DANIEL AARON
233
associated with his name and times) and to Jerome Charyn's
The
Franklin Scare-"A
Novel About the True Life and War-Time of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt,
J.
Edgar Hoover, and a
Sailor Named Oliver Beebe."
Charyn's book has the earmarks of novelized history. Il is a
scandalous story of backstage official Washington in 1944, a kind of
scabrous equivalent of William D. Hassett's
Off the Record with
F.D.R.,
1942-1945, which Charyn, I suspect, used as one of his sources.
Il is full of the gossip about the Roosevelts' domestic life and the rivalry
of government agencies.
It
contains allusions to popular songs, base–
ball players, newspaper columnists, and the like. Yet what might well
have become simply another exercise in black comedy and the studiedly
perverse turns into an evocative fantasy. The action is hyperbolic, the
characters dreamlike, the true and apocryphal blended, but if Charyn
distorts and caricatures the traits of his notables, he neither cheapens
nor sentimenta lizes them.
We see them through the eyes of Seaman Oliver Beebe, a cross
between Billy Budd and the Good Soldier Schweik. He is F.D.R.'s
barber and surrogate child; Fala's caretaker and companion to Eleanor
Roosevelt (a comic yet noble figure as impressive in her way as "The
Boss"); he is diner-out with his "Uncle Edgar"
J.
Hoover, whom
Charyn transforms into a wonderful wizard-like presence, half
Cali–
gula, half Robin Hood; he is an object of fascination to Stalin and the
Russians and a "Rasputin in seaman's dress" to Churchill and the
British. Involved willy-nilly with crazies and whores, Trotskyists and
fascists, and veteran of sexual encounters with his sister, Oliver
throughout retains his natural goodness and tact and fidelity and his
fondness for Tootsie Rolls without ever discovering how his sexual
indiscretions could have brought down the Administration. Charyn
relates Oliver's odyssey in an inventive style, simple and declarative,
that is appropriate to his hero's bluntness and simplicity. He is witty
and funny but never smirks at the reader or hits him over the head.
Candidean books of this sort are often disquieting not merely
because they handle sacred cows sacrilegiously but because they give
the outrageous a tragi-comic dimension and make moral judgments
profanely. Hence they are received with more gingerliness and less
delight than slick spoofs like E.
L.
Doctorow's
Ragtime
which is not at
all disturbing. A few grouches here and abroad panned
Ragtime
when
it came out, but reviewers all across the critical spectrum scarcely found
words enough to express their delight in Doctorow's "viscerally
satisfying" achievement which "read like a streak," "altered one's view
