240
PARTISAN REVIEW
have been contending since the Pilgrims landed. The Devil foments
mischief in literal or metaphysical hideouts, and Mr. Big, his protean
American agent who figures so prominently in crime fiction , orches–
trates the shenanigans of the "Interests" and the Mafia and the C.I.A.
"The situation of our time," W.H . Auden wrote, "surrounds us
like a baffling crime," and the resourceful practitioners of novelized
history find "private faces in public places" less inviting "than public
faces in private places." By converting recent enormities into fiction
and capitalizing on the conspiracy motif, these writers stand not only
to
increase the sale of their wares but also to revenge themselves against
a society hungry for personalities and indifferent
to
all but "relevant"
subjects. The demolition of Richard Nixon is one of those subjects, the
story of the fall of a tinhorn Cataline from high place that ends not in
tragedy, not even in pathos, but in bathos.
It
evokes no somber
reflections. The groundlings pelt the ousted trickster with garbage.
"Quick comedians" mock his speech and gestures and convey his
heinousness through parody. How seriously the parodists take them–
selves it is hard to say, since they can either claim or disclaim a moral
burden in their spoofs. Do they see themselves as the unacknowledged
interpreters of events if not the legislators of mankind? Do they believe
that their x-ray vision
r~ally
does disclose the cancer in the body
politic?
It
has often been asserted that the serious writer with "tyrannous
eye" and sense of felt life is better equipped than historians to explore
the "hidden corridors" of history. Unbaffled by the plethora of facts
which inhibit the historian who must eliminate to see, he is ostensibly
endowed with the power
to
detect designs and read meanings in the
contemporary flux. But what happens to the "antennae of the race"
when current reality embarrasses the literary imagination and the
balked writer can no longer distinguish the real from the meretricious
and the fake, when the fictional historians of our "low dishonest"
decades have to compete with unfrocked politicians, ex-White House
aides, newspaper reporters, and former undercover personnel-not the
most clairvoyant elucidators of the postwar years?
The inventive fantasies of Doctorow, Coover, and company are
denser but not intrinsically more interesting than the self-justifying
ones of Spiro Agnew, E. Howard Hunt, William Safire, John Dean,
and John Erhlichman. Both groups compound the contemporary
confusion or grossly simplify it. The Washington based novels may be
nothing more than
romans
d
clef,
packages of vendible gossip that
enable their authors to cash in on their exposures to power in high
