Was Portsmouth a significant city in the colonies at that time?
Portsmouth was a significant commercial colonial seaport and the provincial capital with its first royal governor during the 1740s and 1750s. It was in the network of Europe’s vast Atlantic trade circle at the time—fish, timber, rum, slaves, etc. During the decade my story covers the town had roughly 3,000 residents, growing up to 5,000 residents, and a considerable transient population beyond that, as did all seaports. (Compare Boston, which had economic troubles during this decade, at nearly 20,000 residents.) But Portsmouth was intimately connected by economics and politics to all the surrounding towns—a huge population base.
Your story makes evocative use not only of prosperous and settled Portsmouth, but also of the rather more volatile interior frontier. Was this juxtaposition inspiring to you as a writer?
Well, the frontier and its juxtaposition to the urban center was inspiring because the two ways of life demonstrate the reality of the colonies as they evolved from a “wilderness” filled with natural resources toward a nation of great power in the world. But more to the point, the frontier seemed to suit my tale of love, art, betrayal, and ambition. The newer (but by the 1740s not really “primitive”) settlements to the west (those still east of the Merrimac River) became the locale for my exiled child-artist, the place of her maturing, the dangerous zone of the Indian wars, the area that even then was being so thoroughly exploited for financial return that my “little visionary,” Rebecca, could hardly not remark on the destruction in a few of her paintings.
Once again you have incorporated some historical figures into your story as characters. Which are based on real people and why did you choose them?
I try to avoid having the more famous historical figures be main characters in my novels. It sets one up for having pasteboard characters pop up mouthing famous words, as if in a bad Masterpiece Theatre costume drama. But I do use the famous and obscure from history as supporting characters and as minor characters. In this instance there are just a couple out front, so to speak: John Smibert, the major Boston painter who came with Bishop Berkeley from England, and Arthur Browne, minister to the Anglican church in Portsmouth. These two were not only in fact there at the time, but my protagonists (Sanborn and Rebecca) could hardly have avoided them, given my story. In both cases I decided to use them because we have diaries and biographies of these men and a lot is known about them. This might increase the authenticity of the novel—of the imagined characters and action happening at that time and place. The “real” characters also give an important point of view on the conflicts and dangers the main characters face. I try to keep their consciousness and words true to what I’ve learned about them. Numerous other real people are referred to in varying degrees, or their family names used: Robert Feke, William Pepperrell, Governor Wentworth, Reverend Gilman, and so on. But my central characters are imagined, often from composites of people uncovered in my research. One example of a middling character’s provenance: Captain Carlyle is in part modeled upon (or initially inspired by) one Captain John McNeil of Hillsborough—a six-foot, six-inch powerhouse who tossed a rival tavernkeeper through a window.
This novel shares an interest with Allegra Fullerton in painters and painting. Have you always been interested in painting? Are you particularly interested in American art? Do you have some favorite paintings? What is the significance for you as a writer to tell a story about painters?
The painters in my stories are more or less stand-ins for individuals laboring in any of the arts. They just happen to be painters. We probably don’t need another novel about a writer. Still, think about it: Can any person be stranger than that creature the artist? What is this desire to create art, to create it against all the forces of a culture that doesn’t reward it or even want it? And this seems especially true in America where our artists—in nearly all media—have been and are now more than ever oddballs out. That’s what jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan meant when he was asked in an interview why so many jazz musicians left America for Paris, or Rome, or Copenhagen, or wherever: In Europe, they love art and esteem the artist, he explained. In America, it is the businessman and the sports/entertainment celebrity we esteem. Mulligan spoke of how an Italian man came up to him one night and asked why this was so. It was a question the musician couldn’t answer, beyond to say it just was so. For these and other reasons, artists of all kinds interest me, and not only because I’m a frustrated musician myself. And I’ve always sort of seen the artist as a stand-in for anybody who feels at odds with his or her culture. Some days I wonder if that might not be most of us. But then another day something happens and I get cynical again and figure we’re by now a nation of robots programmed to consume.
I’ve grown more interested in the visual arts as I grow older. My daughters studied painting and drawing, and that caught my attention. I took a course in American art preparing for Allegra Fullerton. I research art history for my novels. I go to art museums now and feel moved by what I see in ways I never did before: if the art is good, if the art is an expression of something other than the artist’s ego or some dry-but-hip theory about art or politics. I don’t have any favorites, really. But I gravitate toward beauty, evidence of real dedication, and great skill. That means I often spend time, once again, with artifacts previous to the twentieth century. But from the period I’m writing about in this novel, in America in the eighteenth century, I doubt anybody outdid Copley.
Allegra and Rebecca are both individuals, women, struggling against the roles set for them in their time and place, their cultures. Mistress Coffin was also a woman out of her time and place, and perhaps that is why she was murdered; she made herself vulnerable by her boldness and difference, so to speak. I guess it’s time for me to stop writing about women, though. I don’t want to become a one-note novelist.
Were there actually portrait painters in Portsmouth in the eighteenth century?
Yes. There’s been a considerable amount of work done on early portrait painters, even in Portsmouth, but many are still nameless to us. Most of the “names” came later: like Copley and Joseph Blackburn (who made it to Portsmouth). Joseph Badger was about in the 1740s but his work is notoriously naïve and literal. John Greenwood was in America between 1745 and 1752. And Robert Feke, an American rather than a Brit, was active very much during the time of Sanborn’s Portsmouth adventures, but he never made it this far north, apparently. More specifically, Carolyn Singer’s work on Portsmouth painters, if I have these numbers right, shows about fourteen surviving portraits from 1701–1725 in Portsmouth, mostly of merchants and their families. Clergymen, military officers, and physicians figure in also. Men and women were painted roughly in equal numbers. Thirty-six Portsmouth portraits from 1726–1750 survive. Blackburn signed his later, but most are unsigned. After 1750 the itinerant amateurs increased e-class patrons), Karen Calvert’s research reports. When I started, I had Blackburn in mind as my rough model, but I made Sanborn younger and got him into the busy port nearly a decade earlier. Such is the license of a fiction writer.
Why did you choose Daniel Sanborn as the point-of-view character? Was the story always told from his perspective? Mistress Coffin is told from two viewpoints, while Allegra Fullerton is narrated in the first person. What are the challenges and benefits of various point-of-view strategies?
I vary points of view among novels, and sometimes within novels, for a number of reasons. First, I like the variety; anything that makes a long process (like writing a trilogy over a decade) less tedious and more fun is good. The next issue then is what point of view (or points of view) is best for the tale—both overall and at a particular narrative moment? Once you ask that question, the writer’s desire for variety begins to serve the story. These are always judgment calls and only the readers (and reviewers) know whether you’ve succeeded, made the right choices for them, too. Now we get to this particular book. Sanborn. Why him? Well, I wanted Rebecca to remain as mysterious as she could be (without ge
tting melodramatic, that is), so, seeing her from the outside contributes to retaining her mystery and strangeness. Then, Sanborn is also an artist, a particular kind of accomplished, schooled, commercial artist. As such, he is something of Rebecca’s opposite. He is a little too dull, too conventional (to say the least), and perhaps represents most of us when we are confronted by visionaries, geniuses, prodigies, or true artists and their work. He feels a degree of confusion, destabilization; his comfortable attitudes and mind-set have been challenged; he is a little threatened, yet fascinated. In short, he becomes rather unhinged by Rebecca, and it doesn’t help that he is also, ultimately, falling in love. His voice and viewpoint were the point of view I found, mercifully, from the very start of the first draft. Sometimes you get lucky. Every now and then a little gift.
You mention in the autobiographical profile some of the themes that you feel tie these three novels together: the circumstances of women, the role of class, the dangers of religious fanaticism, etc. Why do these particular themes resonate for you as a writer, and as a person?
That’s a hard one. “Only his shrink knows for sure”? I may be the last to know. But there is something, I suppose, to the saying, “It’s a historical novel about the present. ”First of all, the themes have to resonate for me and for readers, I hope, because the issues they raise are with us today—in different forms, different degrees, different guises, perhaps, but still with us. Then, I have my obsessions. How does one escape them? I hope my readers share a few of them, at least. I hope readers think some of my own obsessions are still important to us all. If readers see no relevance to themselves and their world, I expect they won’t read for long. On the other hand, I bank on readers’ continuing interest in the foreign country of the past. Like all travel, there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in discovery, in difference, in the beauties and adventures of someplace new.
You have said that you enjoy writing historical fiction because you find the research involved stimulating. Now that you have completed this trilogy, do you think that you will continue to work in an historical mode?
I don’t know. Since finishing this novel I’ve been fooling around with some short pieces. And I’ve been working on and off since 1993 on a novel set in post–World War II America, largely in the Berkshires, but I haven’t been able to make that one work yet. Maybe I can’t write about the twentieth century. Wouldn’t that be a ridiculous handicap for a writer? I do know that I don’t want to write about contemporary suburbanites or urbanites up to their nostrils in angst. I just get bored with it. History, particularly New England history, for some reason, still interests me. So maybe I will return to the past. It’s actually kind of pleasant, having just spent more than a decade on a trilogy, not to have a big new project under way at the moment. But I’ve never gone for long without an idea for a new book.
I wrote Rebecca Wentworth’s Distraction to complete a New England historical trilogy that began with The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin, set in seventeenth-century New Hampshire, and The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton, set in nineteenth-century New England and Italy. When I was looking for my next novel project, I realized that there was not only a similar New England setting in my two previous novels, there were recurring themes. The historical circumstances of women, the enormous influence of social and economic hierarchies on people’s lives, the conflict between the desire for self-expression and the pressures of conformity, the perils of religious fanaticism, the overwhelming yet confining temptations of material wealth (the American Dream?), and so on, all seemed to gather my interest. These themes, I realized, were essential to understanding our formative, early American experience between 1648 and 1850. But I had yet to fill in a huge gap: pre-Revolutionary America during that most revolutionary eighteenth century.
The eighteenth century had always left my overheated imagination a little cold, at least in comparison to the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But I was aware of a deficiency in my understanding and in my New England narratives. Then, by good fortune, I happened to attend, with my wife and in-laws, a series of summer lectures at the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion and the Portsmouth Historical Society. The people of the colonial province of New Hampshire, beginning in 1741, started to fascinate me, and it is people (characters), finally, who make a novel. Thus began my two years of research into the people of eighteenth-century Portsmouth and New Hampshire—their houses and accoutrements; their reports and maps; the records of their wars, governing bodies, and personal joys and fears. And there were others to enlighten me—early travelers to the province and later historians.
I gradually began to see that I could, with a third novel, tie the two previous novels together through common themes, genealogical and economic lineages, and the historical settings. More than that, I could develop another central thread introduced in Allegra Fullerton: the complex, ambiguous role of the artist in the New World. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that this mysterious creature, the artist—in her desire for independence, for creative fulfillment in conflict with the imperatives of social and aesthetic orthodoxies—is a metaphor for us all, for our secret, innermost, rebellious selves. Once I found my way to Rebecca Wentworth (my artful American prodigy) and Daniel Sanborn (my academy-trained British portraitist), I was off once again on yet another journey into the useable past.
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