I think the best example of that is in my novel The Source, in which I am dealing with the digging of this well in a place like Northern Israel. And anybody who is doing that would ultimately come into contact with King David. And so my boy comes into contact with King David, and I try to show David as a troubled king, as a worried king. As a king who, late in his life, told his prime ministers to go out into Israel and find him a couple of nice 17 year-old girls, that he was lonely. A king who sent his prime general into the front lines so that the general would be killed so that David could inherit the general’s widow. That’s my David. And I’m entitled to do that because I know David intimately. I know everything about him, that a man like me could know, within the limits of my knowledge.
So I will use David to elucidate this whole period, but I will not fake him. I will not give him resounding statements of what we are going to do about the people living out in the desert, when there is no evidence he ever even bothered with that. And that’s a tricky gambit, and I have fallen on my face sometimes. As in Centennial, when I wrote about the marriage [of the parents] of Winston Churchill. His father to this wonderful daughter of a New York jeweler, Jenny Jerome. I have Churchill’s father out there looking for Jenny Jerome, I think eight years after he married her. I’m ashamed of that. I’m disgusted with myself. But I don’t do it too often.