CUSHING STROUT
99
Clover's death, that the novel was "written in one's heart's blood." It is
not surprising that Adams too would look back on his novel, as critics
have done, with grim hindsight.
The novel's Catherine Brooke is as beautiful as Elizabeth Cameron,
Esther is as plain and troubled as Clover Adams, and Adams did later
develop a platonic love affair with Mrs . Cameron. Trist's reading of
Esther
as maliciously directed at Clover is consistent with his affection
for her and his hostility to her husband; nevertheless, it is a melodra–
matic stretch of poetic license on Byrd's part. Have I put myself in a
quandry by giving Byrd so much freedom already that I am no longer in
a position to criticize his treatment of Adams? Is it arbitrary to draw the
line at this point?
It
is not as irrelevant as it may seem that Trist makes a mistake by
assuming that the characters in
Democracy
congregated to visit Monti–
cello, when actually they did so in order to visit Mount Vernon. There
is nothing to indicate that Byrd knows Trist is wrong. For Adams the
response of his characters to Mount Vernon was a measure of their
worth. He would not consider it a trivial mistake, because he was a
tenacious critic of Jefferson and an ardent admirer of George Washing–
ton, a "pole star" who, Adams remarked in his autobiography, "alone
remained steady, in the mind of Henry Adams, to the end." Trist's view
of Adams as a prejudiced disdainful patrician blots out the patriot,
reformer, and great historian.
Byrd has conceded that his exercise of poetic license is "speculative,"
and he is right that there is no evidence to settle the question decisively
of when Clover knew about Adams's authorship of
Esther.
Trist's lurid
version of Adams's maliciousness, however, is hard to reconcile with the
abundant evidence for Henry and Clover's mutual love. An afterword
from Byrd about Trist's prejudice, or a way of dramatizing his unrelia–
bility on
Esther,
would make the story more subtle and complex.
Uncertainty has become a modern theme, especially in postmodern
literary theory in which "undecidability" has become something of a
critical refrain. In some influential extreme versions there is a dogmatic
skepticism about the ability of either fiction or history to get into refer–
ential relationship to anything outside our own imagination. Michael
Frayn's play,
Copenhagen
(1998),
might seem to fall into this category.
It
uses the indeterminacy principle in quantum mechanics as a metaphor
to explore the historical and moral uncertainties about Werner Heisen–
berg, its discoverer, who was head of the German nuclear program dur–
ing World War
II.
Yet Frayn is historically very well informed about his
subject, discusses the issues in a lengthy postscript, and even comes
to
