A Bodyguard of Lies

When fiction overlaps with real life, things can get scary...

‘In wartime,’ Winston Churchill said, ‘the truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’  This was Churchill’s justification for his many deceptions during the second world war, but his words might also suggest how writers can approach the portrayal of historical figures in fiction. Because fiction is the invention of a writer’s imagination. It might even be regarded as a ‘lie.’  And it is certainly a tricky vehicle for the depiction of real people. As I know from my experience as a novelist, when fiction overlaps with real life, things can get scary.

Charles Edward Stuart by Allan Ramsay 1745

Hilary Mantel memorably said, ‘As soon as we die, we enter into fiction.’ I think I’d go even further by saying that everyone, living or dead, is essentially unknowable, ourselves included. Mantel’s thesis was that no writer, whether historian or historical novelist can hope to create an ‘authentic’ portrait of a real person. The sources will always be incomplete. The stories told about them, even in non-fiction, will rely to some extent on the author’s imagination. For novelists, this imagination must be applied liberally. Readers should be able to see and taste and feel the lost world of the past, or the novel won’t be doing its job. That means the author will always have to make stuff up.

Alan Warner addresses this necessity in the afterword to Nothing Left to Fear from Hell, his novella about Bonnie Prince Charlie. Warner laments the lack of motion and sound in the sources available to him during his research into the 18^th century, and he asks; ‘What did the Prince really look like when he was twenty-four years old? How did his spoken voice sound? How did men and women really sound when they spoke to one another in 1746? Fiction writers must ask these questions perhaps more intensely than historians.’

I asked these questions myself when I included Charles Edward Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, as a minor character in my new novel Ravenglass. As with all the historical fiction I have written, Ravenglass is rooted in a real place and time, but its characters and plot come from my imagination. These invented characters, even if they are inspired by real lives, can speak and act however I want them to. Real people are different. They require intimate knowledge. My fictional Charles Edward Stuart is the product of extensive research even though he appears on only a few pages of my novel, and the scene in which he appears never actually happened. But I wanted the spirit of the real man to infuse this part of the story: his slightly too precise English, his extravagant Continental style, his arrogance and his vulnerability. And I wanted this iconic historical figure to seem like a real person, as well as the larger-than-life symbol of a glorious and disastrous rebellion whose image still sells tins of Scottish shortbread.

In my imagined scene, the prince says little to my book’s fictional narrator, Kit Ravenglass. But Kit notices everything about the prince: the exquisite stitching on his waistcoat, the odd lilt to his speech, his royal bearing. Despite the adulation the prince receives in an Edinburgh he has captured from the British government, there is no doubt that he, like Kit, is an outsider. Imperious yet weak, this ‘Young Pretender’ exudes an atmosphere of glamour and adventure which will lead thousands of his followers to disaster.

So yes, there is a ‘bodyguard of lies’ around my portrayal of Charles Edward Stuart but they point up some essential truths about his character and his life. That’s what I think anyway. But who can really argue with my depiction? Anyone who knew the man has been dead for two hundred years. So it’s easy to defend my version of Bonnie Prince Charlie. When history is more recent, however, things can get much more tricky.

My novel When We Fall is set during the second world war, and it also weaves a fictional plot and characters through real historical events, in this case the Nazi occupation of Poland. Again, a real person makes a fleeting appearance in the narrative but their fate is at the heart of the story. In When We Fall, this person is the pioneering aviator and wartime heroine, Janina Lewandowska, who was murdered by agents of the Soviet Union in the spring of 1940, the only female victim amongst thousands of Polish prisoners of war slaughtered in the Russian forest of Katyn. Her life and fate are well known and I felt no qualms about fictionalising her to serve the plot of my wartime thriller. When I started recreating her in fiction, the real woman had been dead for almost eighty years and she seemed to me then an historical figure as remote as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Janina Dowbor-Musnicki weds her gliding instructor Mieczysław Lewandowski 1939

But this complacency was shattered when, not long after the book’s publication, I was contacted through Goodreads by a young man called Jack Lewandowski with the lines, ‘Is Janina Lewandowska in your novel? She was married to my grandad.’ My heart dropped a beat when I read those words. Janina was suddenly a real person, standing before me. What would her husband’s grandson feel about how I had portrayed her in her final moments, a devastatingly intimate scene which, although the context was deeply researched, I had completely made up? This very act of imagination could be regarded, quite reasonably, as profiting from human tragedy.

Thankfully, Jack and his family could not have been more supportive of my novel. It has been one of the great privileges of my writing life to get to know several of the living relatives of Janina Lewandowska and to find out more about her amazing life and the tragic reality of death; how she had just rented an apartment with her new husband Mieczyslaw when war broke out preventing them from ever living in it, how Mieczyslaw called one of his English daughters Nina, perhaps in memory of his first wife who was murdered on her thirty-second birthday.

And the people who are closely related to the real events portrayed in When We Fall have said they are glad Janina’s story is told in a novel. Fiction brings her story alive to people who would not otherwise have heard her name or know anything about the massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn. And the fictional imagining of her last moments taps directly into the reader’s emotions. The cruelty and poignancy of her fate is intensified by the immediacy of the telling. Readers not only know what happened to Janina, they share a visceral shadow of the horror and grief she must have experienced. A bodyguard of lies? Perhaps. But they protect a precious truth.

This article first appeared in Writing.ie