Hedric, Dick, and Peter
More musings on where characters come from.
In my last Post I offered a few thoughts on ways of introducing a character. It’s not the first time I’ve talked about characters and what’s often called ‘character development’ (see also 'character creation', 'character planning', even 'character mapping’). All these terms feel a little bit off-kilter for the way I deal with characters. I’d sum it up this way: I don’t 'create’ characters, I find them. Or, better still, they find me. Where they come from, I don’t know; but in one or two instances I have an idea, or part of an idea.
In that earlier Post, I spent some time discussing one character in particular: Hedric. He’s been a POV character in only one book (so far): Vows and Watersheds. In the following two, he’s generally more in the background; in The Skilthorn Congress, he’s offstage for the first quarter of the narrative, and in Stones and Secrets for more than three-quarters; but he’s more significant than this may suggest, as evidenced by the number of times Jerya and others refer to him in his absence (nearly forty in Stones and Secrets).
Having teased it previously, the earlier post finally spilled the beans on Hedric’s genesis. I struggled then, and still do, to think of another character, in any of my fiction, where I consciously based even specific aspects of a character on another person, real or fictional. With Hedric, however, I intentionally drew specific cues from Dick Callum in Arthur Ransome’s books (he and his sister Dorothea first appear in Winter Holiday, possibly my favourite of the whole series).
Hedric, like Dick is scientifically-minded. He wears prominent round glasses—tick—and at times of stress or when he needs a moment to think he likes to remove them and clean the lenses carefully. He even, in a nod to a specific episode in Winter Holiday, thinks about centres of gravity to settle his mind when halfway up a scary crag.
From the 'Character Connections' Post
However, Hedric1 can’t be simply a shadow-Dick. Although Ransome is astute enough to hardly ever specify the ages of his characters2, there’s sufficient indirect evidence to feel confident Dick can’t be older than about eleven in Winter Holiday, and therefore thirteen at most in his final appearance in The Picts and the Martyrs3. Hedric is in his mid-twenties at his first appearance in Vows and Watersheds, twelve years older by the time of Stones and Secrets.
Even then it’s too simplistic to think that Hedric is simply a grown-up version of Dick Callum. Dick is not and never has been the 'model' for the character, only a starting-point. Besides, it’s recently occurred to me that there’s another fictional character who may also have contributed to Hedric’s evolution.
This revelation—if that’s not too strong a word—arrived as I read a splendid Post by Laura Thompson on Dorothy L Sayers’s novel Gaudy Night. Like Winter Holiday, this is a personal favourite: both figure in my Top Twelve fictional reads.
But just how close are the similarities? Here’s part of Laura’s description of Lord Peter Wimsey:
…a figure of near-fathomless emotional depths, who loves John Donne, is a historian of weight and discernment, seeks to advance his wife’s career, supplies her with a mansion near Park Lane and is stupendously good in bed…
I’m not sure Hedric’s 'emotional depths' are fathomless, though he’s by no means shallow… so what about those other attributes?
Historian of weight and discernment: No, but he has other academic distinction; he’s essentially what used to be called a 'gentleman amateur', but he’s a very sound astronomer: he and Jerya together do original work on refining the measurement of distance to the moons. He’s also, as we learn in The Skilthorn Congress, a decent field geologist or perhaps more precisely a geomorphologist.
Seeks to advance his wife’s career/Supplies her with a mansion: I think we can bracket these together. There is a nice town house, if not a mansion, but more importantly, when Hedric’s uncle dies he inherits the huge country house (and estate) at Skilthorn. In TSC Jerya describes it as 'ghastly', but wastes no time in putting it to good use by hosting the eponymous Congress; soon enough it’ll be home to the first real school for girls in the Five Principalities.
Is stupendously good in bed: evidence is less clear. Only a single sexual encounter is described, and—at least at this point—Hedric is the less experienced of the pair. Though having said that, both Jerya’s previous lovers were female.
For another perspective, Ann Kennedy Smith sums up Wimsey as 'aristocratic, athletic and intelligent'; Hedric is all of these. Aristocratic and intelligent we can take as read. As for 'athletic,' consider Jerya’s first sighting of him:
She gained only a rear view of the rider as he dismounted. A man, undoubtedly, and young, by the slim build and lithe movements, in well-fitting but unostentatious riding-clothes, with splashed boots and a dark green jacket.
From ‘Vows and Watersheds’.
Yes, 'well-fitting' is code for 'has nice buttocks'. And it’s unfamiliarity with mountains, not any lack of fitness, that lands him in a bit of bother a couple of times during the Crossing to the Sung Lands.
Hedric is unusual in that he’s essentially the only one of my characters where I have any clear sense of specific (even if partial) inspiration(s). This doesn’t mean, of course, that I created every other character from virgin clay—and if you count all the walk-ons and bit-parts, there are over 250 named characters4 in the five volumes published so far. All I can say for sure is what I said before: Where they come from, I don’t know.
And just to be clear, while I consciously drew on Dick Callum for some of Hedric’s attributes, I never consciously connected him with Peter Wimsey until very recently. I can’t say, then, that Wimsey definitely is an 'inspiration'; but if my imagination is a simmering stock-pot, Gaudy Night and the rest of the Wimsey novels are among the ingredients.
Of course this prompts the follow-up question: is Jerya in any way derived from Harriet Vane? The correspondences are neither as close nor as clear, but there are a few similarities. However, the same could be said of numerous other people from life and fiction. Let’s just say there’s a pinch or two of Harriet in the stock-pot too…
A related area where the influence of Gaudy Night is at least a prime suspect is the struggle, spearheaded by Jerya, for women’s education in the Five Principalities5. In this respect Ann Kennedy Smith’s Post, referencing Dorothy L Sayers’s presence among the very first women to receive degrees from Oxford, is particularly apposite. But again, a suspect is all it is; I can’t definitively pronounce it guilty.
For one thing, life might be implicated here just as much as art is. I didn’t go to Oxford like Sayers, but I was at Cambridge in the 1970’s and (un)lucky enough to have gone to an all-male college. (Unlucky in almost every respect, but it’s added a few bones to the stock-pot.) Like most of my contemporaries at St John’s, I participated in campaigns for 'co-residence'—a clunking term for what should simply have been called normal life—and I heard all kinds of lame arguments against it.
Well, things are better now; St John’s even has a female Master6. And I’d like to think I’ve made a decent recovery—eventually.
Afterthought.
The two novels mentioned here have publication dates just two years apart: Winter Holiday appeared in 1933 and Gaudy Night in 1935. Coincidence? You tell me.
Re the glasses-cleaning: as you’ll find in a future volume, he’s passed this habit on to the next generation.
Admittedly there’s a glaring exception in the very first line of Swallows and Amazons (the third word, in fact).
Not counting Great Northern?, where the chronology is unclear.
And that’s only the humans.
And there are scattered hints that, for those not Chosen as Dawnsingers, opportunities are pretty limited in the Sung Lands too.
Yes, Heather Hancock is the Master, not the Mistress. The leaders of the Guild of Dawnsingers are Masters too.
I loved this behind-the-scenes look at character creation. It’s rare to see such thoughtful dissection of inspiration while still letting characters grow beyond their roots. Thank you for sharing
I loved the Swallows & Amazons series as a child. They had a huge impact on me - love of adventure and wilder places. And surely Dorothy L. Sayers is due a revival - Gaudy Night being one of her best.