Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Frances FitzGerald's "America Revised"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on America Revised by Frances FitzGerald. It begins:

At the beginning of the novel, The Prosecution, the defense lawyer, Joseph Antonelli, tells the story of what happened when, a small boy, he broke his mother’s favorite crystal bowl and tried to hide the evidence of his crime.

“Holding one of the largest pieces in his hand, my father asked me that evening if I knew anything about it. I did what anyone would have done: I denied it.

“He did not seem to believe me. Sitting in his chair, he put his hand on my shoulder and started telling me about George Washington and the cherry tree. I knew then I was finished. That story was everywhere. You couldn’t run away from it. Every father told it to his son, and every schoolteacher told it to her class. You might go all the way through grade school without knowing anything about American history, but you knew young George had ruined it for the rest of us when he made his famous confession, ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie.’”

It does not occur to the young Antonelli - or to anyone else who was ever taught that story as a child - to ask why George Washington chopped down the cherry tree in the first place. Washington could not lie, but he could destroy for no apparent reason a tree that may have taken ten, or even twenty or thirty, years to grow! It is worse than you might think. Cutting down a tree in an orchard was no innocent boyhood escapade. Under the English common law, damage to an orchard was a felony. Felonies in the l8th century were punishable by death. George Washington, the Father of our country, was not just a felon, he should have been hung!

If no one knows this, it is because of what we were taught in school; what, to be more precise, we learned from the American history textbooks we were given to read. We are always talking about history, debating what really happened in the past, but no one stops to wonder how much of our disagreements are because what we were taught in grade school and high school has changed; that what we think our history has a history of its own. No one, that is, until Frances FitzGerald wrote America Revised in 1979 and made the dull and prosaic business of textbook publishing come alive. FitzGerald begins with what seems obvious: Each generation reads only one generation of schoolbooks. “That transient history is those children’s history forever - their particular version of history.” More important than the historical facts they are taught are the impressions created, impressions which, like other things learned in childhood, become the unexamined assumptions on which most of us think and act for the rest of our lives.

FitzGerald grew up in the l950s when, according to the textbooks she was given to read, “America was perfect: the greatest nation in the world, and the embodiment of democracy, freedom, and technological progress;” a country that “never changed in any important way.” When she read the textbooks that had been published over the two hundred years of American history, she discovered...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised.

--Marshal Zeringue