ONE THE ART OF HISTORY I Objectivity in History

It is two decades now since University of Chicago historian Peter Novick published his landmark work That Noble Dream, a gloomy analysis of "the objectivity question" and its importance for the American historical profession. In 1989, That Noble Dream won the American Historical Association's prize for the best book of the year in American history. From the date of its original publication a year earlier, it attracted much, and heated, attention. Yet, in all the years that have passed since its first appearance, little or no progress has been made toward any sort of solution for the conundrum Novick posed in his book.

On the one hand, Novick argued, the "ideal of 'objectivity'" had long been "the rock" on which "the professional historical venture" in this country "was constituted, its continuing raison d'etre. It has been the quality which the profession has prized and praised above all oth-ers—whether in historians or in their works. It has been the key term in defining progress in historical scholarship: moving ever closer to the objective truth about the past."¹ On the other hand, this ideal of objectivity is "essentially confused." It is based on "philosophical assumptions" that are "dubious." It is "psychologically and sociologically naive. As a practical matter, I think it promotes an unreal and misleading invidious distinction between, on the one hand, historical accounts 'distorted' by ideological assumptions and purposes; on the other, history free of these taints."²

For, of course, there is no history that is free of such "taints." In a post to an e-mail discussion group on December 12, 1995, Novick noted that

[i]n writing a work of history, the historian inevitably [...] is radically selective, choosing from among the infinite number of ("true") facts which could be recorded a small portion which he or she will record. Further, also inevitably, some are centered, others marginalized. And all of them are necessarily arranged, in different ways. Selection, centering, and arrangement are inherent in the process; and are typically decisive in determining the sort of picture which emerges.³

And yet, to say all this is barely to have scratched the surface of the problem. For before the historian can select, center, marginalize, or arrange the facts, he or she must first ascertain the facts. And this is by no means as unproblematical a matter as at first it might seem.

"The past is never dead," the attorney Gavin Stevens declares in William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. "It's not even past."⁴ What he means by this is plain enough to anyone who has ever taken a stroll through any of our older American cities—Boston, for example, or New York or Philadelphia or San Francisco. Walking through such a place, one passes, like a geologist, through what Carl Gustavson calls "a present world which is also the world of the past," a world in which "outcroppings" of the past—buildings, statues, place names, institutions, and even transportation infrastructure (like San Francisco's famous cable car tracks)— appear cheek by jowl and fully contemporaneous with buildings, statues, place names, institutions, and transportation infrastructure established only within the last few years, or at least within living memory.⁵ Stevens was right. The past is still here. It is all around us, inescapable, no matter how we may try to shatter the bonds that tie us to it.

There is a problem, however. For not all of the past is still here. Some of it is still here. But the rest—the majority—is indeed past, gone, inaccessible. The historian, in studying the past, "is at a great disadvantage when compared to the trained journalist on the spot," wrote Harry Elmer Barnes, for that journalist "witnessed the events at first hand." The historian, by contrast, "can never have more than a secondhand and remote contact with the issues, events and peoples he is seeking to describe."⁶ Still, the historian, in putting together the best possible secondhand account, can make productive use of such buildings, statues, place names, institutions, and transportation infrastructure as may remain from the time in question. Mainly, however, s/he will tend to rely on documents. "The reason," John Tosh reminds us, "is not just academic conservatism. From the High Middle Ages (c. 1000-1300) onwards, the written word survives in greater abundance than any other source for Western history."⁷

The surviving written word is of a number of types. There are published and unpublished sources. The unpublished sources include the diaries, journals, and letters of individuals; the records and correspondence of those engaged in business enterprises; and the paperwork generated by government at all its levels. The published sources include flyers, pamphlets, almanacs, catalogues, newspapers, magazines, and books. Far and away the most important of these latter—"the most important published primary source for the historian," Tosh calls it—is the daily newspaper. Nor should this be surprising. Newspapers "record the political and social views which made most impact at the time"; moreover, they "provide a day-to-day record of events" and "from time to time present the results of more thorough enquiries into issues which lie beyond the scope of routine news-reporting."⁸

On the other hand, daily newspapers are by no means perfect sources of information for the historian. As Tosh notes,

the very fact of publication sets a limit on the value of [...] these sources. They contain only what was considered to be fit for public consumption—what governments were prepared to reveal, what journalists could elicit from tight-lipped informants, what editors thought would gratify their readers, or [politicians] their constituents. In each case there is a controlling purpose which may limit, distort or falsify what is said.⁹

More important, "they recount only what people found worthy of note about their own age—which may not be what interests us today."¹⁰

Then, too, even if newspaper accounts of events did focus on what interests us today, and even if the reporters and editors responsible for them were able to gain access to the information they sought, there would still be the age-old problem of journalistic incompetence. A hundred years ago, George Bernard Shaw satirized it in The Doctor's Dilemma in the person of an unnamed character, The Newspaper Man,

a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees, or understanding or reporting accurately anything he hears. As the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism (for a newspaper, not having to act on its descriptions and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and unveracity), he has perforce become a journalist, and has to keep up an air of high spirits through a daily struggle with his own illiteracy and the precariousness of his employment.¹¹

Fifty years ago, H. L. Mencken did not find the situation markedly improved. "The more reflective reader," he wrote "reads next to nothing" in the way of newspapers

and believes the same amount precisely. Why should he read or believe more? Every time he alights on anything that impinges upon his own field of knowledge he discovers at once that it is inaccurate and puerile. The essential difficulty here is that j ournalism, to be intellectually respectable, requires a kind of equipment in its practitioner that is necessarily rare in the world[...]. He should have the widest conceivable range of knowledge, and he should be the sort of man who is not easily deluded by the specious and the fraudulent. Obviously, there are not enough such men to go round. The best newspaper, if it is lucky, may be able to muster half a dozen at a given moment, but the average newspaper seldom has even one. Thus American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.¹²

And today, according to the late David Shaw, longtime media critic of the Los Angeles Times, the situation detailed by Bernard Shaw and by Mencken persists. "I've long since lost track," Shaw reported to his readers on May 22, 2005, not long before his death, "of the number of times that readers from all walks of life have told me, 'Any time I read anything in the paper that I know anything about, it's wrong.'"¹³

Consider then the plight of the historian dependent upon newspaper accounts for his information about a period, a series of events, the doings and sayings of an historical figure—the "facts" which are his principal concern. "The historian possesses the advantage of better perspective on the events recorded in the newspapers," according to Barnes, "and he can check and compare the reports submitted in the various newspapers. Yet, his results cannot, in the end, be more accurate than the sources which he has used."¹⁴

Of course, newspapers do not stand embarrassed and alone with regard to these deficiencies. Quite the contrary, for, as John Tosh observes, "[m]any primary sources are inaccurate, muddled, based on hearsay or intended to mislead," and, indeed, "the majority of sources are in some way inaccurate, incomplete or tainted by prejudice and self-interest."¹⁵

So some of the facts the historian needs are inaccessible and much of what is accessible is also unreliable. But never mind all that. When it comes to the facts of history, we have what we have, and whatever its deficiencies we must make do with it. Novick emphasizes, as we have seen, that history is "radically selective." Tosh agrees. "The facts are not given," he writes, "they are selected." Moreover,

Historical writing of all kinds is determined as much by what it leaves out as by what it puts in. That is why it makes sense to distinguish[...] between the facts of the past and the facts of history. The former are limitless and in their entirety unknowable; the latter represent a selection made by successive historians for the purpose of historical reconstruction and explanation.

But "[i]f historical facts are selected, it is important to identify the criteria employed in selecting them. Are there commonly shared principles, or is it a matter of personal whim?"¹⁶

The answer, of course, is neither—or, perhaps, both. To some extent the criteria will be personal—though, for all that, not necessarily whimsical; and such commonly shared principles as may exist may not necessarily redound to the benefit of those who seek useful information from their study of history. Consider, as a case in point, the commonly shared principles that informed most high-school-and-col-lege-level textbook writing in the field of American history until very, very recently. The American history taught in most schools during the past hundred years faithfully reflected received opinion, and received opinion sees the United States as a consistent, devoted partisan of the same spirit of individual liberty that once moved its Founders— a peace-loving nation that wishes the rest of the world only the best and never goes to war except in self-defense (or in defense of Western Civilization itself).

Apply this set of principles to what we know of the past and, at the end of the day, you'll wind up with quite a pile of facts that didn't meet the criteria for selection and now litter the cutting room floor. The facts about the gross violations of individual liberty that have been championed by U.S. presidents almost since the beginning, for example— John Adams's Sedition Acts, Andrew Jackson's genocidal treatment of the American Indians, Abraham Lincoln's military conscription (to say nothing of his suspension of habeas corpus and his imprisonment of newspaper editors who dared to disagree with his prosecution of the Civil War), William McKinley's brutal suppression of the independence movement in the Philippines after the Spanish American War, Franklin Roosevelt's order to round up American citizens of Japanese ancestry and imprison them in concentration camps—are any of these inconvenient facts likely to be selected for inclusion in a textbook based on the "commonly shared principle" of the saintliness of the U.S. government?

But if John Tosh is correct, the only alternative to such "commonly shared principles" is "personal whim." As Harry Elmer Barnes put it,

[a] historical fact refers to a specific concatenation of circumstances which was both born and terminated at the moment of its occurrence. When we say that we have discovered a historical fact we actually mean only that we have acquired information which allows us to make a highly subjective and incomplete reconstruction of one or more of the elements which once existed in a now extinct historical situation. No one can ever entirely recreate this historical entity and, in general, we make of a historical fact essentially what we put into it as a result of our subjective imagination.¹⁷

When Barnes refers to the historian's "reconstruction" of an historical event as "highly subjective," when he declares that what "we make of a historical fact" is "essentially what we put into it," using "our subjective imagination," this may sound at first like a warning of impending disaster. Surely if every historian relied on "subjective imagination" as the basis for selecting facts, no two historical accounts would agree, and the discipline of history would be plunged into chaos.

II

History and Fiction

But we should calm ourselves; no such outcome looms on the horizon. To understand why, we should turn our attention at least briefly to what may seem at first an obvious irrelevancy—namely, the world of imaginative literature, and particularly fiction. Today, history is regarded, if not as one of the social sciences, then at least as an independent discipline that deals in facts, not fancies; in edification, not entertainment. But it was not always thus. Harry Elmer Barnes reports that before the 18^th Century, "there had been either no attempt to cite sources or else the citations had been hopelessly confused; there had been no general practice of establishing the genuineness of a text; there had been little hesitancy in altering the text of a document to improve the style."¹⁸ And even after the 18^th Century itself had begun to fade into history, the new standards Barnes describes had still not really become universal. On the contrary: "Prior to the French Revolution," Hayden White writes,

historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary art.[...] The eighteenth century abounds in works which distinguish between the study of history on the one side and the writing of history on the other. The writing was a literary, specifically rhetorical exercise, and the product of this exercise was to be assessed as much on literary as on scientific principles."¹⁹

In point of fact, until late in the 19^th Century, most historians regarded themselves neither as social scientists (a concept that did not even exist before the 19^th Century) nor as humanistic scholars, but rather as literary men, men of letters. The stories they were telling were true, of course, but nonetheless they were telling stories, just as though they were novelists, and their job, as they saw it, was to tell their stories as vividly and poetically as any novelist. Peter Novick reports that

George Bancroft, William Lothrop Motley, William H. Prescott, and Francis Parkman[...] each, in at least one of their major works, employed the organization of the stage play, with a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue. Sir Walter Scott was, by a wide margin, the most popular and imitated author in the early-nineteenth-century United States, and the florid style of the "literary" historians gave clear evidence of his influence.²⁰

And not only did the most representative 19^th Century historians think of themselves as litterateurs, most of them saw themselves in particular as the providers of an important kind of inspirational literature. As Novick puts it,

[t]he "gentleman amateurs" wrote not to keep the pot boiling, or out of professional obligation to colleagues, but because they had an urgent message to deliver to the general reading public. "If ten people in the world hate despotism a little more and love civil and religious liberty a little better in consequence of what I have written, I shall be satisified," Motley wrote.²¹

More specifically, most of the 19^th Century American historians were convinced that, as Peter Charles Hoffer writes,

by celebrating our history we might heal our political differences. Look to the Founders, these historical boosters argued; praise, exalt, and honor them. Ignore their faults and failings, for the message must be an uplifting one to which everyone can subscribe. The greatest of the Founders, George Washington, became at the hands of the itinerant bookseller and preacher Mason Weems an unblemished paragon of virtue, whose "great talents, constantly guided and guarded by religion he put at the service of his country."²²

Of course, in order to transform George Washington into "an unblemished paragon of virtue," Weems had to exercise a bit of literary license, even making up one of his most famous anecdotes—that of the young Washington and the cherry tree—out of whole cloth.

But Weems was far from alone in employing such techniques. As Hoffer puts it, "Against the vast profit perceived in this approach, what reader could object to the historians' rearrangement of their subjects' language, or to their selective use of facts?" Hoffer calls attention to "an 1835 edition of Washington's letters, edited by Reverend Jared Sparks," in which the editor "regularly altered Washington's words" and "sometimes pasted one piece of a document into another document entirely." Yet, so far as readers and other historians were concerned, "[i]t did not seem to matter [...]. After all, the entire purpose of editing the letters was moral instruction, and ministers like Sparks long had the tradition of cutting and pasting Scripture in their sermons."²³

Hoffer also suggests that we take a close look at George Bancroft's "monumental ten-volume History of the United States, the last volume of which appeared in 1874. Bancroft's History was to become the standard work on American history for generations. [...] When he died in 1891, he was the most honored of our historians, and his works were widely read." Bancroft "believed that his job was to write a chronicle that would make his readers proud of their country's history," Hoffer tells us,

[a]nd when it suited his didactic purposes, he fabricated. He "felt free [as Bancroft himself explained in the preface to his great work] to change tenses or moods, to transpose parts of quotations, to simplify language, and to give free renditions." If the purpose of history was to tell stories that taught lessons, such "blending" could hardly be objectionable, and for contemporary reviewers, it was not.²⁴

Hoffer notes that Bancroft was also sloppy about crediting his sources. For example, he "made no real distinction between primary sources and secondary sources. When a secondary source cited a passage from a primary source, Bancroft felt perfectly free to reuse the language of the secondary source in his own account wilthout identifying it as such. He cited the secondary-source pages, but copied or closely paraphrased rather than quoted." After all, a work of history was a work of literature, was it not? All that really mattered was whether the passage in question fit into the flow of the style, whether it fit artistically into the work— not whether it was accompanied by some sort of footnote!

It was the tail end of the 19^th Century before the calling of the historian had been professionalized and academicized to such an extent that a majority of practitioners in the field had come to hold the view of their discipline that we now take for granted—the historian as dispassionate seeker after truth, a scholar, much more like an anthropologist or sociologist than a novelist or playwright. Still, there were holdouts. The long tradition of historical works written by novelists and poets and offered frankly, not as scholarship but as lovely letters, died particularly hard. In the 1890s, just as the new social-scientist paradigm was at last coming to dominate the historical profession, Edgar Saltus, a then very popular and successful writer who is now utterly forgotten, was putting the finishing touches on his best known and most frequently reprinted book, Imperial Purple (1892), a specimen of what Claire Sprague calls "a genre almost non-existent today—history decked in the colorful impressionism of the magazine essay of the last [19^th] century."²⁵ Before his death in 1921, Saltus would also do for Russia's Romanov dynasty what he had done for the Caesars of imperial Rome in Imperial Purple. The Imperial Orgy was brought out by Boni and Liveright in 1920.

A few years later, the renowned poet Carl Sandburg would begin publishing an even more ambitious work, though one quite as free of footnotes or bibliography as Saltus's works had been—a six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. "The two volumes of The Prairie Years were the publishing event of 1926," reports James Hurt, "and the four volumes of The War Years were an equal success in 1939."²⁶ As late as 1969, Richard Cobb, whom John Tosh describes as "a leading historian of the French Revolution," could write of the historian that "His principal aim is to make the dead live. And, like the American 'mortician,' he may allow himself a few artifices of the trade: a touch of rouge here, a pencil-stroke there, a little cotton wool in the cheeks, to make the operation more convincing."²⁷ Only five years later, in 1974, the late Shelby Foote, who made his early reputation as a novelist, published the last volume of what The New York Times called his "2,934-page, three-volume, 1.5 million-word military history, The Civil War: A Narrative," a work characterized by "punctilious, but defiantly unfoot-noted research." It was immensely popular, earning "considerably more in royalties than any of his novels had earned," and winning him an invitation to serve as a consultant and onscreen expert for the "smash hit" Ken Burns documentary on the war, a job that made Foote into "a prime-time star."²⁸

It is difficult indeed to ignore the many similarities between the historian's task and that of the novelist. As Hayden White writes, "[v] iewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another." Moreover,

the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of "reality." The novelist may present his notion of this reality indirectly, that is to say, by figurative techniques, rather than directly, which is to say, by registering a series of propositions which are supposed to correspond point by point to some extra-textual domain of occurrence or happening, as the historian claims to do. But the image of reality which the novelist thus constructs is meant to correspond in its general outline to some domain of human experience which is no less "real" than that referred to by the historian.²⁹

To achieve this common end of "providing a verbal image of 'reality,'" both historians and novelists tell stories. "The late R. G. Collingwood insisted," White reminds us,

that the historian was above all a story teller and suggested that historical sensibility was manifested in the capacity to make a plausible story out of a congeries of "facts" which, in their unprocessed form, made no sense at all. In their efforts to make sense of the historical record, which is fragmentary and always incomplete, historians have to make use of what Collingwood called "the constructive imagination," which told the historian—as it tells the competent detective—what "must have been the case" given the available evidence[...].

"Collingwood suggested," according to White, "that historians come to their evidence endowed with a sense of the possible forms that different kinds of recognizably human situations can take. He called this sense the nose for the 'story' contained in the evidence or for the 'true' story that was buried in or hidden behind the 'apparent' story."³⁰ Journalists, those historians in a hurry who provide what legendary Washington Post publisher Phillip Graham famously called the "first rough draft of [...] history" (and whose rough draft not infrequently becomes the final draft), make a very similar disinction. You either have a "nose for news," they say—good "news sense," good "news judgment"—or you don't. If you do, you can see the story contained in the evidence, the true story buried or hidden behind the apparent (or, sometimes, the official) story.

The important point here is that describing any historical event, whether one that took place yesterday or one that took place a century ago, by telling a story is inescapably an act of imagination. As White sketches the problem,

traditional historiography has featured predominantly the belief that history itself consists of a congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal task of historians is to uncover these stories and to retell them in a narrative, the truth of which would reside in the correspondence of the story told to the story lived by real people in the past.³¹

Yet, "real events do not offer themselves as stories [...]."³² In fact,

the notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origin in wishes, daydreams, reveries. Does the world really represent itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see "the end" in every beginning? Or does it present itself [...] either as mere sequence without beginning or end or as sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude?³³

In short, "stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a true story, this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which means, of course, that they can be true only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure of speech can be true."³⁴

A metaphor is a lie that conveys truth—or, at any rate, what the maker of the metaphor regards as truth. "Men are pigs." "The world is a ghetto." "The years are gusts of wind, and we are the leaves they carry away."³⁵ Taken literally, all these statements are untrue. They are falsehoods, lies. Taken figuratively, however, each of them conveys an arguable truth about its subject. A novel—a long, elaborate lie, involving the events in the lives of wholly imaginary human beings—is a metaphor for human life in the world as we know it. In this sense, every work of fiction is philosophical, because every work of fiction conveys an at least implicit statement about or judgment upon the human condition.

This does not mean that every fiction writer is also a philosopher or even philosophical by temperament. Consider, in regard to this issue, the testimony of three fiction writers who are also, in some sense, philosophers: Jean Paul Sartre, William H. Gass, and Ayn Rand.³⁶ According to Gass, "fiction, in the manner of its making, is pure philosophy," and "the novelist and the philosopher are companions in a common enterprise, though they go about it in different ways."³⁷ "The esthetic aim of any fiction," he writes, "is the creation of a verbal world [...], often as intricate and rigorous as any mathematic, often as simple and undemanding as a baby's toy, from whose nature, as from our own world, a philosophical system may be inferred [...]."³⁸ Moreover, "the world the novelist makes is always a metaphorical model of our own." ³⁹ Nevertheless, "[t]he philosophy that most writers embody in their work [...] is usually taken unconsciously from the tradition with which the writer is allied." Alternatively, "[h]e may have represented, in just the confused way it existed, the world his generation saw and believed they lived in [...]."⁴⁰

Rand agrees. "The art of any given period or culture," she writes, "is a faithful mirror of that culture's philosophy." This is so because "[s]ome sort of philosophical meaning [...], some implicit view of life, is a necessary element of a work of art." Art is "the voice of philosophy."⁴¹ Indeed, in a sense, art is the language we employ to express philosophical ideas.

Just as language converts abstractions into the psycho-epistemo-logical equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units—so art converts man's metaphysical abstractions into the equivalent of concretes, into specific entities open to man's direct perception. The claim that "art is a universal language is not an empty metaphor, it is literally true[...].

The philosophical ideas that are "in the air," taken for granted, during the lifetime of a fiction writer need not, cannot, be the only source of the philosophical ideas that find their way into that fiction writer's fiction, however. Another source, one drawn upon by many novelists, is religion, which Rand calls "the primitive form of philosophy."⁴² Still another, drawn upon inescapably by every fiction writer, is the individual writer's "sense of life."

"A sense of life," Rand wrote in 1966, "is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence."

Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him—most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e., merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.⁴³

According to Rand, "[t]he key concept, in the formation of a sense of life, is the term 'important,'" and it is crucial that we understand, she says, that

"[i]mportant"—in its essential meaning, as distinguished from its more limited and superficial uses—is a metaphysical term. It pertains to that aspect of metaphysics which serves as a bridge between metaphysics and ethics: to a fundamental view of man's nature. That view involves the answers to such questions as whether the universe is knowable or not, whether man has the power of choice or not, whether he can achieve his goals in life or not. The answers to such questions are "metaphysical value-judgments," since they form the basis of ethics.

In the end, "[i]t is only those values which he regards or grows to regard as 'important,' those which represent his implicit view of reality, that remain in a man's subconscious and form his sense of life."⁴⁴

And what has all this to do with fiction writing? Everything, for, as Rand puts it, "[e]sthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?" Another way of saying this is that "[a]n artist [...] selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically signifi-cant—and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence."⁴⁵ Thus, particularly among those fiction writers who are unphilosophical, but to some extent among all fiction writers, "[i]t is the artist's sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style." ⁴⁶ Accordingly, Rand defines art as "a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments."⁴⁷

Needless to say, then, by publishing a novel, a novelist displays his metaphysical value-judgments, his sense of life, for all to see. As Rand puts it, "nothing is as potent as art in exposing the essence of a man's character. An artist reveals his naked soul in his work [...]."⁴⁸ Sartre saw the same phenomenon. Literary artists, he wrote, are noted for "the involuntary expression of their souls. I say involuntary because the dead, from Montaigne to Rimbaud, have painted themselves completely, but without having meant to—it is something they have simply thrown into the bargain."⁴⁹ They could hardly have done otherwise, however, Sartre notes, for

[i]f I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone's face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things. That is, I feel myself essential in relation to my creation.⁵⁰

For when it comes to "the unique point of view from which the author can present the world," it is always and everywhere true that "if our creative drive comes from the very depths of our heart, then we never find anything but ourselves in our work."⁵¹

But of course, all this is true of historians as well. Most historians are no more philosophically minded than most fiction writers. On the contrary, they are notoriously "sceptical of abstraction," as John Gray put it not long ago in the New Statesman.^⁵² Yet every work they produce has philosophical implications, provides support for various general ideas— ideas about the nature of government, for example, and the utility of war, and the way national economies work. Where do these ideas come from, in the works of unphilosophical historians wary of "loose generalization" (as Gray puts it)? Some of them are inherited, so to speak, from earlier practitioners of the historian's particular area of specialization. Some are absorbed unthinkingly from the culture in which the historian grows up and matures. Still others are provided by sense of life. For every historian has a sense of life, just as every fiction writer does—a set of "metaphysical value-judgments" built up subconsciously over years of living until they provide a sort of "automatic response to the world" and an automatic answer to such questions as "whether the universe is knowable or not, whether man has the power of choice or not, whether he can achieve his goals in life or not." How any given historian has inwardly answered such questions will exercise considerable influence over what that historian regards as a realistic view of government, war, and economics—and, thus, how that historian treats these subjects in his or her work.

It is little wonder, then, that Roy A. Childs, Jr., ever an assiduous student of Ayn Rand, offered the following definition of history in his influential essay, "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism":

"History is a selective recreation of the events of the past, according to a historian's premises regarding what is important and his judgment concerning the nature of causality in human action."⁵³ Childs saw clearly that the historian proceeds much as the fiction writer proceeds, and obtains similar results. Nor was he alone in doing so. John Tosh writes that "[i]n many instances the sources do not directly address the central issues of historical explanation at all. [...] Questions of historical explanation cannot, therefore, be resolved solely by reference to the evidence. Historians are also guided [...] by their reading of human nature [...]."⁵⁴ The legendary economist and social theorist Ludwig von Mises notes that any historical writing "is necessarily conditioned by the historian's world view" and stresses the importance of what he calls "the understanding" in making sense of historical evidence.

The historian's genuine problem is always to interpret things as they happened. But he cannot solve this problem on the ground of the theorems provided by all other sciences alone. There always remains at the bottom of each of his problems something which resists analysis at the hand of these teachings of other sciences. It is these individual and unique characteristics of each event which [...] the historian can understand [...] because he is himself a human being.⁵⁵

More recently, the historian John Lewis Gaddis has proposed that every historian approaches his subject with certain assumptions, based on personal experience, about "how things happen" in the world—assumptions about "the way the world is,"⁵⁶ the way the world works. "Sorting out the difference between how things happen and how things happened," Gaddis writes, "involves more than just changing a verb tense. It's an important part of what's involved in achieving [a] closer fit between representation and reality."⁵⁷

But if the historical enterprise can be difficult to distinguish from the fictional enterprise (particularly in light of the concept, introduced some four decades ago by Truman Capote, of the "non-fiction novel"), what does this imply about so-called "historical fiction"? Is there any reason a reader should place any more confidence in the work of an historian than in the work of an historical novelist? The answer is that everything depends on what historian we're talking about, what novelist we're talking about, and what kind of historical fiction we're talking about.

III

The Historical Fiction of Kenneth Roberts

Consider, in brief summary, the careers of three prominent historical novelists of the last century: Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957), John Dos Pas-sos (1896-1970), and Gore Vidal (1925-). Kenneth Roberts grew up in his hometown of Kennebunkport, Maine, matriculated at Cornell from 1904 to 1908, then traveled to Massachusetts, where he spent a decade as a reporter and columnist for the Boston Post. He served in U.S. Army intelligence during World War I, then joined the staff of the Saturday Evening Post as a roving correspondent. He spent the next decade moving constantly, from London to Paris to Berlin to Prague to Washington, D.C. and back again, in search of material for his articles for America's most popular general magazine.

Finally, in 1928, at the age of forty-three, Roberts turned his back on j ournalism and embarked on a project he had long considered and dreamed about, but had never before attempted: the writing of a carefully researched historical novel. "I've had a theory for a great many years," he wrote in a 1935 letter, "that a writer can write more effectively about his own people than he can about people that aren't in his blood.... My people have always lived in Maine."⁵⁸ Four years earlier, in a letter to fellow writer Julian Street, he had confessed that he began writing historical novels to help insure preservation of "the speech, the events, the customs and the appearance" of his beloved native state.⁵⁹ Accordingly, then, he called this first historical novel of his Arundel (Arundel having been the original name of Kennebunkport—the name was changed in 1821). Arundel was published in 1930. It was followed, in short order, by The Lively Lady (1931), Rabble in Arms (1933), and Captain Caution (1934).

None of these volumes became bestsellers, or anything close to it. But Roberts persisted in his chosen course, and his next novel, Northwest Passage (1937), not only made the bestseller lists but was also sold to Hollywood and became the basis for the February 1940 motion picture of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, and Walter Brennan. So successful was this cinematic debut at the box office that by October, another, much less ambitious film had been quickly thrown together to cash in on the new Roberts boom—an adaptation of Captain Caution, starring Victor Mature. Roberts's next two novels, Oliver Wiswell (1940) and Lydia Bailey (1946), were bestsellers as well, and the latter title was adapted by Hollywood for release in the late spring of 1952. All this activity by Roberts on the bestseller lists and the silver screen during the late '30s, the 40s, and the early '50s stimulated new interest in—and new sales for—his earlier novels as well. In 1957 he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for "his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history."

In a nutshell, then, Roberts's novels attracted relatively little attention for several years, only to become the cat's meow and the toast of the town by the end of the first decade in which he occupied himself writing them. To what may we attribute this sudden and very definite turnaround in public opinion?

Well, consider the nature of most of Roberts's novels. His first two novels of the American Revolution, Arundel and Rabble in Arms, focus on Benedict Arnold—his unsuccessful expedition against Quebec in Arundel, his victories at Lake Champlain and Saratoga in Rabble in Arms. Roberts maintained to the end of his life that Arnold had been "the most brilliant soldier of the Revolution."⁶⁰ Moreover, in his third and final novel of the Revolution, Oliver Wiswell, Roberts describes the last year of the conflict through the eyes of his title character, a loyalist spy who joins Arnold when the most brilliant soldier switches sides. Linda Orlando may be overstating the case when she writes that Roberts "explained and defended the treason of General Benedict Arnold" and that Roberts considered Arnold "misunderstood," and "not the villain history had depicted him to be." But there can be little doubt that Roberts's novels were taken in just this way by many of his contemporaries.

Now, generations of Americans had been taught in school that the revolutionaries of 1776 were on the side of the angels, that the views of the loyalists were the merest rubbish, scarcely worth recounting, and that Benedict Arnold was a Traitor with a capital "T," an utterly evil and despicable man, as close as you could come in American history to the Devil himself. Moreover, the England of the 1930s was no more likely to win any popularity contests held in the United States than was the England of George III. As Charles Callan Tansill reminds us, it was only twenty years earlier, in the first years of World War I, long before the United States had become involved in that conflict, that the British government had commenced seizing "American vessels under such specious pretexts that even our Anglophile President lost his patience and called for some action that would protect American rights."⁶¹ And now, two decades later, the British were up to the same tricks all over again.

Up to the middle of November 1939 the British had detained thirty-three American ships for examination, and had removed cargoes, wholly or in part, from seven of them. After November 4, under the terms of the Neutrality Act, American ships were forbidden to carry cargoes in combat areas in European waters. It was expected in Washington that British detentions would sharply decrease after this date. But the British Government, with the same irritating unconcern for American feelings that it showed during the years 1914 to 1917, continued the practice of detention and even compelled American ships to proceed to control ports within the combat area which was closed to them by the express terms of the Neutrality Act.⁶²

Not that this was the full extent of the beef most Americans felt they had with the English in the 1930s. There was also the fact that, in the popular mind at least, the great war the English had helped persuade the United States to enter in 1917 had been a disastrous waste. As Thomas Fleming puts it,

Disillusion with the American experience in World War I permeated the nation. The soaring idealism with which Democrat Woodrow Wilson had led the country into that sanguinary conflict "to make the world safe for democracy" had ended in the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. Thanks in large part to that document, Europe's statesmen had created a world in which democracy soon became ridiculed and dictatorships of the left and right ran rampant. Worse, America's democratic allies, England and France, had welshed on repaying billions of dollars loaned to them to defeat Germany.⁶³

As late as the late summer of 1941, only a few months before the Pearl Harbor attack, Fleming points out, "polls revealed 68 percent of the people preferred to stay out [of the war in Europe], even if that meant a German victory over England and Russia."⁶⁴

The confidence of those Americans who held that position was fast eroding by the summer of 41, however. It had been eroding, with gathering speed, ever since 1937, when the intellectual leadership of the "liberal" wing of the Democratic Party—which dominated American politics from 1932 to 1952—began revising its view of U.S. foreign policy. As James J. Martin reminds us,

[m]any American liberals were warm supporters of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy which led us into war in 1917. Disillusioned with the outcome of this first American crusade in foreign lands, they repudiated their previous position on the First World War, bitterly opposed the Treaty of Versailles, seriously criticized the motives and conduct of our wartime Allies, adopted and supported revisionist historical writing, and became the main bulwark and shocktroops of the peace movement and disarmament for nearly two decades between the two World Wars.⁶⁵

As Martin sees it, liberals in the '30s displayed "[a] benign, friendly and optimistic attitude towards the 'collective security' foreign policy of Soviet Russia" but were "shocked and repelled by what was presented in the public prints and personal reports as the nature of the Fascist systems in Italy and Germany." Gradually, but with rapidly accelerating speed, they allowed themselves to be persuaded by articles, including editorials and reviews, "on the subject of United States foreign policy and our relations with the rest of the world by [...] authors, journalists, essayists, professors and related specialists in the realm of the social studies, in a [...] group of highly influential periodicals circulated nationally in the United States."⁶⁶

These "authors, journalists, essayists, professors and related specialists" were, of course, the people Friedrich Hayek labeled "the intellectuals" in his famous essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism." Intellectuals, Hayek declared, were "professional secondhand dealers in ideas," or, differently formulated, "professional interpreters of ideas." The intellectual, he wrote, is

neither[...] the original thinker nor[...] the scholar or expert in a particular field of thought. The typical intellectual need be neither: he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.⁶⁷

It is the intellectual class, Hayek contends, that exercises the greatest influence in "shaping public opinion."⁶⁸

There is little that the ordinary man of today learns about events or ideas except through the medium of this class; and outside our special fields of work we are in this respect almost all ordinary men, dependent for our information and instruction on those who make it their job to keep abreast of opinion. It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.⁶⁹

The intellectuals' "selection from the multitude of new ideas presenting themselves at every moment creates the characteristic climate of opinion, the dominant Weltanschauung of a period." And it can do so more quickly than one might expect, for "once the more active part of the intellectuals has been converted to a set of beliefs, the process by which these become generally accepted is almost automatic and irresistible." ⁷⁰ Thus it was that the intellectual leadership of the "liberal" wing of the Democratic Party in the 1930s brought off the considerable feat of turning its members around 180 degrees—from doves to hawks, as we say today—in a mere handful of years. But to accomplish this, the intellectuals had to first accomplish a number of lesser public relations triumphs. One of these was rehabilitating England's tarnished reputation. Martin notes that before 1937, "cordiality toward England was not a feature of editorial policy" in the "liberal" press. On the other hand, he reasons, "[t]he sudden growth of deep affection for England at war after a lengthy period of often grievous criticism could hardly have been possible if a basic, underlying favorable pre-disposition had not been lying dormant during this spell of coolness."⁷¹

Perhaps it was this same "underlying favorable pre-disposition" that led the reading public to suddenly embrace the pro-British novels of Kenneth Roberts, after years of ignoring them. Or perhaps, as the efforts of the "liberal" intelligentsia to reshape public opinion on the crisis in Europe began to succeed, the pro-British stance of Roberts's novels began to seem more palatable—even appealing. Or did a confused American public, still only partially weaned from its suspicion of England and its distrust of what George Washington had called "foreign entanglements," reach out for Kenneth Roberts's novels out of a felt need to find a way to justify the friendlier attitude toward the English that already seemed well on its way to becoming the new conventional wisdom?

We don't know. But we do know this: history is, as Cicero insisted, "the witness of the times." Note the plural. History is the witness both of the times it describes and of the times in which it is written, for each generation revises history to accord more closely with its own particular values and preoccupations. Roberts's meticulously researched depictions of the American Revolution tell us much about the times they depict, but they have much to reveal as well about the times in which they were published and first found a mass audience. For the writers who gain the widest fame and favor with the public in any given period are the writers who do the best job of reflecting back to that public whatever are its own major preoccupations—the ideas, the dreams, the notions of what things in life are the most and least important, most and least worthy of a person's attention and concern.

IV

The Historical Fiction of John Dos Passos

For that matter, the writers who fail to gain wide fame and favor with the public in any given period have much to tell us about that period, too. John Dos Passos, eleven years younger than Kenneth Roberts, is a case in point. While Roberts was settling into the newspaper trade in Boston, Dos Passos, born in Chicago, was growing up in a series of European hotels and in boarding schools in England, New England, and Washington, D.C. While Roberts was signing up with U.S. Army intelligence, Dos Passos, a newly minted Harvard graduate, was taking "lessons in driving, automobile maintenance, and medical techniques as preparation for volunteer service" with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in World War I France.⁷² In the '20s, while Roberts was traveling through Europe and the United States filing articles for the Saturday Evening Post, Dos Passos was publishing "essays, poems, and reviews in The Dial, The Nation, and The Freeman" and writing Three Soldiers— along with E. E. Cummings's The Enormous Room and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, one of the best known antiwar novels to come out of the American experience of World War I.⁷³

For Dos Passos was one of those "disillusioned" liberals of whom James J. Martin wrote—those liberals who "repudiated" their previously "warm support" of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy and became "bulwarks" of the peace and disarmament movements. "When Woodrow Wilson led the country into the European war," Dos Passos wrote nearly forty years later, "however little we approved this reversal of American tradition, most of us just out of college were crazy to see what war was like. We experienced to the full the intoxication of the great conflagration [...]."⁷⁴ But when Dos Passos reached the front, he did not find exactly what he had expected. During 1917, in the first year of his ambulance corps service in France, he wrote to a friend that "[t]he war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.none of the poor devils whose mangled dirty bodies I take to the hospital in my ambulance really give a damn about any of the aims of this ridiculous affair." A year later, he was "[a]ccused of disloyalty by Red Cross authorities," not only because of his "insubordinate attitude" but also because of his "criticism of 'stupidities' of modern war expressed in an intercepted letter."⁷⁵ War, Dos Passos found, was a "[w]aste of time, waste of money, waste of lives, waste of youth." Those of his generation who had eagerly marched off to war "came home with the horrors."⁷⁶

And this attitude toward the war found its way into Dos Passos's fiction—not only Three Soldiers but also the U.S.A. trilogy, his major work of the 1930s: The 42^nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The BigMoney (1936). U.S.A. was a fictionalized history of the war years and the years of disillusion that followed. It was composed in a new, patchwork style which Dos Passos had developed, placing tightly written fictional scenes in quick juxtapostion with collages of newspaper headlines (both real and invented), popular songs, radio commercials, and short prose poems on real people (Woodrow Wilson, Randolph Bourne, Sacco and Vanzetti) and events of the years during which the story unfolded. Dos Passos thought of "novels as history, history presented more accurately and more deeply than conventional history," Linda W. Wagner explains. As he saw it, "a few great novels," the ones he sought to emulate, "drew much of their force from their mixture of history with fictional narrative and character." In such novels as War and Peace and Vanity Fair, Dos Passos argued, "the story is the skeleton on which some slice of history is brought back to life." Or, as Wagner puts it, in novels of the sort Dos Passos himself wrote, "characters and their adventures exist not because they are of interest in themselves but because they illustrate the ways in which society has developed."⁷⁷

World War I soured Dos Passos on war for good. His newfound pacifism and distrust of centralized authority found expression, not just in Three Soldiers and U.S.A. but in everything he wrote thereafter. In 1950, looking back on Dos Passos's career up to that point, Granville Hicks wrote that "[n]othing is deeper in the man than his fear of power." Unless, of course, it was his hatred and fear of war. "As for war," Hicks wrote, "Dos Passos hated it in and for itself and because it inevitably resulted in the piling of power upon power." So it was that, as Wagner notes, "[m]aterials used in 1919 [...] and in Mr. Wilson's War" the nonfic-tion work which Dos Passos published in 1962, "are frequently similar and might also have appeared in [...] Three Soldiers."⁷⁸

Not surprisingly, in light of these views, Dos Passos was prominent among the liberals who counseled against U.S. involvement in World War II. Martin reports that in the summer of 1937 he was advising his fellow liberals "to avoid the involvement talk by fellow travelers, stay home, and concern themselves with domestic reform."⁷⁹ Later that year he warned that "[l]ashing ourselves up into a partisan fever will only make us the prey of whatever propaganda the warmongers want to put over on us" and that "[f]ascism thrives on the war spirit. Fanning the war spirit is preparing the ground for destruction of our own rights and liberties."⁸⁰

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor late in 1941, Dos Passos abandoned his effort to talk Americans out of going to war, as did nearly all of his liberal colleagues. But he could never bring himself to fully accept the war, either, for, as he himself put it many years later, "For better or for worse the uselessness of war has been basic in my political thinking all my life."

District of Columbia, Dos Passos's second trilogy of novels on contemporary American history, applied the U.S.A. technique to the 1930s and early '40s, depicting the Great Depression, the rise of the American Communist Party, the Spanish Civil War, the New Deal, and World War II. Of the three volumes—Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949)—it is the final one that most succinctly conveys Dos Passos's by now familiar take on war:

At home we organized bloodbanks and civilian defense and imitated the rest of the world by setting up concentration camps (only we called them relocation centers) and stuffing into them

American citizens of Japanese ancestry (Pearl Harbor the date that will live in infamy) without benefit of habeas corpus [...].

The President of the United States

talked the sincere democrat and so did the members of Congress. In the Administration there were devout believers in civil liberty. 'Now we're busy fighting a war; we'll deploy all four freedoms later on,' they said.

[...]

War is a time of Caesars.

[...]

And the American People were supposed to say thank you for the century of the Common Man turned over for relocation behind barbed wire so help him God.

We learned. There were things we learned to do

but we have not yet learned, in spite of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the great debates at Richmond and Philadelphia

how to put power over the lives of men into the hands of one man

and to make him use it wisely.⁸¹

Dos Passos spent 1941-1946 as a correspondent for Harper's and Life magazines, filing stories from cities and towns all over America, and from Europe and the Far East as well. "A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone," he wrote in the January 7, 1946 issue of Life.

Europeans, friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word "liberation." Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting.

"Never has American prestige in Europe been lower," Dos Passos reported. "People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdy-ism of American troops, of our misunderstanding of European conditions. They say that the theft and sale of Army supplies by our troops is the basis of their black market."

Worst of all, perhaps, was the destruction the war had brought.

The ruin this war has left in Europe can hardly be exaggerated. I can remember the years after the last war. Then, as soon as you got away from the military, all the little strands and pulleys that form the fabric of a society were still knitted together. Farmers took their crops to market. Money was a valid medium of exchange. Now the entire fabric of a million little routines has broken down. No one can think beyond food for today. Money is worthless. Cigarettes are used as a kind of lunatic travesty on a currency. [...] "Well, the Germans are to blame. Let them pay for it. It's their fault," you say. The trouble is that starving the Germans and throwing them out of their homes is only producing more areas of famine and collapse.

Had fighting the war been worth it? Dos Passos wasn't at all sure. "All we have brought to Europe so far," he wrote, "is confusion backed up by a drumhead regime of military courts. We have swept away Hit-lerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease."⁸²

In another 1946 dispatch, after a visit to Berlin, Dos Passos wrote:

The ruin of the city was so immense it took on the grandeur of a natural phenomenon like the Garden of the Gods or the Painted Desert... you drove in past the shattered university and the heaps that had been Friedrichstrasse and the empty spaces where a little of the shell of the Adlon still stood. The Brandenburg Gate was oddly intact. Through it you looked out over the waste, punctuated by a few stumps of trees and a few statues, that used to be the Tiergarten. At the further end of the Tiergarten were crowds of furtive people with bundles under their arms scattered in groups over a wide area that looked like an American city dump.⁸³

There were worse things than physical destruction, however, Dos Passos found: "Once war has broken the fabric of human society, a chain reaction seems to set in, which keeps on after the fighting has stopped, tearing down the decencies and the inhibitions that hold civilization together."⁸⁴

For half a century John Dos Passos railed against war and the strong, centralized State in novels, essays, polemics, and works of history. Little wonder, then, that his historical fiction sold poorly during the same period in which Kenneth Roberts's novels were topping the bestseller lists and wowing Hollywood producers. Little wonder that in 1942 and 1943, while Roberts was happily building a spacious new home in Kennebunkport with the profits from his historical novels, Dos Pas-sos, "despite literary fame," found that his "finances continue[d] to be shaky."⁸⁵ Little wonder that his entire career was marked by what Linda W. Wagner bluntly calls a "lack of any real financial success."⁸⁶ He was swimming against the tide of popular opinion. He was not telling readers what they wanted to hear.

Gore Vidal, like Dos Passos, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was educated in expensive private schools in and around Washington, D.C. Unlike Dos Passos, whose father was a wealthy corporate lawyer and world traveler, Vidal grew up around politics. His father was a high ranking official in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, the agency known today as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). His maternal grandfather, who lived in the Vidal family home, was the venerable, sightless U.S. Senator Thomas Pryor Gore (D-Oklahoma), and Vidal recalls the daily ritual of being

sent with car and driver to pick up my grandfather at the Capitol and bring him home. In those casual days [ca. 1935-1937], there were few guards at the Capitol—and, again, ["Washington was a small town where"] everyone knew everyone else. I would wander on to the floor of the Senate, sit on my grandfather's desk if he wasn't ready to go, experiment with the snuff that was ritually allotted each senator; then I would lead him off the floor.⁸⁷

In his thirties, after years as an author of modern mainstream novels, a scenarist for motion pictures and television, and an intellectual journalist, Vidal decided to try his hand at historical fiction. (Dos Passos had also been in his thirties when he sat down to begin The 42^nd Parallel.) Given his early political background, Vidal might well have been expected to focus his new historical fiction on the politics and diplomacy of the times he sought to depict. And that is precisely what he did. His first historical novel was Julian (1964), a portrait of the Roman emperor who attempted to reverse his nation's official adoption of Christianity as the state religion, in hopes of reverting to the long-discarded paganism of earlier days. His second historical novel, Washington, D.C. (1967), takes place in this nation's capital between 1937 and 1952 and depicts the major events of that time—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Second World War, the death of FDR, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the McCarthy Era—as they might have been seen by politicians and journalists plying their crafts on the shores of the Potomac during those years. This second historical novel has its admirers, but it seems fair to say that its principal importance lies not in its text but rather in what it led to. For it was the first step in the creation of Vidal's American Chronicle, a series of historical novels whose phenomenal success makes it worthwhile to contemplate at some length. It may fairly be said, I believe, that no success on this scale has been enjoyed by any historical novelist writing with serious artistic and scholarly intent about America since... well, since the days of Kenneth Roberts.

Consider: The first of Vidal's American Chronicle novels (Burr) was the fifth biggest fiction bestseller of 1973⁸⁸; it was so successful that three years later the Book of the Month Club acquired its sequel, 1876, "sight unseen" and before the manuscript had even been completed; and the club's gamble paid off handsomely, for, upon publication, "1876 quickly went to the top of the bestseller list."⁸⁹ In 1984, when the third volume in the series, Lincoln, was published, Vidal found that he was faced with another "huge bestseller," another "critical success, reinforced by[...] immense sales."⁹⁰ Four years after its first publication, Lincoln was adapted as a made-for-TV movie. In the '90s all three of these novels (the first three in the series) were confirmed as modern classics by being reissued in Modern Library editions. The later volumes in the series enjoyed less spectacular sales than the first three, but all the novels have sold briskly, and the entire American Chronicle enterprise has been a profitable one, both for Vidal and for his publishers and producers.

But I get ahead of my story. Let us pause, then, and examine more closely this American Chronicle series of Vidal's.