Dead Certainties:
(Unwarranted Speculations)
By Simon Schama
Knopf, 333 pages, $21
With the two beautifully written novellas that make up ”Dead Certainties” (”The Many Deaths of General Wolfe” and ”Death of a Harvard Man”), the gifted historian who gave us ”Citizens” joins those who have played variations on ”the nonfiction novel” in the last 60 years. Truman Capote`s ”In Cold Blood,” Norman Mailer`s ”Armies of the Night” and ”The Executioner`s Song,” Gore Vidal`s ”Burr” and ”Lincoln” are a few of the celebrated books in a tradition that includes Janet Lewis` ”The Invasion”
(1931) and ”The Wife of Martin Guerre” (1941). Yet few historians before Simon Schama have ventured to experiment with literary form in the way that won Oscar Handlin a Pulitzer Prize for ”The Uprooted” (1951) or that distinguished Bernard Bailyn`s ”Voyages to the West” (1986).
Schama chooses for his ”dead certainties” the glorious death of Gen. James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, in the battle that won Quebec and Canada for England in 1759 and the inglorious death 90 years later of Dr. George Parkman, who was murdered and dismembered by Prof. John Webster in Webster`s laboratory at the Harvard Medical College. What links these events, besides Schama`s perceptive interest in the uncertainties of historical knowledge, is the historian Francis Parkman`s admiration for Wolfe and the participation of Parkman`s powerful family in the campaign to find, convict and hang his uncle`s murderer.
Of course Francis Parkman did not publish ”Montcalm and Wolfe,” the culminating volumes of his ”France and England in North America,” until 35 years after the notorious murder. But Schama`s theme is the difference between what actually happened, insofar as historical research can ascertain the information, and the uses that interpreters make of the events.
Francis Parkman therefore appears more prominently in ”The Many Deaths of General Wolfe” than in ”Death of a Harvard Man,” which occurs during his own lifetime. Schama portrays him in ”Many Deaths” as the obsessive romantic who was driven to escape the smug Unitarian pieties and the imported literary sensibilities of his Boston Brahmin family, first by venturing among the Sioux and the buffalo in the West and then by identifying with Wolfe and other neurotic heroes in the history that became his life`s work.
In the first novella Schama focuses on Wolfe`s death through a kind of triangulation. We begin with a private soldier`s impression of Wolfe and the British army`s secret movement up the St. Lawrence River in the black of night. Then a look into Wolfe`s own anxieties both domestic and professional brings us with the fated general to the face of the cliff separating the Heights of Abraham from the river.
We switch abruptly to the royal exhibition 12 years later at which the American-born Benjamin West`s painting ”The Death of General Wolfe” was shown. Schama`s brilliant analysis of the painting introduces us not only to West`s innovation-daring in the name of historical fidelity to depict historical characters in contemporaneous rather than classical or
”universal” costume-but also to errors that West imposed on the actual event. West placed at Wolfe`s side officers and a muscular Native American who certainly had not been present.
At last we see Parkman`s version, written in the 1880s but colored for us by his revealing personal memoir, which was read posthumously to a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1893. It is here that we see both his youthful compulsions and (as Schama reads the times) the Brahmins` effort to fend off the new wave of immigration and the future. A brief coda returns us to an 18th Century captain who witnessed Wolfe`s death and to a letter of condolence written by Wolfe`s fiancee to his mother, who had refused to approve of the proposed marriage.
With admirable economy, then, Schama presents Gen. Wolfe`s death as an important incident in 18th Century imperial warfare and as a phenomenon of social and cultural history in three centuries, including our own-doing so from several different biographical perspectives. The richness of texture would be even more admirable if Schama had found room to acknowledge Parkman`s deeply sympathetic identification with the sickly Wolfe`s antagonist, the French general Montcalm, who was eminently sane, healthy and elegant, even courtly, and whose name appears first on Parkman`s title page. Also, by representing Parkman as a rebel against Unitarian literary fathers as well as the Unitarian preacher who was Parkman`s actual father and namesake, Schama overlooks the Unitarians` encouragement of the kind of history Parkman wrote, and he ignores Parkman`s debt to American predecessors in both history and fiction, George Bancroft and James Fenimore Cooper.
This is fine work nonetheless, and the second novella is even better. Here both the narrative and the social history are much more complex. We begin with a sympathetic view of Gov. George Briggs, son of a blacksmith from western Massachusetts, as he faces a stack of angry letters demanding that he spare the condemned Harvard professor`s wife and daughters the horror of an execution. Here, moreover, we have no witnesses to Dr. Parkman`s death except for the murderer himself. For awhile we have no body at all.
Dr. Parkman has simply disappeared. Before the mutilated parts of his body have been discovered, several people in different sections of the city claim that they saw him, in contradictory places, before and after he vanished. And during the murder trial itself, expert testimony questions whether the parts discovered in Prof. Webster`s incinerator actually belong to the body of George Parkman.
The unlikely man who breaks open the case turns out to be one of the best of many fine characterizations in the book. A janitor who has overheard fierce words long before the murder, when Dr. Parkman was dunning Prof. Webster, Ephraim Littlefield has the enterprise to tunnel into the hiding place in which parts of the body have been burned. But his enterprise in exhuming bodies also has a history. He has sometimes pieced out his income by trafficking in the grave-robbers` goods that medical students need for dissection. As Boston and Cambridge take sides during and after the sensational trial, Littlefield becomes for many Bostonians not the hero who virtually solved the crime but the persecutor of an innocent man.
Horrified and embarrassed by the scandal, the ”gentle men of Harvard”
are ”impatient to be rid of this squalid embarrassment.” The Parkman family offers to pay an outside specialist to assist the prosecution in the trial. The Supreme Court of Massachusetts, with the majestic Lemuel Shaw presiding, hears the original case along with the jury. One of the chief attorneys proves to be inept if not incompetent. The murdered man turns out to be not merely a fierce dun whose hounding apparently provoked a desperate debtor to murder, but an enlightened specialist who has tried unsuccessfully to bring to Boston the most advanced Parisian therapy for the insane. And while newspaper readers are preoccupied with the trial, cholera, poverty and other urban miseries afflict Boston`s Irish immigrants.
Against such richness, Schama plays his theme of uncertainties and projects his ”unwarranted speculations.” Eventually we do have a confession, but we never really know why Webster killed Parkman or how he did it. His claim that a grape vine was the weapon seems hardly credible. Was Webster sane? Should he have been hanged? What happened to his own body, which was secretly buried? Schama reminds us in a brief conclusion that ”these are stories . . . of broken bodies, uncertain ends, indeterminate consequences.” He calls them ”works of the imagination, not scholarship,” but his scholarship brightens every page.
Several unintended perplexities may remain. Does Schama deliberately change the date of Herman Melville`s marriage to Chief Justice Shaw`s daughter? Does he deliberately misrepresent William H. Prescott (age 53 at the time of the murder) as ”young William the historian,” to underline the solidarity of Webster`s relatives-by-marriage when they regularly visit the defendant in prison? I assume that these are simply minor slips, but registering such supposed facts does provoke doubts-even as we applaud Schama`s innovative achievement-about the implicit contract between narrator and reader.
However you read that unwritten contract, you will be wise to read this excellent book.
