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November 12, 2008 #08

Historian Battles Novelist in War of Words

Rodman Philbrick was born in Portsmouth, NH and is among the most successful of our working writers today. His novel Freak the Mighty has only sold over 2 million copies world-wide, and was made into one of the best family films (The Mighty) ever to fly under the radar. In January, Scholastic will release Rod’s newest novel – The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg. It’s the story of a boy torn between two sides of the Civil War. Rod has promised us an exclusive interview and an advance copy, but I wanted more. I asked him to comment, before the whole world gets to him, on the act of writing children’s fiction based on history. This is,a fter all, a history blog. I thought he might send a scribble or two, but this full-blown little essay just arrived (see below). In addition, I couldn’t wait to post a copy of the cover. I totally love the painting of Homer P Figg, a character I hope will become as familiar to young American boys as Tom What’s-His-Name – Oh ya, -- Sawyer, and that Huckleberry kid.

Making Sure The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg is Mostly True’

By Rodman Philbrick

The American Civil War is, on the one hand, fabulous source material for a novelist. On the other hand (the backhand to the face) there are many more historians, Civil War buffs, and guardians of the sacred dead than there are novelists, and all of them are eager to mercilessly bayonet any writer of fiction who changes so much as a button on a Civil War uniform. So it was with some trepidation that I offered the manuscript of my latest young adult novel to a much published historian of substantial reputation who had already made if clear that books for kids – or at least my books -- were not to be considered literature. Fine – I wasn’t looking for an evaluation of the book’s critical merits, so much as whether or not I’d gotten those uniform buttons – and guns and ammo and such – to pass muster.

The Historian (who, after all, had been kind enough to take the time to read the manuscript) identified several misuses of 1863 vernacular – one of the characters is a Quaker abolitionist – and objected to my use of ‘bullet’ to describe the lead flying through the air instead of the more accurate "Minié balls", the muzzle-loading rifle ammo that killed so many combatants on both sides of the conflict. The historian was correct about usage, of course, but my better angels decided to stick with "bullet" because of my contemporary understanding of 6^th grade boys, who tend to erupt in hysterical laughter whenever the teacher utters words like "Minié balls".

Of more concern to me was a dispute about my use of the phrase "home run" as being an anachronism. I knew from research that baseball was popular at the time of the Civil War and before, and so when one of my characters whacks a slave catcher in the head I described him as rearing back to swing for a home run. "Home run", according to the historian, was not in common use in 1863.

One thing you probably already know about authors: sometimes we are stupidly stubborn about not wanting to change a certain phrase or usage. So it was with me and "home run". I could easily have substituted another phrase but, darn it, home run seemed to fit best. Therefore I had to hunt down "home run" and find out when it was first used, because any use was going to be good enough for me, even if it wasn’t exactly ‘common’.

With the help of my stalwart research assistant, Mr. Google, I eventually determined that a "home run" was first reported in a newspaper in 1858 by young Henry Chadwick, who would become one of the most famous sports reporters of his day. On July 20, 1858 the first of a three game series was played between all-star teams from Brooklyn and New York. More than five thousand fans paid the ten cent admission price, and saw Henry Holder, a player from the Brooklyn Excelsiors, hit the first home run ever recorded in a box score, although surely not the first time a ‘four bagger’ flew over the fence, since the New York team eventually won 22-18, a score then typical of the game.

The home run was "first ever recorded" because newspapers had only recently started printing box scores. The notion of a dedicated sports page was brand new. Many teams, supported by enthusiastic, admission-paying fans, had been playing in Boston and New York for years without newspapers bothering to print the scores. Therefore the phrase "home run" could plausibly be on the lips of a twelve-year-old boy in 1863.

Conclusion? Grant and Lincoln may have won the war, and Joshua Chamberlain surely helped win the Battle of Gettysburg, but Henry Chadwick invented the box score, and made it safe for fictional boys to hit fictional home runs in fictional books about the American Civil War.

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