The Making of "Letters"

Now that you have read the letters, I must come clean and acknowledge that they are, as many of you have suspected, fiction. The idea that became “Letters” was proposed by a colleague, and the concept was confirmed by something that was said in an email exchange with Bruce Bentzman (who is, however, not complicit). Once I understood the strength of the concept and began writing, the epistolary story took control on its own and pretty much insisted that I write and publish it as if it were nonfiction. I proposed it that way to Donal, and he agreed to go along with the charade; thus, I can say that we hope you have enjoyed the tale.

At Donal’s suggestion, I present here a short “documentary” on the creation and production of “Letters.” I think it important to note that I did nothing that any writer of historical fiction doesn’t do in the process of creating a new work.

Why Did I Write “Letters”?

As a collector of vintage pens, I’m always curious about my pens’ provenance. Especially with a pen that bears the name of a former owner, I find myself wondering, “Where has this pen been? What has it seen? Who was its owner?" It is rarely possible to answer these questions, but on occasion luck strikes. Thanks to my mother, Priscilla Anderson, who saved it from her father’s estate to become part of mine, my red rippled hard rubber Waterman’s Ideal No. 7 pen provided the perfect opportunity to learn a pen’s history. In my childhood, I knew my grandfather; and I know much about him not only because he was well known in his time but also because he was an inveterate letter writer. I have dozens of his typewritten letters to my parents.

In addition to my own pens, I restore pens belonging to other collectors, some of them prized family heirlooms like my Waterman, and I wonder whether those pens’ owners have been fortunate enough to learn the histories of their pens and the family members who owned them. When I watch Antiques Road Show on public television, I am frequently struck by how many of the people bringing things for appraisal know virtually nothing of their own family histories. “Letters” was an opportunity to set down a compelling story that would draw connections between ordinary people and the grand panorama of history; it was for me something of a soapbox, as it were, from which to share my fascination with the past.

How Did I Write “Letters”?

The first essential for any work of fiction is an idea. The germ of “Letters” can be found in my story “Pen Pals,” in which I used letters between a boy and his grandfather to gain a greater immediacy than straight narrative can achieve. It was clear that I had done something right, as nearly a dozen people have told me that “Pen Pals” brought them to tears. I had touched my readers, and I wanted very much to do it again.

“Letters” was conceived when a professional colleague, who is also a pen collector, suggested that I extend the epistolary technique to an entire story, using as a thread the novel idea that all of the letters would be written with the same pen. Later, in returning a pen to Bruce, I noted that his address had changed and remarked that I did not want his property to become a “Flying Dutchpen,” doomed forever to wander across a trackless sea of mail; with that image of a pen that would travel from hand to hand, the story's conceptual framework was complete.

One winter evening about a year ago, I sat down with my wife and daughter to outline the correspondence that would become “Letters.” I had already decided that the first letter would be written by a passenger on the Lusitania’s final voyage, and from there we mapped out a set of historical events into which we could weave credible fiction. Some of the events we wanted to use, such as the 1929 stock market crash, were so obvious that to use them directly might be a giveaway; for those events, a little indirection in time seemed to provide the required believability while at the same time allowing a better view of the events themselves. Others, such as President Gerald R. Ford’s 1974 amnesty for draft dodgers, triggered personal memories; I am Ron B, the nephew of whom Rose Hall wrote in the last letter. Thus the skeleton of the story came into being.

Having developed the outline, I then began to write. As each letter took form, I undertook the necessary research to set it accurately into its historical place. Many of my sources were on the World Wide Web, and I found most of those by using “advanced” searches to eliminate clutter quickly. Sources not on the Web came primarily from my personal library.

One obvious concern is the dense historical content of the letters. This is not accidental. I do possess, in my library and among my family papers, many instances of letters that are similarly dense. Not everyone writes about the major events of the day; but some people do, especially when they are “in harm’s way,” as it were, and I tried to vary the depth of content and presentation in a way that would be appropriate to the examples I used as models.

There are five distinct family groups involved with the letters. To flesh out my characters and make them more real, I developed a set of family trees for them. In case you’re terminally curious, here are the trees:

• Stephen J. Henderson and family
• Margaret Cadogan and family
• Gérard F. Robioux and family
• Richard A. Fleming and family
• Rose B. Hall and family

The events, names, and places mentioned are real, even including street names. I drew from many and varied sources, and my choices may well have led to “mistakes” in the letters (e.g., the question of whether the Germans held the Passchendaele Ridge before Second Ypres or captured it during the battle). These sorts of errors are the bane of fiction writers, but in reality they could as easily appear in real letters because reporters did not then, and do not today, always report accurately. Thus, only my characters (and, in some cases, their house numbers) are inauthentic; but even there, I strove to maintain consistency. English and Irish surnames, for example, were researched to ensure that they are appropriate for the counties to which I assigned characters bearing them. In my choice of places, there is a combination of pure research and personal recollection. For example, I am a 1965 alumnus of the Bullis School to which Richard Fleming referred in his letter to his grandson; but I did not remember its street address, and the school is no longer in Silver Spring, Maryland. I reconstructed the location of its campus from U. S. government aerial photographs and then determined the address of the site, now a city park, from the city’s Web site.

Stephen Henderson wrote that the weather was beautiful, but the historical record shows that May 1, 1915, was a rainy day in New York. Stephen’s letter was written from his hotel room, several hours before the Lusitania’s 11:30 a.m. departure; this is shown by his remark that there was yet an hour before he could board and that there was nothing to do in the Cunard shed except to sit and read (but not to write letters). Ocean liners were (and still are) opened for boarding three or four hours before departure; thus, Stephen would have been writing in the very early morning, to be given the lie as the weather changed before the ship’s departure. I began my research on the Lusitania in particular, and the World War I era in general, at the Lusitania Historical Society’s Lusitania Online, and I found much more information in the World War I Document Archive.

In addition to much of the background and writing style for Henry Penyard’s letter, the ditty that Henry related is taken from No Parachute, © 1968 by Sir Arthur Gould Lee, Air Vice Marshal, RAF; but Lee does not mention what I discovered during my research, that it was sung to the same tune as “Mademoiselle from Armentières.” An earlier British army song from India, where a skiboo is a hired assassin, was the parent of both. I have also restored information that Lee bowdlerized, by correctly identifying the part of the landlord’s daughter’s anatomy that was lily-white; but I chose not to spell the word out. Lee’s book is a compilation of letters he himself wrote to his wife from the Front in May 1917, and I followed his lead in “inserting” into Henry’s letter and Sam Fleming’s the various place names and other information that the writers would have omitted. Further sources for Henry’s letter included The Aerodrome, other Web sites, and Heroes & Aeroplanes of the Great War 1914-1918, © 1966 by Joseph A. Phelan.

The Sodality of which Margaret Cadogan wrote would be her parish’s Altar Sodality, a women’s devotional group. Bridget McCraith, whom Margaret encountered in Boston, did exist, and she lived in Bandon, Ireland; but she died before Margaret was born, and her father was not, to the best of my knowledge, the manager of the Allman distillery in Bandon, which ceased operation in 1929. To make Margaret’s and Gérard Robioux’ letters as authentic as possible, I sought expert linguistic and cultural assistance. Margaret’s letter went to Donal Higgins, who offered valuable suggestions. Gérard’s letter, after being translated into French, went to a French friend named Roland Karcher, who rephrased it into the colloquial forms a native speaker would use. I then discarded my original English version and translated Roland’s French anew in order to yield an English version in keeping with the French rather than the other way around.

The recipe that Bernadette Robioux sent to her mother is a slightly reworded version of a recipe of the time as included in a fascinating home-front document, Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen: World War II and the Way We Cooked, © 2000 by Joanne Lamb Hayes. I am not certain whether Love Memorial Hall, on the campus of the University of Nebraska, was still being used as a women’s residence hall in June 1942; at some point during the war, it was taken over for use as a military barracks. There was, and still is, a Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Lincoln, and the current parish secretary was kind enough to tell me that Father A. I. Kraemer was its pastor in 1942.

The Martin factory near Omaha did produce both the B-26 bombers that the unfortunate Randall Swift’s unit would have used and, under contract to Boeing, the specially modified B-29s that Col. Paul Tibbets took to Tinian island with Sam Fleming aboard. The serial number I have given Sam’s aircraft is the correct one, as listed in Martin company records. I drew much of the “local color” for Sam’s letter from Joseph Majeski’s memoirs of his service as a B-29 tail gunner.

As proof once again that truth is stranger — or at least more amusing — than fiction, the anecdote that Tommy Long related to his grandfather about President John F. Kennedy and football legend Paul Hornung is true, as documented in When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, © 1999 by David Maraniss. The only invented individual at Fort Riley is Tommy himself. The First Infantry Division, long a fixture at Fort Riley and still stationed there, did go to Vietnam in 1965; thus, what Kevin Long told Rose Hall squares with the record.

I could list all of my other explorations into source material, but I think I’d prefer to leave some of them for you to explore on your own, should you be so inclined.

In Conclusion

Not only was “Letters” fun to write, but it was also an education. Some of the things I used, such as the description of Tinian Island, came as new and interesting tidbits from my research. I suspect that this is a common occurrence when a writer sets out on a project like this one. I hope that “Letters” has touched you, and I hope that it will move you to learn more about your pens, their histories, and the histories of the people who may have owned them, above all your own family.