When you read history, you start to ask yourself what history is.  (I’ve been reading a lot of Rimbaud biographies, and so many of the same anecdotes, the same quotes, even, through literal translation and the more subtle translation of sensibility and emphasis, vary from biography to biography, teller to teller, like a circular game of Telephone.)  The truth of the details, insofar as it can be known, stays the same; the thrust and the feelings differ.

Writing of a time not my own, I brushed up against, I guess, the inverse of that situation.  The world of Under the Poppy is mid-to-late Victorian in fashion and in feel, in available technology, in the patient spool of time between events; it owns a different velocity than a piece of more contemporary fiction might.  While I strove to make sure the details I used were correct (feathering the nest, as in the excellent phrase of Anthony Lane speaking of Flaubert “furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind”), what I want most for a reader is to feel not “the Victorian” (mid-to-late, verging on Edwardian, when did gaslights actually come into use and when were they replaced by electricity?) but the authenticity of this created world, that brothel lobby, that opulent townhouse, that bed with its striped silk hangings and china cups of roses all around; not “real” history because it is fiction, but real history in that you itch from the wool, you smell the fug of flesh and old cigars, you find yourself shivering in the rooms where coal is precious and therefore little-used.  I was there when I wrote it; I want you to go there, too….The true history of a world that never happened.  That’s fiction, isn’t it?