Bevis Longstreth

Author Profile by Bevis Longstreth

I have now written three historical novels: Spindle and Bow, Return of the Shade and Boats Against the Current. The characters developed in each story are wrapped around a particular period of history that I knew just enough about to know I didn't know much, and about which I wanted to know a great deal more.

As a lawyer for most of my professional life, I knew and enjoyed research. And I knew and enjoyed writing that tried to achieve objectives with the reader, be they to inform, enlighten, persuade or engender feelings of passion, hatred, envy, anger or whatever. It seemed natural to turn to history as the platform for making up characters and the stories of their lives.

And there was another reason, if I were to be honest and complete. Old folks like me often need a trainer to force them to do the exercises that, theoretically, they could do alone. These novels were my trainer, forcing me to research the period of history I needed to know to write a novel, but might not have the zeal and energy to take on without the prospect of having that research enable a novel to be born, as Michangelo's chisel enabled his famous Prisoners to be released.

Spindle and Bow grew out of my love for textiles as a pre-eminent art form. In Hali, the leading international magazine for textile nuts, I read of the discovery, in a frozen Scythian tomb in 1949, of an ancient pile wool carpet, magnificent in both the quality of its weaving and the artistic expressions in its design. It was named the Pazyryk, for the village nearest to the tomb. Carbon-dated to the early 5th Century, BC, it puzzled scholars as to where and by whom was it woven. Some of its motifs derived from Persia, suggesting Persian origin. However, other motifs reflected the Animal Style typical of Scythian art. Looms weren't used in Scythia to weave wool. Instead, wool was turned into felt, a much easier process. I developed an urge to imagine the woman who created the Pazyryk. And to tell her tale. My goal was to fashion a story that could claim a high degree of plausibility, even with the scholars, whose diverse opinions, to a high degree, reflected their diverse nationalities. This goal called for an immense amount of research, taking me to three libraries in New York, various museums in London, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Pazyryk now hangs. I also spent almost a week at the site of the tomb, now emptied, in Siberia, camping with members of my family and savoring the surroundings, virtually unchanged for well over two thousand years.

The story's heroine is Rachel, a young Sardian Jew of consummate skill at weaving, who toils in the royal workshop of Cyrus the Younger, second son of Great King Darius II and his Queen, Parysatis. Her name comes from the Hebrew word for ewe. Her story spans 3,000 miles from the ancient city of Sardis on the western edge of the Persian Empire in Anatolia to the Scythian village of Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains of southwestern Siberia. Both sites are richly endowed with gold, a metal that, by chance, brings Rachel together with a Scythian prince, Targitus.

My second novel, Return of the Shade, tells the story of Parysatis, a Queen and Queen Mother of the Persian Empire at its peak of power. I stumbled upon her in doing research for Spindle and Bow. She lived for about 60 years from around 444 to 384 BC, one and a half millennia ago. Ok, I know what you're thinking: "Why bother?" "Why pluck this woman from the dustbin of ancient history? For goodness sakes, she wasn't even a Greek!" No, not Greek. She was the purist strain of Persian, a direct descendent of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid dynasty and of the Persian Empire, which lasted 220 years from 550 to 330 BC - a dynasty that brought stability, prosperity and a flourishing civilization to what we now call the Middle East and beyond. In its day, the largest and most powerful Empire the world had ever seen. It extended from the Indus River to North Africa, from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf, all told one million square miles.

So, one reason for writing of the Persian Empire was to try to understand the proud and glorious origins of what today is Iraq and Iran. The head and heart of this Empire was the so-called "land of two rivers", the Euphrates and the Tigris, between which the cradle of civilization had rocked. The research necessary to tell the Parysatis story might start to fill in my personal knowledge gap. Readers of my story might similarly benefit. But this was not the main reason for creating this novel.

The Persian Empire had everything under the sun. Everything, that is, except a single historian to preserve for posterity its highs and lows. Herodotus, much later recognized as the father of history, was just then making a name for himself, and that name was Greek. As seen through his eyes, and those of other Greek historians, the Persians were weak and effeminate: a barbaric and despotic foil against which the courage, discipline, democracy, and culture of the Greek civilization could be set. London's British Museum titled its stunning exhibition "The Forgotten Empire."

So, my heroine was the forgotten Queen of a forgotten Empire. And that's the answer to why Parysatis? At first I hoped, and then, gradually, became convinced that hers was an immensely interesting and important life that no one had bothered to write about. Parysatis wielded great power as Queen and Queen Mother. Imagining the hows, whys and wherefores was my goal in writing Return of the Shade. It was a joyful task, and, in the end, one that convinced me hers was a life well worth remembering.

In Boats Against the Current, I was able to fashion tales out of the history of the Great Depression, an event that gave rise to many stories now forgotten. FDR's Works Progress Administration (WPA) is the skeletal platform on which this "coming-of-age" story rests. Dan Murdock, a widowed and quirky cattleman from Manhattan, Kansas, raises Adam and Benno, twins who grow up to hate their father's right wing politics. Both connect with the WPA: Adam as a young lawyer hired to help Harry Hopkins; Benno as a young, unemployed and impoverished sculptor in New York City, who finally lands a job carving plaques for the WPA. Demanding little imagination, the plaques depict only the three letters of the acronym and the date 1935. It was these plaques, a number of which adorn the stone wall along the road from Bear Mountain Inn up to Perkins Drive, leading to the summit of Bear Mountain, that first suggested a story about the man who carved them. One of them is pictured on the front cover of the book. On bike rides up Bear Mountain, I couldn't get them out of my mind. Who could have done those carvings. Would he be as boring as those plaques were repetitive?

One of my story's central characters is a young woman who experienced up close the Dust Bowl as it affected Dalhart, a new town in the Texas panhandle, a wheat-inspired, wheat-supported town -a town drawing farmers eager to accept the federal government's incentives to plow under nature's long-stem drought-impervious grasses in order to plant wheat. She had vocal and acting talent on offer when her nose and throat weren't filled with dust. Violet Long was her name. She flees Dalhart after history's worst duster hit the town on her 21st birthday, seeking work in New York City.

There is another young woman in the story. Mariah Massie, who leaves her home in Richmond, Virginia to attend Newton Theological Seminary. She's a self-possessed, selfish and controlling woman, embarrassed by her parents' wealth and seeking a way through religion to give it away. She lands a summer job on Huey Long's staff, finds reinforcement of her goal to end great wealth in the Kingfish's efforts to enact "Share the Wealth" legislation to cap wealth - he gave speeches condemning the richest one percent -- and ends up helping him write his autobiography, Every Man A King. Her desire for control extends to the many men in her life, of whom Adam is an important example. Between bouts of love-making, they discover irreconcilable political differences, making for a ceaselessly fraught relationship.

Long's political touch, flamboyance, braggadocian talents and persona, overall, remind one, irresistibly, of Donald Trump. And his attack on concentrations of wealth reminds one of Bernie Sanders. Long's powers of persuasion were immense. In Arkansas, he lifted up Hattie Caraway, wife of a Senator who died, leaving her in his unexpired term. She decided to run for re-election against 7 or 8 men, a hopeless prospect. Long delivered to her a shocking victory. Had he not been gunned down in 1935, who knows how the era of FDR would have changed?

For this book, my research took me to the Kansas State University library, in Manhattan, Kansas, to examine the papers of a prominent cattleman, including his correspondence with William Allen White, the owner and publisher of the famed Emporia Gazette. I also spent a week in the library of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, examining the extraordinary oral history of Hallie Flanagan's Theatre Project. And, course, I spent much time in the National Archives.

For sheer fun, nothing at my age beats reading history. But I have found this pleasure to be greatly enhanced by braiding it with the creation of stories about people who lived through that history.

Bevis Longstreth

February 23, 2016