1. December 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

In keeping with my resolve not to change the historical record where it exists, I still wrestle with how to handle the gaps.   The writing of fictional biography gives me some license, of course, but I mostly interpret that to mean that I am imagining the scenes that are suggested by the historical record and making up the dialogue.  I’m also inventing characteristics and histories for minor characters who are documented in the record, but about whom little is written.  Mrs. Grut is an example, in my Darwin book.  She was the children’s  governess at a critical time in the Darwin household and appears in the Darwin letters but in no other place.  I knew she tried to make a proper Victorian household out of Emma Darwin’s fun house full of children–to the chagrin and detriment of all.  I had to create a character who was motivated to put things in order and provoke consternation.  Okay.  I’m fine with that.

What I find more troubling  is a matter like Mileva Maric’s sister Zorka, who was known to have developed something like schizophrenia.  What I don’t know is when it developed.  I can read statistics on when young women typically develop symptoms and I can read letters, but it seems that as soon as I write her into a scene with symptoms at an age of onset consistent with statistics, I read that Milos Maric (Mileva’s father) sent all his children abroad to school.  Now, how likely is it that an 18-year-old would thrive abroad at school with symptoms of schizophrenia?  I’m certain that Zorka was suffering symptoms by age 24, but then, after that, she went to help Mileva with the children during periods of Mileva’s debilitation after Einstein left the family. It doesn’t make sense to me that someone with unmedicated schizophrenia would be able to run a household with young children.

Perhaps the diagnosis is wrong.  Zorka was in Serbia and would have been hidden in the attic like Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre to avoid sending her to some brutal asylum where, at that time, she would have been chained to a wall or confined in some torture device and possibly put on public display like at Bedlam Hospital in England.  Zorka would not have been seen by a professional until later, when she went to Zurich and was treated at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital, where the Einstein’s son Eduard, also schizophrenic, was interred at times.   So, there was a serious dysfunction of a psychological nature, which eventually Zorka self-medicated with alcohol, but it seemed to relapse at times.  One relative/neighbor interviewed by Michele Zackheim for her book Einstein’s Daughter said that before Mileva came home to visit her in later life, Zorka stopped drinking and put the house in order.   There’s volition, devotion, and shame in that behavior.  She knew she didn’t want Mileva to see how she was living.  Is that kind of self-awareness typical of schizophrenia?

There are two other bits of data that make me put age of onset sooner rather than later.  One is that when Mileva, already pregnant with Lieserl and still unmarried, traveled from Serbia to Switzerland to visit Albert in secret, he sent her a book on hypnotism by Auguste Forel who was then the director of the Burgholzli.  Why that book?  While it is true that Mileva took a psychology course at some point in her education, they were not known to have read and discussed anything but physics together, so it seems out of context unless Mileva had requested he send her anything he could find to help her help Zorka.  He was in Schaffhausen, tutoring a young Englishman, and living in a household with a family.  Perhaps it was the only remotely relevant book he could find in a Schaffhausen library.

Conjecture.

The other data bit that makes me wonder about early onset for Zorka is that after Mileva’s baby was born, Albert and Mileva considered putting her up for adoption.  Why would they not have asked the Maric family to keep the baby?  She had already caused them shame by the fact of her unwed pregnancy.  They were wealthy and had servants, though Marija Maric (Mileva’s mother) continued to help with all house and farm work.  That means she was healthy.  The little girl lived there for 18 months, which seems a long time if she was going to be given up.  Perhaps Mileva’s parents couldn’t handle another dependent in addition to Zorka?

It’s all puzzling.  Then there is the fate of Lieserl–another unknown–except that Mileva clearly knows what happened to her and she’s a point-of-view character, so how do I get around that one?  I’m leaning heavily on Michele Zackheim’s interviews with family members and friends in Einstein’s Daughter, though I’m not certain how to explain a few things there, either.  For example, if Lieserl was born with Downs Syndrome–as Albert seems to have reported to a colleague later in his life–why would Albert have at the time written “I’m very sorry about what has befallen Lieserl.  It’s so easy to suffer lasting effects from scarlet fever.”  To me, this sounds as though scarlet fever caused a disability she didn’t have before.  If Lieserl had died of the scarlet fever (lasting effect, indeed!), he would not have written the sentences that follow:  “As what is the child registered?  We must take precautions that problems don’t arise for her later.”

What is the likelihood that Lieserl was a Downs baby?  95% of Downs children are born to older mothers with no hereditary component.  Mileva was 25 at the time of conception.  The percentage of Downs children born due to other factors is 2-3% and then, only 1 in 3 due to a hereditary defect in one parent.  The fact that their third child was schizophrenic then, hardly seems to be related.

And, if Lieserl had been born a Downs baby, would Albert have been pleased when Mileva got pregnant a second time, after they were married? Even without a hereditary factor–likely not known at that time–wouldn’t the feelings be more complex at the thought of a second go-round?  But that same letter begins “I’m not the least bit angry that poor Dollie [his nickname for Mileva] is hatching a new chick.  In fact, I’m happy about it and had already given some thought to whether I shouldn’t see to it that you get a new Lieserl. . . .  Brood on it very carefully so that something good will come of it.”

So what can I conclude that will satisfy the parameters in this letter?  This is the primary source.

Posted in Michele Zackheim, Eduard Einstein, Zurich, Einstein's Daughter, Marija Maric, schizophrenia, Bulgholzli Psychiatric Hospital, Zorka Maric, Milos Maric, Auguste Forel, Serbia, reading, Mileva Maric, Fictional biography, historical fiction, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, point of view, writing | 2 Comments »

11. August 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

For the second time since I began writing fictional biography, someone said, “But how am I to know what’s true?”  My answer is that the scenes are made up, the dialogue, the emotional movement, but the settings are as real as I can make them, and I don’t tamper with known facts–assuming they are recorded somewhere and that I have found them.  I don’t change dates or rearrange events to my own ends, either.  In the case of SANDWALK, my fictional biography of the Charles Darwin family during the 17 months preceding the publication of Origin, it was relatively straightforward, thanks to Darwin being such a frequent and thorough letter writer,  available online at www.darwincorrespondenceproject.com, and their daughter Henrietta’s editing her mother’s letter collection into two volumes called Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters.

In the case of the Einstein book, it’s not so simple.  The letters were written in German, for example, so I’m dependent on translations.  And the executors of his estate were perhaps too conscientious in wanting to preserve Albert’s sainted image and destroyed much that was inconsistent with it.  Consequently, for the period I’m writing about now–August, 1901-November 1901–after Mileva had failed her exams and went home pregnant to Vojvodina (Serbia) to tell her parents and the time she turned up in Stein am Rhein, Switzerland to be near Albert, letters were either never written (unlikely) or were destroyed.   That means it’s up to me to figure out, based on what I can learn about her family and the cultural mores and religious values of Vojvodina in 1901, how that scene might have played with no help from actual accounts.

So, how does that work?  As a novelist, I have to look to the end game.  I know what happened to various family members, ultimately.  I know that Mileva’s father, very successful in terms of worldly goods, owning as many as four farms in various sections of Serbia and two other houses as well, felt he had failed with his children, that they had betrayed him.  I know that Mileva left Serbia to marry Albert after nearly dying, unwed, in childbirth with their first child Lieserl, that Albert never saw the baby, that she disappeared after age 2.  I know that Mileva’s brother was assumed lost in WW I, but then turned up in Russia and became a professor in a university, though his fellow Serbs and family considered his abandonment traitorous.  I know that her sister Zorka became schizophrenic and that she died on a bed of straw surrounded by 43 cats.

So, knowing those things, what can I assume about these people’s characters and their likely responses to Mileva’s news?  Another interesting fact that seems totally out of context is that when Mileva was in residence at Stein am Rhein, Albert sent her two books.  One was a book on hypnotism by Auguste Forel, the most recent director of the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurich.  Since nothing psychological has ever entered their letters before, what might that suggest?  Mileva found the book disgusting, though she’s not very specific on that score.  Perhaps because Forel was into eugenics?  Or is that why he disgusts me?

That’s another problem, of course.  The matter of being revisionist.  I know that Forel’s work was used by Hitler, but it’s 1901 and no one knows that, yet.  It’s got to be kept in mind.

So, therein lie a few of the problems and my manner of addressing them.

Posted in Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, fictional truth, Stein am Rhein, Auguste Forel, Milos Maric, historical fiction, Fictional biography, Einstein, Darwin, reading, Serbia, writing | 2 Comments »