by Mary Malloy
She snuggled in against her husband. “I am really looking forward to getting back to my class,” she said.
“Home then?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Because you know,” Martin continued, “that home is where. . . .”
She put her hand to his lips. “Don’t say it,” she laughed.
He kissed her fingertips and then moved her hand from his mouth down to lay it upon his chest. “But I believe it,” he said.
“I know,” Lizzie answered, feeling his heart beating beneath her palm. “Me too.”
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to have among my circle of family and friends so many talented writers and perceptive readers who have supported me through the research, writing, and publication of this book. My thanks to Deborah Harrison, Bart St. Armand, Kimberley Davis, Christina Ward, Caroline Preston, Kathleen Quinlivan, Peg Brandon, James McElwain, Gladys Paxton, Juliet Morefield, Pearl Frank, Richard St. Clair, Joost Schokkenbroek, all my sisters, my husband Stuart Frank, and Lisa Graziano.
The Author
Drawing by Wurge
Mary Malloy is the author of four maritime history books, including the award-winning Devil on the Deep Blue Sea: The Notorious Career of Samuel Hill of Boston, and Souvenirs of the Fur Trade: Northwest Coast Indian Art and Artifacts Collected by American Mariners, published by the Peabody Museum at Harvard. She has a Ph.D. from Brown University and teaches Maritime History at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass., and Museum Studies at Harvard University. The Wandering Heart, the first of a trilogy, is her first novel.
An Interview with Mary Malloy
• • • • •
Mary Malloy was interviewed in 2008 by two librarians, Juliet Morefield of the Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon, and Kathleen Quinlivan of the University at Buffalo Libraries. Readers’ circles might find some interesting points of discussion in their conversation.
Question:This is your first novel, but not your first book. How would you describe the difference between writing nonfiction and fiction?
Answer: There is a real distinction for me between scholarly nonfiction and novel writing in that the former requires that I stick close to my source materials in the conclusions I draw. Many academics who write fiction choose to have it published under a pseudonym, to avoid any confusion in the minds of readers about what information in a book can be documented through background research or personal experience, and what comes from the imagination of the author.
Q:How did you get started on it?
A:I started writing this novel when I was working on my doctoral dissertation at Brown University, in part to allow me to explore the historian’s fantasy of having evidence come easily to hand rather than being the result of a methodical and often tedious process. I start the research for every project with some idea about where it is heading, but I am always prepared to let the documents I find change the direction or focus of the work. It can be frustrating when long hours of research do not result in evidence that will support your ideas, so I made it easy for Lizzie to find things by creating the kind of evidence I would love to find myself. All the journal entries, letters, objects, poems and paintings in this book are fictional but I was inspired by historical examples.
Q:It seems that many readers want novels to teach them factual material. Does the novel still reflect historical research?
A:Absolutely. Writing a novel allowed me to stray from the sources, so that I could add new material to existing texts and even invent whole new documents, objects, and works of art, but I still wanted the book to be grounded in the process of historical research, and to introduce readers to how that process works. In order to give Lizzie some veracity as a historian, I gave her my own specialties: maritime history, museums, and Northwest Coast Indian cultural anthropology. But the situations I write about never happened. In the references to Captain James Cook’s voyage in the Pacific, for example, I started from Cook’s journal but created the characters of Francis Hatton and Eltatsy and all of the scenes in which they appear. I hope that any reader who finds that episode interesting might be inspired to go to the original source, which is terrific reading.
Q:To take another specific example, is the contract between the Templars and Henry III based closely on an actual document?
A:No, I made that one up to serve the plot of the book. There are, however, a surprising number of documents that survive from that period, many of which are now available online through the “Henry III Fine Rolls Project” at http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/cocoon/frh3/home.html.
Q:Are there any other places in the book where you would like to make a distinction for readers between fact and fiction?
A:If you go to Salisbury Cathedral you will find the tombs of the William Longespèes (Elder and Younger), which I tried to recreate as I saw them. There is a small tomb adjacent to the effigy of the son that is described as either a boy bishop or a heart burial. The younger Longespèe died at Mansoura in Egypt, and that was what inspired me to send John d’Hautain there too, as his companion. There is absolutely no evidence that Longespèe’s corpse was mummified to be returned; that is fiction. I did rather like putting the heart of John d’Hautain in an existing grave and then making the folks in charge of the Cathedral exhume it. You can enjoy a certain power as an author.
Q:Do you think that there will be readers who will challenge your interpretation of history?
A:I do expect that some people will have questions about how I wove past events into the story, and I am prepared to deal with that. The first real critique of the book, and one which I took very seriously, came from one of my professors at Brown University, Barton St. Armand. He wondered “if a family like the Hattons would have been building a new wing on their house in 1650, a year after Charles I had his head chopped off and when Cromwell was in command.” I decided I could live with that question since I was wrestling with the overall chronology of the family tree. Bart also commented that “Inigo Jones died in 1652, and I don’t really know where he was in 1650, but I doubt he was building in the English countryside.” This was another questionable fact that I decided I could keep in the book. Fiction, unlike history, allows us to place characters in places where they never were. If these had been more difficult for me to rationalize I would have changed the timeline in the book to conform to historical events. This is important to me because a glaring historical error can draw the knowledgeable reader out of the book and create doubt about other scenes.
Q:Do you have an example?
A:I love Elizabeth Peters and have read all of her “Amelia Peabody” novels, but the last one, Tomb of the Golden Bird, has a major historical error that really nagged at me. In a very minor reference, Edward II is quoted as the king who precipitated the murder of Thomas Becket by asking if someone could rid him of “this turbulent priest.” I happen to be interested in Becket, but I’m certainly not the only reader who knows that it was Henry II with whom Becket had a close and confrontational relationship, and who spoke those famous words. Peters has written novels with themes of English history and that makes this mistake particularly surprising.
Q:What did Professor St. Armand have to say about the poems in the book?
A:He said “a poem written in the fourteenth century would be much closer to Chaucer’s Middle English than the version you present, while the 1880s poem would not likely have been in free verse unless the author had been reading Walt Whitman.” These were things that I knew. Again, I allowed myself some wiggle room on stylistic decisions.
Q:What books do you acknowledge as having influenced you as you developed the story and the characters?
A:I was a great fan of Jane Austen long before she became a pop-culture icon, and the idea of setting a story in an English manor house clearly came from her novels. One summer when I was in high school I read Northang
er Abbey and all of the Gothic sources mentioned in it and more. I loved The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, and The Monk, and tried to create in Hengemont a house with a past and with secrets that could be revealed through research. That said, I didn’t want there to be a supernatural element in the book. One reviewer describes it as “explained Gothic,” and I rather like that idea.
Q:Without some supernatural element, how did the curse pass from generation to generation? You gave clear reasons why Bette and Lizzie were not actually experiencing a curse, but I still want to know about all those other Elizabeths. How did they find out about the heart? How did they ask the same question?
A:I think there is a lot of information that we pick up in ways that can’t be specifically pinpointed. In families, this might start when a child overhears conversations of which she is not a part, in whispered exchanges, in discussions that stop when a new person enters the room. Add to that an environment in which paintings of tragic victims are all around, a house where places would be pointed out through generations as having been “the spot” where something important happened, and stories begin to have their own life. I think that you can process a lot of things in this way, not fully conscious of or knowledgeable about details and consequently filling in with imaginative or romantic notions. When heartache or depression enter into the mix I don’t think it is beyond the realm of the believable that the Hatton girls would identify with a story of such importance in the family. When I created the Hatton family tree, I tried to make the time between events close enough that there could always be someone in the family who had heard the story within the time span of grandparents or great-grandparents.
Q:What is the role of the dreams?
A:All the information that comes to us in random ways needs to be processed somehow and dreams seem like the way that our subconscious makes that happen. I’m not sure if dreams actually do this, but it works as a literary device.
Q:You might have chosen to write a historical novel in which all the action was set in the past. Why didn’t you?
A:Mostly because I wanted to describe the historical process, but I also wanted to challenge some of the standard romantic expectations that certain elements of life and character are desirable above all others: wealth, beauty, social position—especially connections to the British aristocracy. It seemed that a modern perspective was required for that. Lizzie’s circle of smart and opinionated women friends, especially Jackie, were created to voice some of those ideas. It allowed me to let Lizzie feel the seductive power of Hengemont and the Hattons, but not make moving there the expected happy ending.
Q:When you say you wanted to challenge “standard romantic expectations,” do you mean that in social or literary terms?
A:A little of each, I guess. The female characters certainly consider the way that images in the media influence the socialization of girls in America, but I am also interested in the literary conventions and devices that have, for eons, allowed writers to provide a shorthand for character development by describing certain physical traits. For instance, it is not uncommon for heroes to be blonde and blue eyed with fair complexions, while villains are more frequently dark. Lizzie’s two potential love interests, Edmund and Martin, represent those two different physical types, but not a good and a bad choice; both are warm-hearted and sexy good guys, which I hope adds complexity to her confusion about being attracted to both of them. They might also be thought of as symbolically representing Old World and New World values, at least in the way those things have been described as literary themes.
Q:Did you base your description of Hengemont on an actual manor house or estate in England?
A:Years ago, when I was driving along the south coast of the Bristol Channel, I saw a big house off in the distance. I was on a fairly high road and the view swept down the hill toward the water. This house was placed in a fabulous position between me and the Channel and when I was considering where to build Hengemont I thought of it, though I never saw the house up close. That region also has a number of the ancient chalk figures on the hillsides, which I decided to reference.
I used several sources in putting together Hengemont and I tried to incorporate architectural details from a number of different eras, and to use architects and landscapers whose work was influential, though I didn’t want to just be a name dropper. As with the paintings and other things that filled the house, I chose artists and artisans who would have been hired by people with money and taste. My most important source on the building itself was a series of books called English Homes by H. Avray Tipping, published in the 1920s. There are separate volumes for different periods in history, and each has information on architectural styles and garden designs, with excellent illustrations of details. Using those books I drew a pretty detailed floor plan of Hengemont, and referred to it often as I was writing.
Q:There is a lot in this book about corpses and body parts. Did you begin with the idea of making that central to the story, or did it develop as you wrote the book?
A:I have always had a morbid curiosity about relics and the disposition of corpses in the Medieval period. Since 1990 when the U.S. Congress passed the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, the subject of human remains in museums has also been a topic of keen interest, and much discussed with colleagues and students. The way people view the physical remains of their loved ones (and how dismissive they can be about the remains of strangers) intrigues me. Obviously I am not alone in finding the subject fascinating; all of the descriptions in this book about the multiple burials of body parts of British monarchs are factual.
Q:Near the end of the novel, Lizzie mentions that there is a difference between “doing history” and “being history.” Can you elaborate on this statement?
A:Historians are basically nosy about other people’s business, but I consider myself a very private person, and so I wondered as I wrote this what it would be like for a researcher to find that she had somehow become part of the story she was telling, as Lizzie did when she realized that the Hattons were her own family. Would you then be willing to obscure evidence, or even destroy it to protect your privacy? I liked giving Lizzie an ethical dilemma about this, so that she didn’t destroy all the evidence of the suicides, but just buried it.
Q:At one point, Lizzie promises herself that she will “always look beyond the documents of the story to those things that lie unspoken behind them.” What does she mean when she says this?
A:This is closely related to the last question. If clever people obscure or destroy information that they think might reveal too much about themselves or cast them in an unfavorable light, then the curious historian must be even more diligent in ferreting out secrets. This makes the historical process sound a lot like what the tabloid press does, so it also raises some conundrums. Are there some private details that people have a right to keep private? If there are, is it still true if they have chosen to live their life in the public sphere? Is it still true after they are dead? I think anyone who writes about a living person has a responsibility to be judicious and to consider the result of revealing private information, but we are a curious species and prone to gossip. People who lived in the past can provide us with wonderfully interesting and human stories and I’m certainly willing to tell them when they come to my attention. In Devil on the Deep Blue Sea, my biography of the Boston sea captain Samuel Hill, I exposed everything about the man I could find and used him as a springboard to talk about really private stuff, including sexual behavior on shipboard, and the awful actions on shore of the young American men who traveled out to the Pacific in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Q:If I were interested in learning more about the Crusades, what do you recommend for Crusades 101?
A:For an overview of the Crusades, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades by Jonathan Riley-Smith is excellent, and I recommend two books that have descrip
tions written by people who were there. Chronicles of the Crusades includes accounts by two Europeans, Geoffrey Villehardouin and Jean de Joinville (which I quote from in the book). Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes gives the perspective of the other side.
Q:And the same question about Captain Cook and his voyages; can you recommend a book or website that would give me some additional information?
A:Cook was a good writer and a perceptive observer and I find his own shipboard journals very compelling. There are several editions of excerpts available, including a paperback Penguin edition. Cook continues to be the subject of much research and discussion. Glyndwr Williams, the preeminent historian of Cook, has a new book out that is very interesting, The Death of Captain Cook: A Hero Made and Unmade, and the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Va., has a good website for looking at Cook’s voyages: http://www.mariner.org/educationalad/ageofex/cook.php.
Q:Is Lizzie your alter ego?
A:I am surprised at how many people have asked me this question. When I started writing the book I identified very closely with Lizzie, but the more I wrote the more she evolved in ways that make her very different from me. As time went on over several years of writing I went back and edited out a lot of material that seemed too much like me. I didn’t do this out of embarrassment or a need for privacy or anything like that. The character had simply taken on a life of her own and didn’t need to be doing things I had done.
