232
PARTISAN REVIEW
burlesque on American would-be Hitlers and on the hypocrisy of the
American gospel of success. Among West's targets were John D.
Rockefeller, who claimed
to
have run his business according to the
Golden Rule, and Calvin Coolidge, author of the imperishable piece of
wisdom, "When men are out of work, unemployment results." The
special quality of West's brutal and disdainful parody is suggested in a
passage from Herman Melville's novel,
Pierre,
quoted by West's
biographer: "in the hour of unusual affliction, minds of a certain
temperament find a strange, hysterical relief in a wild, perverse
humorousness, the more alluring from its entire unsuitableness to the
occasion." West, however-unlike the writers I am about to discuss–
used the historical scene only as a backdrop for his fable. He invented
grotesque parodies of unnamed but real people (he had President
Coolidge in mind and a well-known Fascist demagogue), but although
history becomes nightmare in his fiction, he does not write what I have
defined as novelized history.
Writers of novelized history are likely to find more popular and
lucrative subjects in the "visitable past," to borrow Henry James 's
term, than in remote times about which most modern readers seem to
know or care little. Their books do not have much in common with
such historical novels as
The Confessions of Nat Turner
or
Burr
whose
authors take liberties with facts but who manage all the same to evoke
the historical shudder. William Styron's story of a slave insurrection
seemed all too topical to some readers.
It
was denounced as a covert
defense of racism and triggered an insurrection of its own. Yet Styron's
formulation of a shadowy historical personage, however distorted it
might seem to his critics, is what he calls it : a "meditation" on history,
an exercise of the historical imagination by a novelist contemplating
the inner lives of characters rooted in antebellum America. Gore
Vidal's
Burr
appears to be a tour de force, more adroit than deep; in fact
it is a considered judgment of a personality and an age by a writer for
whom American history is virtually a family affair.
It
might be said of
Styron and Vidal , as H.B. Henderson
III
wrote of their distinguished
predecessors, that for
b~th
"History becomes myth, a collection of
traditional tales which are timebound yet possess contemporary rele–
vance and emotional force."
The same with considerable reservations applies to Beryl Bain–
bridge's
Young Adolph,
a ferociously comic account of Hitler's brief
sojourn in Liverpool, England, shortly before World War I (an
invented episode that brilliantly foreshadows the subsequent career of
the clownish and warped hero as well as some of the horrific events
