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PARTISAN REVIEW
this story of Owen's is a contrived and unconvincing psycho-biography.
We can understand his suppressed rebellion: "There was so much that I
could not understand about this man, my father, and the life we led
because of him-my thoughts, my questions, were blocked, occluded by
the absolute rightness of his cause, which none of us could question, ever,
and by the sheer power of Father's personality, the relentlessness of it, how
he wore us down, until we seemed to have no personalities of our own,
even to each other." But Banks labors to provide a Freudian diagnosis,
which is only postulated and never given substance-oedipal hostility
born of Owen's unrelinquished longing for his long-dead mother. He hints
at a sexual blockage which keeps Owen celibate except for a single early
encounter with a prostitute, and he also suggests suppressed homosexual
feelings for one of his father's black followers. This love results in a dis–
placed sexual fixation on the black man's wife-and then a murder by
accident when he hands this friend a cocked gun. It is his guilt for the
black man's death, we gradually learn, that makes Owen the secret master
of the tale we thought was John Brown's own. Banks's Owen comes to
believe that he can expiate his guilt by becoming "an assassin with no prin–
ciple or ideology and with no apparent religion, save one: death to slavery."
So, it is
he,
the solitary and silent one, who executes John Brown's wishes
again and again but actually betrays his father by focusing his wandering
will upon one end.
The older man's spasmodic anti-slavery zeal is not enough. Owen calls
himself an Iago who becomes the true author of those happenings that
alter the course of human events. In Kansas it is Owen whose implacable
will compels his brothers and father to do their bloody work: "For with–
out my having instigated the attack and then goaded them when they grew
timorous and frightened by the idea, they would never have done it."
Projecting the hindsight of a modern historian back upon 1856 America,
Owen says, "What Father called the will of God I now called history." He
sees himself as an apostle of historic necessity who showed his father and
brothers that if they did not butcher those five at Pottawatamie,
the war in Kansas would have been over. Finished. In a matter of
weeks, Kansas would have been admitted to the Union as a slave–
state, and there would have been nothing for it then but the quick
secession of all the Northern states, starting with New England,
and the wholesale abandonment of three million Negro
Americans to live and die in slavery, along wi th their children and
grandchildren and however many generations it would take before
slavery in the South was finally, if ever, overthrown. There would
