Books: Angry Man's Romance

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Having written himself into the money, Roberts bought a 100-acre estate within sight of the Atlantic at Kennebunkport, put up a spread-wing goose over a name sign (Rocky Pasture). From his pasture Roberts presently grubbed enough rock to build a house and garage. On the bookshelf in Roberts' living room squats a grinning brass Chinese god of happiness with his hands folded over his paunch. Roberts never sends a novel to his publisher without first rubbing the polished paunch for good luck. Last September he rubbed it for Oliver Wiswell. By this week Oliver Wiswell's advance sale in the trade had passed 100,000 copies. Many a publisher called it the biggest advance sale in a decade, expected Wiswell to be the publishing sensation of the year.

The Book. Oliver Wiswell is a more important outgrowth of Rabble in Arms, In that novel Roberts created two brothers, one a rebel, one a tory. He made the tory rather a weakling. But by the time he had finished the book, Roberts decided that the tory had a case, "and a damned good case."

Never in fiction, seldom in history has the tory case been effectively stated before. Oliver Wiswell states it. In this angry book the lyrical mood of Arundel is completely gone. Its 836 pages are sustained by Novelist Roberts' wrathful consciousness that while history is always written by the victors, a historical romancer sometimes has a chance to tell the truth. Roberts tells the truth (as he sees it) about the lost cause of American loyalism with as much passion as if he himself had been tarred and feathered by a Massachusetts mob.

The novel's plot is simple. Son of a distinguished Massachusetts tory lawyer, Oliver Wiswell comes home from Yale to find himself caught in the early stages of the American Revolution. When he rescues tory Printer Thomas Buell from a mob that has tarred and feathered him, Wiswell has already taken sides. By the time a sadder and wiser Wiswell starts a new life in Canada years later, he has fled from Boston to Halifax to New York to London to Paris, back to New York, and down to Virginia in search of Burgoyne's lost army. Most of the novel reports Wiswell's adventures in all these places as a British spy.

New characters and some old ones appear in the book. There is tory Benjamin Thompson, British secret agent, American scientist who in exile became Minister of War to the Elector of Bavaria. There is Benedict Arnold (this time in charge of the expedition to Virginia), whose treason Novelist Roberts still believes was high-minded. There is George Washington (whom Roberts considers "one of the few truly great figures this world has produced"), slashing his poltroonish troops back into action with his sword during the retreat from New York. Major Rogers of Northwest Passage flits through Oliver Wiswell—an old, talkative, "clabber-voiced" British agent now, engaged in some nameless activity on Long Island. And there is vigorous, forthright Mrs. Belcher Byles (before her marriage she was a Salem Barrell), and Printer Buell who peddles his cure-all "metallic tractors" as a cover for his spying activities.