Behind every great man

THE ART of history is the art of deception," Albert Fried has one of the characters in The Prescott Chronicles say. Fried would know. His own art represents an attempt to purvey a new kind of history in literary guise--to perpetrate another, more elaborate form of dissimulation which he paradoxically sees as an essay in truth-telling. This may not be the way the history books tell it, Fried suggests, but it's the way it must have been.

The Prescott Chromicles purports to be a collection of first-person source material--journals, letters, literary sketches, etc.--culled from the archives of one very prominent American family. According to Fried, the Prescotts go way back--all the way to pious Samuel Prescott, who penned a Book of Confessions startlingly similar to John Winthrop's famous Journal. Samuel's descendants apparently managed to maintain a unique historical proximity to many of the most prominent figures in American politicla history, from William Penn to FDR. Even more surprisingly, they left behind an invaluable set of documents to tell the tale.

Of course, the documents are fake, the inspired creations of Fried's imagination. But, as Fried (under the pseudonym Julian K. Prescott, the latest member of the line) argues in his preface, they tell the sort of truth most histories, based as they are on inadequate evidence, can never quite capture. Prescott (alias Fried), who has previously revealed a similar book on the Cold War, puts it this way:

Another hoax, another spoof, some will say. More fictitious documents, more fun and private jokes at the expense of the ingenuous reader, the whole history of America being the province this time of my (or my master's) invention. Maybe so, but this, as I have been at some pains to show, is a pedestrian and unimaginative way of approaching the truth. A last word of reassurance then (if it is still needed): I exist! The Prescott family existed! These chronicles exist!

They do indeed, and they demand evaluation both as history and as literature, as the representation of a certain historicla bias and as an artful attempt to embody that bias in the outpourings of fictional characters.

As an historian, Fried is a mild revisionist who sees American history as a process of declension from the egalitarian ardor that sparked the American revolution. Fried's characters, in whose mouths versimilitude passes for verity, run the gamut from out-and-out radicals like Anthony Flagg Prescott, hwo finds even FDR's second New Deal unabashedly capitalistic, to reactionaries like Timothy Prescott, Tory poet. Still, it isn't hard to tell where Fried's own sympathies lie; in Julian's words, "Mine was a family of antinomians, dissenters, gadflies and nay-sayers." Most of the Prescotts, at least the most articulate ones, fall to the left of the men they write about (Timothy's poetry, as it turns out, is egregiously bad).

The tip-off to Fried's perspective--and the book's climax--comes in the cpilogue, a transcript of Julian's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The vocal indignation of the committee notwithstanding, Julian's message is essentially no more than a liberal critique of American society; pointing to the vast economic gulf between rich and poor, he advocates the transformation of our social and economic structure as a prerequisite to the establishment of a truly representative government. The senators cry revolution, yet Prescott's revolution is not "the violent over-throw of the government" but rather

A revolutionary change of consciousness and character, a reawakened sense of true individualism, true freedom, true equality, a rededicated opposition to monopolies and concentrations of power, to the excess wealth and extravagant privileges that have come to be built into our way of life, a reassertion of the common people's pride in themselves.

His is in fact a backward-looking revolution, which envisions a return to a mythical historical past in which Horatio Alger individualism was unhampered by monopoly power. Such a vision, reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, presupposes a peculiarly slanted view of American history--one which Julian loses no time in expounding. He tells the senators that "Roger Williams, Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Lincoln and the Roosevelts" shared a single "collective vision" of America as "a nation of independent and self-reliant individuals who are free because equal in wealth and power equal in opportunity if not status." It goes without saying that no such America--where opportunity was equal for all--has ever existed; what is more disturbing is Fried's association of all these men with the same social prescription, to which only a fraction of them actually subscribed.

Not even Fried's own history seems to substantiate Prescott's claim that contemporary America is a fallen world, at odds with its ideal past. A large part of the book's bite comes, in fact, from a half-humorous debunking of out historical myths: Emerson got most of his ideas from his Unitarian cohorts, Fried smirkingly insinuates, and Benjamin ("Early to bed, early to rise") Franklin never rose until noon. More substantively, it's hard to detect any real difference between, for example, the imperialism for which Julian chides the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Stuart Rantoul Prescott's glorious paeans to "manifest destiny."

If the endpoint of The Prescott Chronicles is puzzling, the journey there has its compensations. Not as consistently engrossing as the finest historical novels. The Prescott Chronicles does occasionally attain to a plotted intensity. Each section of the book consists of the leavings of one particular family scion (there are, interestingly, no women represented, perhaps because women were not in a position to make the kind of political history Fried is concerned with. (Each is written in a genre particular to the times and events it describes.) Samuels Book of Confessions is complemented by the journals of Basil Litchflied Prescott, transcendentalist; on the other hand, Bartholomew Flagg Prescott's contribution comprises a series of dispatches, ostensibly briefing Lincoln on the calibre of his various generals, while Stewart Rantoul os represented by muckraking articles and his correspondence with Teddy Roosevelt.

The most successful sections are those which mange to interweave the personal with the political. The entry for Samuel Prescott, for exampel, tells the perhaps n ot untypical story of one Puritan's growing tolerance for free expression, resulting in part from his own foray into sexual philandering. The sexual peccadilloes of Basil Litchfiled--who lives with a half-crazed wife and hides his homosexual yearnings from his Unitarian colleagues--also sustain dramatic interst.

Anthony Flagg's Diary of the New Deal Years is engrossing for different reasons. The longest segment of the book, it painstakingly details a radical braintruster's reactions to the gradual development and stultification of the New Deal, and then America's cautious steps from isolationism to World War II. It is a stunningly realized picture of a brilliant, politically calculating President whose chief skill resides in getting all his various staffers, each in his own way, to serve his turn.

Other sections suffer, however, from a lack of narrative development, or an overemphasis on the explicitly political. Andrew Prescott's to his sister, for example, seem no more than standard historical accounts, from a radical perspective, of America's staggering towards independence. A frightening glimpse of the imperialist mind in its heyday, Stuart Rantoul's letters to Teddy Roosevelt have strikingly little literary merit.

Fried's appointed task--to synthesize history and literature in a way that will do justice to both--is an ambitious one, perhaps overly so. In the end, his work is very hard to judge for jsut that reason. Only when he sticks to public figures and actual historical events is Fried assured of historical accuracy, his own philosophising about truth notwithstanding; but only by endowing those characters with distinctive motivations as mediated by the biases of fictional observers can he make history into drama. The combination of the verifiably historic with the personally idiosyncratic--when Fried achieves that synthesis--makes for pre-eminently satisfying reading. But whether that combination finally represents a history which "really happened" is another question altogether.