Tokyo downtown. I like the private room karaoke bars in Koreatown (of which there are lamentably few in Paris) and Chosun Galbi for Korean BBQ, and I like the Mexican markets where I buy jamaica, red hibiscus tea. I like the photography exhibits at the Getty Center and the view on a clear day. I like James’ Beach’s hamburger and I like Skylight books in Los Feliz and Fred 62’s tuna melt, something I have never been able to find in Paris. I like the drive out to Palm Springs, especially in the early evening, with the sunset in your rear-view mirror. I love road trips and planning the soundtrack for them. LA requires some work, because you really do have to drive a lot, but it can be very rewarding.
In Paris, I love walking and biking around, and the city is so beautiful that sometimes merely getting from one place to another is its own reward, an opportunity to discover a neighborhood and look at the architecture. Some of the tourist spots are wonderful: I never get tired of the stained glass windows at la Sainte Chappelle, and I love the Eiffel Tower, especially at night when it sparkles every hour on the hour. I like hot chocolate at Angelina as does every tourist who’s ever been there, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling very Parisian. I like the meandering streets of Montmartre and neighborhood shopping streets: up high on the rue de Belleville, up by the Place des Fêtes, there’s a boulangerie, a cheese store, lots of small little shops and a couple of cafes by the church. As you go up the street, you pass the stone plaque commemorating the steps where Edith Piaf’s mother gave birth to her. I like the lesser-known parks all over the city, particularly the view from the terraced Parc de Belleville and from the folly at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. I like the Vietnamese restaurants in Belleville, the revival movie houses of the 5th, and the comfy chairs at the Max Linder cinema. I love lounging in the green enamel metal chairs by the fountains in the Tuileries and the Palais-Royal. I like walking by the river, by the canals, but also strolling around the boutiques and cafes of St. Germain. I like the vintage shops and art galleries in the Marais, the open markets all over town, and stumbling across tiny merceries, where you find buttons and ribbons and lace. I found the most adorable candy store in the 5th, everything in large glass jars and made à l’ancienne, the old-fashioned way. Paris is the best city in the world to get lost in, because there’s always something to see and because it’s so small that you can’t really get that lost in it.
LH: What is your favorite childhood memory from each home?
VM: Good question! My favorite memory about Paris is feeding the ducks at the small lake in the Bois de Boulogne with my grandmother and my sister. My grandmother would keep stale baguette bread in a bag, and when we had enough, we’d walk over to the small lake and feed the ducks. In my memory, it’s always cold and somewhat misty, the water an eau de nil green, the ducks all beautiful, noisy, iridescent mallards, and the one white swan utterly beautiful and a tiny bit forlorn.
In Los Angeles, it’s got to be the entire Enchanted Summer, as I refer to it: I think I was 10 or 12, and my parents were given a huge pile of unused ticket books from friends who were leaving LA for a diplomatic posting far away. Back then, admission at Disneyland was inexpensive, but you shelled out for ticket books. My father was teaching summer school at a university near the park, so every Friday, we piled into the car, drove down the 405, dropped my dad off, and went off to Disneyland for a few hours, using up our ticket books until it was time to pick him up, right after the parade and fireworks. I know that place like the back of my hand. I don’t care how commercial it is–it was magic for me when I was a kid.
LH: What was it that inspired you to write Foreign Tongue? Was there anything that surprised you while you were writing it? What was the most difficult aspect for you?
VM: Growing up bilingual, I think I probably had some good material to start with, but the difference between languages has always been one of my favorite topics of conversation: the things you can say in one language that you can’t in another. I hoard those books about expressions that only exist in other languages, always marveling that, say, Japanese has a word for a certain kind of aesthetic or that German is endlessly creative in putting two or three words together to create a new one. I’ve never actually stopped learning French, because people are always using words I don’t know–slang, of course, which changes all the time and is a perpetual source of both mystery and delight, but also old-fashioned words that come back into use, or particularly specific words that I never learned in the first place. I’m always asking my French friends how those words are defined and used, and the French are always delighted to give you their take on what a word means, its connotations, even what it means about you when you use it. Those conversations are definitely part of the root of this book.
What surprised me the most about writing it has to be the serendipity of writing. You think you’re going down an improbable, odd path, and you second-guess yourself, but you write anyway, and then somehow, it works and it makes sense, and it’s like a gift, the unexpected twist that glimmers and comes into view. I used to get annoyed when a writer friend would say “my characters talk to me and I just write down what they say,” because it sounded, well, perhaps slightly ludicrous or precious, but as I wrote this book, I realized that if I let my imagination wander out of the safety zone, loosen the reins a bit on my intentions, sometimes that was enough to allow things to come together.
The most difficult aspect was maintaining the stamina to keep writing. I think writing a book teaches you how to write a book, but it’s a lot of work, especially if you write long, the way I do, and then you have to pare back and edit. When I say I write long, I mean really long–I think I spent a year and a half editing before I thought it was ready to start sending out.
LH: One of the things about Foreign Tongue that really pleasantly surprised me was that there wasn’t any indication that Anna preferred one place over the other. Oftentimes in similar novels and even memoirs there is a heavy anti-American sentiment. It was nice for me to explore Paris in your novel without having to apologize for being American. Was this a conscious decision you made when you wrote your novel?
VM: Yes, very much so. On the one hand, there’s been some anti-American sentiment, as you point out, and sometimes, in the US, some anti-French sentiment. Politics aside, I’ve actually talked to people who swear they’d never go to France because “people are snobby there.” I can see where some places might appeal more than others, but I am constantly astonished by the preconceived notions people can have about other cultures.
So, it seemed to me that an interesting point of view about the difference between cultures and languages would have to come from someone who knew and loved both of them; otherwise, the deck would be stacked. For instance, a lot of people don’t realize that the French are, in general, rather nice to foreigners–where they’re sometimes not so nice is to each other. This seemed like an interesting predicament to put a bilingual woman in.
There are also so many Americans in Paris, and there have been for so long (Henry James, Hemingway, etc., etc.), that Americans seem very much a part of the city–you see it in the English language bookstores, the Gap, American Apparel, even the breakfast and lunch diners that have sprung up around town, all the places that do brunch, the huge numbers of American movies that come out, almost always subtitled, not dubbed. In France, there’s often a real delight in these parts of American culture, and I find that touching.
LH: I really loved the quotes that you used at the beginning of each chapter. They were very appropriate, especially the one selected for the last chapter. Are they something you compiled afterwards? If not, how did fit into your writing process?
VM: I’m so glad you liked them! It’s a hobby of mine, collecting quotations. I’ve got boxes and boxes of them, all on index cards, organized by category. I love quotations. I get them from articles, from interviews, from movies, but also from books–I tend to dog ear pages, and when I’m done, I go back and copy the passages I like onto my index cards.
In my book, I liked the notion of a slightly mysterious, sometimes mischievous voice commenting on the chapters–after all, who picks those quotations? It could be Anna, my heroine, but it’s not clear. It could be the voice of her subconscious, or it could be the voice of a distant, omniscient narrator, a shadow lurking somewhere in the background. I liked the idea that they’d point to a couple of things going on at once, like a sly or whimsical joke, or an illustration of something, a comment on the proceedings, oblique clues.
LH:I really enjoyed Anna’s relationship with her employer Monsieur Laveau and with Bunny. They were both older men who had a profound impact on her. She needed them both to learn about herself. Where did those characters come from? Was it important to you as the author that Anna’s mentors were both male? Could a female have made such an impact on her?
VM: Anna is definitely trying to figure out a lot of stuff in her life, and one of her journeys involves figuring things out for herself instead of trying to locate their answers in other people. I wanted both Monsieur Laveau and Bunny to be father-like figures for her, people who could challenge her, and I liked that one of them was French and the other American. Bunny was partly based on an old, dear friend, and Monsieur Laveau was pure invention–what they have in common is that they both hold language in high regard, so that they are both able to challenge her translation work, and hence also her ideas about language and the book’s content. Because the book she’s translating is racy, it makes her uncomfortable, puts her in a bit of a bind, that the two people she talks about it with are men. I think there would have been less tension had either of them been women. But I think Anna gets a lot of insight from her women friends, Clara and Althea, and Lucy in London, so they supply a kind of counter-balance.
LH: Let’s chat about cuss words. I enjoy learning new ones from different languages, so learning those along with Anna’s translation was a lot of fun for me.
VM: Because you share my delight in cuss words, I thought I’d share some more with you. Years and years ago, when I taught English to French business executives, the only way to get them to get over their shyness in actually speaking in class was to teach them how to curse. So, I began every introductory class began with a sophisticated deconstruction of how to use f*ck in English. FYI, “motherf*cker” has no real equivalent in French, but the closest equivalent is “enculé,” (pronounced ohn-cu-lay) which in its verb form means “to bugger” and in its past participle form can be an adjective, meaning “a person who gets buggered.” It is therefore quite possibly the rudest thing you can say in French.
Other words that crack me up: “putain,” which means whore, but is used kind of like “shit,” and “bordel,” which literally means bordello, but which really means something like “what a f*cking mess.” The best part is when French people link them all together, in a Ricky Ricardo-like stream of invective: putain-de-merde-fais-chier-bordel.
LH: Thank you so much, Vanina! I enjoyed our chat and I love all of the pictures you sent! I couldn’t choose from among them, so I included them all. Best of luck with Foreign Tongue. As my readers know, I highly recommend it.
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A Visit with Thomas Robisheaux
My second installment in all things witches this week is a question and answer session Thomas Robisheaux, Professor of History from Duke University. While the Blue Devils couldn’t count on their basketball team to lead them to glory during March Madness this year, they have much to be excited about in Professor Robisheaux. He wrote The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Villiage, which I will be reviewing here tomorrow. It is an interesting look at the witch trial of Anna Schmieg, a miller’s wife accused of witchcraft after a local woman suddenly dies after eating one of her Shrove Tuesday cakes. After reading his book I was interested in so many different thingg that I found it hard to narrow down my questions to a reasonable amount. Tom was very gracious in answering them all. I hope that you enjoy our visit as much as I did.
Literate Housewife: Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and the readers of The Literate Housewife Review about your book, The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village.
You are a History professor at Duke (sorry about their March Madness loss). What is your concentration? What are your favorite courses to teach?
Thomas Robisheaux: Long ago I became fascinated with the Middle Ages, the era of the Renaissance and Reformation, the time of Europe’s religious wars right up to the Enlightenment. The questions that stirred me as an undergraduate student—what was it like to live in a period of discovery, new states, and religious strife?—have never left me. It was only natural that as an historian that I would specialize in the “early modern era” of Europe’s past, the centuries between 1400 and 1800. My favorite course? There’s no doubt about it: it’s my “Magic, Religion and Science since the Renaissance.” When I first started work on The Last Witch of Langenburg I realized that magic, witchcraft, religion, and science came up in the story in complicated ways I had not foreseen. Teaching this course became my way of exploring the intriguing ways that these ways of knowing the world overlapped with each other. Students seem to share my curiosity and since then the course has become a very popular one at Duke. The course also asks the questions that students often have about science, religion and magic but which frequently go unanswered. I teach it every spring.
LH: Before I readThe Witch’s Trinity by Erika Mailman, I had no exposure to European witch trials. I enjoyed your book because it provided an in depth look at the role of government and other outside forces to these people’s lives. What was your inspiration for writing The Last Witch of Langenburg? Have you always been interested in witch trials?
Neuenstein Castle
TR: The inspiration for this book: understanding Anna Schmieg, the woman at the center of this last witch panic in her region, and her life story. When I first came across her trial records in the castle archives in Neuenstein, Germany, I was astonished. At the time I was looking for something else. I never set out to research and write about witchcraft. I thought that historians had written enough about it and that there was little new to say. I also avoided the topic for a long time because my mentor at the University of Virginia, Erik Midilfort, had written brilliantly on the subject, opening up this difficult topic for many other historians to write about,, and I never imagined that I would have anything of interest to say about it. When parts of Anna’s story began to leap off the pages of the trial records, however, I simply could not let it go. Who was this fierce woman? What was her life story? How did her cakes spark a terror that swept through the countryside? I was hooked. I had to find out as much as I could about her, her family, her neighbors, and how she came to be the center of such a crisis at the end of her life.
LH; How long did it take you to write this book? What did you find the most difficult to write about? The easiest?
TR: It took over 15 years. Reconstructing the lives of villagers from the seventeenth century is difficult. There were no established accounts of Anna Schmieg’s story or the Langenburg witch trials to work with. There are no biographies, no diaries, no letters. To reconstruct the story—and the lives of all of the people who were drawn into it—I had to work through many separate series of archival records, hundreds of documents, thousands of separate entries in protocols, account books, government and church records. There were trips to specialized libraries and still other archives in Germany. The project was like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces strewn across the table. Piecing them together was time-consuming, extremely pain-staking work. As an historian I could not solve difficult problems in the narrative. In this regard I envy novelists who can solve them with their imaginations. As an historian I have to be scrupulously loyal to historical method. You cannot make things up. The easiest part of writing this book was dedicating it to my wife, Angelique. She is a medievalist, knows six modern languages (plus several ancient ones) and therefore has an extraordinary sense for language and the meanings and uses of words. She offered countless insights into Anna Schmieg and many other characters. When I took a big gamble and set aside a more conventional approach to the project, and imagined telling the story in a new way, she supported me every step of the way.
LH: While reading your book, I was struck by how relatively calm the government was. Although the townspeople may have been more hysterical, the government followed its processes to ensure a fair outcome. Was this a relatively new phenomenon at the time of Anna Schmeig’s trial? Do you think that the people would have taken justice into their own hands if this happened closer to the end of the Thirty Year’s War?
TR: The government was indeed calm, deliberate, and methodical. The prince and his ministers all knew from their own experience what chaos and terror was about. They knew the price of giving in to panic. And they also knew that the only thing that stood between their world and unimaginable disorder and reckless persecution was the state and the law. Our modern stereotypes of witch trials as panics driven by fearful persecutors make it difficult to grasp this fact about the authorities who faced the terror of witchcraft. Their cautiously deliberative approach to the evidence was not new. Most trials in Europe were small, individual trials that never triggered larger panics or hunts. In fact, a great many accusations—perhaps up to half of them—failed and the accused were let go. The really terrifying chain-reaction witch hunts took place around 1590 and then again in the late 1620s, but those were exceptional. In some of the earlier witch hunts around Trier, the Moselle and the Rhine Rivers, when the authorities proved reluctant to pursue suspicions of witchcraft, small communities had organized their own witch committees. By the middle of the seventeenth century the authorities were very reluctant to give in to such pressures. The chaos at the end of the Thirty Years War also made this kind of rough popular justice unlikely.
LH: Langenburg was a Lutheran town. How different was the Lutheran approach to dealing with witchcraft and prosecuting witches different than a Catholic approach? Did you come across any references to the Malleus Maleficarum during your research?
TR: Protestants and Catholics approached witchcraft in much the same way: as a heresy and a heinous crime. Theologians and jurists and popular writers debated the reality of witchcraft and there were skeptics on all sides. The debates generally cut across lines other than the religious ones. For example, some questioned the reality of witchcraft. Everyone knew that Satan worked in the world, and that sinners could be lured into pacts with him. But some wondered whether witches might be deluded into thinking that they could work the harmful magic they were accused of. Others thought that witnesses and the faithful could easily be deceived as well. How well can you trust your senses after all? Many others worried that it was difficult to detect secret or occult crimes, and that the law was a crude and even doubtful way of ferreting out evil malefactors. The one difference that historians have noted between Protestants and Catholics is that some Catholic bishops—those of Trier, Cologne, Würzburg and Bamberg—presided over unusually large and fierce witch hunts. But Catholic Bavaria, Italy and Spain prosecuted relatively few people for witchcraft overall.. The Malleus malificarum—the notorious legal manual on prosecuting the crime of witchcraft—was sometimes cited in sixteenth century trials. By the seventeenth century—when the Langeng burg trials took place—it was rarely cited any longer. There were more modern, more comprehensive, more recent works that were influential, like those of Jean Bodin, Bendedict Carpzov, Nicolaus Remy and others.
LH: Although we often use the term “witch hunt” today, we no longer have witch trials. Do you think this is because science is advanced enough to explain things otherwise attributed to witchcraft or because people themselves have changed? Do you think economics plays a role?
TR: It’s true that witch trials declined and ended in the eighteenth century. It was largely the elites who abandoned witch ideas, such as the biblical basis for prosecuting witches or the theological idea of witchcraft as a pact with the devil. Others found more persuasive explanations of poisoning in medical theories of how toxins worked in strictly material ways within the body. In parts of rural Europe the fear of witches continued well into the twentieth century, however. As late as 1944 Britain invoked its witchcraft laws to prosecute “Hellish Nell,” a Scottish seer, out of fear that she might use her powers as a spirit medium to reveal the Allies’ secret plans for invading Europe. We may no longer have witch trials like those in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but here and there we still endure small panics triggered by social dynamics and fears very much like a witch trial. Back in the 1980s and 1990s—in both America and Great Britain—a wave of panics over alleged Satanic ritual abuse of children struck a number of small communities and suburbs. These panics fed on parents’ anxieties over daycare, fears of organized underground rings of Satan worshippers, and waves of concern over sexual abuse.
LH: Based upon Anna Schmeig’s relationships with her daughter and her neighbors, I got the feeling that no one, especially not a woman, was safe from being accused of witchcraft. Of all the evidence against Anna Schmeig, what do you think was the most damning? Would it have gotten to this level had Anna not been the miller’s wife?
TR: We historians who work on witchcraft are now struck by how pervasive witch beliefs were, how easily adapted they were to many circumstances. The amazing thing is how few trials actually took place. The potential existed for many, many more. You’re right about women and the fears of witchcraft: under the right circumstances the suspicion of witchcraft could settle on many women: older women beyond their reproductive years, women known for an independent streak or who stood out for their behavior, etc. The most damning evidence against Anna Schmieg in the end—the evidence that clinched her conviction in the last appellate review in Strasbourg—was that she was a “barbarous, wicked old woman” who had “renounced the kingdom of God” and shocked the community with her drinking, cursing and immoral behavior. To these jurists such a woman was the most dangerous enemy of the civic order they could imagine.
Did your research point to what might have really happened to Anna Fessler?
TR: This may surprise and shock some of your readers, but I believe that Anna Schmieg actually did poison her neighbor, Anna Fessler. Most likely she laced her Shrove cakes with arsenic powder. The descriptions of Fessler’s death accord almost exactly with acute arsenic poisoning. It is very unlikely—in my view—that she died a natural death from complications of following pregnancy and childbirth or some other cause. But I don’t think that Anna Schmieg intended her poisoned cake for Anna Fessler. Instead I believe she meant it for her son-in-law, the one who had brought such grief and crisis to the future of Anna’s family. Had he eaten the cake and died I doubt that there would have been an uproar. In fact, the authorities may not have conducted an investigation at all. Villagers understood that some men were simply “no good” or “of no use”—and Anna Schmieg’s son-in-law certainly fit the bill—and a woman might understandably resort to extreme methods to protect their family and household.
LH: Have you read many novels about witch trials? If so, what might you recommend to my readers?
TR: I really recommend Kathleen Kent’s new novel, The Heretic’s Daughter: A Novel. What makes it so compelling is her extraordinary ability to work her way into the life of a woman touched by the Salem witch trials. There are others that I find well worth reading, too, including Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem and Leslie Wilson’s Malefice. I also found the older novel of Mary Webb, Precious Bane, a realistic depiction of how suspicions of witchcraft settled on a woman. There is also a six-part BBC production of it.
LH: What is your next project? Can you give us a little sneak peak?
TR: I have two other projects in the works. Your readers are likely to be more interested in the one called Magic, Religion and Science since the Renaissance, a historian’s view on the ways that these three great ways of knowing the world and nature have related to each other since the Renaissance. We have a lively contemporary debate about science and religion, of course, but my view is that a “third person” also sits at this table, one whom we acknowledge only reluctantly, but who is equally engaged in the debate: the person who relies on “magic” to think about and live in the world. My other project is meant for historians. Colleagues who read The Last Witch of Langenburg often ask me: how did you do it? This is a book about the historical technique behind The Last Witch: microhistory.
LH: Thank you so much for your time and bringing the lives of those living in Langenburg, Germany circa 1672 to life for us.
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A Conversation with Erika Mailman
In February of 2008 I read and reviewed The Witch’s Trinity by Erika Mailman. Little did I know then that she would be the first author to email me after I posted my review. That started an email conversation that I really enjoyed and ultimately sparked my idea to feature her and her novel on my blog all throughout last October in my October Spotlight. In addition to reposting my review and offering a giveaway, Erika wrote a guest post.
During that time, we had a phone conversation that I had planned on posting at the end of the month. As luck would have it, life got in the way and I didn’t have enough time to transcribe it. It’s been a few months, but I thought that it would be great to prepare it to coincide with Erika’s giveaway of one hard cover and one paperback copy of The Witch’s Trinity on her blog, The World of Mailman.
Later this week I will be posting a review and other posts about The Last Witch of Langenburg by Thomas Robishaeux this week as well. It’s safe and appropriate to say that the witch is back here on The Literate Housewife Review this week!
Without any further delay, here is the conversation Erika and I had last October:
Literate Housewife: How is it that you set out to write The Witch’s Trinity?
Erika Mailman: A really good friend of mine knew that I was interested in history, so he gave me a copy of audio-taped lectures called “The Terror of History” by UCLA professor Teofilo Ruiz. Over the course of these lectures, Ruiz talks about the history of witchcraft and all of the belief systems involved. The last cassette (this was back in the day when I still had a cassette player in my car) was about the witch hunts when they really heated up. One of the things he talked about statistically high number of accusations that were made by daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law. This is attention grabbing in itself, but even worse was the reason why. These people were so hungry that they found themselves looking around their tables wondering what it would be like to have one less person there. If this person weren’t doing any work because they’re older, they’re a little more expendable. So, whether consciously or sub-consciously, they were looking to get fewer people eating at the table. That blew my mind. I was shocked and horrified to think about people offering up their own family members because they were that hungry.
LH: One thing that struck me immediately in your novel was Güde’s vulnerability, even though she was Jost’s mother. It felt like elder abuse. I know that times were different, but I didn’t look upon the daughter-in-law very kindly after that.
EM: She’s fighting for her children, too. In that era, life expectancy was very much shortened. In your late 30s you were getting ready to leave.
LH: Oh Lord, here I go… (laughter)
EM: The few who managed to make it past all of the diseases, plagues, and even things like what we consider simple infections today and you make it to their 70s and 80s start gathering attention to themselves as someone strange. In that way, Güde is historically accurate. She’s outlived her usefulness. Her mind is starting to go, so she is not easy to be around within a starving family with two young children. Consciously or otherwise, Irmeltrud is thinking about what is best for her kids.
LH: What I still remember from when I read your novel was just how glad I was to be born in this day and age.
EM: Absolutely. I used to say how lucky I was to live in this time period, but I’m really lucky to live on this continent. There are still witchcraft persecutions taking place in Africa. People are literally being doused with gasoline and set on fire just like being burned at the stake today for the crime of witchcraft. I’m hoping that with this book I can bring a little attention and focus to that as well. It’s heartbreaking. I think we all like to think that “Ah, that was the middle ages, the dark ages, we’ve come so far.” [In the Western world] We are not driving women to the town square and hanging them or burning them, but people are still unsafe in certain parts of the world. That’s really tragic.
LH: I had no idea that it was still happening. I have recently read several books that take place during the Inquisition and how horrible that was. A lot of times the focus is on the Catholic Church’s role in that, but it wasn’t always the Catholics who did such things. In Salem, MA is was the Puritans. Can’t people learn from others who had done such things before?
EM: It is really upsetting. The New York Times ran an article about something much like my novel. It was about families who are hungry and how they are trying to take care of their own. They are pushing out family members for being witches, leaving them without a place to stay or the ability to feed and clothe themselves. This time, however, it’s not elderly being targeted. It’s the children. The article ran with a photo of a four-year-old boy who had been kicked out like that and it made me nauseous. This is not to say that children weren’t targeted in the medieval period. They were, but in most circumstances it was elderly or middle aged family members.
LH: What was it that made you select Germany as the setting for your novel?
EM: Germany really was the heart of the witch hunts. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunter’s bible, were German friars. I’m also of German heritage. My last name Mailman comes from Mehlmen. I wanted to go to the dark forest, thinking about the Brother’s Grimm and their medieval folklore landscape. All of those things pointed me toward Germany.
LH: Do you think it was simply superstition that made people do those things like turn on neighbors or outsiders or were they hungry and trying to gain some sort of control over their environment?
EM: I think you put your finger on it. The environment is out of their control. They were trying in their small, disparate ways to control the uncontrollable. Fate is random and harsh. The world isn’t easy for people who didn’t understand scientific explanations for famine, earthquakes, or lightning strikes. They were searching for a way to explain things and the only thing available to them are others around them. Even today, when things get bad people turn to scapegoats for an explanation. For example, after September 11th, a lot of people were either avoiding or even attacking people who looked Muslim. Another example is John Ritter. After he died, his widow, being heartbroken and trying to find an explanation for why this terrible random thing happen, looked to the hospital and medical providers to place blame. Now that our economy is really tanked and going down, I hope that we can resist the temptation to blame someone else.
LH: One of the things you brought out in your book were the tests taken to see if someone was a witch, such as the pebble test. If you could reach in and pull out three pebbles from the boiling pot of water without getting burned, you were not a witch. Knowing that is impossible, that whole scene made me really angry. The priest never reached in to prove that he could do it, did he. What in your opinion were some of the more bizarre ways that people tested for witchcraft that you uncovered during your research?
EM: First I want to mention the pebble trial. That was not something I invented. I came across this during my research. If you put your hand in boiling water you will of course burn. The only modification I made [in the novel] was to make it be three pebbles, keeping with the motif of threes throughout the book.
Another famously unfair test was witch dunking. In this situation, the woman’s thumbs would be tied to their big toes, in essence hobbling them. The woman is then tossed into the water. If she somehow managed to wrestle her body around and stay afloat and keep breathing, she was guilty. If she sank and drown, she and her family have the satisfaction of proving her innocence. Still, she is dead.
The last witchcraft trial in the United States, someone in what is now Virginia Beach was dunked and managed to float. They pulled her out and, although I forget what the exact circumstances were, she was eventually let go despite the fact that she didn’t sink and drown. Not that many hundred years ago people were thinking this was a good idea.
LH: What would you consider to have been the most sadistic method of torturing witches?
EM: Before I wrote this novel, my husband and I went to visit a torture exhibit put on by Amnesty International. This exhibit traveled all over the country. You just cannot go there and without being affected. You wonder who these people were who thought “How can I hurt my fellow human being in the worst way possible?” In fact, one of the worst parts about the exhibit was reading the plaque with each tool and see that it was used in 14th century Italy, 15th century Germany and in use today in Argentina. That was the point of the exhibit. This is not just buried in the past. Torture is still being used.
I feel like as a woman that The Tear is the most exquisitely sadist torture instrument. It is a devise that I talk about that in my book. It is inserted into the vagina and when itt is opened inside it the woman’s vagina into shreds. You can’t look on something like that and not imagine it being used on you or someone you love. So, when I wrote my book I was concerned. I wanted it to be readable yet allow people to learn about the horrors of the witchcraft trials. But I also wanted it to be realistic so I had to do some creative things to get around it. This is not an easy read for those who are compassionate, but it’s readable.
LH: As I wrote my review, my heart was racing almost the entire time I read it. I wanted very desperately to escape the book, but I had to keep reading because I needed to know what happened.
EM: Thank you for that. It would be interesting to figure out the psychology of an inquisitor. Is this someone who is fervently religious and really thinks he is doing the right thing, or is there some mysogony not just under the skin but deliberately out there? It would be so interesting if we could go in a time machine and bring one of them back. We could ask them what was on their minds? What were they thinking? Did they think they were saving the woman from Hell’s eternal flames by torturing them on earth or did they not have her best interests at heart?
LH: Even the community’s best interests for that matter.
EM: Right.
LH: Did you find in your research that people would stand up against these trials?
EM: Yes to a degree, although the Malleus Maleficarum makes a point to say that anyone standing in defense of a witch is defending a heretic. They themselves are therefore under suspicion of heresy themselves. There was a discussion as to whether a witch should be allowed an advocate, an attorney in that era, but even the advocate would be under suspicion of heresy. So, it was really dangerous to stick your neck out for anyone else. It did happen, but somebody would have been very courageous to do so.
EM: Going back to the pebble test, my initial thought was to say, “You do it first and show me.” That much would have been the end of me, wouldn’t it?
LH: That’s powerful reasoning and they weren’t able to bring it to the forefront. I have an ancestor who was accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts. The Afterwards of the novel discusses her. She did have witnesses come forward to say that she’s not a witch. The person accusing her has a long term vendetta against her and eventually [the government] was reasonable. She was let go.
I think women accused of witchcraft were safer in New England than in Europe because it wasn’t so deeply entrenched there. Europe had the 400 year cycle of killing witches. New England was a newer area. I learned through some research that 30% of witches accused in New England were acquitted. It seems like people were becoming a little more enlightened by that time. They were becoming more skeptical. Those people who came out at trial to support my ancestor were less at risk than somebody might have been in medieval Europe.
LH: The men in your novel take off to the woods to search for food, leaving their wives and mothers in jeopardy without having them there to defend them. How much of their decision to leave at that crucial time was because of their own guilt over not being able to take care of their family?
EM: I had never thought about it that way, but they were in a sense retreating from their hardships.
LH: It seemed awfully convenient for them to choose that time to look for food away from the village.
The Hunters In The Snow by Pieter Bruegel
EM: These characters are desperate. If the woods are emptied and there is nothing to eat, they have to keep moving to find animal footprints in the snow. I was inspired in part by a painting I’ve loved for so long: Pieter Bruegel’s ‘The Hunters in the Snow.’ It’s a wonderful, desolate painting of what looks like a partially abandoned village. The hunters are coming back after clearly being away for a while, but they’ve got meat with them. I’ve used that painting with classes because several poets have used it as a jumping off place for writing poems. In my English classes I show the painting and then the poems and have my students write on it as well.
I have spent so much time looking at the details of that painting that it just kind of organically arose in my mind. Güde’s son Jost was protecting her and he needed to leave so that she was more vulnerable. It made sense that he had to leave to get more food. I think that painting helped me make that plot decision.
LH: The Witch’s Trinity isn’t your first novel. Your first novel takes place during the Gold Rush. How was the experience different between writing those two books?
EM: Oh, worlds apart. The first book is Woman of Ill Fame and it’s about a prostitute who comes to San Franscisco at the very beginnings of the Gold Rush. It’s a little bit of a murder mystery with a Jack the Ripper kind of character. It’s also a romp. It was fun and I hope that the main character is funny. People have told me that they’ve laughed out loud about a few things. From there, I went to the painful research for The Witch’s Trinity. I hope this demonstrates that there is versatility in me. I’m a voracious reader and love to read all kinds of books. I didn’t want to get stereotyped into be a certain kind of writer.
LH: What are you working on now?
EM: I am working on a young adult horror novel. There is a ghost story type of haunted mansion.
LH: Erika, thank you so much for talking with me. I enjoyed reading your novel and working with you in my October spotlight. I look forward to reading your next novel.
EM: I really appreciate your interest and what you are doing for me on your blog. It’s so cool.
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A Chat With Castle Freeman, Jr.
I recently read and reviewed Go With Me by Castle Freeman, Jr. I have had the opportunity to ask him some questions about his name, his inspriration, his novel, and what’s coming up. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as we did.
Literate Housewife: First of all, I want to thank you very much for answering my questions. I enjoyed reading your novel and I’m really looking forward to spending some time with you.
As someone named Jennifer, I’ve often fantasized about what it would be like not to have a common name. How did you get the name Castle? It’s so unique and memorable. Is having a unusual name a blessing or a curse?
Castle Freeman, JR.: Castle was my grandmother’s maiden name. When she married and had a child, she gave that name as a first name to her son, my father, to preserve it from being forgotten when she took her husband’s name. We are talking about 100 years ago. This was pretty common in those days, I think, and may still be, for all I know. But keep in mind that commonness of names is all time-bound. I remember from when I was a kid only one person named Jennifer, and she didn’t count because she was English. Then (1950s), Jennifer was an exotic name, like Castle.
Is having a memorable name is a blessing or a curse? Well, for an author, I suppose it does no harm, as it might for, say, a confidence man.
LH: What stories and authors have you found inspirational in your life and in your writing?
CF: I am greatly devoted to the classics. My favorite writers are everybody else’s, therefore, but I have always had special love for Twain, Joyce, and Faulkner. I find them endlessly rich, rewarding, and fun to read and then to come back to over and over, lifelong.
LH: When I enjoy a novel, I’m always curious how it came into being. What inspired you to begin writing Go With Me? Was it a place, a character, a theme?
CF: The main action of Go With Me is based on one of the King Arthur tales of Thomas Malory. I have loved that particular story for decades and have long contemplated transposing it, so to speak, into modern rural New England terms.
LH: What part of this novel did you have the most fun writing? Did any of the characters surprise you along the way?
CF: The novel is divided between chapters of fairly straight narration and chapters of commentary framed as conversations between 4-5 subsidiary characters. These latter chapters were the most fun to write, for me. One of the most exciting things about making up and writing a story like this one is discovering resources in the story that you didn’t intend or expect. That is always a surprise, a small miracle, and I found it in the chapters of conversation–not so much in the characters themselves, but in the tangents and digressions they got off on, especially the (I hope) funny ones.
LH: Lillian is an interesting character. She goes after what she wants and thinks is right. My thoughts on her motivations to stay in town changed throughout the novel. She could be staying because she likes it, because Blackway wants her to go, or because she is simply lost. Do you think that destiny plays a role at all? What might have happened to the town and to Whizzer’s mill if she hadn’t shaken things up?
CF: To me, Lillian is a fairly simple person. She’s strong willed. She’s young, and she’s stubborn. Though she is afraid of the villain, though she has no particular affection for the community where she finds herself, she simply refuses to be pushed around.
I think your question about destiny is very astute. Absolutely, destiny plays a role in this story. The various characters enact or respond to their evident destinies in various ways: consider not only Lillian but the disabled Whizzer, the nearly-over-the-hill (but not quite!) Lester, etc. In a way, the whole novel is about how you learn that you have a destiny, how you learn what it is, and how you like it.
LH: The town and its citizens were perfectly okay with lives and their environment, blemishes and all, until Lillian arrived. Why do you think it is that the status quo can remain satisfying or at least acceptable until someone or something from the outside forces change?
CF: If this is a question about real life, I can’t help you. If it’s a question about fiction, then to my mind the answer is that the status quo can remain until someone or something from the outside forces change because that makes a good story.
LH: Whizzer did not necessarily send out the best and brightest to help Lillian stop Blackway from stalking her. What do you think that says about him? The situation? Blackway?
CF: Oh, I don’t know that I agree with your premise. It seems to me Whizzer chose pretty well. It’s mainly Lillian who doubts whether her helpers are the best and the brightest, isn’t it? Whizzer used the material that was available. Like former Defense Secy. Rumsfeld, he went to war with the army he had, not the army he wished he had. And, say what you like about Lillian’s helpers, they got the job done.
LH: I don’t disagree with what you say at all. In fact, it made me think more about it. Not that I thought that Whizzer intended anything terrible to happen to anyone other than perhaps Blackway, I could not figure out why he would send the people he did. In a way, it was am much about them being willing to go, wasn’t it? There is no real way of knowing, but I wonder if I perceived the same things about Nate the Great and Lester because I am a female reader and not male?
CF: Jennifer, I agree it is always interesting to see what others make of a written piece; in fact, it is one of the singular rewards of writing fiction to learn how different readers’ takes can be from one’s own understanding of what one has written.
On the question in hand, in truth, the motives or meanings of Whizzer’s choice of helpers for Lillian was not, to me, of paramount importance. Rather, this is where the King Arthur tale on which GWM is modeled has its function: Whizzer’s starting the unlikely pair of Nate and Lester on their adventure with Lillian is what gets the story moving. It winds the clock, which is then set running. For me, that’s the main point here, not why he chose them rather than, say, two of the other guys around the mill. Lester and Nate’s willingness to go must also have been essential, as you observe, and also the text supports the idea that Whizzer didn’t have anybody else available, as the person supposedly most apt for the job, Scotty, wasn’t around.
Now, how far our differing genders lead us to notice different things in the same content is a pretty big question, isn’t it? I guess I will only say: Vive la difference!
In author’s section at the back of your novel you champion the shorter novel. Why is it that you think the standard novel is around 300 pages and not less than 200? How might you have written this novel differently if it was going to be longer?
CF: I don’t think the standard novel is any particular length–or that there is such a thing as a standard novel, really. Simply, I wanted to have a crude but easy-to-apply way of defining “short novel” for the purposes of the little reading list I was compiling.
I don’t know if I have an answer to the second part of this question. I didn’t set out to make Go With Me any particular length: I wanted it to be as long as it needed to be, and when I thought it was, I stopped writing.
LH: What are you working on next? Can you give us a taste of what is to come?
CF: My new novel, All That I Have, is just published by Steerforth Press in New Hampshire, the original publishers of Go With Me. The new novel is about the same length as Go With Me, and is set in a similar community, but it is a very different kind of story, being more concerned with the lives, minds, and hearts of its (I hope) complex characters than Go With Me was. Beyond that, I plan to hold off on starting another novel and concentrate on short stories, essays, and other writing–at least for the near future.
LH: Thank you so much for your time to be with us on The Literate Housewife Review.
CF: You’re very welcome, Jennifer. I’m grateful for your interest.
Photograph by Donald C Landwehrle/Getty Images
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Book Blogger Con
Have you heard about the 1st Annual Book Blogger Convention that will be held in NYC during the BEA? You should check it out. I know it will be a fantastic experience. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend due to family obligations, but I'll be trolling blogs for up to the minute news.
WE Magazine’s A Woman Blogger to Watch
Literate Challenges
What's in a Name? 3
Random Reading Challenge
