The Judges of the Secret Court (2 page)

Soldiers try to clear the box of spectators. The dead matches “crunched under their boot heels as they moved about.” It may be that, like the other details Stacton relates, those eerie metonymic matches are in the record somewhere, but if so I haven't found them.

Though Booth is its vagrant center, the novel moves among a half-dozen major and several minor characters, seeing events from within their variously limited points of view. This is the “distributed third-person-limited” narration that is, effectively, the default mode of contemporary popular fiction: a few pages of X, switch to Y's point of view, then to Z's, and back to X's. Yet Stacton's deployment of it is quite different from the workaday writer's “show, don't tell.” Always, on every page, a ruling consciousness is analyzing, weighing, telling truths, naming virtues and (more often) shortcomings. About the tragically ineffectual Mrs. Surratt when we first meet her:

It could be that it is Mrs. Surratt who is pondering in this way, though it would seem beyond her. It is more likely the narration itself thinking, brooding over her case. When that narration considers Booth, its task is more complex; it acts like a recording angel—like a judge—installed in his heart. Without comment the angel records Booth's opinion of Lincoln: “And though the niggers may have followed that tall, shambling, plug-hatted nemesis, no one else had but his own troops.” It records Booth's feelings on that assassination Good Friday:

But then the same analyzing voice shifts a distance away:

Then it passes judgment:

Throughout the novel, and in others of Stacton's, this is the movement: from the interior of a consciousness to an exterior judgment, cast in what is termed the
gnomic present
: “Everyone is ambivalent about his profession, if he has practiced it long enough.” “An actor is limited. He has no right to make the world his stage, for then he reminds us of what we do not want to know, that we are merely players.” “When a corrupt man becomes incorrupt, that merely means that he uses the forces of corruption for incorrupt ends. Unlike a man born good, he is hard to dislodge.”
Time
in its 1963 article described Stacton's work as “masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood.” But unlike true epigrams, these judgments arise in connection with a certain person, a specific soul (Vice President Johnson is the corrupt man become incorrupt, though “as yet nobody had had the chance to find that out”). They reach from particularity to generality, a generality that is sometimes withdrawn or brought down to earth again or even contradicted, as though a fluid situation is changing before the author's gaze.

Many of these authorial judgments are cast in terms of acting, actors, and the stage. The entire novel is concerned with performance—acting a part, changing parts, not being who you seem to be. The Booth family is central to it (John Wilkes's brothers Edwin and Junius Brutus, his sister, and her husband are all suspected in the assassination plot and only reluctantly exonerated). To picture a fictional John Wilkes Booth as acting a part—Southern hero, Byronic avenger—would be a natural tack to take; what's more interesting is how everyone in the story is seen as acting a part. The narration is at once observing the performances and looking out through the performers' eyes at the intended audience—which is sometimes only the performer himself, or herself, the audience that needs to be convinced, from whom the real self must be hidden. The failed conspirator Atzerodt—whom the narration has already labeled a “miserable troll”— has funked, pawned his unused revolvers, and is on a five-day drunken spree, going by the name of Atwood. “That was the name he always took on his drinking expeditions, when he impersonated a normal man.” The climactic moment of Booth's role-playing, a moment at once appalling and horribly comic, is his last:

The officer is capable of a moment of self-perception, but Booth, even after dreadful suffering and the approach of death, can only exist in the terms of popular melodrama.

One figure—he is at once more and less than a character—is impersonating no one: Abraham Lincoln. “As he lay dying, under the dry shimmering jet of the gasolier, the tact drained out of [his face], and one could see, what usually that tact concealed, the awful marks of knowledge.” In physical and moral stature Lincoln bestrides the narrow earth like a colossus, as Caesar is said to do in the Booths' warhorse play; fallen, borne on his funeral train, he is like a great dead god, in whose passing all moral reality is evacuated from the world. There are judgments and judges galore in this book, but only one man fitted for the work: “About Lincoln there was always the reserve of a kindly judge who, kind or not, still sits up there, fingering the dossiers of both sides of the case, whether he admits to doing so or not.”

A kindly judge, who, whether kind or not, will know both sides, whom we could hope would judge with charity for all and malice toward none. With him gone, the open court becomes a secret one, driven by the only other character in the book who is not pretending, though he lies often: the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton. Both literally and figuratively a midget compared to Lincoln, the paranoid bully Stanton instantly assumes a huge conspiracy and has the power—martial law is still in force—to arrest, incarcerate, and try in a military court anyone he likes. The great disaster that has suddenly come upon the nation is at once his duty to meet with overwhelming force and an opportunity he won't let slip. He considers legal restraints cowardly. He hated Lincoln. He holds Johnson in contempt. Whatever his actual official status, he is in charge.

It's irrelevant to a proper understanding of a novel written in 1961, and yet it's inescapable that we in 2011 will respond to Stanton and his role in the story in the light of recent events. The ruthless search for hidden enemies; the men and one woman gathered into Stanton's net, kept hooded and shackled in their cells in what we might call “stress positions”; a rapidly assembled military court set up to try them, some guilty to a degree, some not, but all of them—given the national mood and Stanton's ceaseless drive for vengeance and power—without a hope of understanding or effective defense; and in the end the country altered forever. “The Civil War had made it an Imperium.” Is it possible for fictions to become retrospectively allegorical?

Even if you are generally well read in American fiction of the last century, it is very likely that this is the first book of Stacton's you have opened; you may well never have heard of him. Even as
Time
included him in its list, the article noted that he was “as nearly unknown as it is possible for a writer to be who has written, and received critical praise for, thirteen novels.”

He is “a Nevadan who wears cowboy boots, is fond of both Zen and bourbon,” the article said—but he was not a Nevadan, and his outfit was not exactly a working cowboy's. (The only photograph I remember seeing of him when I was first reading his books was taken in London, and shows a handsome young man in all-white cowboy rig, sitting in a chair turned around Western-style, with a rugged smile and teasing eyes: I suddenly understood something about him, and perhaps about the books I'd read.)

Stacton's self-description for
Contemporary Authors
does say he was born in Minden, Nevada, to a couple he names Dorothy and David Stacton, but in fact he was born Lionel Kingsley Evans, or possibly Arthur Lionel Kingsley Evans, or later Lyonel, on May 27, 1923, in San Francisco, where he went to high school and, until World War II intervened, to Stanford.
[2]
In the war he was a conscientious objector, though on just what grounds I don't know. In 1942 he began using the invented name “David Stacton”— he told a friend that a writer ought to have a two-syllable name with a staccato rhythm. It wasn't a pen name—he changed his name legally. His first book (after a slim volume of verse) was a biography of an eccentric Victorian traveler; his first novel,
Dolores
, was published in London in 1954—British publishers regarded him as a more salable commodity than the Americans. His characteristic historical novels begin with
Remember Me
, a novel about Ludwig II of Bavaria, like Akhenaten a still being within an elaborate self-made prison-palace. The range of his others is remarkable: sixteenth-century Japan (
Segaki
, 1958); Renaissance Rome (
A Dancer in Darkness
, based on the same lurid story as John Webster's play
The Duchess of Malfi
, and similarly nightmarish); the career of Wendell Willkie, of all people (
Tom Fool
, 1962); the Thirty Years' War (
People of the Book
, 1965, his last published novel). Despite slight sales, he did attract a small but devoted readership—in Italy he was introduced to the critic and aesthete Mario Praz (
The Romantic Agony
), who was thrilled by his novels; he compared Stacton to Walter Pater, a high compliment in some circles, but wondered why Stacton, so tall and handsome, needed to play a role with his cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat.

A man, then, who knew something about performance and pretending, but who had either little taste or little ability for the standard ways American novelists have of making the money needed to keep writing. The poet and translator David Slavitt, in the most substantial critical study of Stacton's work I know of,
[3]
repeats the Minden, Nevada, story and retails a piquant anecdote about Stacton's arriving by plane to be a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University, in complete though apparently not entirely convincing drag, and departing (prematurely and after a row, it seems, which Slavitt doesn't report) in his white cowboy suit, with chaps and eye shadow. Between coming and going, he seems to have worn standard preppy attire for this his only such appointment. Instead he eked out his income with pulp fiction, written under pseudonyms. Though books like
Muscle Boy
, as Slavitt notes, “have had an odd
Nachtleben
among Queer Read fans and collectors of kitsch,” he finds it sad that Stacton, “a writer of signal refinement,” had to “grind out” such stuff.

I wonder if this isn't somewhat backward. Stacton wrote his potboilers and the books that he wished to be remembered by not only at the same time but with the same hand, and his literary novels exhibit methods and techniques that he, and many other pulp writers, commonly used.

Let Him Go Hang
, by “Bud Clifton,” was published in 1961, the same year as
The Judges of the Secret Court
. Like the last third of
Judges
it's a courtroom drama; like
Judges
it uses an omniscient narration that visits in turn many consciousnesses both major and minor in the story. And like
Judges
it is about the cruelty of justice in the hands of power. Here the jury is being seated; Jan, one of the panel, is called:

Compare a moment in the courtroom in
Judges
. Spangler, the man Booth asked to hold his horse while he was in Ford's Theatre, is listening to the testimony against him:

Robert Nedelkoff has calculated (using the timelines that Stacton, in James Joyce fashion, appended to his literary novels) that most of Stacton's books were written quickly—some in three months, none in more than nine. That's pulp-fiction speed. Of those that I have read, most are uncomplicated as narratives: they move steadily forward in time order, as though the writer himself also moved forward page by page without looking back. This is not solely the method of the paperback writer—the esteemed Spanish novelist Javier Marías makes a point of never looking back, never altering what he first laid down—but it seems to connect these two threads of Stacton's work.