Books: Angry Man’s Romance

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Kenneth Roberts has a legendary temper, on which he practices great self-control. But self-control in his case is said to be a brief, turkey-red moment between the rush of blood to his face and an outburst that begins (in milder cases) with goddam, ends (several minutes later) in total verbal annihilation. Fellow authors like Booth Tarkington, Ben Ames Williams, Samuel Blythe have publicized these tantrums with such glee that the suspicion has grown that Roberts rages are also literary, less an adrenalin effusion than a character signature like Wotan’s motif in the Nibelungen Ring.

His friends have claimed that when his anger really towers, he looks eight feet tall. Catalogues have been compiled of the things that touch him off: little boys who run outboard motors; wet boots that will not pull off easily; billboard advertising; Dorothy Thompson; intruders during working hours; cooks who carbonize and mummify ducks, partridges, trout; politicians ; Americans who are more interested in Europe’s affairs than the U. S.; the cheerful squirplings (a Roberts word) of English sparrows; the New Deal; Pulitzer Prize awards; interior decorating. Disapproving of a mantelpiece in a house where he was a weekend guest, Roberts has been known, Friend Ben Ames Williams insists, to tear it out “with the aid of no levers, saws, axes, or any other tools or implements save his own simple teeth.”

But nothing puts Novelist Roberts into a fury quicker than historical distortion. Since he feels that much U. S. history has been deliberately distorted or deliberately left unwritten, he has existed for some years in a high state of historical dudgeon. The margins of his history books (he owns the largest private Revolutionary War library in the U. S.) crackle with expletive and epithet: “What an ass!”; “Nuts!”; “The louse judgment of a literary louse!”; “Beef from a moose?”

The reverse of this negative hatred of sham and lies is a quality that has helped to make Kenneth Roberts the finest U. S. historical novelist since James Fenimore Cooper* his respect for cold facts. His tirelessness in tracking down historical obscurities (he is probably the world’s No. 1 literary detective), his fearlessness in publishing what he finds, have resulted in some shocking reversals of U. S. cultural myths. In two of his books, Roberts has heroized Traitor Benedict Arnold. This week the same qualities resulted in another first-class historical shocker. Oliver Wiswell is a sustained and uncompromising report of the American Revolution from the Tory viewpoint. It will start Union Now advocates turning handsprings, may well set the D. A. R. to plaiting nooses.

Maine Boy. Absence of fear in the face of hard facts comes naturally to Novelist Roberts—he comes from Maine. Even before there were 13 colonies, Boston theocrats found out that the rest of the country might or might not go as Maine goes, but Maine would keep right on going its own way. One of the earliest men to settle there was Richard Nason who arrived in Kittery before 1639. Toward the end of the last century, Grandmother Jane Nason Tibbets used to take six-year-old Grandson Kenneth Roberts on her knee, tell him bedtime stories about Indian massacres—burning villages, murdered and mutilated men; women and little children trudging through the deep snow and the dark forests to Montreal while their captors, with scalps dangling and dripping at their belts, knocked on the head anybody who felt tired.

Grandmother knew stories about the Old French War too, in which Maine men made British officers’ eyes bug by capturing impregnable Louisburg. In the American Revolution, Benedict Arnold led Maine men through the blinding blizzards to attack Quebec. With him went two of Kenneth Roberts’ great-great-grandfathers. And there was the persecution of the Tories by the rebels.

Until Kenneth Roberts was 40, it looked as if Grandmother Tibbets had talked to no purpose. Roberts seemed perfectly content as a newspaperman. Out of Cornell (where he had edited the Widow), he went to work on the Boston Post, stayed there eight years as reporter, feature writer, humorous columnist. He went to Manhattan for brief spells on Puck and the old Life. Then World War I took him to Siberia as a captain in the military intelligence. Thus began nine years of roving in which he covered Europe, Asia and Washington, D. C. for the Saturday Evening Post. Twelve years ago Kenneth Roberts was a top-flight U. S. foreign correspondent.

In 1922 Roberts published Why Europe Leaves Home. It described the new wandering of the peoples in war-dislocated Europe, warned vanishing Americans that unless they tightened restrictions on immigration, the U. S. would soon be a disposal plant for most of Europe’s human waste. Boldly he stated a premise that every stockbreeder knows, most liberals deny: “Races cannot be crossbred without mongrelization any more than dogs. . . .” His book hastened the passage of the Restrictive Immigration Law.

Roberts had dedicated his book (like three later ones) to Booth Tarkington, one day dropped in to see him. Roberts said he wanted to write a novel too.

Grandmother Tibbets’ stories had been swirling around his head all those years. Moreover, he had read Schoolmaster-Postmaster Charles Bradbury’s History of Kennebunkport, was determined to write a novel about the Louisburg expedition. He was in one of his rages because he had collected so much research that even in his own mind he could not condense it into an outline of anything resembling a novel.

Novelist Tarkington, one of the kindliest and most helpful writers in the busi ness, soothed and encouraged Suppliant Roberts. Trouble was, he said, that he had the makings of two fine novels, maybe even three or four. Let Roberts write the story of the Quebec expedition first.

“Bring me your first chapter in two weeks,” said Tarkington. Roberts dashed home, in a week wrote Chapter I of Arundel. Tarkington thought it was fine. Soon, with $1,000 from Publisher Russell Doubleday (who showed “astounding trustfulness”), Roberts rushed off to the cold discomforts of an Italian “palace” where, by “sitting at a desk, facing a blank wall,” he wrote 2,200 words a day. Now & again he would storm out to take furious potshots with his .22 rifle at squirpling sparrows. When Arundel was finished in 1929, Novelist Roberts decided that “the life of a railroad track-worker or a lumberjack may often be easier.” But he has been writing historical novels ever since.

January 1930 was the worst possible moment for a historical novel to come out. Amid long and difficult labor pains, the “proletarian” novel was being born. If the hero and heroine spoke bad English mixed with a brave obscenity, they were proletarians. Characters who spoke good English were, by Depression critical standards, the enemies of progress.

In such circumstances Arundel’s sale was small, but it was steady. Soon Roberts was working on The Lively Lady, an early 19th-Century story of privateering and Dartmoor jail. Then he went back to the American Revolution. Rabble in Arms was finished in the hungry autumn of 1933. Wrote Roberts in his journal: “Finished the proofs. Broke and almost dead.” Said A. Hamilton Gibbs: “A masterly presentation of the period.” Murmured Friend Alexander Woollcott: “A fine murmurous forest of a book.”

Novelist Roberts still did not have a bestseller. But his publishers began to note something else that pleased them just as much—a steady sale of Roberts books. Roberts was fast becoming something better than a best-seller—a publisher’s property. He had started something with his historical novels. Suddenly U. S. readers forgot the proletarians, took up Anthony Adverse, then Gone With the Wind.

Roberts went on writing. Each of his books had a way of leading to another.

Each grew out of research for one that went before. He wrote: “I began to get a sort of broad picture of what had gone on in Maine and New England in the old days. . . . It dawned on me that nobody had ever written it—nobody: not even historians. . . . I believe the experiences of the Northern army are almost without parallel in the history of War; but out of what history can you get an understanding of it? Not out of one damned history. Or out of ten. And if that isn’t a show-up for our historians. . . .” Privately he has said with unprintable interpolations: “They ain’t telling the truth. The history of America has been —, —, and —I didn’t have the faintest idea that we had sacrificed so much truth for intolerance.”

In 1937 he published his best-seller—Northwest Passage. In the rise & fall of No. 1 Indian Fighter Major Robert Rogers, Roberts had a dramatic theme. He had also learned a lot about writing. Northwest Passage sold like hot cakes, was bought by M. G. M. for a Spencer Tracy movie.

Having written himself into the money, Roberts bought a 100-acre estate within sight of the Atlantic at Kennebunkport, put up a spread-wing goose over a name sign (Rocky Pasture). From his pasture Roberts presently grubbed enough rock to build a house and garage. On the bookshelf in Roberts’ living room squats a grinning brass Chinese god of happiness with his hands folded over his paunch. Roberts never sends a novel to his publisher without first rubbing the polished paunch for good luck. Last September he rubbed it for Oliver Wiswell. By this week Oliver Wiswell’s advance sale in the trade had passed 100,000 copies. Many a publisher called it the biggest advance sale in a decade, expected Wiswell to be the publishing sensation of the year.

The Book. Oliver Wiswell is a more important outgrowth of Rabble in Arms, In that novel Roberts created two brothers, one a rebel, one a tory. He made the tory rather a weakling. But by the time he had finished the book, Roberts decided that the tory had a case, “and a damned good case.”

Never in fiction, seldom in history has the tory case been effectively stated before. Oliver Wiswell states it. In this angry book the lyrical mood of Arundel is completely gone. Its 836 pages are sustained by Novelist Roberts’ wrathful consciousness that while history is always written by the victors, a historical romancer sometimes has a chance to tell the truth. Roberts tells the truth (as he sees it) about the lost cause of American loyalism with as much passion as if he himself had been tarred and feathered by a Massachusetts mob.

The novel’s plot is simple. Son of a distinguished Massachusetts tory lawyer, Oliver Wiswell comes home from Yale to find himself caught in the early stages of the American Revolution. When he rescues tory Printer Thomas Buell from a mob that has tarred and feathered him, Wiswell has already taken sides. By the time a sadder and wiser Wiswell starts a new life in Canada years later, he has fled from Boston to Halifax to New York to London to Paris, back to New York, and down to Virginia in search of Burgoyne’s lost army. Most of the novel reports Wiswell’s adventures in all these places as a British spy.

New characters and some old ones appear in the book. There is tory Benjamin Thompson, British secret agent, American scientist who in exile became Minister of War to the Elector of Bavaria. There is Benedict Arnold (this time in charge of the expedition to Virginia), whose treason Novelist Roberts still believes was high-minded. There is George Washington (whom Roberts considers “one of the few truly great figures this world has produced”), slashing his poltroonish troops back into action with his sword during the retreat from New York. Major Rogers of Northwest Passage flits through Oliver Wiswell—an old, talkative, “clabber-voiced” British agent now, engaged in some nameless activity on Long Island. And there is vigorous, forthright Mrs. Belcher Byles (before her marriage she was a Salem Barrell), and Printer Buell who peddles his cure-all “metallic tractors” as a cover for his spying activities.

As a story, Oliver Wiswell is one of the best yarns Novelist Roberts has spun. It is packed with people, battles, sudden flights, escapes, rail-riding mobs, secret service, forlorn defenses, intrigue, massacres, exile, and there is the usual restrained Roberts love story. There are also great scenes: the headlong flight by sea of thousands of tory refugees and British troops from Boston; the heroic stupidity of the repeated British frontal attacks at Bunker Hill, seen through tory eyes from Charlestown windows and roof tops.

There is the battle of Long Island, like an old panorama print, with Smallwood’s line of brown-clad Marylanders saving the routed American forces. There are weird night scenes in the Long Island swamps where the hunted tories hide, the horrors of life in the British prison hulks; the desperate tory defense of Ninety Six, a Virginia outpost. One of the book’s best passages describes the long columns of tories stretching from Winchester (far down the Shenandoah Valley) to the Cumberland Gap. Persecuted by the rebels, let down by the British, the homeless loyalists ooze slowly over Boone’s old Wilderness Trail into Kentucky.

Like all Roberts romances, Oliver Wiswell is also important history. Novelist Roberts sees the American Revolution as a social revolution in which the colonial masses, stirred by rabble rousers like Sam Adams and John Hancock, brought the colonies to the brink from which they were later saved by the men who framed the Constitution. This book explains why Americans became tories, why the tories, through they appear to have represented at least half of the population in the 13 colonies, were defeated, why the English were unable to quash the rabble in arms.

Oliver Wiswell is also contemporary. The tragic dilemma of Oliver Wiswell and the tories is a central tragedy of our time. They learn what modern exiles have to learn: 1) that decency, thrift, sobriety, intelligence have no value in a civil war; 2) that there is no hope for the vanquished in a social revolution except to start life over again in a new country. Says Author Roberts through the mouth of troubled Oliver Wiswell: “God grant to all peoples a Wilderness Trail at whose end they can find surcease from demagogues, interference, greed, intolerance and politicians. . . .”

History Repeats. It takes Kenneth Roberts about five years to finish a novel, two of which he spends in research (meanwhile finishing another book). He revises his books five or six times, sometimes makes 200 corrections per page, smokes more & more cotton-tufted Parliament cigarets as he gets going. When a novel is all in, so, as a rule, is Author Roberts.

For Oliver Wiswell he dictated 2,500,000 words. They were taken down by his secretary-niece, dark-eyed Marjorie Mosser. Niece Mosser looks like the portrait of Grandmother Tibbets that hangs in the Rocky Pasture living room. When she came to work for him, Roberts warned her, “Before I’m through with a book, you’ll think I’m the worst stinker that ever lived. But you’ll never be fired.” She has lived through three books, Trending into Maine, March to Quebec and Wiswell, has also (at Gourmet Roberts’ suggestion) written one of her own —a recipe book called Good Maine Food. Third member of the Roberts household is small, wellread, tranquil Mrs. Roberts, who used to do the secretarial work Niece Mosser does now.

When Roberts is working, he works all day, sometimes relaxes at a movie while Secretary Mosser types his notes. One movie at which he did not relax: M.G.M.’s Northwest Passage. Says Roberts. “They cut the guts out of it, they gummed up the characters and balled up the plot.” He is determined not to sell Wiswell to the movies. “It will be a good insurance policy for Mrs. Roberts,” says he, “and it will be just as good ten or 20 years from now.”

Roberts expects to go on writing historical novels. “I like this stuff,” he confesses. He likes the sameness of historical types over the ages, claims Caesar’s and Washington’s legionnaires were the same types, has discovered that soldiers of the American Revolution said “buddy” and “okay”and used modern obscenities.Critics call his work romance, but Roberts’ real interest is to tell what he thinks really happened. Says Kenneth Roberts: “All novels are historical, unless you just want to write about yourself. “

* Asked: “How do you feel when your books are compared to those of Fenimore Cooper?”, Roberts snapped: “It irritates me almost beyond endurance. “