Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner’

 When people talk about what stories mean, I usually hold my tongue. 

It’s a bit like asking what words mean. The words “I do,” spoken in chapel, mean something very different from the word “and” when you order a ham and cheese.

Words do different kinds of things and so do stories.

Yesterday’s note was about a kind of story that hits me as a contemporary version of scripture. These stories illuminate the possibility of human goodness in some way. They are hard to do well, and I admire the writers who can pull them off.

Other stories do different things: Science fiction stories do different work than detective stories. We use them differently. They feed different parts of our imagination.

Different kinds of stories resonate with different types of personalities. A person who loves one kind of story might not like another. That seems natural to me. It would be odd, in a world of such diverse tastes, if we all liked the same kind of story.

One of the kinds I especially like is a story that captures a moment in history.

I spent my working years with newspapers. Objectivity is the ideal: Good reporters try to give an account of the facts that everyone who would tell if they witnessed the same event. But good reporters are human, and they fail daily.

One of the reasons is that we simply never know all the facts. What we decide to include and how we arrange the facts we do know colors our account in small ways that erode the ideal of objectivity. We just don’t know.

I like to read short stories about small but fascinating events of the past. There are gaps in the factual accounts. Imagination fills in those gaps.

To me, the model of this kind of story is Guy Davenport’s story “John Charles Tapner.” Tapner was the last man executed on the isle of Guernsey.

In 1854, Victor Hugo, who was famous for his hated of capital punishment, went to Guernsey to investigate. The great writer came with his official family, his mistress and his dog, Senate.

Guernsey was a small place. The islanders knew their famous guest didn’t approve of executions and was not likely to write warm, glowing things about them. But they found him fascinating and appalling. They weren’t bored.

So what was Hugo’s visit to Guernsey like? We know it occurred. We know some of the facts. We even know what his dog looked like. We don’t know what most of the people were thinking.

To get a complete picture, Davenport had to imagine it.
His research was thorough. It’s hard to tell what’s fact and what’s fiction.