It’s a historical novel in which the protagonist is Aaron Burr, but told largely from the point of view of (I believe) the wholly fictional character of Charles Schuyler. Schuyler is a writer, hired first by Burr to help him compose his memoirs, then by a newspaperman named Leggett to simultaneously write a tell-all pamphlet, accusing presidential contender Martin Van Buren as being the illegitimate son of Burr.
It’s a frame in which our protagonist, Burr, can only be seen through the perspective of others, much, I think, like the historical person himself. Just as Schuyler is constantly looking for clues that reveal the real Burr…
“When you next see Mr. Leggett,” [Burr said,] “tell him how much I admire his editorials on the subject of nullification. I, too, am a Jacksonian, and oppose nullification.” A clue. Recently South Carolina claimed that it had the “right” not only to nullify federal laws but also to dissolve, if challenged, its connection with the union. If Colonel Burr had indeed wanted to separate the western states from the east (as everyone believes), he would favour South Carolina’s Nullification Act. Yet he does not. Or he says he does not. He is a labyrinth. Must not lose my way.
...the reader finds himself in the same position. And, in doing so, slowly discovers that Schuyler himself is an unreliable narrator; doing things he continually claims he will never do again and taken frequently to the heights of editorial excess.
I told Leggett of my conversation with Madame, adding, “I’m collecting material.” Actually I have done no more than record my few findings in this book, with altogether too many digressions of a personal nature. Yet like a criminal’s deposition, one thing does lead to another. At first the testimony is garrulous, self-serving, repetitive; then, gradually, themes emerge, lies become evident, truths isolated. I believe that if I put down everything I know of Colonel Burr, I ought, at the end, to be able to make that riddling Sphinx rise and show me whether it be man or woman, brute or human, or some hybrid undreamed-of lying athwart my days. Who is Aaron Burr, and -- again -- what is he to me?
And it is through this dim and distorted lens that we, the readers, must approach Burr, or at least the pieces of Burr that Vidal will allow us see. Aaron Burr. Perhaps the most misunderstood and notorious figure in American history.
Something Burr -- Vidal’s fictional Burr -- himself knows.
It has been my fate to be the centre of a thousand inventions, mostly of a disagreeable nature. I never deny these stories. People believe what they want to believe. Yet I do think that my name has in some mysterious way been filched from me and used to describe a character in some interminable three-volume novel of fantastic adventure, the work of a deranged author whose imagination never sleeps -- although this reader does when he reads for the thousandth time how the hellish Aaron Burr meant single-handedly to disband the United States when a voyage to the moon would have been simpler to achieve, and a good deal more interesting.
This is Burr speaking through the vehicle of his memoirs, a document he is writing out longhand and which Schuyler is absorbing and editing, desperately looking for clues as to the paternity of Martin Van Buren.
All of this means that the text is very self-aware, and add to that the layer that is Vidal speaking through his characters, not about the book Burr is writing, nor about the book that Schuyler is writing, but about the book that he, Vidal, is writing. “The work of a deranged author whose imagination never sleeps” is one of the multitude of phrases in this book that can be read with that ultimate meaning behind it. Here’s another:
I now act even to myself as if I were writing the full story of the Colonel’s life when, actually, I am only on the track of one small portion of it which Leggett assures me will change history. Though I sometimes wonder how different history will be if the president is Clay rather than Van Buren. Also, do I want to be the key that opens such a door? Odd situation to be in for someone who dislikes politics and politicians. It is my secret dream to live in Spain or Italy and write stories like Washington Irving. I am counting on this work to bring me the money to travel. I only hope that the Colonel is dead when I publish. No. I cannot hope or want that. But I must publish within the next year and a half. Before the presidential election. It is a hard business I have gotten myself into.
The reference to Washington Irving reminds me of a particularly delightful aspect of Vidal’s novel -- the fact that Washington Irving himself shows up in it as a character.
Standing at the fireplace, beneath a drawing of a Moorish-looking palace (the Alhambra?), was Washington Irving. In the books I read at school he is portrayed as a dreamy-looking, slender youth. No longer. He is now very stout and elderly, with a crooked but pleasing smile. The eyes are guarded, watchful, and he does take you in, every inch, the way painters do at the preliminary sketch. He affects to be shy. At first the voice was so low that I got only an occasional word. “So happy … Mr. Leggett … to Washington City soon … not used to … please … sit down … to warm?”
It’s an appointment set-up by Leggett, thinking that Irving, who has known Burr for decades, might know something about his connections to Van Buren. And Irving, like all of Vidal’s minor players, comes alive with a point of view and a political position.
“But I do think -- all in all -- that [Burr] does himself -- all of us -- a disservice by…” The tentative crooked smile again, the voice suddenly, deliberately soft. “...well, by living so very, very long -- so unnaturally long -- a continuous reminder of things best forgotten.”
“I think it splendid that he is still among us,” [Schuyler said]. Able to tell us the way things really were.”
“‘Really were’? Perhaps. Yet isn’t it better that we make our own useful version of our history and put away -- in the attic, as it were -- the sadder, less edifying details?”
Vidal is playing with us again. Giving us clues as to what he is doing with Burr, knowing, as he has his protagonist say, that “people have always preferred legend to reality.” Burr should know, “having become one of the dark legends of the republic, and hardly real.”
But at the same time Vidal is doing all of these things, he is also teaching us history -- a kind of alternate history from Burr’s point of view. The Wikipedia article on the novel states it well when it says, from Burr’s perspective:
George Washington is an incompetent military officer, a general who lost most of his battles; Thomas Jefferson is a fey, especially dark and pedantic hypocrite who schemed and bribed witnesses in support of a false charge of treason against Burr, to whom he almost lost the presidency in the election of 1800; and Alexander Hamilton is a bastard-born, over-ambitious opportunist whose rise in high politics was by General Washington's hand, until being fatally wounded in the Burr–Hamilton Duel.
These portrayals are all based on facts already in evidence, and Vidal successfully uses them to countermand our popular understanding of these men. Thomas Jefferson, especially, comes off as the main villain of this tale, which, from Burr’s point of view, makes perfect sense.
From that perspective, Jefferson is a hypocrite:
Later I discovered that Jefferson never simply freed anyone. On occasion, however, he would allow those slaves who had found employment to buy their freedom, usually with money advanced by a future employer. But then the hundred or so men, women and children Jefferson owned at Monticello were his capital. Without them, he would have been unable to till the soil or to manufacture nails and bricks, to build and re-build houses, to write the Declaration of Independence. From all accounts, he was a kind master. Yet today I find it hard to reconcile the Jefferson who the Abolitionist demagogues enjoying quoting with the slave-owner I saw at home in Monticello.
A dictator:
Now, most comically, noble democrat Jefferson and Spanish agent Wilkinson were confederates. Forgotten was Wilkinson’s disobedience. Ignored was Wilkinson’s military dictatorship at New Orleans. When the Governor of Louisiana protested Wilkinson’s actions to the President, the author of the Declaration of Independence responded with a remarkable letter of which I possess a copy (given me by Edward Livingston). “On great occasions,” announced the scourge of the Sedition Law, “every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict line of the law, when the public preservation requires it.” … In other words, if public opinion is not unduly aroused one may safely set aside the Constitution and illegally arrest one’s enemies. Had this letter been published at the time, an excellent case might have been made for the impeachment and removal a president who had broken that oath he had taken to defend and protect the Constitution by conspiring to obstruct and pervert the course of justice.
And a madman:
But Jefferson was hard. “Rather than their revolution fail, Colonel Burr, I would see half the earth desolated! After all, if in every country there was but one Adam and Eve left, one free Adam and one free Eve remaining, the world would be better than it is now.” I could not believe my ears. Either Jefferson was a fool in his zealotry or an active principle of evil.
All three of these excerpts are based in real historical situations. By deploying them, Vidal is, in fact, teaching us history. And you don’t have to agree with Burr’s point of view on them in order to gain useful historical insights into the complexities of the age. Truth be told, too often those complexities, real as they were, are purged out of our common understanding for the sake of simplicity and retention. Vidal, in writing Burr the way that he has, has given us a useful, albeit imperfect, glimpse into the personalities that created what we now think if as American history.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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