5. May 2012 by Nancy Pinard.

I am a writer.  I am also a tennis player.  (In fact, I have torn the ligaments in my right elbow playing tennis, and in lieu of having Tommy John surgery, I wear a wrist-to-shoulder metal  Bledsoe brace on my racquet arm which makes me look like the bionic woman.)  I frequently think about what the two have in common–like the need to learn the craft by taking lessons, then putting in hours of painstaking practice, until certain skills become automatic.  How many top- spin forehands have I hit in my life?  Too many to count.  And how many balls did I serve before the ball consistently hit the court in the proper box, let alone where I wanted it?  A googolplex, at least.  I started as a child.

But am I obsessed?  It seems that I am not, for when a tennis friend suggested that I write a novel about tennis, nothing resonated. “Anne Lamott has already done that,” I said, referring to Lamott’s book Crooked Little Heart, as if only one novel could be written on any subject.  It was an excuse lamer than my right arm, so how do I explain that a sport I’ve allowed to occupy so much time, for which I’ve risked and sustained significant injury, is not an obsession?

It leads me to think about subjects that do resonate.  A writer friend who sees my drafts before they are published noted that all my books have young women who figure prominently.  Another said, “Everything you write is about death.”  Yes.  Because the one thing I’ve never gotten over is the death of my sister, never mind she died before I was born.

So how do my current topics–my historical subjects–draw on that obsession?  Both the Darwin and the Einstein marriages and careers turn on a dead daughter.  It’s well-known that Charles Darwin’s faith deteriorated at the death of his daughter Annie.  But imagine my surprise when, well into my research for the novel, I first saw a photo of her gravestone.  Her name was Anne Elizabeth–my dead sister’s name, spelled exactly the same way.  The god of synchronicity was laughing.  No surprise then, that Henrietta Darwin, Annie’s next younger sister, has a point of view in the novel. There’s the obsession:  how death affects young women.

Why young women?  Because this is an area of my life where I continue to come of age as I explore what my sister’s death meant to my life.  I was the youngest child in my family, but my sister, being the oldest, left her place vacant.  I leap-frogged my brother, the middle child, and took over for her, becoming both the youngest and the oldest, carrying on my back a rag-picker’s bag full of ambiguity and identity confusion.   So yes, Henrietta Darwin is me.  And Emma Darwin is my mother.  And yes, my mother really did carry my dead sister’s body around at the wake.  I wasn’t born yet.  But in the few moments when the subject came up–the subject shrouded in a sacred silence in my household–mother described how she couldn’t let her baby go, how in the years that followed–years she was taking care of my brother and me, both babies, she had trouble covering us up at night when Anne was out in the rain.   I don’t remember the context of these revelations.  Perhaps it was the day I unearthed an unlabeled box in the hall closet.  Inside were my sister’s tiny pink bathrobe, matching slippers, and her well-worn Raggedy Ann doll, called DeeDee Ann.

All the best details come from real life.

Albert and Mileva Einstein also “lost” a daughter, but the fact was either unknown or obscured until their love letters surfaced in the closet of his oldest son’s wife, the person who cleaned out Mileva’s apartment in Zurich.   The little girl lived until she was two, at which time she contracted scarlet fever and likely died.  But the best efforts of scholars have not turned up documentation of her birth, baptism, or death–either because the shame of her being born prior to their marriage caused Mileva’s father to make certain records were destroyed, or because the records were destroyed in Serbia’s many wars.  My novel, as yet, is incomplete.  I’ve not yet written the passage where the baby is born.  But I know my identification with Mileva is so strong, it takes conscious effort to write Albert’s side of the story.

It takes this kind of obsession to sustain the work of writing a novel–the way the work gives back to the author.

What obsession is driving the work for you?

Posted in Zurich, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, Einstein's Daughter, Charles Darwin, Annie Darwin, obsession, Einstein's children, point of view, Mileva Maric, Einstein, death, reading, historical fiction, Serbia, writing | 1 Comment »

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 »

8. June 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I’m working on a scene where it’s hard to understand Einstein’s behavior.  It’s mid-July, 1901, and Mileva is about to re-sit her exams at the Polytech, having failed them the summer before.  It’s her last chance to pass, and, oh-my-god, she’s pregnant now, with Einstein’s baby.  You might think he’d want to be there for her, to coach her through, to help her with geometry, a subject that eluded her, no thanks to a particularly obtuse professor in the subject.  Surely she would have appreciated his presence.  Whatever happens with the tests, she must head home to Serbia afterward, to tell her parents she’s going to have a baby. 

Did I mention the two aren’t married?

How do I make Einstein’s behavior something other than a dastardly abandonment, when instead of staying in Zurich, he’s off vacationing with his mother and sister in Mettmenstetten?  Yes, indeed.  He’s at a cushy hotel, the Pension-Paradies in the Alps!  

Fortunately, I have point-of-view on my side.  The important thing here is not to look at the big picture and see what he might have done, but to get inside his head and see how the prospect looked to him.  And I don’t mean the view from the hotel veranda.  Behind his eyes, I see that the greatest threat to Mileva’s well-being is not the exams or her father.  It’s his mother.  He’s off to do battle with the dragon.  I’m reminded of Grendal’s Dam and thinking I might need to re-read Beowulf.   s

Posted in Switzerland, Fictional biography, historical fiction, point of view, Mettmenstetten, Pauline Einstein, Einstein, family members, Mileva Maric, Serbia, writing | 3 Comments »

15. February 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Additional research–my thanks to Marion Kaplan for her book The Making of the Jewish Middle Class–reveals that as laws in Germany allowed Jews freedom to join the professions and become upwardly mobile, the German ideals of cleanliness entered the Jewish household.  They accepted the need for the clutterless household, regularly picked up and polished, as a way to bring security into an insecure existence.  Jewish housewives, it happens, came to be trend setters in terms of furnishings, as, thanks to having more relatives living in cities, they brought city styles and furniture arrangements to the outlying areas.

But here is a most revealing fact in terms of why Pauline Einstein, sight unseen, opposed Albert’s marriage to a Serb:

“Both Gentiles and Jews believed that dirt could lead to decadence, but for Jews it could also lead to the dreaded identification with their proletarian, Eastern, nonacculturated brothers and sisters living in the ghettos of Berlin and other major cities.  German Jews focused on eliminating dirt and smell—class symbols—from their lives.” (Kaplan, 33)

Anyone Eastern European threatened to bring down the standards of the household, those countries being associated with dirt and odor.  German households had a horror of garlic, that being the odor associated with Eastern European, nonacculturated Jews.   Imagine Albert’s mother, having a son who couldn’t be bothered to wash, comb his hair, or tie his shoes, now wanting to bring a Serb into the family!  (Land of gypsies and brigands, Serbia.  And Mileva’s father was proud of it.)  For a persecuted people group like the Jews, entering the middle class, acculturating with German Gentiles, was a way to avoid anti-Semitism.  

 And, I’m learning about my own family–that German grandmother, whose bedsheets were passed down to me, each with a little red thread in the exact center, so that when making the bed, one could center the sheets perfectly.  She was my mother’s mother, and so now I understand my mother’s horror of clutter–the need for bare kitchen counters, all appliances put away–and her dislike of garlic or any foods containing it.  Needless to say, she never made pasta–which we then called spaghetti.  (My dad loved it, but he had to eat it in a restaurant.)  I understand why cooking was no fun to mother–so much work, if one had to get out all the appliances, do the cooking, then expunge the evidence of the labor as soon as it was accomplished.  My mother was a bright, funny woman who couldn’t tolerate a mess.  I always felt this intolerance extinguished her creativity, not just in the kitchen, but in other aspects of her life, too.  Creativity is messy.  I can’t imagine being able to write a novel if I couldn’t stand the mess of structurelessness that  precedes a meaningful assemblage of pieces.

Posted in Pauline Einstein, Marion Kaplan, Serbia, reading, Mileva Maric, Research methods, writing | No Comments »

10. December 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

In my continued quest for a sense of the character of the people of Serbia, I found this description on the internet.  It is a bit that was written by  US. Congresswoman Helen Dilich Bentley in 1948 for American-Serb Life:

For instance, Serbianism can be synonymous with fighting for the right, or what we believe is right, with every possible breath.

Then it can mean giving whole-heartedly of whatever you have to help one who needs it.

Or it may be simply sharing whatever you have with everyone; or sticking with him, come hell or high water; Or the guslar spirit, where your cards are stacked for you.

The Do or Die Spirit
It might be a determination to fight doggedly on, as the Serbs did when the Turks tried to master them, and as they probably will again before this century is out.

Or a fiery spirit and flaming temperament.

Perhaps it is none of these.  Or perhaps it is all of them rolled into one.

Serbianism is too big a thing to be able to toss aside lightly with a definition of one or two words.

I’ve watched this Serbianism in action from the West Coast to the East Coast.
Whatever it is, it’s the same everywhere.

You come to the door of a Serbian home.
You’re welcomed with open arms, even though they have never seen you before.

Real Hospitality
The table is spread with strudel, sarma, kuspa y meso, and other favorite dishes.
Rakija and wino are brought forth in abundance.  You are to make yourself at home.

It can be no other way.  If it is, your host feels he has slipped up somewhere.
It’s both a disgrace and dishonor for a guest to be dissatisfied in the home of a Serb.

____________________

How like the description of Deda Bora in Their Backs to the World!

Thanks to the response of Serb Karl Haudbourg to my post, I now am connected to his blog where you simply must see the videos of Serbia:   http://www.ambassador-serbia.com/videos-serbia/

Posted in Serbia, reading, Research methods | 1 Comment »

9. December 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

One of my challenges with this book, in addition to getting a sense of all the physics, is that I have not yet visited the countries important to the principal persons in the text.  Generating scene tends to be very dependent on setting in my mind, and while I can look at travel guides and the internet to see pictures, a trip to Switzerland and Serbia is on the schedule for 2011–assuming the economy improves.  I was already quite familiar with England when I wrote the Darwin book, so this backward approach is different and, I find, slows me down while I do extensive research that hasn’t been internalized.  Yet.

That said, one of the treats of doing this kind of research is a rich addition to my knowledge base.  Prior to this project, my sense of Serbia had no visual geography.  I could point to it on a map and knew about Kosovo and Slobodan Milosevic from news reports of carnage in the late ’90’s. I understood that there was a religious divide–Christians vs Muslims–and that the borders of the country changed with the formation, then disruption of Yugoslavia.  I remembered Winter Olympics in Sarajevo–mostly seeing the Olympic village covered in snow.

But what the place really looks like?  What the climate is like?  What grows there?  Who the people are?  What they eat?  In addition to books on Serbia found in the juvenile non-fiction section of Wright Memorial Library–books full of gorgeous photographs that show me a country the size of Maine with farmland like the American midwest in the north and mountains like Vermont in the south–I also found a wonderful book of essays called With Their Backs to the World:  Portraits from Serbia by a Norwegian journalist named Asne Seierstad.  Between 1999 and 2004 she made three trips to Serbia, finding people willing to be interviewed, willing to open their homes so that she might see such things as Deda Bora’s bedroom where DaVinci’s Last Supper was hanging on the wall though the man, like Milosovic, was an atheist.  When she inquired, she learned that this was not Christ at all, but Tsar Lazar, a Serbian hero who died on the Kosovo battlefield in 1389.  There he sits, eating a last meal with his soldiers.  Judas, to Deda Bora is really the traitor, Vuk Brankovic, who caused Tsar Lazar to lose the battle.  This revisionist view is held by a man who is a jack-of-all-trades, who goes to his neighbor’s home to mend his harrow, then, since he is there and the neighbor is old and hunchbacked, harrows his entire field for him.  He was married to a woman who, after losing four babies within one month of delivery, put her fifth infant, bundled up, out on the road on a bitter cold December day, waiting for a neighbor to take the baby home, believing that the curse of her children’s deaths would be broken  if the child was taken into another home.  She then retrieved the child and he grew to manhood.  All the while Deda Bora is telling his story, he is serving Turkish coffee with homemade plum brandy and cheese he has made himself.   He gives her his recipe, suggests that Asne might make some cheese herself when she gets home.

This is the land that birthed Mileva Maric, though she grew up in Vojvodina in the north, in the late 19th century, a Serbian Orthodox Christian, in an upper middle class family.   Deda Bora is from a dying village in the southern mountains of Kosovo.

While Mileva has little in common on the surface, I see similarities in her dogged determination not to give up what she perceives is right without a fight, her willingness to exhaust herself for others in acts of self-sacrifice,  and her taste for strong coffee.

Asne Seierstad, Norwegian Journalist

Posted in Asne Seierstad, Serbia, reading, Mileva Maric | 2 Comments »

9. December 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

One of my challenges with this book, in addition to getting a sense of all the physics, is that I have not yet visited the countries important to the principal persons in the text.  Generating scene tends to be very dependent on setting in my mind, and while I can look at travel guides and the internet to see pictures, a trip to Switzerland and Serbia is on the schedule for 2011–assuming the economy improves.  I was already quite familiar with England when I wrote the Darwin book, so this backward approach is different and, I find, slows me down while I do extensive research that hasn’t been internalized.  Yet.

That said, one of the treats of doing this kind of research is a rich addition to my knowledge base.  Prior to this project, my sense of Serbia had no visual geography.  I could point to it on a map and knew about Kosovo and Slobodan Milosevic from news reports of carnage in the late ’90’s. I understood that there was a religious divide–Christians vs Muslims–and that the borders of the country changed with the formation, then disruption of Yugoslavia.  I remembered Winter Olympics in Sarajevo–mostly seeing the Olympic village covered in snow.

But what the place really looks like?  What the climate is like?  What grows there?  Who the people are?  What they eat?  In addition to books on Serbia found in the juvenile non-fiction section of Wright Memorial Library–books full of gorgeous photographs that show me a country the size of Maine with farmland like the American midwest in the north and mountains like Vermont in the south–I also found a wonderful book of essays called With Their Backs to the World:  Portraits from Serbia by a Norwegian journalist named Asne Seierstad.  Between 1999 and 2004 she made three trips to Serbia, finding people willing to be interviewed, willing to open their homes so that she might see such things as Deda Bora’s bedroom where DaVinci’s Last Supper was hanging on the wall though the man, like Milosovic, was an atheist.  When she inquired, she learned that this was not Christ at all, but Tsar Lazar, a Serbian hero who died on the Kosovo battlefield in 1389.  There he sits, eating a last meal with his soldiers.  Judas, to Deda Bora is really the traitor, Vuk Brankovic, who caused Tsar Lazar to lose the battle.  This revisionist view is held by a man who is a jack-of-all-trades, who goes to his neighbor’s home to mend his harrow, then, since he is there and the neighbor is old and hunchbacked, harrows his entire field for him.  He was married to a woman who, after losing four babies within one month of delivery, put her fifth infant, bundled up, out on the road on a bitter cold December day, waiting for a neighbor to take the baby home, believing that the curse of her children’s deaths would be broken  if the child was taken into another home.  She then retrieved the child and he grew to manhood.  All the while Deda Bora is telling his story, he is serving Turkish coffee with homemade plum brandy and cheese he has made himself.   He gives her his recipe, suggests that Asne might make some cheese herself when she gets home.

This is the land that birthed Mileva Maric, though she grew up in Vojvodina in the north, in the late 19th century, a Serbian Orthodox Christian, in an upper middle class family.   Deda Bora is from a dying village in the southern mountains of Kosovo.

While Mileva has little in common on the surface, I see similarities in her dogged determination not to give up what she perceives is right without a fight, her willingness to exhaust herself for others in acts of self-sacrifice,  and her taste for strong coffee.

Asne Seierstad, Norwegian Journalist

Posted in Asne Seierstad, Serbia, reading, Mileva Maric | No Comments »