Life Shapes an Author's Truth

How my experience informs my stories

I write intentionally to challenge my readers to re-evaluate their notions and arrive at a new level of understanding. I have chosen to do that through Austenesque literature where Austen is used as a starting point for my stories. Thus, I must reach into my toolbox to pull out that which I believe to be the correct implement.

Back in the day, I would explain to my writing classes that authors carry two sets of tools that they use to create their work. Please note that I was speaking to students who were seated in a class on research writing, but the discussion invariably moved toward fiction writing (something about which I frequently chided students submitting a research paper for evaluation).

First is the obvious: the tools of technique. Grammar, vocabulary, flow, and the intangible constructs used to set the pace. My students always found it amusing that I included the breakage of every rule of “good writing” that had been drilled into their heads. You know of that I speak: no sentence fragments, intentional word choice, the creation and use of words not yet countenanced in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The second is equally obvious—at least to me: the tools forged by life’s experience. The decades that shape an author’s weltanschauung—used by Freud as a worldview, the lens through which an individual evaluates the world around them—ought to be brought to play in the service of the story.

I will ignore the first in this contemplation except to note that a writer can make intentional structural choices informed by their weltanschauung. At this time, I am in the midst of a pivotal scene in The Sailor’s Rest: a card game upon which the denouement of the book rests. I am considering presenting the Points-of-View of both players simultaneously by using the cinematic technique of split screen. I know that this is “doable” both in electronic and print. I believe this will allow the reader to experience the tension inherent in the scene. I also am concerned that the reader’s attention will be fractured if I first present one player’s POV and then section break to present that of the other player. Of course, there are spectators…oh well…more thought is needed.

The second basket, though, is what gives a story life.

How often have we read a stale recounting of an ODC plot which never goes beyond expectations? I am not decrying amnesia, kidnapping, compromise, attraction across class boundaries, or any of the other romance structures that have been mainstays since the late 1930s (Heyer) that have leaped the Austen barrier into JAFF. In fact, to the contrary—particularly when it comes to questions of class—Austen offers authors fertile ground to explore variations on how the characters would react.

Using one’s life experience demands a great deal of self-awareness and reflection. Yes, I did spend seven years in therapy (seen below). However, any author is the sum of their life’s experience. Consider Helen Williams’s In Essentials. She personally experienced the trials through which she put Elizabeth Bennet. What is key, though, is that she did not change her name (Helen) to Elizabeth and have the young woman act as Helen did. No, she used her own life’s truth to inform how she imagined Elizabeth Bennet—and, by extension, Darcy as well as her family—would have reacted and responded and prevailed. This is one of the most authentic books I have ever read in the #Austenesque genre.

The same holds true for me. My family suffered an unaccountable tragedy in 1986. The loss of our son brought forward my underlying depression. It took seven years of multiple days-a-week therapy with one of the Chicago Institute’s leading Freudians (Dr. Sandford Weisblatt—who gets a nod in the third book of the Wardrobe, The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque) for me to see the light on the other side. Now I can celebrate Jamie while still mourning the six-year-old we lost that May Day.

All author’s processes are unique. I did not enter the seventh book of the Wardrobe—The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion—planning to have Lydia give birth to the martyred George Wickham’s son in 1940. However, my Guide (see throughout the Wardrobe beginning with Volume Five) brought our loss forward to explain why the Lydia who returns from 1944 to 1815 was thoroughly altered. The chapter I offer below is how I processed my pain into Lydia’s life (another time my loss appeared can be found in the second part of Volume Four where Elizabeth articulates her pain caused by miscarriage).

This section (and its preceding chapter) took me a month to write. I was only able to withstand a few hundred words every day.

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This excerpt of “The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion” is © 2019 by Donald P. Jacobson. Any reproduction is prohibited.

Chapter 40

Time ceased to be measured in hours and days. Rather it was dispatched like blank pages in an old-style, single-day calendar rustling as they flipped, recording passage without any sense of what had transpired. Featureless, dry as the dunes surrounding the House, and full of monotony but bereft of context, Cronos’s leavings whispered by like sandy grit floating in the prevailing breeze to dust all without consideration. This was the great medium, the current upon which all were buoyed until those particles would sink beneath the surface to rejoin the eternal riverbed.

The change so wrought in the streets of Deauville was as monumental as it was meaningless: minutiae to all but those directly influenced. If a Flying Fortress captain chanced to peer down from his cockpit while cruising five miles overhead, he might see the blackened scar where Villet’s had been. The broken gap marred the tiny roofs lined up along the roads snaking across the countryside. However, not for an instant would he have wondered what had been there or what cost had been exacted in its removal.

Yet the world—even this realm colored by war—was never seen from God’s view; rather, all its immediacy was borne by those from arm’s length at most.

And that made facts inescapable.

***

She was empty…a void.

As she lay in her bed, the only way she understood that she was real and not a figment of some greater being’s imagination was the weight of the sheets against her legs. She would lie on her back, her legs and arms splayed out atop the mattress. She could feel nothing, but then, she rarely moved enough to disturb her covers.

In this attitude, Lydia passed the first weeks of June.

Oh, she responded to the calls of nature for she abhorred, on an elemental level, the idea of forcing anyone to personally supervise her efforts or, worse, to clean up after her. That would have necessitated more interaction than she was prepared to endure. Better to arrange her world so they would leave her alone. To remain in the bed without soiling it was, in her narrowly circumscribed world, a victory that ensured her solitary repose.

Her emotions were stripped back to those simplest to feel and most expected by those around her: loss, anger, and guilt.

Maxim Vorobiev, Oak Fractured by Lightning (1847)

Of these, the profound hole in the center of her existence was the one feeling for which her previous life had prepared her. Every morning she would awaken standing atop the precipice overlooking the bottomless crater, only to throw herself headfirst into its maw, praying to end her awareness of a world from which her babe had been ripped. Not until her body collapsed in upon itself as Sol extinguished its blaze in the Channel did she succumb to the peace offered by the alter ego that had risen to protect her.

Not that Lydia had ever before lost a child, but she had been born into a world where infant and childhood mortality was a distressing part of everyday existence touching lessers and betters alike. Added to that, her awareness, if not deep understanding, of Mrs. Bennet’s horrific loss in the year zero, and Lydia Wickham was cognizant that her wrenching pain was to be expected.

What, however, haunted her—awake or asleep—was the sound of Georges Henri’s voice echoing like a breeze wafting over the dunes and spinning the windmills of her mind.[i]

She heard it in her dreams, in her waking moments, hearkening to the time before when she stepped into the nursery to surprise her little boy. Upon seeing her, Georges would launch himself into her arms or wrap her legs in a bear hug. His joyous shout of, “Mama,” although it faded over the years as her brain aged, remained with her to the end of her days. The weary anticipation of rejoining him in a distant future was cold consolation.

Lydia’s anger, growing from her sense of loss, was profound and monumental, hissing like sleet against slate darkened by tears. Potent in its coruscating ferocity, her fury transcended the numbness that was her natural defense against ineffable loss.

She hated the random nature of the tragedy. Yet, to call it an accident, a twist of fate, was contrary to her intuition.

There had to be something more.

She knew that there was, for—in the depths of her somnolent state before Campbell had begun reducing the medication—she could see great quakes shivering the infinite plain behind her eyelids. Something was disrupting that faraway high country. Although her own Guide had seemingly fled, she could sense others, the strands of china-blue, silver, steel-gray, and even antiqued copper, tapping into thought memes, crossing barriers normally impenetrable. Try as the azure thread might pacify the world, the infinite cords whipped and quivered with awful knowledge. She felt the images—grenade, petrol, fire, search—that directed all within her ken. These clues were banked for later.

Yet, if she tried to reach out too energetically, to participate rather than remaining passive, a monumental power would reach up from behind her and gently but firmly pull her back.

She railed against the knowledge that the Deauville tragedy would be nothing more than a minor footnote in a time when death was audited in the millions. That the lost ones in the pâtisserie would be mentioned in a minor note in the back of a dusty, unopened volume detailing France’s war infuriated her even while rendering her desolate. Knowing that the deaths swiftly would be forgotten as everyone did that which everyone did…move on…fractured her mind’s efforts to grasp onto something…anything.

Who would remain to mourn once all were gone who knew Georges or Marie or Old Madame Villet? Would the only remainder of their memory be worn limestone markers in Deauville’s burial ground behind the old church, weathered by salt air into oblivion?

If they had made no mark, carved no channel across human consciousness, how could their existence have been accounted as meaningful?

And that brought about the third great feeling: guilt.

After all, who had sent the children to Villet’s? If she had been more patient, and less concerned about a child’s natural messiness, would not her babe still be here?

Was she still so selfish? Was she still that foolish girl who embarrassed her sisters and nearly destroyed her family in the year eleven? Why had she eagerly ceded a mother’s responsibility to protect her babe to a ten-year-old girl?

If she had been at Villet’s, she could have saved Georges! If she had only walked the children into town, they would not have had the chance to arrive at the shop before the explosion.

Lydia kept turning the conundrum over in her mind, considering it from every angle, as if she could make sense of the nonsensical. She conducted great thought experiments, adjusting and changing variables, searching for a pure explanation, and a replicable outcome.

But, in none of those scenarios did the children survive. And, at no point did the blessed nullness overtake her. She was condemned to go on, reliving her guilt over having dispatched her child to his doom or, perhaps, not having joined him in death.

Which was, she was convinced, the greatest betrayal of all.

Parents do not, cannot, should not, outlive their children.

It was in this way she lived her days and nights.

She dressed or undressed as required by daylight. Letty would tend to her, offering pleasantries that served only as a back tone that rolled beneath the dreadful lassitude that dragged down her limbs.

If asked to sit, she would…or to stand. None of it mattered. It was not as if she would move from the position where she had been placed.

She allowed herself to be guided from her chamber down to the dining room. If left to her own devices, her feet would become too heavy to lift, and she would fall into immobility, drooping like one of the willows in Renoir’s garden. Trays finally had been denied her by well-meaning caregivers, so she sat at the table and mechanically ate that which would be placed in front of her. She would remain sitting, hands motionless atop the cloth, until another soul—perhaps Letty or maybe Kitty—would softly suggest that she might wish to take in the air while seated in a chaise on the veranda shaded by the green and white-striped awning. She would drink from a glass of tea if it was placed in her hand.

The comings and goings of the Channel as it moved through its tidal paces in front of the House were invisible to Lydia, turned inward as she was.

She neither encouraged nor discouraged Kitty or Jacques when they offered to read to her.

However, she never engaged with either over the subject of the book. They themselves were too submerged in their own grief to rise to something more overt than reciting the words of authors usually long vanished from the scene.

Even Richter could do little to force her into the world of light and sun, so wrapped was she in her pain. However, the tall German himself was crippled by his own grief and guilt; for, despite Kitty’s advice, he was convinced that he had been the father of their troubles.

He could not release his sense that, like all officers, if he had considered every factor and had planned for all the contingencies, he could have guaranteed a different outcome for an event about which he had no knowledge.

He engaged in his own attempts to rationalize, to account for the elements leading up to the attack on Villet’s. And, like Lydia, he was equally unable to reorganize the Universe in his hands to offer a different outcome…or even an explanation beyond the idea that a malevolent act had been complicated by the stupidity of the primary actors, leading to the deaths of innocents.

The senseless nature of this war…any war…frayed his being.

He prayed for the relief that a 7.62mm bullet would bring.

And, that entreaty, likewise, was denied.

Unlike Mrs. Wickham, though, Richter had his work for the Oberst as well as his search with Commandant Maxim to uncover the authors of the outrage to occupy his mind and hands. Denied idleness, he was able to wall off more quickly those darkened areas of his soul. As a soldier, he had learned that dwelling on the reptiles of the mind stirred up by military life was the surest way to insanity. The comfort he derived from his tasks, though, changed nothing of the finality of the situation. He found no surcease to ease his guilt, and, no matter how hard he worked or exercised, the cloud that had imposed itself over his spirit was slow to lift.

Although he knew nothing of the Wardrobe, he already had been used once to fulfill its purpose. This Sir Gawain had two more quests to undertake to defend the lady before his own wishes would be granted.[ii]

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Here is the US link to Helen Williams’s book In Essentials

https://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Pride-Prejudice-Variation-ebook/dp/B09J4J6BBV

Here is the link to the first volume of the Bennet Wardrobe: The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey—the books are sequential and interlocking. This is a universal link.

mybook.to/MPKeeperwardrobe

NOTE: Some folks find the marriage between Mary Bennet, 23, and Edward Benton, 24, her half-uncle, as being problematic. I feel that this is an example of applying today’s standards of exploitation of a tender-aged girl by an older relative. None of this exists in the Edward/Mary relationship.

Readers do not object to the possibility (well, at least in Lady Catherine’s mind) of first cousins marrying. In fact, the possibility of a Darcy/Anne wedding is only precluded by the apparent agreement that they would neither suit nor did they love each other. What would have happened if one or both of the conditions had existed?

Yes, the English Book of Common Prayer (1662 edition) does have a woman marrying her father’s brother as a no-no, but #20 out of 24. There is no mention of half brothers (Benton is Thomas Bennet’s brother but from a different mother). I accepted the direction of the Wardrobe’s Universe, but instituted Rule #7 to allow readers to accept the love between Mary and Edward.

7.     No male Bennet will be able to sire offspring in the future having travelled to that future through the Wardrobe in order to prevent improper relations. No female Bennet can increase in the future and then return to the past while awaiting confinement. Bennet children born in the future will not be able to return to the past with their parent.

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[i] “The Windmills of Your Mind” was composed by Michel Legrande (music) and Alan & Marilyn Bergman (lyrics). Performed by Noel Harrison, it won the Academy Award for Best Song in 1968 (Thomas Crown Affair).

[ii] [Gawain] is often portrayed as a formidable, courteous, and a compassionate warrior, fiercely loyal to his king and family. As such he is a friend to young knights, a defender of the poor, and as “the Maidens’ Knight”, a defender of women as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawain