DANIEL AARON
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Their curiosity and their appetite for the "low-down" extended
beyond the private lives of the famous to the important events the
famous ostensibly participated in and affected. The secrecy surround–
ing American military and diplomatic adventures and certain undis–
cussed phases of domestic politics-especially those growing out of the
Vietnam war and Watergate-encouraged lurid speculation about
what was really going on behind closed doors. Unsavory revelations
(some of them pretty wild) dug up by investigative teams, inspired even
wilder fictions. Here was incontestable proof of national rottenness,
fresh evidence to buttress the texts of a hu'ndred profane moralists.
What could supply more relevant themes for "apocalyptic parody"
with its helter-skelter sequences, its jumbling of historical facts, its
cartoon characters, and its kaleidoscopic narrative line?
Robert Coover's
The Public Burning
comes directly out of this
frenetic ambience.
An
oversized parody lit up by coruscating verbal
fireworks and at moments savagely comic, it has none of the funny–
funny humor of genial
Ragtime
or the off-beat comedy of
The
Franklin Scare.
Coover is out to get America and scorns Doctorow's
calculated palliatives. His countrymen are as "perverse, rapacious,
atavistic" as Cooper's half-savage frontier renegades, "civilized in
externals but savage at heart" like Melville's John Paul Jones. Whit–
man's dark diatribe against American corruption in 1871 might serve
as a motto for
The Public Burning:
"the dominance of greed, the hell
of passion, the decay of faith, the ceaseless need of prophets." Coover's
America is all this and more, but although he flourishes the shreds and
tatters of his research, his findings corroborate a predetermined conclu–
sion. He is less historian than social pathologist.
The novel's action is compressed into three days of June 1953.
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's ordeal will culminate in a Grand
National Lynching Bee, for they have collaborated with the Phantom,
the epitome of everything alien and evil, and relinquished to him and
his minions America's Holy Grail-the Bomb. It is a time of fearful
tensions at home and elsewhere. The nation's troops are stalled in
Freedom's War, and Joseph McCarthy cries treason to receptive ears. In
this atmosphere of mass hysteria with the population terrified by
threats of nuclear attack, the Rosenbergs are framed by the Power
Structure and condemned
to
be electrocuted in Times Square while the
world looks on. The traitors who disarmed the U.S.A. and conspired to
kill our soldiers in Korea must suffer the vengeance of a wronged
people. After delays and crises, the "burning" takes place.
Vice-President Richard Nixon is Coover's informing intelligence.
