MILLICENT BELL
have been no raid on Harpers Ferry, certainly, and no Civil War,
for the South would not have objected in the slightest to the
breakup of the Union.
639
I could only put
Cloudsplitter
down in disbelief when I came upon this
"disclosure" by an Owen become a madly prescient historian. As I
observed in the beginning of this report, it is the novel's fate and obliga–
tion to try to explain human experience, and historical novels sometimes
propose explanations that connect the scattered events of history with a
paranoid insistence-but the makers of real history are rarely so conscious.
Owen says, "No little thing in our lives is without meaning. I did what I
did, my duty, in order to free slaves. I did it to change history." Of course,
however unlikely it seems that a real Owen Brown could have spoken so,
he is terrifyingly right in declaring the efficacy of terror. "The terror and
the rage that we caused with those murders ignited the flames of war
all
across Kansas, to be sure, and
all
across the southern states and in the North
as well." Banks's revisionary fictional history goes on to Harpers Ferry
with Owen-who manages to escape when the raid fails-but it does not
recapitulate the trial and execution of the displaced hero,John Brown.
In
absolute contrast to
Cloudsplitter
is Jane Smiley's flawed but mar–
velously alive novel, which takes for its subject the very same dramatic
moment in U.S. history. Again we are in Kansas Territory just after the pas–
sage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. We are made witness to the struggle
between Missouri slavery men and Free Staters from elsewhere for the sov–
ereignty of the new land. But in the place of a somewhat incredible
revenant like Banks's Owen, Smiley has created a narrative personality to
rival Huckleberry Finn (whom Smiley, surprisingly, has claimed to dislike).
To have given life to Lidie Newton-a mixture of naivete and wit who
compels belief as an authentic witness to her world-is a triumph of vir–
tuosity that makes it impossible not to forgive her creator's exuberant
lapses of control.
Almost exactly midway in Smiley's version of Kansas history in 1858
is the following:
There was an old man in K.T. who afterward became famous, by
the name of Old Brown. He came from Ohio or New York some–
where, and wasn't related
to
any of the other Browns-there were
lots of Browns in K.T. I can't say that I ever saw him, though
Louisa said that she did. Perhaps we saw some of his sons or asso–
ciates, as there were qui te a few of them, riding through the town
