Books: Angry Man's Romance

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Kenneth Roberts has a legendary temper, on which he practices great self-control. But self-control in his case is said to be a brief, turkey-red moment between the rush of blood to his face and an outburst that begins (in milder cases) with goddam, ends (several minutes later) in total verbal annihilation. Fellow authors like Booth Tarkington, Ben Ames Williams, Samuel Blythe have publicized these tantrums with such glee that the suspicion has grown that Roberts rages are also literary, less an adrenalin effusion than a character signature like Wotan's motif in the Nibelungen Ring.

His friends have claimed that when his anger really towers, he looks eight feet tall. Catalogues have been compiled of the things that touch him off: little boys who run outboard motors; wet boots that will not pull off easily; billboard advertising; Dorothy Thompson; intruders during working hours; cooks who carbonize and mummify ducks, partridges, trout; politicians ; Americans who are more interested in Europe's affairs than the U. S.; the cheerful squirplings (a Roberts word) of English sparrows; the New Deal; Pulitzer Prize awards; interior decorating. Disapproving of a mantelpiece in a house where he was a weekend guest, Roberts has been known, Friend Ben Ames Williams insists, to tear it out "with the aid of no levers, saws, axes, or any other tools or implements save his own simple teeth."

But nothing puts Novelist Roberts into a fury quicker than historical distortion. Since he feels that much U. S. history has been deliberately distorted or deliberately left unwritten, he has existed for some years in a high state of historical dudgeon. The margins of his history books (he owns the largest private Revolutionary War library in the U. S.) crackle with expletive and epithet: "What an ass!"; "Nuts!"; "The louse judgment of a literary louse!"; "Beef from a moose?"

The reverse of this negative hatred of sham and lies is a quality that has helped to make Kenneth Roberts the finest U. S. historical novelist since James Fenimore Cooper* his respect for cold facts. His tirelessness in tracking down historical obscurities (he is probably the world's No. 1 literary detective), his fearlessness in publishing what he finds, have resulted in some shocking reversals of U. S. cultural myths. In two of his books, Roberts has heroized Traitor Benedict Arnold. This week the same qualities resulted in another first-class historical shocker. Oliver Wiswell is a sustained and uncompromising report of the American Revolution from the Tory viewpoint. It will start Union Now advocates turning handsprings, may well set the D. A. R. to plaiting nooses.