Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier on writing Cold Mountain

'As I wrote my way into it, I found myself less and less interested in the civil war itself … I was more interested in the devastation visited on ordinary lives'

guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 September 2011 22.55 BST


The author Charles Frazier. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

I've never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends.

From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the civil war, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s. So, just one direct transmission of memory from hers to mine makes for a pretty shallow past. And yet, the civil war is as mythic in the American mind as the siege of Troy.

The year I began Cold Mountain, 1989, I had been working on a novel set in the current moment. About all I recall clearly of those months of writing is a beautiful couple of September weeks in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a story set in the southern Appalachians and in northern Mexico, Tarahumara country, where I'd spent some time. I recall a hapless narrator on the road trying to find his runaway wife. But by late fall that year I had abandoned the story because I had fallen into a much better one, and it just happened to be historic.

As I wrote my way into it, I found myself less and less interested in the civil war itself, all that fetishising of the generals and their tragic grandeur. I was more interested in the devastation visited on ordinary lives. And also the shadows it cast forward to the present, since it has always seemed to me that historic novels tell as much about the times in which they are written as the times in which they are set.

I was interested, too, in why my ancestors volunteered to fight. They didn't own slaves; like most people, they did their own work. Of four brothers, two were dead by the time General Robert E Lee handed over his sword and went home to brood and fade into such a legend that even his horse has its own large grave marker. My great-great grandfather was one of the surviving brothers. He came back and built a small country chapel – still standing – and became a Universalist minister.

I wished I had been able to ask him how he looked at the war when he volunteered and how he looked at it when he came home. So, the story I found myself writing became an Odyssey, not an Iliad. Returning, not going. A long journey home through a devastated world. Late in the third century BC, the Greek geographer Eratosthenes wrote: "You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the four winds." His point, of course, had to do with readers who get twisted up trying to untangle fact and fiction, especially the ones needing too much of the former.

While writing Cold Mountain, I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic. Also sometimes violent. The mountains he wanders seem to go on forever. I wanted Cold Mountain to incorporate the sort of practical magic and weirdness of those stories and of murder ballads and lonesome fiddle tunes, but I also wanted the book to insist on the reality of its fictional world.

Henry James wrote that "The historical novel is, for me condemned … to a fatal cheapness." And yet he also wrote that "The sense of the past is our sense." I kept both of those lines pinned to the wall over my writing desk. Every day, trying to avoid the one and reach for the other. It is not either/or, though. It's a continuum. The Scarlet Pimpernel near one end, The Scarlet Letter near the other.

I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it. So the first couple of years were a learning process. Just simple things, like understanding the narrative voice as a distinct character in the book. Certainly not me and also not the characters' inner voices, but the voice of the tale teller with his/her distinct language and knowledge and attitude toward the world. Maybe I would have learned that in the first week of a creative writing programme, but to me fiction seems too important to professionalise. Leave it to amateurs. You're always in the process of learning the trade anyway, even though it's a primitive one, shaped from fragile materials, mostly just words and memory.

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I love the beginning of Cold Mountain (in fact I loved the whole book) where he jumps through a window in the convalescent home - it reminds me of Catch 22 (convalescent home and for that matter English Patient).....

the movie was atrocious - Jude Law and Nicole Kidman - how are they supposed to be Southerners.....(just my prejudice)

and now, I have to go to bed.....

it's 9pm here but I'm on a kind of early shift to learn the new software at work....(all this week)

I also have a panic attack.....which is not as bad as it sounds, given that I'm used to them now and they dissipate in the night....

sorry I haven't been around much - it's been a bit difficult recently......

I shall endeavour to keep up with things a bit more when I get back on my feet.....

really wanted to read that Stephen Pinker thing but not right now

...I'm sorry you're not in top form Catherine, but glad you're posting again.

In the past, if I was at home and near a teapot, valerian tea helped stave off a panic attack. It got so the (albeit discusting) smell of it brewing started to calm me. In an on-street emergency valerian pills aren't too bad, but they're not as effective as the tea. I haven't had a panic attack for years, but I always have a tin of tea on hand.

I had to resist the urge to leave out some apostrophes

blue moon wrote:
I had to resist the urge to leave out some apostrophes

fun times

I might try that - thanks for the tip, Moony.....

I stopped one of my medicines and had no more panic attacks....downside - I had a breakdown.....

the mind is a puzzle.....

but teh training is going swimmingly......I don't know why the other people have a problem with the new software - I like it!

Camomile tea calms me down.