REACHING FOR THE ART OF FICTION WHILE HOLDING ON TO HISTORY

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, March 29, 1998

Page: G4

Section: Books

These days such tact -- the discreet suggestion that the thing you hold in your hand is not designed for the purpose it clearly serves -- is increasingly found in the world of letters. I recently came across an example of circumspection worthy of the canniest maltster in Russell Banks's ``Cloudsplitter'' (HarperFlamingo, $27.50). Here is a novel whose very title rings of truth, achieving, as it does, perfect consonance with its subject, the abolitionist John Brown. Still, in an author's note, Banks cautions the reader that, while some of the characters and incidents in the novel can be found in accounts of John Brown's life and times, they have been altered ``to suit the strict purposes of storytelling.'' Given this, he declares, ``the book should be read solely as a work of fiction, not as a version or interpretation of history.''

But really, how is that possible? The book cannot be abstracted from history, nor history from it; it is, at the very least, an engagement with history, its immense power deriving from that. The added particulars and developments of character serve to amplify the truth of the past. The character of John Brown seems only -- not that ``only'' is quite the right word here -- a fleshed-out version of the man described by his contemporaries; so does the predicament of his sons, conscripted by their father in the war against evil.

What exactly that meant, its reality as life lived and, frankly, its horror, is brought home in this big book, which purports to be an account written by Brown's son Owen, now an ancient recluse in California. Aside from showing the toll Brown's campaign took on his family, which he does with mixed emotion, he hopes to settle the question that remains open today: Was John Brown insane? Here, Banks's portrayal of the tempering of that fearsome patriarch's will for the climactic confrontation is not only credible but revelatory as well. In a chilling scene he shows Brown thanking his son for having prevented him from killing a man in anger. `` `Fact is,' '' the older man says, `` `I'm not ready to kill a man, Owen.'

`` `Not in cold blood,' I said.

`` `Yes, and that's the problem. My killing him would have been murder, pure and simple. I have no cold blood, Owen. Not a drop. I must acquire it.' ''

He does, and becomes the instigator of ruthless, cold-blooded killings. Is this sane? Was it necessary? What is the relationship between the two? In an alchemy of invention and empathy, ``Cloudsplitter'' shows history at a critical juncture being brought into being by individual actions of paradoxical moral valance.

I imagine the reason Russell Banks issued what we may call the maltster's warning before letting us loose in his novel was to avoid being roughed up by historians patrolling the borders of their bailiwick. Still, that boundary has become permeable both ways. John Lukacs's ``A Thread of Years'' (Yale University Press, $35) shows that historian slipping into the territory of fiction as a means of conveying his historical understanding, though he abominates such efforts as Banks's, works that supply historical figures with more than the historical record provides.

Lukacs's project is to invent characters, but not the historical context of their lives, and to show how a variety of invented persons -- all, as it happens, middle-class Europeans and Americans -- would think and feel in specific circumstances from 1901 to 1969. His overarching theme is the decline of ``civilization,'' which he claims accompanied the Americanization of the Western world. With that, the ``cement of hypocrisy'' that once held things together crumbled, and was replaced by ``a moral and intellectual sleaziness pretending to be `sincere' or even `honest.' ''

This hits a chord, to be sure. But unlike good novelists and story writers, academics (even great ones) don't trust their readers to understand fiction -- or anything, really. Lukacs is no exception. His little sketches are often quite fine, moving, acerbic, or evocative as the case might be. But each is followed up by a debate between himself and his alter ego in the course of which his intent is hammered home, objections co-opted, pet peeves aired, and the antithesis between ``culture'' and ``civilization'' (that old Middle European obsession) given a good workout. In the end, despite a few really brilliant observations, the book seems the product of exhaustion, of a writer who can't surrender himself to fiction but who hasn't the energy to forge a treatise on the theme that bedevils him.

Stephen Fry is an English actor and comic writer whose novel ``Making History'' (Random House, $24) makes a stab at intellectual gravity and ends up being, shall we say, very small beer. The novel -- which is more a demonstration and grab-bag of formats -- offers an answer to the familiar question: What would have happened had Hitler never been born? Half the book is devoted to a labor-intensive bringing about of this state of affairs. But is it a good thing? The reader who has noticed Fry's mention of ``Daniel Goldhagen's brilliant `Hitler's Willing Executioners' '' in his acknowledgments will already have some idea of how things pan out.

In other words, it seems, certain ineluctables exist in which the individual is inconsequential -- a point of view that John Brown, at least, did not accept. In that respect, it is funny to see Fry's main character muse in the face of evil -- presumably just a special, if contagious, sort of German evil -- that the ``simple point to which history tends despite its violence, despite itself'' is ``love.'' My goodness. That could have been plucked from the mouth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who claimed that abolition was inevitable: not because of individual endeavor, but, as he put it, because ``the arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love.'' Russell Banks must have had such piffle in mind when he had his own John Brown, emerging from a meeting with Emerson, exclaim: ``That man's truly a boob!''