Dead Certainties
Castronovo, David
When the dancers left the stage at the end of "Primitive Mysteries," the lights that had bathed the children in "To the Future" two hours earlier slowly dimmed and Ms. Graham's absence settled over...
...It's a revolt against dead certainty without being a rejection of truth...
...Money obsession, keep- ing up professorial appearances, and the Brahmin idea of the gentleman may well have driven Webster crazy...
...EXPORTING DEMOCRACY The United States and Latin America Edited by Abraham F. Lowenthal The Johns Hopkins University Press, $55, 422 pp...
...he looks at people more closely than abstract forces and shows how their delirious idealisms, misreadings, and impulses led to several years of horror that point directly to the events of the 1930s and 1940s...
...Part 2, called "Death of a Harvard Man," is a concatenation of voices--people who felt sorry for the Webster family, President Spark ("Harvard professors do not often commit murder"), attorneys (with agendas and sometimes with consciences), and a large cast of Brahmins and ordinary work- ing people...
...In Citizens DEAD CERTAINTIES (UNWARRANTED SPECULATIONS) Simon Schama Knopf, $21,333 pp...
...labor, and U.S...
...The authors believe deeply in democracy but most are skeptical, even cynical, about the motivation of the United States, its consistency, and its commitment for the long haul...
...Attorneys, clergy, teachers, and doctors will unquestionably be absorbed by Schama's weaving of accounts: was Webster's trial and conviction, as one journalist put it, "a hunt of expiation and defamation" or a matter of justice served...
...The authors call instead for restrained, respectful, sensitive, and patient diplomacy which would emphasize the protection of fundamental human rights, 520: Commonweal...
...Like them or not, you cannot deny their mastery of storytelling...
...Up until very recently, at the end of each of her concerts, Ms...
...Trusting to the biographical approach and keeping faith with Alexis de Tocqueville's skeptical, tragic sense of events, he seems to want little to do with contemporary ideologies or methods, pre- ferring to immerse his readers in the "chaot- ic authenticity" of textured stories...
...This afternoon, as the applause crested, the curtain remained BOOKS up...
...Two major ideas emerge from this cat's cradle of conflicting stories...
...David Castronovo he brings his humane and rather conser- vative intelligence to bear on the topic of revolutionary violence...
...Since Citizens is so beautifully paced, the reader may wonder what's going on in Schama's latest volume, the brain-teas- ing Dead Certainties...
...And this was a moment that many dreaded...
...Schama presents an oftentimes unsettling search for "alternate accounts," a polyphonic recounting of stories about a hero and a criminal that "compete for credibility...
...Parkman's (probably) dismem- bered body...
...Basically he's implying that the age of Romanti-cism-with its legends, myths, and tales----ended at the time of the trial of Webster in 1850...
...The first is the responsibility of the historian...
...By extension the book also explores mythmaking and stigmatizing, rit- uals of celebration and degradation, vari- eties of exoneration and mudslinging...
...Graham would take a curtain call that went like this: When the applause for the dancers of the program's final ballet had crested and began to subside, the act curtain would sink a foot deeper into the stage floor and then zoom up to reveal a glittering Ms...
...One of the aggressive instincts studied in the book is the status drive of the learned people in Cambridge: it amounted to their fastidiousness about the penny press and its "enthusiasts of the gal- lows," yet its accompanying Unitarian- ism--so much more genteel than old time Calvinist fulminating about sin--may have blinded Brahmins to the nature of the evi- dence against Webster and perhaps made them forget that they themselves shared in his colossal sin...
...The other is about a mid- nineteenth-century Harvard chemistry pro- fessor, John Webster, who doubtless killed another Harvard man, Dr...
...These curious plots thicken as we become aware of the fact that the book is about "the teasing gap separating a lived event and a subsequent narration...
...The audience left the theater and were assaulted by a hot, humid, and blinding New York rush hour...
...The connection between these two dead certainties--which soon emerge as quite uncertain in the reader's mind is Francis Parkman, George Parkman's nephew who became a renowned historian specializing in the British-French conflict in Canada during the eighteenth century...
...economic policy...
...busi- ness, U.S...
...General Wolfe, in real life an Augustan racist, would hardly have liked this emphasis on the noble savage in the midst of his transfiguration...
...Robert E. White his study was created to challenge the easy assump- tion, so prevalent in today's Washington, that the United States knows how to export democracy and should make that transfer a principal plank in policy toward Latin America...
...GARY SE1BERT Gary Seibert, S.J., is in residence at St...
...Webster, who was probably guilty as hell, nevertheless was convicted on very soft evidence...
...Schama's point---embodied in his work is far from the anything-can-mean-anything double talk one hears these days...
...It begins with four chapters of historical overview, pre-World War II, post-World War II, the Alliance for Progress of John F. Kennedy, and the Reagan era...
...Telling stories about the past is a matter of piecing together fragments--"hailing someone who has just gone around the corner out of earshot...
...In one chapter he uses Benjamin West's epic painting, The Death of General Wolfe (1770) as a document, analyzes its histri- onic qualities and its use of the imagery of Christ's descent from the cross, and shows how the work in effect created one of the British Empire's finest hours...
...George Parkman, an eminent physician and exacting land- lord, in a quarrel over a loan payment...
...Graham had become famous for her final bows...
...Exporting Democracy is a serious work by serious scholars...
...Slowly the light began to dim on the empty stage...
...Joseph's Church of Yorkville and is associate producer of Parish Video Library, Sparkill, N. Y Contending narratives, plausible truths imon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, published in 1989, is a sweeping, dramatically presente 4 story reminiscent, in its style of telling, of the great narrative histories of the nineteenth and twentieth century: Macaulay on England in the late seventeenth century, Michelet or Carlyle on revolutionary France, Barbara Tuchman or Edmund Wilson on political currents in the early twentieth century...
...Schama is the Mellon Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard, and his gifts as writer as well as his deep learning make him an extraordinary figure in the scholarly world, someone with boundless enthusiasm for everything connected with modem his- tory--manners and morals, debt manage- ment, art, curiosities and ironies of behavior of the powerful and the obscure...
...And Schama deals with two stories that seem quite distant from each other...
...Five chapters then focus on case histories of U.S...
...Graham's absence settled over the hall...
...Filled with personalities, highly developed intellectual and social contexts, and juicy anecdotes, Schama's Citizens--like those classics of readability--is what first-rate historical narration used to be like before our own age of academic scholarship, bar graphs, elaborately deployed methodolo- gies, and endless qualifications couched in jargon...
...And with it came a dis- respect for listening to all sorts of accounts and an inordinate respect for hard facts...
...Graham, gloved hands gently on at her sides, her hair often bejew- eled, center stage, aglow in a gown by Halston...
...But the story of Wolfe, entangled with the fate of Parkman, soon makes us wonder about accuracy, versions of the truth, identification as distortion...
...Always a dissolver of certainties, Schama points out the falsifications in the canvas, includ- ing the use of a contemplative Indian in the foreground...
...By the end of the volume Schama is slipping in another idea, essentially an affront to smug deter- minists of every stamp...
...its episodes seem jagged...
...Francis Parkman, a scholar who lived and breathed the destiny of General Wolfe, is in many ways the central figure of Schama's book: a chronically ill man who wrote a monu- mental work while contending with family tragedy and his own depression, he stands as an emblem of intellectual conquest, a 13 September 1991:519 hero who grappled with mountains of documents and emerged with his story--a masterpiece about the tormented General Wolfe...
...Adrift in this ocean of New York street life, I found myself chanting, "I love the sky...
...the second was surrounded by ugly details, on both sides, that threatened to cling to old Harvard --Parkman's miserly fanaticism, snobbish Boston Brahmin denial, and the grisly mat- ter of Dr...
...One is about General James Wolfe, the fallen leader of the English forces in the French and Indian War and a martyr to the British idea of empire in the New World...
...In any event, the culpability of the case adhered to the prosecution side as well...
...These are followed by discus- sions of the respective roles of U.S...
...The fact that all documents and evidence from the past are in a sense imaginative constructs should not make investigators despair...
...attempts to advance democracy in Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Nicaragua...
...I love the earth and the world I live in...
...To forget this is to be seduced by scientific exactitude or ideological right- eousness, both dangerous temptations for people entrusted with evaluating the plauDEMOCRACY "SI," EXPORT "NO" sibility of narratives...
...One can only admire him in our time of relentless smrveys and endless unitary interpretations of why we are, like Wolfe and Webster, caught in a violent story...
...The book closes with two chapters of con- clusions, mostly cautionary, about the value of direct programs to promote democracy...
...Schama quietly laments this tendency, and, like Herodotus, prefers to be the kind of historian who collects seemingly fanciful bits and pieces in order to arrive at his ver- sion of the past...
...it jumps from passages that employ authorial interference to sections that are fabricated interior monologue assigned to people in the past...
...The thematic link between Wolfe and Webster, never quite made explicit, involves the nature of violent death, how we record our impressions of it, create it as an event, and store it in our communal memory...
...For Ms...
...Schama delineates the character of a judge who in effect helped the prosecutors by sermonizing, telling moralistic tales, and interpreting the events rather than the law...
...Taxi horns blurted, couples dashed out of restaurants and toward theaters, boys and girls in shorts careened up West 55th Street on those newfangled roller blades, men and women in every imaginable costume, from business suit to halter top, navigated their ways through the crowd that was now flooding through City Center's doors...
...Its chapters are unevenly proportioned...
...it questions without erod- ing our sense of coherence...
...The first death was heroic, worthy of historical paintings and panegyrics...
Vol. 118 • September 1991 • No. 15
