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Mar. 31st, 2016 07:34 pmI just finished Gore Vidal's Burr: A Novel, which will be the last round of Aaron Burr-blogging for a while, I swear!
Burr is essentially the fictionalized Memoirs Of Aaron Burr, as collected by Charlie Schuyler (no relation), a young man in Burr's law office who has been paid to write a defamatory pamphlet claiming that Aaron Burr is MARTIN VAN BUREN'S SECRET DAD, VAN BUREN'S NEVER GONNA BE PRESIDENT NOW!
I did some internet digging to see if this was a real rumor and found a reference to it in the e-book of Lyndon Orr's "Famous Affinities of History," published 1912, so it appears to have been a real thing or at least a thing that Gore Vidal did not just pluck out of nowhere! AND IT'S HILARIOUS. Maybe all of our presidents are secret descendants of Aaron Burr. (My other favorite historical facts learned from this book that turns out to be true: Aaron Burr totally hooked awkward turtle James Madison up with Dolley Madison; Davy Crockett hated Martin Van Buren so much that he wrote an angry smear campaign book about him.)
Anyway, the book is basically Burr's written-out sections of memoir interspersed with the Adventures of Charlie, theoretically the actual protagonist. I have absolutely no affection for Charlie as a character. His whole storyline consists of a.) waffling with himself about whether he's going to betray Burr, whom he likes, by abusing his trust in order to publish this defamatory pamphlet, and continuing to take people's money for it anyway; and, b.) fantasizing about a prostitute named Helen Jewett who reluctantly accepts his offer to have him set her up in an apartment but who would clearly much rather be doing anything else, with anyone else. (Helen Jewett is an actual historical personage, but don't click if for whatever reason you don't want spoilers.) There is also a lot of period-appropriate but nonetheless extremely grating casual racism. The only thing that I found really worthwhile about the whole Charlie frame story was the -- genuinely really interesting and well-done -- examination of the continuity and contrast between the America of the eighteenth century, which Charlie is only experiencing through Burr's memoir, and the almost completely different nation that exists in the 1830s. But this could I think have been conveyed through a protagonist who's a little bit less of a tool.
The 'Burr's-memoirs' bits of the book, on the other hand, are enjoyable, witty, interesting, and historically extremely well-researched. They are also, in some ways, extremely well characterized. Possibly my favorite part is how Burr spends hundreds of pages describing his attempts at gaining power without ever actually saying why he wants power or what he plans to do with it, which is perfectly in line with both Miranda's Burr and the sense that one gets of Burr as a historical figure.
(I feel it is also worth nothing that as much as Burr trash-talks Hamilton in the book -- and boy howdy, does he -- he also never mentions him without going on and on about how good-looking he is. He also describes Hamilton as playing Jonathan to Washington's David, and Patroclus to his own Achilles. I'M JUST SAYING. The subtext in Vidal's fanfic ain't subtle. And Vidal himself was extremely queer, so it's not like he didn't know what he was doing.)
However, I am not entirely convinced by Vidal's Burr. For one thing, Vidal's Burr does not just trash-talk Hamilton, he's mean about pretty much everybody he meets. This is funny and frequently satisfying -- I really deeply appreciate seeing Jefferson called out for his hypocrisy in a book from 1974 -- but stands in rather stark contrast to the Burr of Burr's diaries, who really does seem to like pretty much everybody he meets. I think the point where this officially tipped over into 'wildly OOC' for me was when Burr starts being sarcastic about Jeremy Bentham. Excuse you, Gore Vidal, I know for a primary-source fact that Burr loved Jeremy Bentham so much that he wrote Theodosia and basically told her that Jeremy Bentham was going to be her new second dad.
Also -- this is really less a complaint about characterization and more a complaint about the whole book -- Burr just does not talk enough about women. I don't mean this in the sexy sense. Vidal gives some lip service to Burr's identity as a prominent early feminist, but I feel very strongly that if you're going to write a book about Aaron Burr, Famously Interested in Women's Brains, you have not just the opportunity but the responsibility to -- as Lin-Manuel Miranda would put it -- put some women back in the narrative. And Vidal doesn't, not really. Women do appear, some affectionately portrayed, but they rarely do much moving or shaking even from behind the scenes. Theodosias 1 and 2 each get, if I remember correctly, one scene with dialogue apiece in the entire book. One scene each! The more I think about this the more frustrated I get, especially considering that ( book spoilers of which I very strongly disapprove )
Burr is essentially the fictionalized Memoirs Of Aaron Burr, as collected by Charlie Schuyler (no relation), a young man in Burr's law office who has been paid to write a defamatory pamphlet claiming that Aaron Burr is MARTIN VAN BUREN'S SECRET DAD, VAN BUREN'S NEVER GONNA BE PRESIDENT NOW!
I did some internet digging to see if this was a real rumor and found a reference to it in the e-book of Lyndon Orr's "Famous Affinities of History," published 1912, so it appears to have been a real thing or at least a thing that Gore Vidal did not just pluck out of nowhere! AND IT'S HILARIOUS. Maybe all of our presidents are secret descendants of Aaron Burr. (My other favorite historical facts learned from this book that turns out to be true: Aaron Burr totally hooked awkward turtle James Madison up with Dolley Madison; Davy Crockett hated Martin Van Buren so much that he wrote an angry smear campaign book about him.)
Anyway, the book is basically Burr's written-out sections of memoir interspersed with the Adventures of Charlie, theoretically the actual protagonist. I have absolutely no affection for Charlie as a character. His whole storyline consists of a.) waffling with himself about whether he's going to betray Burr, whom he likes, by abusing his trust in order to publish this defamatory pamphlet, and continuing to take people's money for it anyway; and, b.) fantasizing about a prostitute named Helen Jewett who reluctantly accepts his offer to have him set her up in an apartment but who would clearly much rather be doing anything else, with anyone else. (Helen Jewett is an actual historical personage, but don't click if for whatever reason you don't want spoilers.) There is also a lot of period-appropriate but nonetheless extremely grating casual racism. The only thing that I found really worthwhile about the whole Charlie frame story was the -- genuinely really interesting and well-done -- examination of the continuity and contrast between the America of the eighteenth century, which Charlie is only experiencing through Burr's memoir, and the almost completely different nation that exists in the 1830s. But this could I think have been conveyed through a protagonist who's a little bit less of a tool.
The 'Burr's-memoirs' bits of the book, on the other hand, are enjoyable, witty, interesting, and historically extremely well-researched. They are also, in some ways, extremely well characterized. Possibly my favorite part is how Burr spends hundreds of pages describing his attempts at gaining power without ever actually saying why he wants power or what he plans to do with it, which is perfectly in line with both Miranda's Burr and the sense that one gets of Burr as a historical figure.
(I feel it is also worth nothing that as much as Burr trash-talks Hamilton in the book -- and boy howdy, does he -- he also never mentions him without going on and on about how good-looking he is. He also describes Hamilton as playing Jonathan to Washington's David, and Patroclus to his own Achilles. I'M JUST SAYING. The subtext in Vidal's fanfic ain't subtle. And Vidal himself was extremely queer, so it's not like he didn't know what he was doing.)
However, I am not entirely convinced by Vidal's Burr. For one thing, Vidal's Burr does not just trash-talk Hamilton, he's mean about pretty much everybody he meets. This is funny and frequently satisfying -- I really deeply appreciate seeing Jefferson called out for his hypocrisy in a book from 1974 -- but stands in rather stark contrast to the Burr of Burr's diaries, who really does seem to like pretty much everybody he meets. I think the point where this officially tipped over into 'wildly OOC' for me was when Burr starts being sarcastic about Jeremy Bentham. Excuse you, Gore Vidal, I know for a primary-source fact that Burr loved Jeremy Bentham so much that he wrote Theodosia and basically told her that Jeremy Bentham was going to be her new second dad.
Also -- this is really less a complaint about characterization and more a complaint about the whole book -- Burr just does not talk enough about women. I don't mean this in the sexy sense. Vidal gives some lip service to Burr's identity as a prominent early feminist, but I feel very strongly that if you're going to write a book about Aaron Burr, Famously Interested in Women's Brains, you have not just the opportunity but the responsibility to -- as Lin-Manuel Miranda would put it -- put some women back in the narrative. And Vidal doesn't, not really. Women do appear, some affectionately portrayed, but they rarely do much moving or shaking even from behind the scenes. Theodosias 1 and 2 each get, if I remember correctly, one scene with dialogue apiece in the entire book. One scene each! The more I think about this the more frustrated I get, especially considering that ( book spoilers of which I very strongly disapprove )
