A Case of Divided Loyalties FREEDOM

By Paul Gray

This behemothian novel comes from a surprising source. William Safire has largely made his reputation through epigrammatic feistiness and hit-and-run repartee. As a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, he gave Spiro Agnew the epithets and alliterations ("nattering nabobs of negativism") to attack liberal opponents of Administration policies. In 1973 he became a columnist for the New York Times, just as Watergate began to drag his conservative cause and many former colleagues into disrepute. Safire not only survived that debacle but prevailed: he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978, and his twice-a-week columns continue to display reportorial zeal and refreshing unpredictability. At the conclusion of the Iran-contra hearings, for example, he lectured his "fellow contra supporters" on the necessity of prosecuting members of the White House staff who broke the law. Away from politics, Safire writes essays in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on language, its uses and abuses, and has become a formidable pop grammarian.

Nothing in his past accomplishments suggests that Safire would produce a tedious and seemingly endless work of fiction. In fact, Full Disclosure (1977), his first novel, was a sprightly, best-selling account of a beleaguered White House not entirely unlike Nixon's. But Freedom is another, infinitely longer story. Subtitled A Novel of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the book inches its way from May 1861, shortly after the Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter, to Jan. 1, 1863, when President Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. This takes just under 1,000 pages, followed by about 130 more, which Safire calls the "Underbook," where he discusses the sources of his information and reveals where and how he embroidered on the record. Capping all that is a selective bibliography of more than 300 books, articles and pamphlets that informed his research.

Freedom, in other words, is a case of divided loyalties, not only in its subject matter -- a nation at bitter war with itself -- but in its execution. For in trying to pay equal respect to the demands of truth and fiction, Safire strands his novel in a no-man's-land between concrete facts and illuminating imagination. He recognizes this dilemma and tries to pass it off as a virtue: "The reader of any historical novel asks, 'How much of this is true?' " But many readers surely have more urgent questions, such as "How much of this is vivid and interesting?" or "Why should I turn the page?"

The answers provided by Freedom are not encouraging. For one thing, it is difficult in 1987 to generate much suspense over whether or not Lincoln will free the slaves. Curiosities have to be piqued by something other than the plot. But Safire does not seem to acknowledge this necessity. His narrative is hobbled to a crawl by the freight of information it must carry. Characters are rarely allowed to act and think like recognizable human beings; instead, they must constantly remind themselves (and possibly forgetful readers) just who they are and what they have done. Hence Union General John Fremont muses about his wife: He "knew that she never thought of herself merely as Mrs. John Charles Fremont, wife of the first senator from California, wife of the first Republican candidate for President in 1856, now wife of the commander of the Army of the West." Hence a young rebel soldier in a tight spot wonders, "What would his father do? He was a former senator, a former Vice President of the United States, a general in the Confederate Army, a man of the law." In Safire's hands, character analysis boils down to a matter of reeling off resumes.

In the Underbook, the author displays commendable candor in disclosing what parts of his story are invented. He notes that a love affair between Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky and Anna Ella Carroll, a pro-Union pamphleteer, did not really happen. The trouble is, it hardly happens in the narrative either. When Breckinridge and Carroll get together, the passion they expend takes the form of abstract debate: "Two nights before, in her rooms at the Ebbitt House, they had stayed up through the dawn arguing the details of the ( President's war power." So much for titillation.

In fact, Safire consistently skimps on physical descriptions. Photographers reach Antietam, the scene of the bloodiest battle in American history. What does it look like? How does it feel to be in the middle of unimaginable carnage? Safire disposes of such questions in two perfunctory sentences. Then he gets to the important part, a detailed exposition of how photographs are made, circa 1862: "He coated a sheet of glass with collodion, the guncotton dissolved in alcohol and sulphuric ether mixed with a little bromide and iodide of potassium they had compounded the night before."

Ultimately, the urge to inform overrides the obligation to entertain. Perhaps punditry is not the best preparation for fiction. Safire the columnist is entitled to his belief that the stuff of life can be summed up in political thrusts and parries. Safire the novelist would have been better off if he had allowed himself, and his imagination, more freedom.