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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
novel.
In
The Maul and the Pear Tree,
her study (with
T.
A. Critchley) of
the Ratliffe Highway murders of 1811, which produced national panic
and revulsion in England, she is scrupulously faithful to the evidence and
keeps a clear historical eye on a society where the police forces were
primitive and inadequate to their task. James, like Hare, has avoided
Buchan's dilemma about fictionalizing history, but recently the historian
Simon Schama has given cause to remind us of its peril. He created a stir
with
Dead Certainties,
which includes a fictionalized history of a notorious
actual nineteenth-century crime, the grisly murder of one Harvard profes–
sor by another. The partly documented drama, however, fractures the
unity of the book because it is only contingently related to the book's
three brilliant historical essays (on the death of General Wolfe on the
Plains of Abraham, Benjamin West's famous painting of the event, and
Francis Parkman's historical account of it): the murdered professor was
the historian Parkman's uncle.
Schama stirred up controversy because in the case of the Harvard
murder he appropriated the novelist's privilege of writing from inside the
private inner consciousness of several characters who, however, are his–
torical not fictional persons. Wallace Stegner, who has written both nov–
els and histories, has pointed out a principle that, along with Buchan's
cautionary point, should be pasted in the hats of both historians and writ–
ers of detective stories.
In
spite of their cousinly kinship , they should re–
member that while the novelist can (in T. S. Eliot's phrase) legitimately
"do the police in many voices," the historian can speak only in one.
