Susan Stinson, a Northampton writer who hosted me at the town’s local library in March 2011, wrote me about an interview I did for a radio show in neighboring Amherst when I was visiting for that reading. I grew up in Northampton, and my most recent novel The River Gods is set there. Susan wrote:
I’m interested on what you say here about the central reason that Jonathan Edwards got dismissed is that he was taking it on himself to be the judge of souls. That reading makes so much sense in The River Gods, since it certainly does represent a big part of what the town accused him of (it’s a complex, kind of slippery story, the why there, I know you know), but, I see it a bit differently. In changing the policy to require people to make professions of experiences of grace in order to join the church, he was reversing decades of local precedent and overturning an important policy of his widely beloved grandfather and predecessor in the pulpit, Solomon Stoddard—but, while I don’t doubt that people felt both judged and terrified under his no-doubt arrogant eye, he was instituting a practice that was common in other parts of the colony, and he wasn’t taking it on himself to judge their souls—he was very clear that only God could do that. (And, yeah, all sorts of other things went into the dispute, including fallout from a case of lots of youth using midwives’ books as porn, and residual tensions from land disputes.)
Susan Stinson is putting the finishing touches on a beautiful novel about Jonathan Edwards herself, but she’s reacting to my own pronouncements during the interview with Francesca Rheannon on her syndicated radio show Writer’s Voices. Here is a link to the interview:
Susan quite rightly disputes some of my remarks about Edwards. My novel touched on him for only fifteen pages. Susan knows much more of his story and the history around him than I do. What intrigues me about this radio interview is that I sound so sure of myself when I talk about the historical research, and in fact I am not at all sure that what I said was very well-grounded in fact or history. My brother, long ago, told me that you had to sound certain of your facts before you actually knew what the facts were. I marveled at his ability to sound so sure of himself whenever he told me any story (we were in our early teens at the time). I later realized that this is the essence of writing fiction. Not that you lie, but that you pretend to be certain you’re telling the truth. Some writers of memoir and nonfiction (and some critics of the process like David Shields) have noted that sometimes the best memoirists deliberately lie in order to achieve something remarkably like the truth of a memory. I have noticed this when I’ve written completely fictional versions of experiences I’ve actually had, I arrive at something that does look an awful lot like the truth—or a truth—of the experience. When I write something I think of as completely fictional, it takes months or years to feel I’m telling the truth about this reality. Before I feel that, especially if I have been away from the project for a while, it is a pale shadow, a set of unfinished unrealities, bullshit. But in making any nonfiction or fiction it is vital and necessary to find the certainty that one’s own bullshit is true.
Mark Athitakis, in his blog American Fiction Notes, passes on a report from a reading E.L. Doctorow gave at the George Washington University: “How much of what you write is true?” called a voice from the crowd. “Does it sound true?” replied Doctorow. “Well, yes.” “Then it is true.”