A Skewed Vision
GOODMAN, WALTER
A Skewed Vision The Public Burning By Robert Coover Viking. 534 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Walter Goodman Robert Coover is a lively song-and-dance man who doesn't know when to leave the stage....
...Indeed Coover, no mean writer, can be brilliant...
...Calabash to any damfool what gets in my way...
...From offstage, Robert Coover presents Robert Coover's America, embellishing it with faces and details from the real thing...
...When Celine gives us his picture of an insane society, it comes through as brutally authentic because there is never any doubt that we have been taken into the writer's mind and are looking out through that marvelously distorted glass...
...Unfortunately, Coover cannot resist turning his creation into a cartoon: Nixon trips, slips and steps into dog shit...
...1 noticed then for the first time that the placards they were carrying read death to the Jewish traitors...
...The treatment of Nixon is not exactly a hatchet job...
...Why else would he take pains to include so many real names, so many true incidents...
...Is it...
...But in presenting this view Coover does not exhibit Coover...
...While it is sometimes difficult to believe, this man Nixon is still among us...
...Coover has a vision...
...But 534 pages...
...This is a small joke that runs out of steam fast...
...And even if 1 though...
...And I realized then, as this was going on, that right here was the ruthless-ness and the determination, the fanaticism of the enemy that we faced...
...Surely Coover wants to be believed, to appear credible...
...Of the three main chroniclers of the events, the first is Uncle Sam, sometimes known as Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, or the Star Spangled Superhero...
...Since novelists are free of the obligation to give all sides their due, some may excuse Coover for using what he wished and disregarding all the rest...
...He gives out with a confab-ulatin' fumigatin' discombobulatin' boliteratin' sagassitous, splutteratious monologue: "You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints...
...The fact is, though, that this book is flagrantly selective...
...The author's opinion of Nixon's career seems not much different from mine...
...This book, alternately effective and wearisome, raises some odd questions that go beyond the author's exhibitionism...
...I'm wild and woolly and fulla fleas, ain't never been curried below the knees...
...The subject of his new, ambitious novel is the condition of the United States, circa 1953, as exposed by the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of passing atom bomb secrets to the Russians...
...Yes, there was mania loose in the land, but there was sanity as well...
...There are poignant passages in The Public Burning, as well as humorous ones-the take-off on Eisenhower, albeit a trifle familiar, is good fun...
...Nixon,' he said, the rest closing up behind, forcing me to pull up short...
...This is fiction, isn't it...
...If he has been unfair, well fairness is not the fiction writer's main concern...
...the real Richard Nixon would have a hard time responding to the news that Coover's Richard Nixon is sexually backward and maybe a bit kinky...
...This was Communism as it really is...
...Is the vision accurate...
...and his allegory of '50s America as a conflict between the force of Light, namely Sam Slick, and the force of Darkness, the Red Phantom, has power...
...It's hard not to feel sorry for the tormented conniver...
...Like many vaudevillians, once he gets going, he can't bring himself to stop...
...Perhaps we deserve to be scourged...
...Coover's version-with its solitary hero, William Douglas-is too unrelenting...
...Coover wants to get at the private man, however, not the public figure...
...Those of us who lived through the '50s and more or less remember them, possibly better than Coover does, may find his vision a bit skewed...
...Here is Nixon approaching a group of pick-eters at the White House: "One of the ringleaders, a typical case-hardened Communist operative, stepped into my path, blocking me off, a look of cold hatred in his eyes...
...This is the hope of the world talkin' to you...
...It is far more difficult to accuse a novelist of inaccuracy...
...1 am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler-i can ride on a flash of lightnin', catch a thunderbolt in my fist, swallow niggers whole, raw or cooked, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, whup my weight in wildcats and red coats, squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson and out-inscrutabullize the heathen Chinee...
...A politician who feels he has been abused by a newspaper story can counterattack, charge the reporter with getting his facts wrong...
...That was what I saw in his face...
...The difference is that Coover can always hide behind his role of novelist...
...much better of him, I could not fault any writer for picking on the public character of any political personality...
...The action takes place during the hours leading up to their electrocution (set by Coover in Times Square), and the climax is a phantasmagoric orgy, a celebration of everything that is worst about the country...
...Am 1 being too fussy...
...Yet it is a novel filled with real people, or at least their names, and with facts, or at least dates and places...
...Coover's America is a deluded and depraved land, ruthless and feckless, mean-spirited, slow-witted and hardhearted...
...Storyteller number two is Time magazine, the National Poet Laureate, whose dispatches sometimes are transformed into blank verse...
...He opened his mouth...
...The book's hero of sorts, Nixon falls in love with Ethel Rosenberg while studying her trial and very nearly seduces or is seduced by the condemned...
...Still, his mixing of artistic and historic judgment takes away from his achievement...
...Some may reply thai it doesn't matter, that The Public Burning is just a novel...
...Operating on shifting ground, Coover takes every advantage...
...Why else would he quote verbatim from Time, from the Rosenberg letters and from what seems to be Nixon's Six Crises...
...He makes a better advocate for the Rosenbergs than they found when they had dire need...
...Could 1 have your autograph?' "'What?' I shouted...
...For Coover, the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of an America gone mad...
...it is more interesting than that, and also crueler...
...But why "accurate...
...Nevertheless, something is amiss when the reader leaves a novel feeling that the novelist is crooked...
...and through sheer desperation he turns his humiliation into victory and wins a buggering by Uncle Sam himself-a kind of all-American annointing...
...he winds up before the entire populace with his trousers down around his ankles...
...and the hot seat for the rosenbergs-sizzle 'em...
...Justice Douglas would never have approved of such cruel and unusual verbosity...
...The thrill is gone, boy, every rainmaker becomes a bore at last, so zip your lip...
...He is an earnest, devious, innocent, guilty, hopeful, hopeless character, suffering from a pervasive self-doubt that he treats with small self-help homilies: a man born to fail but doomed to succeed, an outsider determined to be on the inside even though it means certain mortification...
...It came to me then that this was my own constituency...
...he hides behind Uncle Sam and Richard Nixon...
...America did kill the Rosenbergs in June 1953, and I don't think we should have...
...Excuse me, Mr...
...At its best, the portrait of Nixon is the best thing in the novel...
...You want a make it with me," coos Uncle Sam to Nixon as their coupling commences, "You gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-toting' hustler and tooth-'n'-claw tamer of the heathen wilderness, lusty and in everything a screamin' meddler, novus ball-bustin' ordo seclorum, that's me, boy-and goodnight Mrs...
...when pricked, he bleeds...
...Finally, there is Richard Nixon, the new Vice President...
...But when Coover crawls into bed with Dick and Pat, that's not so funny...
...Oh my God...
...the suspicion that his audience may be drifting away merely propels him on to further exertions...
...that is a healthy part of our tradition...
...One need not be a Daughter of the American Revolution to feel after 500 pages of this sort of thing that the author is laying it on thick...
...As to the facts of the Rosenberg case that are tossed out here in scattershot fa-sion, they will seem persuasive only to those who have already been persuaded by the pamphlets of the Rosenberg-Sobell committee...
...Yippee...
...Some of the passages are sharp and amusing, in a Herblockian way...
...As this overblown work that leaves nothing to the imagination moves, mercifully, toward an end, Uncle Sam speaks for me when he tells Richard Nixon: "One more last word outa you, mister, and I tell you what you're gonna do: you're gonna find your damfool sittin'-piece on 'tuther side a the Great Divide...
...he is like those psychobiographers who analyze from afar the minds of strangers?Richard Nixon being a favorite subject of theirs, too...
...This startled them and they fell back a step...
...He creates a Richard Nixon of his own, and then in scene after scene, shames him not because of his politics, but because of his alleged sexual longings and digestive problems...
...The career was marked by an unctuous phoneyness, by a prodigious self-pity that was matched only by his vindictiveness toward his enemies...
...If what he has written is distasteful, well serious novelists have to fight their way out of prevailing standards of taste...
Vol. 60 • October 1977 • No. 21
