Review: Burr

Burr by Gore Vidal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gore Vidal has long been a “name” whose work I didn’t really know. He seemed almost more famous for being famous than for any particular thing he’d written. So, when this one cropped up on sale, I figured I’d give it a shot.

As a concept, I love this book. A young man and partisan of Aaron Burr is hired to write a scandalous hit-job on Martin Van Buren by claiming that the Presidential candidate is actually the son of the disgraced old man. The result is a novel told back-and-forth between a present of Charlie Schuyler as he navigates the United States of the middle 1830s and a past of Burr’s life.

Burr’s voice, as Vidal gives it to us, is rich and ironic. He offers a view of American history that’s been buried by subsequent consensus, but that comes across as cutting and clever. His Alexander Hamilton isn’t the brilliant but flawed figure of musical fame, but rather an always conniving and striving upstart, jealous of Burr’s distinguished pedigree. (I hadn’t known it, but Burr was the grandson of the famous Jonathan “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Edwards as well as the son of the president of what would become Princeton.) His Thomas Jefferson isn’t the great, deistic sage we know, but rather a serial promise-breaker, a master politician, and a man capable of switching his philosophy as necessary.

The Burr we hear is a voice of dissent who lives long enough to be among the last major participants in the Revolutionary moment. He comes to us as a curmudgeon, a scoundrel even, but an unapologetic one.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine anyone writing this book today. Forty-five years later, most of the references that seem essential to understanding it have simply fallen out of common knowledge. I found myself checking and re-checking Wikipedia for reminders of just who a whole host of secondary characters are. I remember Henry Clay and John Calhoun. But William Wirt? Samuel Swartwout? Some of these are colorful scoundrels in their own right, characters who must once have been near household names and who helped define American history. Today, well, they’re hyperlinks.

I enjoy the history lesson – that’s much of what kept me in this – but it’s striking to think that Vidal must have been writing for an audience (perhaps imaginary even then) sufficiently saturated in American history to recognize the nature of the revisionism he was exploring. In other words, he had faith there were enough “patriots” (in his Burr’s ironic sense of the word) to follow his fundamental claim.

As a consequence, there’s an airy elitism that pervades this, some of it Burr’s and some of it Vidal’s – himself the scion of a distinguished American family that history may have left behind. Vidal turns out to be every bit the master aphorist I’d heard he was. I didn’t write down any of the great one-liners he pulls off, but there are many turns of phrase that I wish I’d been clever enough to think of. Even so, that contributes to the sense that this is something that’s condescending to me, and to most of us reading it. We’re some of Jefferson’s great unwashed, products not of the openly cynical opportunism of Burr (who narrowly escaped execution as a traitor hoping to establish himself emperor of a region comprised of several of what are now some of our Southern states) but of the subtler hypocrisy of Jefferson and his “Virginia junto.”

There’s much to enjoy here if you’re willing to double-check the history against Burr/Vidal’s version. It can drag in places since it takes a while to find Charlie’s story, but it’s a lot of fun too. I understand Vidal wrote a loose series of these histories, books that challenge our received version of the events that shaped who we are as a nation. I won’t rush onto the next, but I’ll be on the lookout for it sometime down the road.


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