The Conquest

 

GAHA: Babes of the Abyss is finally finished, at least, provisionally finished: I am editing the manuscript to send out to my first readers. This implies I have more readers in reserve, which is true, but we are talking 4 people here and 5 people there. And grateful I am for having them! We would need two cars to get to a reading.

The past few months I’ve been reading source materials on the southwest and California, as research for the book. During the early stages of composition I did a lot of online research, and brought many books home for the library, but it was just enough information to feed the story, I hadn’t yet done the excessive reading I love doing for a novel. I read two books, one about Crazy Horse, and one on early exploration of the southwest by Europeans, from 1500-1846. In that book there was a reference to Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession. My Confession is a memoir of fighting in the Mexican American war. Chamberlain was 16 when he ran away from his New England home and headed west. Written in the years preceding the Civil War, it recounts in rollicking detail his adventures fighting, whoring and drinking, falling in love with not a few women along the way. At the end of the war he deserts his unit and joins up briefly with the Glanton Gang, a notorious band of terrorists who killed indiscriminately for profit and pleasure, selling scalps to Mexican authorities. He barely escapes their destruction, lives briefly in California and then returns to New England, where he marries and lives out his life as a colourful and prominent man in his community. The book is source for Cormac McCarthy’s incredible Blood Meridian. My Confession lacks that book’s literary power but is instead full of humanity, romanticism and bravado.

After finishing My Confession I was going to read the massive trilogy about the fall of Hungary by Miklos Banffy, but instead found a book I’ve always wanted to read by Blaise Cendrars, Gold. Gold takes place in the same years as My Confession and is also an exaggerated true story about an outsized figure, in the case John Agustus Sutter, the Swiss ne’er-do-well who deserted his family and came to America to make his fortune. He heads out west, knocks about the Pacific coast, heads to Hawaii and Alaska and finally lands in san Francisco Bay, where he founds a dynasty on a Mexican land grant called New Helvetia. In 1848 he is on his way to being the richest man in the world when Gold is discovered on his land. The discovery of Gold destroys him, and he spends following decades trying to recover his land and rights. He never does. The story gives Cendrars and opportunity to indulge all of his interests. There are paragraph long lists of the languages Sutter learns, there is a pipe smoking dog that does tricks, and there is Sutter, strutting like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. It is Cendrars first novel, but it reads like a masterwork. Oh yes, it violates all of our country club, MFA rules of good fiction writing. Bravo. Who needs them? The rules I mean. the book is extremely short, and, I was surprised to learn very close to the ‘facts’ at least in so far as they are available online.

One of the pleasures of writing novels is doing research, especially research I will never use. It is the saturation in a place and a series of ideas and events that energizes the story. One small detail that comes from reading makes the massive amount of work worthwhile. My mother-in-law, the great novelist Mary Anderson, once remarked that she always felt sad when she realized she wasn’t researching a novel.