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I confess, I often cast my own life in dramatic prose. Having read Swann's Way and To the Lighthouse, I know the trick of elevating an ordinary moment by sticking it into narrative:
"Long enough," I said, watching the last irises wilt against the garden wall outside my window. "I've put this review off long enough." The hum of my computer sounded like a long sigh as I tried to remember the name of that book by Virginia Woolf.
Fascinating stuff, I think, but would anyone else think so? Probably not. What writer would care to build a novel around any of us, translating our experience into prose and probing imaginatively into our hearts? Few characters in history have inspired novelists to take up their literary crosses. Most of those who have (Claudius Caesar, Saint Luke, Michelangelo) are so long gone that it's pointless to argue too much about the accuracy of their literary portraits. Their very obscurity makes them perfect fodder for fiction: characters famous enough to attract readers but so remote that nobody much cares what a writer makes up about them. You won't hear any shocked friends of Alexander the Great complaining to Mary Stewart, "I knew him well and I can say for certain that he was not a bisexual!"
Apart from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I'm hard-pressed to think of any great novel (great novel) with a real-life hero who's been dead fewer than a hundred years. Biographies abound, but biographies have rules of their own. We don't demand dramatic movement from them, nor artful prose, only readable information. Biographers are slaves to hard facts but free to be—well, frequently dull. When a biographer writes well, we are surprised and grateful. Novelists, on the other hand, must always sing for their supper; they must entertain as well as enlighten, and their task becomes all the more difficult if they have to limit themselves to historical facts.
That's why it is both moving and fascinating to see two recent novels based on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the one hand, no one ought to be surprised by the widespread interest in this German theologian and pastor. His participation in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler made him a hero of the German Resistance a la Otto Schindler; his death at the hands of the Gestapo demonstrated for all Christians what it can mean to live for Christ in evil times. Last July, a bust of Dietrich Bonhoeffer took its place along with those of nine other modern martyrs in Westminster Cathedral.
On the other hand, Bonhoeffer died just over 50 years ago. His closest friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge, still lives in Germany with his wife, Renate, who happens to be Bonhoeffer's niece. Nor are they Bonhoeffer's only living relatives; in fact, with so many survivors and witnesses floating around, any novelist would feel some anxiety about how to dramatize Bonhoeffer's story without compromising either art or "truth." It's hard to imagine what could attract a good writer to such a daunting project.
Mary Glazener and Denise Giardina both discovered Bonhoeffer's writings years before they began to write about him. Glazener, daughter of a North Carolina preacher, questioned her faith from an early age. During World War II, while Bonhoeffer suffered through Allied bombings in a Berlin prison, Glazener had a husband fighting for the American navy in the Pacific and a child to care for alone at home. Things settled down after the war. Glazener remained a faithful Baptist, even writing and directing religious theater for her church, yet she never managed to shrug off her religious skepticism until she discovered Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison at the library. It was "a window opening," Glazener says. "This highly intelligent man was not afraid to ask questions."
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