The Inglorious Puritan
CHRISTOPHERSEN, BILL
The Inglorious Puritan Milton in America By Peter Ackroyd Doubleday. 307 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Bill Christophersen Author, "The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's...
...He has garbled Biblical geography but gotten his moral geography right...
...He realizes that the wilderness is an alluring as well as frightening world whose scents and sounds can't be fenced out, a world that begs interpretation so urgently its manifestations—a spate of caterpillars, a deer pursued by wolves through the town—are read as portents...
...The blind John Milton, poet of "Comus" and advocate of the Puritan cause, having publicly defended the execution of Charles I and served in the administration of Oliver Cromwell, flees there for his life when the Commonwealth collapses...
...The Milton whose foibles we've been chuckling at—the Milton of Goosequill's narrative—has shown some humanity, now trading puns with Goosequill, now hoarding lumps of sugar in his coat pocket...
...He will be six weeks healing among the Indians...
...The two meet when Goosequill, a scrivener's apprentice on the lam, climbs aboard a wagon leaving London and discovers Milton concealed beneath its canvas...
...But that's as it should be...
...Milton's tirades against Mary Mount, a neighboring settlement in which Catholics and Indians consort, become tiresome (enlivened though they are by the poet's flair for epithets: Ralph Kempis, the leader of Mary Mount, is "that most incognitant woodcock," "that unswilled hog's head...
...Quoth Milton: "I leave England in order to save England...
...He befriends an Indian and learns his language...
...food spoils...
...He legi slates that witches be immolated, that swearers be burned through the tongue...
...Yet as Milton's character flattens out, it also expands in ways the comic format hasn't prepared us for...
...He is both the Lear-like Soul of England in Exile and a self-magnifying gasbag ("the unmeasured ocean of my mind is forever beating...
...Passengers die...
...The story is narrated by Ackroyd's peripatetic Milton and by Goosequill, the youth who serves as his eyes...
...Ackroyd's satire grows a bit long in the tooth as Milton lapses into that grotesque stick figure, the Puritan stereotype...
...In doing so he resuscitates and illumines his main character, and makes us think anew about an old myth—and about American frontier myths as well...
...It wasn't simply to escape a repressive regime, a British Egypt, that the Puritans came to America...
...When a large bear approaches the castaways, a frantic Milton screams, "Hence, loathed animal/ of Cerberus and blackest midnight born...
...When the pious brethren he sails with to America rhapsodize about inhabiting an "Eden in the wilderness," Milton at first grouses, "I wish to God they would talk more sense and less simile...
...He insults the Indians' religious beliefs...
...they brought me my cartwheels before I had time to drink off their ale...
...He was traveling to Bristol to cool an attack of the sweating sickness there before, as I told them, 'it creeps through the night into your beds.' Of course...
...He stumbles and is caught in a snare...
...Between these extremes is sandwiched a more down-to-earth figure...
...Goosequill makes himself at home in New England...
...Ackroyd, we realize, having raked the Puritans' penchant for self-allegorizing, floats an allegory of his own...
...The contrast and interplay between Milton and Goosequill form the novel's comic heart...
...The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) was— well, the title speaks for itself...
...But as we read Chief Magistrate Milton's account of their errand into the wilderness in letters to a colleague in England, we encounter instead Christ's own Cavalier—supercilious, unbending, insufferable...
...In The Trial of Elizabeth Cree such mundane details combined with pungent renderings of London's verminous Limehouse district to anchor the novel's mystical strains...
...Ackroyd novels are usually naturalistic fictions laced with supernatural motifs...
...Ackroyd's encyclopedic knowledge of London, in particular, underpins his books...
...As New Milton becomes a nest of wasps that can't tolerate "tankard drollery," much less unconverted neighbors, and as Ackroyd's inversion of The Tempest ends where Shakespeare's play began, with political intrigue and violence, the fable we've been laughing at rings sonorous bells...
...His "real" (that is, resurrected) characters lend credibility and allow him to capitalize on his knowledge of the milieus of Britain's writers...
...Ackroyd's latest offering is entitled Milton in America...
...It spoofs the Puritans (Cromwell's and Cotton Mather's) as well as swaths of Western literature, from the Bible and Sir Thomas More to Shakespeare and Milton himself, with winks at various American authors along the way...
...He woos a maid...
...As the community becomes strained by foul crimes in its midst, Ackroyd's Milton, like Dante's Dante, pauses "in the dark wood of this world," unsure of the path...
...I leave England in order to be England...
...A fortunate fall...
...When he returns to the settlement, he will be sightless again and more bullheaded than ever—hellbent on rooting out the Antichrist Kempis and his heathen minions with fire and the sword...
...It was to purify themselves (says scholar Andrew Delbanco in The Puritan Ordeal), to flee from a worldly corruption that threatened to undo them spiritually...
...What happens to him there is for the reader to discover...
...To which the unemployed Goosequill responds, "You need a companion with more flesh and blood" —and gets hired on the spot...
...He knows what songs were popular in its music halls and what the inside of a hansom cab smelled like ("no more wholesome than a dogcart...
...When the ship, wracked by a storm as it nears land, breaks apart on the rocks, Goosequill hauls his floundering master onto a spar, then helps him ashore...
...The two survivors make their way to a settlement, where a group of separatists with names like Phineas Sanctified Coffin and Preserved Cotton receive Milton with devout joy...
...Milton is a tragicomic figure...
...Their narratives—Milton's dictated letters and journal entries, Goosequill's spoken accounts—alternate frequently, and, like their characters, contrast...
...Light and colors stream miraculously into his eyes...
...As charming as he is clever, he tells his portions of the story—replete with sound effects, clownish pantomime and amatory apostrophes—to his pregnant wife as she sews by the fire...
...Its wilds confound him ("I hate a plashy fen...
...Its hummingbirds seem to him to be "some deformed work of nature, the fruit of some monstrous coupling...
...But in Milton in America Ackroyd, like his eponymous protagonist, leaves London—and the home-court advantage—behind...
...But Milton, querulous and judgmental, doesn't fancy this brave new world...
...Then Goosequill, the American Adam, spots a "golden fruit...
...Under way again, the fugitives chat...
...Its clouds of pigeons unnerve him...
...For Milton in America is a comic fable and satire, albeit one with tragic and allegorical elements...
...Its signature device aside, though, this ninth novel is a change-of-pace knuckleball...
...Their domestic bliss becomes a kind of parallel universe to the Puritan dystopia Milton will come to embody...
...Its natives disgust him...
...When the wagon snaps a wheel and overturns, Milton fixates on the driver's profanities, but Huckleberry Goosequill scurries off to a nearby village: "I explained to them that I was carrying a surgeon from London, a wonder worker, a man of miracles...
...Their passage to the New World is a trial by water...
...It's an outrageous premise...
...In the book's most engrossing sequence, Milton enters the wood...
...The novel turns burlesque...
...Instead of a "Promised Land," it seems to him to be "some newfound Golgotha" whose wilderness is "an allegory for the whole of fallen nature...
...The less hubristic Goosequill resembles an amalgam of Lear's Fool, Huckleberry Finn and Sancho Panza...
...Reviewed by Bill Christophersen Author, "The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic" Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer and novelist whose characters, like his biographical subjects (Charles Dickens, William Blake, T. S. Eliot), tend to be British men of letters...
...He refers to Goosequill as the "credulous boy, with whom it was God's will I should be further burdened...
...Whisked upside down into the trees, he hangs "suspended between earth and heaven...
...But his leg is broken...
...The intransigent chief magistrate, we discover, cares for his brethren...
...The bear runs away...
...We have come out of Sodom into the land of Canaan," says Milton shortly after being washed up on the Massachusetts shore...
...Chatterton (1987), a literary detective story, included among its characters the 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton and the Victorian novelist George Meredith (in Ackroyd's fiction, the centuries often seem to coexist...
...like some bright apple bathed in light" beckoning from a tree— and plucks a wasps' nest...
...Set in 1660-63, the tale takes place mainly in Massachusetts...
...Ackroyd dramatizes both the political irony of a repressed sect waxing repressive and the moral irony of Puritans waxing impure...
...Soon the apostle of liberty is preaching "rigor and control" and "a little English ordering" to the brethren who invite his lead in framing the commonwealth of New Milton...
...Goosequill keeps his master's diary, nurses him through an ague, secures him by a rope to his own person in rough weather, and hustles the "bag pudding" his master craves from a closef isted brother-in-Christ ("These Puritans were great graspers and little givers," observes the boy...
...Saint Elmo's fire dances on the mainmast (echoes of The Tempest will prove as thick as the mayflies in Massachusetts...
...Goosequill (Milton names him for his cowlick) asks Milton why he is traveling under cover...
...The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (1994) featured the 19thcentury novelist George Gissing as a suspect in a spate of London waterfront murders...
...This Milton will distill Old England from New, Salem from the New Jerusalem...
...he scolds the disapproving Goosequill, who by now has nicknamed him "His Majesty...
...New Milton indeed...
...Have you not heard that judgment comes in flames...
...Providence is my guide...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 8
