Seacoast Blog #82
February 7, 2010

I wish I had more time for Kenneth Roberts. He not only managed to turn writing about history into a profitable career, but he did it right here where we live. And he did it time and time again, picking factual stories from the seacoast Maine and New Hampshire region and turning them into bestselling novels. He did it with "Indian fighter" Robert Rogers, and with Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear, and again with our Tory connection to Canada during the Revolution, and again with cannibalistic sailors on Boon Island just 12 miles off our shore. (Continued below)

For decades I’ve been picking up books by Roberts – and putting them back down. As fascinated as I am with local history topics that seem to absorb most of my life, I have never gotten beyond the first few pages of Arundel, Northwest Passage, Rabble in Arms, Lively Lady, Captain Caution and Oliver Wiswell, or even Boon Island.

While writing my column about local historical fiction last week I got the Roberts bug again. Lately, when I can’t get below the surface of a printed book, I order an audio copy or have it read to me by my Kindle robot. But surprise, not one of Roberts popular books, from what I could discover, has ever been Kindleized or recorded on tape. Only one historian, Jack Bales, has written a biography of Roberts. In fact he wrote two.

I emailed Bales who is the reference librarian at the University of Mary Washington Library in Fredericksburg, VA and he kindly wrote back the next day. But his biographies, he said, "are not really biographies". One was "an annotated bibliography with lots of photos and a fairly long bio", Bales said, and I will search for it among used books. The other is "something of a biography, but it had a lot of analysis of the books", Bales wrote. The author’s literary estate, he explained, is run by a bank in Portland, Maine that keeps a pretty tight lid on the copyrights. My guess is that Roberts was so traumatized by his Hollywood experience that he didn’t want to see his precious well-research novels mutilated again.

So, of course, I now want to write a book about Roberts. But that will never happen. Although his books remain popular sellers, at least as used paperbacks, my guess is that Roberts writing style grows less and less accessible as the years pass and it is unlikely that a major publisher will invest in a book about a guy who doesn’t want his stuff made into movies.

I did order a paperback copy of Boon Island, Roberts last novel published in 1956 just before his death. I bought the 1996 reprint by University Press of New England that includes almost 100 pages of added info including historical details on the 1710 shipwreck and an essay by Jack Bales. At least I will read that. Bales notes in the introduction that Kenneth Roberts shocked the people of Portsmouth when he gave a lecture at the Warner House in 1937 defending Benedict Arnold. Apparently locals couldn’t handle Roberts’ historical assessment that Arnold was a man Americans should be proud of. I will make another attempt at reading this novel, I promise.

I knew that Portsmouth librarian Dorothy Vaughan helped Roberts with his research on Northwest Passage. I have seen a little of their correspondence in the Vaughan collection that she donated to the NH Historical Society on her death in 2004. My first impression is that Vaughan was thrilled to help out the famous author who pushed her to do a lot of digging for a few morsels of attention. It is a topic I would love to dig into, but not one the world is waiting to hear about. I believe Vaughan later asked Roberts to sign some books for her Girl Scout troupe and he did so with great reluctance.

I did not know until this last spurt of research that Roberts actually wrote an entire book about how he wrote his books. That may seem like an egomaniacal exercise these days (the book runs of 450 pages), but we forget that Roberts was really hot stuff from the late 1930s. HIs reputation as one of the nation’s premier historical writers lasted well into the 1960s and 70s. He did win a Pullitzer and got onto the cover of Time magazine.

The Portsmouth Public Library has a copy of "I Wanted to Write" by Kenneth Roberts, which makes sense since Dorothy Vaughan was the librarian there for 53 years. I took out that copy even though I am no more likely to read it than Roberts novels at the moment. But I did look up "Dorothy Vaughan" in the index and she is there – one reference on page 4.

So here it is, direct from the pen of Roberts himself. It comes in the middle of his rant against Hollywood:

"Incidentally, when the screen version of Northwest Passage was in productoin at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, those in charge found themselves lacking in technical knowledge concerning the uniforms and behavior of Rogers Rangers."

"In such a circumstance, one would naturally suppose that the possessors of even rudimentary brains would consult the book’s author for the information. But the artists engaged in distorting Northwest Passage turned to Miss Dorothy Vaughan, librarian of the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Public Library."

"Being considerably at sea herself about the details, Miss Vaughan appealed to me for the answers. I told her and she told the Metro technicians, only to have them disregard my accurate replies and use their own conceptions, which were nauseatingly incorrect."

Ouch. Dorothy got a lot of local media coverage for her work in helping Hollywood bring Roberts novel to the silver screen. My guess is that she did not put out a press release about her appearance in this book.

Copyright © 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Quotation from I Wanted to Write by Kenneth Roberts, Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1949.