Word: burrs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BURR WAS ONE of the most intriguing early American politicians. Vidal takes the material at hand and succeeds in turning out a coherent, internally consistent narrative. He does so using an almost disjointed technique--developing the story of Burr's career simultaneously through "memoirs" attributed to Burr and through "research" supposedly conducted by Charles Schuyler, a young journalist and friend of Burr...
...disjointed narrative has its advantages. Schuyler's research is used to fill in Burr's background, to reveal little tidbits of bastardy that Burr could not plausibly put in his memoirs. More importantly, by purporting to include portions of Burr's own memoirs, Vidal can ascribe motives to Burr's activities throughout the man's public career...
Vidal claims to find this freedom to ascribe motives very important, so important that it is itself responsible for his chosing to write a historical novel rather than a history. In an After-word he maintains that the novelist can ascribe motives to historical figures such as Burr, while historians, insofar as they are scrupulous, must refrain from doing...
...imputing motives to Burr, Vidal hopes to penetrate his subject's mind and explain his behavior. As a novelist, dealing with history, Vidal sacrifices his ability to manufacture situations, but he is free from the strictures binding historians. This may explain the limits facing the historical novelist, but it does little to indicate the benefits a novelist derives from subjecting himself to the constraints of an historical situation. The motives conjured up by the novelist have no source from which to derive validity; they are only the imaginings of a modern writer...
...much different circumstances. It is the story of Julian the Apostate, a late Roman Emperor, and the novel stands in the Walter Pater tradition. But in Julian Vidal did more than merely ascribe motives to an historical actor--he developed the actor into a rather remarkable character. Burr remains an historical figure, with attributed motives, but little real depth...