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also popular, however, because in 1973, when the novel ap–
peared, newspapers were filled with stories about "low men in
high places," just the sort of vision the novel projects of our
early republic. Vidal's narrative animus is legitimate because, al–
though it cuts Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton down to a
much smaller size than even realistic historians would recognize,
the belittling views are presented through the eyes of Burr, not
Vidal. Vidal had room for his own interpretations in the obscur–
ity of Burr's ultimate purposes; even so, the novelist's vivid,
witty portrait of his hero actually coincides very closely with
Nathan Schachner's earlier, more sober biography of " a man of
extraordinary talents, approaching genius, of a man of human
mold and human faults, of one who remained to the end erect
against the gods," despite his reputation as a disloyal intriguer
tried for treason.
While the historian never complains of having too much
documentation, the novelist may. In a remarkable eighty-page
commentary on his closet drama,
Buchanan Dying,
John
Updike highlighted the novelist's need to find a way into his
subject that is not blocked by historians' findings. Updike felt
the burden of his own historical knowledge that "an actual man,
Buchanan, had done this and this, exactly so, once: and no other
way. There was no air." He needed "a palpable medium of the
half-remembered in which to swim," and his imagination was
"frozen by the theoretical discoverability of
everything."
Once he
flew to President James Buchanan's home and, looking in the
window, "solitary as a burglar, as a lover," felt that coming
closer had only put him farther away. Struggling with his play,
he broke his leg, turned forty, and buried his father, experiences
that may have helpeGi him to feel an emotional link with
Buchanan's agonized wrestlings with the intractable problem of
slavery. Updike's solution was to find an opening for his imagi–
nation in the ambiguity surrounding the girl who broke her en–
gagement to Buchanan and soon died under mysterious cir–
cumstances, perhaps a suicide, believing he no longer loved her.
Updike ingeniously links this private story to the public one
about the crisis over slavery. He sets up a resonance between
Buchanan's personal and political failures, matching his rejec–
tion by his fiancee with his rejection by the South Carolina se–
cessionists. Updike also found his scope for the dramatist's imag-
