MILLICENT BELL
Fiction Chronicle
CLOUDSPLITTER. By Russell Banks. Knopf. $27.50
THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF
LIDIE
NEWTON. By
Jane Sllliley. Knopf. $26.00
COLD MOUNTAIN. By Charles Frazier. Atlantic Monthly Press. $24.00
The word "history"-whatever the postmodernists claim-retains the
sense of what actually
was,
however squintedly seen, remembered, or
recounted. But history is also what hi storians
say
happened-as fiction, a
story
(that shorter word derived from it and coiled into it, like a worm in
an apple). The historians' history is a sense-making tale that tries to explain
why things occurred as they did and somehow makes them visible inside
our heads. History is never more "virtual" than when it resembles a novel.
At the same time, the novel incorporates literal history. Laying aside its pre–
tense of invention and resorting directly to truth-telling, the novel even
sometimes lets in among its imagined persons some who once strode about
among living men and women-like
J.
Edgar Hoover in DeLillo's
Underwo rld,
which I reviewed in this
Chronicle
recently. Fiction often back–
grounds its made-up stuff with historical events and scenes. The novel
never entirely escapes making some reference to actualities. At the maxi–
mum of such reference is the so-called historical novel, which undertakes
to rewri te formal hi story, and places his torical persons at its very center.
It
may make a real person known to history the protagonist of a fiction that
is different from a sober historical biography only because of more frankly
fabricated details and incidents unknown to record.
An
example of this kind is Russell Banks's
Cloudsplitter.
Fiction it is,
but one is bound to read it as though it were another biography among
the many that have failed to agree about John Brown (1800-1859), who
died on the gallows for leading an assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers
Ferry, an event often held to be the opening battle of the Civil War (the
conunander of the
u.s.
Cavalry force that overcame the raiders was a
brevet colonel named Robert E. Lee) . Three years earlier Brown had led
a small band of his own sons and some others in the murder of five proslav–
ery men in the Kansas Territory. Brown's deliberate brutalism-the
murdered were savagely butchered with broadswords in their homes-was
