Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

… whilst coiled behind all gazes the great Worm of Slavery.

— Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

The curious reader need not wonder why Zadie Smith wrote a historical novel for her sixth, The Fraud, which was published in September of last year. She gave us her reasons. Her career has been marked by an engagement with critics of her books, often involving swerves that took that criticism to heart. She prepared the way for this new novel (and set some boundaries for reviews of it) by publishing a 2,500-word essay in The New Yorker two months before it came out. Unlike most writers, she has the clout to command that space. The essay is a good companion to the engaging and vivid novel she has written.

In thinking about The Fraud, the question that concerns me is the question of form. What can the contemporary historical novel offer to us, a civilization of latecomers who know everything about everything and have Google ready to deliver us entire industries of specialist work? Zadie Smith is a good enough novelist to lift up the past from the flatness of our late perspective and to give us access to the mind of Eliza Touchet (a real person, this is a speculative history), a vivid personality who frets about questions of freedom and English culture and shows them to us as the living things they were in the time she was alive. Consider this choice of a lens. Smith has not written a book like Beloved, nor did she set out to do that. Her novel gives a picture of the educated middle class of people that kept on with their lives as a monstrous horror took place, as it had for hundreds of years, with their full knowledge.

In the New Yorker essay, Smith says she did not ever intend to write a historical novel, but it is an almost irresistible urge for an English novelist. She writes, “Any writer who lives in England for any length of time will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not.” In a relatable reveal, she says her subject found her by accident. “Around 2012 I stumbled upon a story from the nineteenth century that I knew at once had my name all over it.” We’ve all been there, right, those of us who write and are also interested in the nineteenth century? We stumble upon—no better phrase for it—a fragment of history or social life. We think: wouldn’t this make for a great novel?

Smith’s found subject is the Tichborne case, a legal battle (one of the longest in English history) that aroused widespread controversy and interest in the 1860s and 1870s. In this case, a man came forward claiming (thus, “The Claimant”) to be the missing and presumed-drowned heir of the Tichborne legacy, a baronetcy and large estate. The Claimant came forward a dozen years after Roger Tichborne drowned in an 1854 shipwreck. He was thought to be a fraud by nearly everyone in the Tichborne family with the strange exception of Lady Tichborne, the drowned man’s own mother. The publicity around the court fight grabs the attention of the author William Harrison Ainsworth and his family. At first, it is conversation fodder, but as the fight proceeds, it draws in Ainsworth’s young second wife, Sarah, and his cousin, housekeeper and one-time lover, the novel’s central, focusing consciousness, Eliza Touchet.

The Fraud is structured to follow the events of Eliza’s adult life and her developing powers of observation and understanding. As a young person, she has no ambition to be a novelist, in fact the idea revolts her, but by the end of the book, we see it is her calling. The point of view of this 450-page novel is a closely observed third person over the shoulder of (and within the conscience of) Eliza Touchet with the exception of a 90-page section that focuses on a Jamaican man named Andrew Bogle. Bogle is a key witness in the Tichborne case. Near the book’s midpoint, we get Bogle’s life story as he tells it to Eliza, and, with one short section as an exception, the point of view is passed back to her for the rest of the novel. Giving 80% of the character space to a white, middle-class person allows the historical lens a plausible access to historical figures Smith wants to show us.

The best sense of this book comes from a lineup of its characters.

Ainsworth

William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) published forty-one novels in his lifetime. In his youth, he was a friend and rival of Dickens (in terms of sales). One of his books outsold Oliver Twist, but his prose is dreadful and unoriginal. Eliza was once married to his cousin. They have been lovers. The novel’s portrait of Ainsworth is generous. Smith gives lengthy descriptions of him, since he is a constant and well-drawn figure among the minor characters.

He transcribed his notes naked, in bed, in the morning, and in the afternoon sat across from her and wrote. She saw herself how much pleasure writing brought him. He dipped his nib with a smile on his face, liked to speak the especially gory parts aloud, and sang his cockney ballads as he invented them. Not infrequently, he wrote twenty pages in an afternoon. He always appeared entirely satisfied with every line. (Volume One, Chapter 17)

Ainsworth’s class and corresponding liberty are a thing Eliza uses to contrast to her own. There are echoes in this of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady.

What interested her was his freedom of movement. His freedom. (Volume One, Chapter 15)

Anne Frances Ainsworth

Fanny Ainsworth (1804-1838) was William’s first wife. Eliza calls her Frances in the novel. The best writing in the first part of the novel shows the relationship between the two women and the things they do together. Frances is an abolitionist. Although the slave trade was banned in England in 1807, this act did not free existing slaves (especially in colonized places like Jamaica) from their bondage. Knowing Frances changes Eliza’s mind.

And it was Frances who, in turn, had succeeded in transforming a hazy, unformed distrust of human bondage in Mrs. Touchet into a burning loathing. (Volume One, Chapter 14)

The meeting of the two women is one of the most beautiful passages in the book, a sort of prelude of Eliza’s future calling as a writer.

She had arrived at Elm Lodge on the twenty-third of April, 1830. Ever after she marked the day in her heart. No language attended it. No conscious ritual. If asked what the date meant to her she would have spoken the truth and called it St. George’s Day and denied attaching any personal significance to it. But somewhere deeper, past language, it was marked. A cluster of sensations. The climbing rose. Frances in the doorway. That first, unmistakeable, impression of her goodness. The feeling of walking down grassy Willesden Lane, early in the morning, plucking wildflowers out of the hedgerows and trying to appreciate them. The happiness of knowing she would soon turn round and walk back to a house of steamed rags and strung-up rabbits, drying linens and chubby baby ankles, small hands with food on them, the smell of bacon, fruit cakes wrapped in cloth, the swampy whiff of pea soup, and the simplest chords of Bach played clumsily but with good humour. All of this warm human sacred business she had almost forgotten existed. (Volume One, Chapter 13)

They meet when Ainsworth abandons Frances and her children to travel in Europe, allegedly to do research for his next novel. Eliza and Frances also become lovers.

One thing permitted and made possible the other, even if the logic was shrouded, too mysterious to penetrate. Like a finger. Like two penetrating fingers. Like two fingers penetrating a flower. In complete, candle-less darkness. As if the finger and the flower were not separate but one, and so incapable of sinning the one against the other. (Volume One, Chapter 14)

Thackeray

He is representative of the guests of the dinner parties Ainsworth held in his home in his younger days, the days when Ainsworth was the rival of Dickens. The titans of 19^th century English fiction do not come off well in Smith’s novel. Here is Eliza Touchet on Thackeray.

Thackeray! That pig-nosed moralist! (Volume Two, Chapter 5)

Strange man. Curious mixture of bitter humour, envy and cowardice. (Same)

He was the kind of man who felt obliged to tell the truth at all times, no matter how uncomfortable this might prove for others. She hated people like that. (Vol. Eight, Chapter 17)

Dickens

There is a complicated, fragmented portrait of Dickens in this book. The years of Eliza’s story run from prior to 1830 to the late 1870s, so the death of Dickens in 1870 (spoiler!) is an event in the novel. To be clear, he is a minor character if we base that on the amount of space given to him. Considering Eliza’s concerns in thinking about him, however, it is important to track the way her mind wavers on him. There are hits of recognition between them. There are times when Eliza knows how simpatico they might be.

In the main, Dickens comes across in Smith’s portrait as the voice of the bourgeoisie and a progressive movement that promised much it did not deliver.

But she was not particularly annoyed by the Great Exhibition of 1851 until she read Mr. Dickens and Mr. Horne’s combined review of the event in Household Words.

We are moving in a right direction towards some superior condition of society—politically, morally, intellectually, and religiously.

Did they really believe it? According to these two gentlemen, heaven was soon to arrive upon the earth. It was simply inevitable, given the progress everywhere.

(Volume 8, Chapter 29)

Much we are shown through Eliza’s experiences and observations destroys the entire notion. What could be described as progress was actually struggle, constant struggle. England was an elaborate alibi. Eliza sees desperate mobs of poor in Manchester. She hears Bogle’s story of life as a slave in Jamaica. Behind all decisions in English public life are the concerns of the class of Lords and the rising of sacred industry.

Andrew Bogle

Bogle is another large minor character in the story in which Eliza is the protagonist. In the 90-page tour de force Eliza relays to us, the attention shifts to allow Bogle to be the protagonist. He has an unusual role in the plantation system. He is chosen to be a messenger and useful man for the business agent in charge of Hope Plantation. This is the white man who is responsible (on behalf of the owner) for everything to do with the plantation, including hiring and supervising the overseers. By selecting him as the protagonist for the Jamaica section of her book, Smith gives the reader a POV that moves through many layers of the system. By following Bogle’s biography, we move around a lot. We see the daily lives of the slaves, the overseers, the business agent and his class, and, later, Bogle even travels to Stowe House, the massive and overdecorated English home of the Duke of Buckingham, an obscene spectacle which is made possible by the exploitation of the labor of slaves.

It is in the Bogle story that Zadie Smith experiments a bit with form. I was impressed with Volume 6, Chapter 27, The Prophetic Circular Dream of Little Johanna. Johanna is one of the slaves on Hope. I am quoting it at length below to give a sense of where Smith stretches her prose far beyond ordinary reportage.

will SEE that we have done what the earth herself FORBID. But I have a DREAM and it is the TRUTH and believe me it will come to pass. I tell you the world is UPSIDE DOWN. These people are BAHAMA GRASS! Wherever they PLANT DEM ROOT they SPREAD and DESTROY! This is hidden from FOOLISH BOYS but not from ME. I have a DREAM. I know that this time will END and a new time will BEGIN, as it is written in their books and in the DIRT IN MY MOUTH and in the shit of that old Devil OBBONEY himself. I have seen the SECRET ENGINE OF THE WORLD! Some fools say the world rests on the back of a turtle, but that is a FAIRY TALE FOR PICKNEY! The world rests upon THE TREADMILL! I have SEEN it. I have a DREAM. The TREADMILL TURNS, it never STOPS, and atop it rests every SHINING CITY and SHIP and GOLD COIN and all KINGS AND QUEENS and LORDS AND LADIES and all CHURCH MEN for it is a TREADMILL WET WITH BLOOD and it is the SECRET ENGINE OF THE WORLD!

Most of the novel is not like that passage. The prose is largely realist with a good eye for detail, but it is scaled back from the materialist vision of the Flaubertian tradition.

The Fraud satisfies a number of Lukács’ requirements for the historical novel. Eliza, Bogle and Ainsworth are real historical figures, but they were not great movers of history like, say, Napoleon. Dickens is an enormous figure in literary history, but he’s a minor part in Eliza’s life story. These are characters placed in moments where they could observe societal changes. Eliza in particular is positioned to see where intellectuals failed to live up to what the urgent historical moment called for them to be. When an atrocity occurs in 1865, as the Morant Bay rebellion is put down in Jamaica, intellectuals ran to the defense of Governor John Eyre. This included Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, and, yes, Dickens. Doesn’t this invite us to consider our present? If perpetrators of mass murder cannot be indicted, successfully sued or, at the very least, vilified by a class of intellectuals with the power to make public opinion, where are we really?