When Fiction Comes Up Against Reality

For the past few months, I've been doing work that would have to rank at the top of any list of interesting activities for a historical novelist. After writing two books (THE RAGTIME KID and THE RAGTIME FOOL), which featured Sanford Brunson Campbell, the "Original Ragtime Kid of the 1890s" as protagonist, I was lucky enough to obtain three big boxes of items that once belonged to the real-life Kid, who died in 1952.

Imagine my feelings, reading autobiographical manuscripts describing Brun's adventures as an itinerant ragtime pianist during the first decade of the twentieth century, and his efforts during the last decade of his life to revive ragtime music and the reputation of his hero, Scott Joplin. There were also musical compositions unknown to current ragtime enthusiasts, 78rpm recordings of Brun playing his and Joplin's music, personal effects (including his barber's razor strop), business and tax records, and extensive correspondence with prominent musicians, entertainment figures, and politicians.

Brun was known as someone who never let facts get in the way of a good story - no wonder he was such a compelling figure to an historical novelist - and so, some of his written material was contradicted by well-established information. I think what inspired Brun to tell many of his tall tales was the desire to bring Joplin the recognition Brun (rightly) thought his old piano teacher deserved. As my Brun put it in THE RAGTIME FOOL, "Well, the way I told it, that's what Mr. Joplin deserved...That's how it should've been."

Brun did tell some good stories, and told them well. He had a very engaging voice. After five years wandering through the midwest, playing bar-room piano, he decided to go home to Arkansas City, KS, to visit his high-school sweetheart. "While I had been away," Brun wrote, "the local gossips had told her all kinds of stories about me and my ragtime career, the places in which I had played and other poisonous gossip. Some of it was true..."

"I arrived dressed in a loud checkered suit; cloth-top, colored patent leather shoes with pearl buttons, a light-colored hat with a loud hatband around it, and that ever-loving loud silk shirt, together with the loud-patterned necktie, about made my ragtime dress complete. When the natives saw me in that getup, I created quite a sensation.

"I thought my girl would faint when she gave me the once-over, and my mother stood dead in her tracks when she saw my loud clothes. But I was her darling boy and my appearance was soon forgotten by her."

I was pleased and not a little surprised to see how well my fictional Brun fit with his historical profile. But now, what? Some sort of nonfiction book needs to come out of this material, probably with a CD of a ragtime pianist playing Brun's newly-discovered music, as well as transcriptions from Brun's recordings. It'll take some time, especially having to fit the work in as I write my next mystery, and probably the one after that. But it's got to be done. It tickles me that the story of the story-telling man who worked so hard on Scott Joplin's behalf now falls to another story-teller. Gonna be a challenge to sort out what's reality in Brun's accounts, and what's fiction.

A Post-Election Day Story

       Back during the 1950s, I read a short memoir by an elderly woman, a reminiscence of a striking childhood event in her life. I can't begin to recall her name, and I can't vouch for the truth of the account. But it's still a good story, and appropriate for today. My version is, of course, a paraphrase.
      The old woman remembered a day when she was quite young, I think seven or eight. She'd become angry with her parents, and determined to run away from home. Not long after she started her journey down a dusty country road, a large man in a horse-drawn carriage pulled up, and asked where she was off to. She explained that she was running away from home.
      "Well," said the large man. "That sounds like a long trip. Would you care for a ride?"
      The girl decided that sounded good, and hopped up beside the man. He questioned her about her situation, and she told him why she felt she had no choice but to do what she was doing.                 "That's a very big decision," the man said. "Don't you think you should perhaps reconsider?"
      "Oh, no," said the girl. "There's no more chance of me changing my mind than there is of Cleveland running again."  
      The man seemed surprised, and asked her to explain.
      "That's what my father always says when he thinks something can't possibly happen. Mr. Cleveland was the last president, but he lost the next election. Some people say he might run again, but my father says there's absolutely no chance of that."
      The man and the girl rode on a good way. The day was warm, the girl became sleepy, and she finally fell asleep, her head resting against the large man. When she awoke, the carriage was in front of her house. "You'd best go inside and talk that matter over with your parents," the large man said. "I'm sure they'll be glad to see you. And it's always well to resolve a dispute with honest talk."
       The girl felt sheepish, and not a little tired. It had been a long day. She thanked the man for his kindness, and for the ride. He smiled. "And by the way, you may tell your father that he's wrong at least about one thing. Mr. Cleveland will indeed run again."

Of course, the large man was Grover Cleveland, a neighbor of the girl's family, and our 24th president, who served from 1885 to 1889. After losing the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland did run again in 1892, and won a second, non-consecutive term. To date, he's the only president to have done that.

Twisting History

       Discussion can get pretty heated when writers of historical fiction talk about whether it's all right to change historical facts in the interest of a story. I tend to go with the naysayers. Tell it like it was. Whenever I hear a sportscaster these days say, "Spahn and Sain, and two days of rain," I think no, wait. That's not how it went.
       I first became a baseball fan in 1948, listening to games on a big floor-model Philco radio in our dining room. That year, the Boston Braves won the National League pennant, though their starting-pitcher staff was supposed to be pretty thin. "Spahn, Bickford, Sain, then pray for rain," the broadcasters said.
       But Boston pitcher Vern Bickford, a rookie, managed an excellent 11-5 won-lost record and a fine 3.27 earned run average. Nor was he a one-year wonder. Before an arm injury ended his career, he pitched seven seasons of major league ball, made the National League All-Star team, threw a no-hitter against the powerful Brooklyn Dodgers, and one year led the National League in complete games and innings pitched. Somebody somewhere really must not have liked him; he lived to only 39, dying in 1960 of stomach cancer. 
       And when you come down to facts, the story told by the 1948 broadcasters was hardly spot-on to history. A fourth starting pitcher on that Braves team, Bill Voiselle, also an All-Star one year, pitched more than 200 innings, won 13 games (only two less than Spahn),and had an ERA of 3.63, lower than Spahn's.  
      Include Bickford and Voiselle, and you're telling an entirely different story, a truer one. "Spahn, Bickford, Voiselle, Sain. We don't care if we get no rain." I wouldn't mind seeing that quartet in Seattle Mariners uniforms this year.

Take A Little Salt With Your Facts

     Many people say they never read fiction, because "it's not real. What's the point of it?" They'd rather spend their book time on history, "which really did happen."
     Is that a fact?
     John Stark, Scott Joplin's publisher for "Maple Leaf Rag," comes across in historical accounts as an honest and honorable man, blunt-spoken, hard-working, a pillar of society. But when I read in They All Played Ragtime (the widely- and rightly-acclaimed first comprehensive history of ragtime music) that Stark had married a New Orleans girl when he was 24 and she, 13, I had trouble representing Stark in The Ragtime Kid strictly according to history. Even allowing for the fact that the marriage took place in 1865, I couldn't help feeling there was a kink in Stark's nature no one had picked up on. So I decided to look further into the situation.
     In a 1915 military pension application, Stark stated his wife was 15 when he married her, and also that they were married in 1864 (contrary to every other document that's been uncovered), as opposed to 13, as reported in TAPR.
     John Stark's claim was supported by information on Sarah Ann Stark's death certificate, in which her son, Will, represented that his mother had been born on Oct 29, 1849. That would have made Sarah 15 at the time of her marriage.
     However, in an affidavit, sworn before a New Orleans Justice of the Peace on Feb 18, 1865, Mrs. Mary Casey gave consent to the marriage of Sarah Ann Casey, a minor of eighteen years, to John Stark. Another affidavit, signed the same day, before Justice of the Peace, M. Weisheimer (what a great name), bore affirmation by two witnesses that "they are well acquainted with John Stark and Sarah Ann Casey, and know them to be above the age of twenty-one."
     At that rate, I thought, the bride would have been menopausal by the time of the ceremony.
     But a copy from the New Orleans Birth Records Index stated that Sarah Ann Casey, daughter of William and Mary Eagan Casey, was born on Oct. 13, 1848. That would have made her 16-1/3 years old when she married Stark.
     Family recollections nearly a century after the event gave rise to the statement that Sarah Ann had been 13 at the time of her marriage. Stark's pension application was full of factual errors. Will Stark did not even know his maternal grandmother's name, and may never have known his mother's actual birth date. And the affidavits could well have been misrepresented to get around inconveniently-illegal youth on the part of the bride-to-be.
     So, once I decided to give the most credit to the Birth Records Index, which likely was filed reasonably soon after the baby's birth, the kink in my fictional John Stark vaporized.
     Not all history is carved in stone - and what is, we usually don't understand,anyway.