[In the following excerpt, Bell elucidates various perspectives on the historical figure of John Brown and views Cloudsplitter as a work of revisionist history.]

The word “history”—whatever the postmodernists claim—retains the sense of what actually was, however squintedly seen, remembered, or recounted. But history is also what historians say happened—as fiction, a story (that shorter word derived from it and coiled into it, like a worm in an apple). The historians' history is a sense-making tale that tries to explain why things occurred as they did and somehow makes them visible inside our heads. History is never more “virtual” than when it resembles a novel. At the same time, the novel incorporates literal history. Laying aside its pretense of invention and resorting directly to truth-telling, the novel even sometimes lets in among its imagined persons some who once strode about among living men and women—like J. Edgar Hoover in DeLillo's Underworld, which I reviewed in this Chronicle recently. Fiction often backgrounds its made-up stuff with historical events and scenes. The novel never entirely escapes making some reference to actualities. At the maximum of such reference is the so-called historical novel, which undertakes to rewrite formal history, and places historical persons at its very center. It may make a real person known to history the protagonist of a fiction that is different from a sober historical biography only because of more frankly fabricated details and incidents unknown to record.

An example of this kind is Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter. Fiction it is, but one is bound to read it as though it were another biography among the many that have failed to agree about John Brown (1800-1859), who died on the gallows for leading an assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, an event often held to be the opening battle of the Civil War (the commander of the U.S. Cavalry force that overcame the raiders was a brevet colonel named Robert E. Lee). Three years earlier Brown had led a small band of his own sons and some others in the murder of five proslavery men in the Kansas Territory. Brown's deliberate brutalism—the murdered were savagely butchered with broadswords in their homes—was an act of terrorism for principle of a kind we recognize all too readily today. It achieved, as terrorism often does, an intensified popular awareness of the irreconcilability of a conflict that had seemed merely ideological to many. The Pottawatamie Massacre—though it was itself a reprisal for violence by slavery men—escalated a struggle that could no longer be a matter of land claims and disputed elections. It made the perpetrator at once a figure of contrary meaning to a rapidly dividing nation. Were it not for these two occasions, Brown would have remained a minor figure in the history of abolitionism, though the organizer of a black league of “Gileadites” in Springfield, Massachusetts and the captain of an outpost of the Underground Railroad at North Elba, New York, where he lived for a few years with his numerous family. A major portion of Banks' leisurely narrative describes the Browns' skirmishes with slave-catchers and the struggles with the harsh natural conditions of their Adirondack farm. But, in 1855, John Brown left for Kansas.

Brown would be reviled by the slavery faction as a religious maniac and at the same time a con-man and adventurer, but, to abolitionists, he became a sacred figure. As he stood trial for Harpers Ferry, the gentle Emerson notoriously said he would make “the gallows glorious like the cross” by his martyrdom. His earliest biography, published immediately after his execution, was written by a correspondent for the New York Tribune, James Redpath, who had attached himself to Brown after Pottawatamie and declared that he had perceived in 1856 that Brown was “the predestined leader of the second and holier American Revolution.” There were soon other defenses and eulogies including a “Life and Letters” published in 1885 by the Concord schoolmaster and friend of Emerson and Thoreau, Frank Sanborn, who had raised funds to support Brown's doomed raid, and, finally, the 1910 biography written by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's grandson, Oswald Garrison Villard, which was a prodigious work of objective research still sustaining the view that Brown's memory was “at once a sacred, a solemn and an inspiring American heritage.” But Villard's book was attacked, particularly by southerners, even so many years after Brown's death. Among other hostile responses, Robert Penn Warren's John Brown: The Making of a Martyr offered an indictment that convicted Brown—as detractors had in his lifetime—as an embezzler and cattle-thief whose Harpers Ferry adventure was an act of brigandism. Most persistent has been the belief that the enigmatic hero/demon could be explained as a sufferer from hereditary insanity—a theory which had been promoted originally by last-minute attempts by his own attorney and others to plead legally for his life. Or that he was whatever we mean when we speak of a religious fanatic, motivated by a conviction that he is an instrument of God's will acting on divine instruction. But the most persuasive of modern biographies is that of Stephen B. Oates, who, in 1970, proposed an undeified John Brown who moved erratically towards his messianic destiny yet remained an awesome and tragic figure.

Banks has denied that he seriously proposes any sort of historical revision—like Oliver Stone in his movie about the Kennedy assassination. He takes no part in the battles of the historians over Brown's character and the significance of his career. Just the same, the novelist, by the design of his narrative, fictively positions himself among those who seek out the truth. In an old-fashioned gesture to suggest veracity, his book presents itself as the confession of a lone survivor, Brown's son Owen, who almost did live long enough to be interviewed, as he claims, by one of Villard's researchers. This fictional Owen aims to shed light on the question of his father's sanity and the nature of his influence over others. Above all, to make him real, to show him as a man variously capable at many trades—a skillful subsistence farmer, a tanner and a sheep raiser, a cattle trader, a wool trader, and a land speculator—and also a Bible literalist convinced of the satanic nature of slavery. Plausibly, he depicts Brown as a prototypically divided American: “Much as he wished to be a warrior against slavery, he also wished to be, like most Americans, a man of means”—and he evokes for many pages the episodes of Brown's forays into speculations that just missed success—like an attempt to capture the international wool market when he took 200,000 pounds of American wool to London. Most of these commercial efforts were failures, and Brown was pursued by angry creditors and was the subject of suits for broken agreements for years on end.

Banks does a good deal to provide that density of incident and description true history longs for but can seldom achieve in the presentation of established facts. He extrapolates from the known to the unknown to give us the Brown family members, especially those five sons who moved with their father to Kansas in 1854—John Junior, Jason, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and Owen—differentiating their strongly individual personalities while making their father's hold on them credible. Old Brown remains impenetrable as ever, like the formidable and invariably identical photographs of him with a fixed stare and set mouth that represent him again and again. All we know is what has always been evident from the outside—his armor of staggering pride and conviction.

Owen's personal account of himself is Banks's invention. As a reimaginer of the John Brown story Banks freely pretends, novelistically, that he can break history's code with the sort of guesswork that may tempt the historian at his peril—and fantasizes a secret true account only known by this mysterious loner son, Brown's most loyal lieutenant. Unfortunately, this story of Owen's is a contrived and unconvincing psycho-biography. We can understand his suppressed rebellion: “There was so much that I could not understand about this man, my father, and the life we led because of him—my thoughts, my questions, were blocked, occluded by the absolute rightness of his cause, which none of us could question, ever, and by the sheer power of Father's personality, the relentlessness of it, how he wore us down, until we seemed to have no personalities of our own, even to each other.” But Banks labors to provide a Freudian diagnosis, which is only postulated and never given substance—oedipal hostility born of Owen's unrelinquished longing for his long-dead mother. He hints at a sexual blockage which keeps Owen celibate except for a single early encounter with a prostitute, and he also suggests suppressed homosexual feelings for one of his father's black followers. This love results in a displaced sexual fixation on the black man's wife—and then a murder by accident when he hands this friend a cocked gun. It is his guilt for the black man's death, we gradually learn, that makes Owen the secret master of the tale we thought was John Brown's own. Banks's Owen comes to believe that he can expiate his guilt by becoming “an assassin with no principle or ideology and with no apparent religion, save one: death to slavery.” So, it is he, the solitary and silent one, who executes John Brown's wishes again and again but actually betrays his father by focusing his wandering will upon one end.

The older man's spasmodic anti-slavery zeal is not enough. Owen calls himself an Iago who becomes the true author of those happenings that alter the course of human events. In Kansas it is Owen whose implacable will compels his brothers and father to do their bloody work: “For without my having instigated the attack and then goaded them when they grew timorous and frightened by the idea, they would never have done it.” Projecting the hindsight of a modern historian back upon 1856 America, Owen says, “What Father called the will of God I now called history.” He sees himself as an apostle of historic necessity who showed his father and brothers that if they did not butcher those five at Pottawatamie,

the war in Kansas would have been over. Finished. In a matter of weeks, Kansas would have been admitted to the Union as a slave-state, and there would have been nothing for it then but the quick secession of all the Northern states, starting with New England, and the wholesale abandonment of three million Negro Americans to live and die in slavery, along with their children and grandchildren and however many generations it would take before slavery in the South was finally, if ever, overthrown. There would have been no raid on Harpers Ferry, certainly, and no Civil War, for the South would not have objected in the slightest to the breakup of the Union.

I could only put Cloudsplitter down in disbelief when I came upon this “disclosure” by an Owen become a madly prescient historian. As I observed in the beginning of this report, it is the novel's fate and obligation to try to explain human experience, and historical novels sometimes propose explanations that connect the scattered events of history with a paranoid insistence—but the makers of real history are rarely so conscious. Owen says, “No little thing in our lives is without meaning. I did what I did, my duty, in order to free slaves. I did it to change history.” Of course, however unlikely it seems that a real Owen Brown could have spoken so, he is terrifyingly right in declaring the efficacy of terror. “The terror and the rage that we caused with those murders ignited the flames of war all across Kansas, to be sure, and all across the southern states and in the North as well.” Banks's revisionary fictional history goes on to Harpers Ferry with Owen—who manages to escape when the raid fails—but it does not recapitulate the trial and execution of the displaced hero, John Brown.