CUSHING STROUT
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ination by focusing the play around a dying man 's reveries and
deliriums, rather than his actions. The dramatist's sympathetic
portrait of a president conventionally dismissed as weak and in–
effective reflects a shrewd judgment that Buchanan 's delaying
tactIcs helped to give "defensive coloring to the dubious cause of
putting down secession with force." This point is reinforced, in
the most searching recent historical study of the origins of the
Civil War, by David M. Potter's conclusion that Buchanan had
"a justifiable fear" of "delivering a fatal blow to compromise at
a time when, on both fronts, there appeared to be some grounds
for renewed hope. " Updike's scrupulosity about historical
knowledge and his strong artistic imagination created a conflict
he could reconcile only by moving to another medium in order
to find room for his own freedom of invention.
E.L. Doctorow in
The Book of Daniel,
on the other hand,
found a novelist 's solution easier because of the uncertainties
surrounding the Rosenberg case, which he looked at sidelong, as
it were, from the point of view of the eldest child, whose parents
were executed as atomic spies. His fictional Daniel, doing his
graduate thesis on radicalism, is a chip off the block of his father,
"who always gave you more of an explanation than you bar–
gained for," and the novel's narrator, oscillating from first to
third person narration , as if struggling for objectivity, seeks to
find the truth about his parents' role in the events that led to
their execution . Daniel eventually develops his own plausible hy–
pothesis about the case, but Doctorow wisely presents it as being
unprovable even within the story. What is remarkable about the
novel from the standpoint of the veracious imagination is how
historical its major suppositions have turned out to be. The
Rosenberg children have recently surfaced in the post-Watergate
era in the hope of clearing their parents' name. Their book,
We
Are Your Sons,
reveals the different temper of two radicals whose
perspectives are matched with eerie exactness in the novel itself.
In both novel and reality the older child, like his father, is more
committed to rationalism, to theory, to the Old Left, and to non–
violent demonstrations, while the younger is more inclined to–
wards the counter-culture, towards drugs, towards communes,
and towards more disruptive demonstrations. " It was not an easy
transition from Old Left to New Left," Michael Meerepol told
an interviewer; and Robert, the younger, declared in a memoir:
