Foundling Father

By R.Z. Sheppard

BURR

by GORE VIDAL

430 pages. Random House. $8.95.

It will be especially galling to those who hate and envy Gore Vidal to pick up Burr and discover that the gods of Julian the Apostate once again seem to have smiled broadly in his direction. Burr, a novel stretched tightly over the historical bones of Aaron Burr, could not have been published at a better time. There is scandal in the highest places. A constitutional storm is gathering in Washington, and interest in historical precedent is rising fast.

Aaron Burr seems particularly pertinent. The Burr-Jefferson Electoral College tie in 1800 led to the Twelfth Amendment, which revised the process of electing the President and Vice President.* After killing Alexander Hamilton in the Weehawken duel in 1804, Burr became the first Vice President to be indicted--a precedent that has lately been dusted off by constitutional experts.

Burr dealt with the indictment by leaving town. There followed his premature adventures in empire building and manifest destiny in the Southwest. These eventually led to a charge of treason brought by President Jefferson, a trial that saw Jefferson invoke Executive privilege to withhold documents. The far-reaching effect of Burr's eventual acquittal was to help define what constitutes a treasonable act.

Besides being a revolutionary, Burr was a New York lawyer, and his ideas on education, especially for women, were far ahead of his time. Yet enlightened views did not stop him, at age 77, from marrying a rich widow and selling her assets under property laws that had been written for and by husbands. Burr always had his way with women. In addition to fathering one legitimate, beautiful and brilliant daughter, he has been credited with numerous "foundlings." Though there is no evidence, it was even whispered that the eighth President, Martin Van Buren, was an adulterous plum off the Burr family tree.

It is precisely such gossip that lubricates Vidal's fictionalizing of revisionist history. The novel's form is a memoir within a memoir, somewhat mechanical but well-suited to Vidal's didactic purposes. Only two characters are pure invention. William de la Touche Clancey is a mischievous and gratuitous bit of satire whom followers of Vidal's TV errors and trials should have little trouble identifying. Charlie Schuyler is, according to the author, a young opportunistic journalist "based roughly on the obscure novelist Charles Burdett." This is a flimsy bit of deception. Burdett was so obscure a novelist that he is not listed in any of the standard literary references. Historians, however, readily identify him as Burr's adopted--possibly natural--son.

Charlie Schuyler's memoirs are considerably more omniscient than those of his obscure model. For they include Burr's own memoirs as dictated to Charlie, his would-be biographer. The Burr sections are Vidal's skillful precis of Aaron Burr's actual letters and diaries, containing intimate justifications for his adventures and intrigues. Burr, the sardonic wit, constantly sees through labels like Republican and Federalist to such common denominators as hunger for glory, power and the preservation of privilege. He talks of Washington's "eerie incompetence" as a military leader, while admiring the man's "fine talent for defeating rival generals in the Congress." Burr libels Hamilton as having been a British agent during the Adams Administration; he mocks him for reading women's novels wrapped in the Anti Jacobin Review.

Burr's most savage bites come out of Thomas Jefferson, portrayed as a coward who sat out the Revolution in Virginia, an "exuberant mediocrity in the arts," a household tinkerer who is almost killed by one of his hideaway beds, and a grand hypocrite who spouted humanist theory but kept and sexually exploited slaves.

In all this Vidal has at least been faithful to the content, style and tone of Burr's own writing. The kinship of author and subject goes beyond elegant barbs at the high and mighty. Vidal seems especially appreciative of Burr's almost classical stoic outlook, a view reflected in Vidal's own works. Yet the question remains, why read a kind of digest of the life of Aaron Burr when there are sympathetic biographies and Burr's own letters and diaries available? The answer: Most of us will not take the trouble. In the interests of Burrian pragmatism, one must be grateful to Vidal for his history lesson. . R.Z. Sheppard

* It provided that electors cast distinct votes for the President and Vice President. Before that, the runner-up for President became Vice President.

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