CUSHING STROUT
97
they have (as Trist puts it) "cleared the arabesques out of American
prose." Interviewing Grant in his last days, Trist concludes that in writ–
ing his memoirs Grant was exhibiting "the old qualities of his general–
ship, which had seemed to vanish during the dark days of his
presidency-utter clarity, complete mastery of detail, singleness of pur–
pose, a will that could apparently defy the fierce rebellion even of his
own body." Byrd appropriately concludes the section on Grant's death
with the dying Grant's poetic insight into himself, written in a letter to
his doctor: "The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pro–
noun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify
all three."
The novelist Diane Johnson, in reviewing Gore Vidal's
The Golden
Age,
recognizes that "the historical novel has a sort of implied contract
with truth," but she goes on to claim that "on faith, we must decide
whether it is all made up or true." For all his mingling of fact with fic–
tion, Byrd's sense of his contract with the reader includes explaining
how much he has fictionalized fact. In a note at the end of it he explains
that the wounded journalist Nicholas Trist is an invented character,
though his romance with Elizabeth Cameron is "loosely based on her
real-life affair with the poet Joseph Trumbull Stickney." Historical char–
acters, however, "do and say here pretty much what they actually did
and said.... Whenever possible I have taken dialogue verbatim from
letters, books, diaries, etc."
Byrd admits that his version of Clover Adams's dismayed discovery
that her husband wrote
Esther
is "speculative, but not inconsistent with
the facts," because there is "no evidence whatsoever" that she "knew all
along about the authorship," as most scholars assume. In Byrd's novel
she comes upon her husband's letters, which lead her to see
Esther
as
referring obliquely to their marriage-such as when a character says
that "being half-married must be the worst torture." Byrd appropriately
has Trist, a wounded veteran in the disastrous battle of Cold Harbor,
find a bond with the witty, artistic, childless Clover, who has a morbid
preoccupation with death and a fear of insanity as a family curse. Trist
comes to the conclusion that
Esther
is an "angry, frustrated book" that
obliquely "sought to cause pain" to Clover Adams and was "as terrible
and deadly to her in the end as cyanide." Trist's harsh judgment is con–
sistent with his persistent dislike of Adams as a disdainful patrician, and
Byrd could cite Gore Vidal's view that the historical novelist is justified
in using fictional characters to speculate about the motives of historical
persons, though it is "dangerous territory for historians." But no biog–
rapher of Adams would support Trist's interpretation.
