Oliver Wiswell
By. Doubleday, Doran, $3.00.
KENNETH ROBERTS’S stories are always as energetic as the events they tell about, but he has never, I think, got so many exciting and enlightening events into any other novel as there are in Oliver Wiswell. After Bunker Hill and the evacuation ot Boston the loyalist hero goes to Halifax, to New York, where he witnesses the battle of Long Island, to London to try to tell the ministry the truth about America, to Paris as a secret agent, back to Virginia and the Wilderness Trail as far as Cumberland Gap, to South Carolina and the defense of Ninety-Six, in the end with a party of loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia.
If there are anywhere in fiction any accounts as living and moving as these of the battle of Long Island and of the defense of Ninety-Six, I have never read them. And while the battles are perhaps the best, as they are the most exciting, parts of the book, they occur naturally in what amounts to a large history of the Revolution seen as a civil war between two parties of Americans. Oliver Wiswell, in fact, is a young historian who plans and begins a work to be called Civil War in America. If such a work had actually been written, it would have invaluably supplemented the History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War by the actual Charles Stedman, who appears in the novel as Wiswell’s friend.
The history behind the fiction is so exact that experts will notice only a few slips. To be possibly pedantic, William Eden was not Sir William in 1777, and the old story of Germain and Howe’s instructions has long been discredited. Mr. Roberts’s section about the British secret service in Paris is so crowded with historical detail that it lags a little. Yet the overwhelming bulk of the novel is as real as fiction can be about history. This is warm flesh and blood on the skeleton of cool fact.
Because the hero is a loyalist, the actions are consistently seen from the loyalist point of view. Often forgotten as it is, it should always he remembered that there were three elements, not two, in the Revolution. There were the rebels who have survived in American history as the heroes, and the British who have survived as the villains. But in 1775-1783 the loyalists, who were to be the chief victims, were in some towns or states as numerous as the rebels, and in some were probably more numerous. What began as a political controversy between the more radical and the more conservative Americans went on to be a desperate armed conflict which was more fierce and terrible than that between the Continentals and the British forces.
The loyalists were for a century after the Revolution so unjustly vilified that it is no wonder they have lately come to be, I think, somewhat romanticized. Though Mr. Roberts may or may not at all points agree with his hero about the rebel riffraff, Wiswell is sympathetically presented in his hatred of the noisy revolutionaries who have disturbed the peace of America and who persecute the Americans that still lawfully and passionately adhere to the British Empire. But Wiswell is no less an American than any of the patriots, and he blames the British for stupid mismanagement as bitterly as he accuses the rebels of ruthless cruelty.
Oliver Wiswell is an extremely American book. It is richer than most Revolutionary novels for the reason that it reveals the two kinds of American patriotism which were contending for the mastery of the country. The British, who handicap the loyalists more than they help them, remain the villains as in the traditional stories. The fumbling British politicians, the bungling generals, the atrocious Cunningham who was provost marshal in New York — they have never come off worse in novels told from the most orthodox rebel point of view.
I believe that Oliver Wiswell will reach countless readers, and will revise the opinions held by almost every one of them about the Revolution. It is also an absorbing narrative in itself, without benefit of history.
CARL VAN DOREN
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