History as Fiction
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN History as Fiction Historical novels, those perennials of fiction, sometimes seem to be watered with the bloodied reputations of their protagonists. Academic...
...This misbegotten form pretended to be giving us fact in the coating of fiction...
...Doctorow and Robert Coover, must be struck by the way history is being put to the service of ideology...
...Presenting himself as Mr...
...Vidal's jab at "the scholar-squirrels' delusion that there is a final truth available only to the tenured" hits home...
...To this sleek radical, Michael S. Dukakis and George Bush occupy the same centrist platform, which has no place for Vidal's antipathies...
...Our best historical novelists are more sophisticated than that and a lot more talented, but they are in a related line of work...
...The prevailing spirit among these writers—with the exception of the excruciatingly Right-wing Safire—is iconoclastic, doctrinaire, trendy...
...Some years ago, the docudrama was all the rage on television...
...The title of his most recent offering, Empire, is as much a reference to the 20th century as to the 19th...
...Their books are often accomplished...
...He shrugs off American political life as " entirely devoid of politics" and does not vote on the grounds that the candidates offer no choice...
...Washington is still up to ite old tricks in Central America...
...Lincoln is rich material for the novelist, the playwright, the poet...
...Among the things Jackson and Vidal have in common are their common enemies: Both mistrust the Pentagon and have been criticized for remarks deemed offensive to Jews...
...It was hokum, of course, insulting to both subjects and audience...
...But their novels are best taken for what they are, which is something different from history...
...Is there, in fact, such a thing as historical "fact...
...They may be in revolt against establishment academics, but they seem to have learned a lot from reputation-bashing journalists and gossip columnists...
...All three authors are on the Left...
...Who can fault Vidal (or William Safire or Robert Sherwood or Walt Whitman) for digging into him...
...No reputable historian could get away with peddling opinions ofthat kind without benefit of footnotes...
...They are like guerrillas engaged in blowing up monuments and bridges behind the lines...
...When he declares that in this country, "The race war goes on," he gives us a clue to the mindset that went into his portrait of Lincoln...
...For Vidal, who resides mostly in Italy, disaffection with his native land is a point of pride...
...all have used their talents to play up the exploitive, aggressive, intolerant, racist elements in American history...
...antiEstablishment, he accused them of engaging in "deliberate revisionism" to save Lincoln from the stain of racism...
...Do academics tend to be a bit possessive about their domains and unobjectively protective of the movers and shakers past who continue to provide their bread and butter...
...This reader's answer would be, pretty far...
...but no one acquainted with the contradictions of Presidential careers and the imponderables of research material could swallowthe evidence asdelivered, especially the secrets that Vidal said he had learned at his grandfather's knee...
...Its concocters claimed the remarkable ability to go into the heads and hearts of real people, living or dead, and extract their deepest thoughts and feelings, which often turned out to be in accord with their creators' predilections...
...The careful reader of his works, and the works of other popular practitioners of politico-historical novels, like E.L...
...If the work of historians sometimes evidences adulation, their work evidences disgust...
...Although the academics doubtless know more about Lincoln than the novelist does, our 16th President was a complex enough man to invite more than one interpretation of his attitude toward blacks or his son or war or most other things...
...Academic historians are often outraged by the liberties that novelists take, in the interest of a good story, with the careers of the big figures of the textbooks...
...Vidal in particular is an engaging storyteller with a sharp eye and true affection for the trappings of other days...
...So there is no reason for readers to deprive themselves of the pleasures of their productions and any reflections about our national failings that they may stimulate...
...Among the matters at issue were whether, as the novel would have it, Lincoln held a low opinion of blacks and indeed seriously contemplated sending America's slaves elsewhere, whether their freedom was less important to the President than the preservation of the Union, whether he forced the nation into a needless civil war, and whether there was any love lost between him and his son, Robert...
...He tossed off references that seemed to support his interpretations...
...One can appreciate Vidal's dismay at the deficiencies of an electorate that did not sweep him into office when he made himself available a while back, yet be suspicious of novelists bearing political agendas...
...That particular dispute will not be settled in this column, but it does invite speculation about how far a novelist may go in treating real historical figures...
...What is the obligation of the writer of such fiction to the facts of history...
...These and other questions were raised during a recent appearance in New York of Gore Vidal, who has completed five novels, with two still to come, in what is designed to be a history, of sorts, of the United States...
...See Doctorow's Ragtime and The Book of Daniel, and Coover's The Public Burning...
...If he were voting this year, he informed his audience at the library to a flurry of applause, it would be for Jesse Jackson...
...But if the scholars are defensive of the past, Vidal is plainly engaged in an attack on the present...
...Their indignation has been aroused especially by the portrait of America's favorite President in Vidal's Lincoln...
...In a talk at the Public Library, under the auspices of the library and the Book-of-the-Month Club, which often uses Vidal's works, he defended himself with polished lines and rough cracks against critics who have knocked his books as unhistorical or antihistorical exercises...
...Vidal, plainly stung by the criticism from academe, dismissed his critics as hagiographers accustomed to treating Lincoln and other former dignitaries as saints...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 9
