2. Some history In my guidebook, The Art of Writing Fiction, I have described how I became, almost inadvertently, an oral historian: Some time in the mid-80s, as I was chaining my bicycle to the railings outside Norwich City Hall, I got into a conversation with another cyclist, a trim, pugilistic-looking fellow who told me he’d recently completed a charity bike ride of almost 900 miles that had taken him less than four weeks. He was nearly eighty years old. His name was Snowy Fulcher, and he was, he said, a ‘lifelong health and fitness fanatic’. He had trained as a junior boxer in the back room of a pub during the First World War, and the lessons had cost his father a shilling and sixpence. On Friday nights a ring would be roped off in the bar for competitive bouts against the boxers of other pubs, and Snowy had won back his father’s investment, first time out. Later he’d learned gymnastics in a boys’ club organised by the city’s chief constable to keep hooligans like himself, he said, away from the pubs. (Cowan 2011a: 101) Snowy told me a lot more besides, not just that afternoon but over the following two years, during which time I visited him regularly to listen to his recollections of a city that persisted mainly in the memory of people like him. He described the cattle market in the centre of Norwich (then a car park, soon to become a shopping mall) and how he would earn pennies ‘bullock whopping’ - helping to herd the animals in from the countryside.
‘finding’, ‘identifying’, or ‘uncovering’ the ‘stories’ that lie buried in chronicles; and that the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact that the historian ‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer ‘invents’ his. This conception of the historian’s task, however, obscures the extent to which ‘invention’ also plays a part in the historian’s operations. (1973: 342) To which one might add that such a conception of the fiction writer’s task also obscures the extent to which ‘finding’ plays a part in the fiction writer’s operations. That I was able to invent a narrative using material from my archive is due to a series of ‘finds’ extraneous to the archive that begins with my stumbling upon an educational documentary about RA Fisher. But while this discovery of a theme allowed me to eliminate a great deal of material from consideration, it also introduced me to what White elsewhere calls ‘“the problem” of the too much and not enough’ (2005: 150). I had belatedly arrived at a solution to the problem of the ‘too much’, but I had also acquired a surer sense of the ‘not enough’. My novel, it seemed, could only emerge through the accumulation of yet more material (additional research into eugenics and the war, for instance) which resulted in yet more productive discoveries. Principal among these was the concept of the ‘worthless men’ (Oram 1998): private soldiers from the social ‘residuum’ considered by their commanding officers to be lacking in the precious gifts of health, courage and patriotism. Crucial too was an observation in Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme (1994) that ‘the young men queuing up to enlist in 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead’ (1994: 6).
In writing Worthless Men I certainly understood myself to be writing a novel set in the past, and by that token a ‘historical’ novel, but I had little sense of engaging with a distinct genre, the ‘historical novel’. In Jerome de Groot’s introductory guide, historical writing is identified ‘within numerous fictional locales: romance, detective, thriller, counterfactual, horror, literary, gothic, post-modern, epic, fantasy, history, western, children’s books’ (2010: 2), an array of ‘locales’ so extensive it appears to deny any possibility of generic specificity. The historical novel emerges instead as a tendency or orientation available to almost all other genres. ‘Indeed,’ de Groot continues, ‘the intergeneric hybridity and flexibility of historical fiction have long been one of its defining characteristics’ (2), which may be as much as to concede that it is so mutable as to have no defining characteristics other than an interest in history, whether as subject or setting. For myself, in so far as I had any awareness of the ‘historical novel’, I took it to mean one of two things: those novels of the nineteenth century discussed in Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1962), which I had studied as an undergraduate, and the popular romance novels of costumery and swashbuckling that Perry Anderson describes as ‘decadent representations of a remote past with no living connection to contemporary existence, but functioning rather as a rejection and escape from them’ (Anderson 2011). I was attracted to neither possibility. My acquaintance with Lukács would have been recent history to the young man conducting oral history interviews in the mid-eighties, but had become ancient history to the novelist writing Worthless Men. My recollection was of a somewhat forbidding range of exemplars (books I had never been able to finish) and an equally forbidding set of
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