Burr by Gore Vidal

Author:Gore Vidal [Vidal, Gore]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Burr; Aaron, Biographical fiction, General, Literary, Vice-Presidents - United States, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9781417633845
Publisher: San Val, Incorporated
Published: 2000-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty

I HAVE TAKEN to writing pieces for the Evening Post under the pseudonym Old Patroon, a very conservative, very angry, very censorious old New Yorker. Mr. Bryant is delighted, Leggett is amused. “I never thought that beneath your stolid Dutch exterior there was so much fire and fury.”

“Nor did I.” Apparently everything offends me, including the voices of women raised in song. I have always hated the custom of the ladies coming forward to sing at polite evening parties (of the sort I seldom attend). They shout the house down; they screech; they have no sense of music—worse, they have no shame. They compete with one another to see who can holler the loudest; and we are expected to sit quietly and look as we do in church, beautifully elevated and inspired. My attack on lady singers distressed Mr. Bryant, but yesterday he allowed it to appear and everyone is angry. “The best response,” said Leggett.

“I hope so,” said Mr. Bryant. “But let your next Old Patroon subject be more ... anodyne.”

The Colonel is amused by Old Patroon. “You have a nice way with our difficult language. Obviously you are to be a writing-lawyer like Verplanck.”

I am pleased with the Colonel’s praise; but would prefer to be no lawyer at all.

Writing-lawyers made him think of Hamilton. He showed me a cartoon of his rival, holding in his arms a blowzy woman identified as Mrs. Reynolds. “There is a mystery to Hamilton, as there is none to Jefferson who simply wanted to rise to the top. Odd how Jefferson is now thought of as a sort of genius, a Virginia Leonardo. It is true he did a great number of things, from playing the fiddle to building houses to inventing dumb-waiters, but the truth is that he never did any one thing particularly well—except of course the pursuit of power. Yet his exuberant mediocrity in the arts is everywhere admired today, and quite unrecognised is his genius for politics.”

The Colonel laid out on the baize table the papers he would need for the day’s work. “If I were young and,” he grinned, “a writing-lawyer instead of a scheming-lawyer, I would do a life of Hamilton and I would go to the Indies and spend as much time as I could trying to find out about a Mr. Nicholas Cruger. He was a young bachelor with a business in that part of the world. When Alexander became an orphan at twelve or thirteen, Cruger took the boy in. They lived in the same house until Hamilton was seventeen or so and came to America to study. Two things amaze. One, at fourteen, Hamilton was running Cruger’s business. The other, in later life, Hamilton came to detest his original benefactor. Why? A falling out? The way Hamilton always fell out with his surrogate fathers? Most mysterious. I have my theories but ...” The Colonel stopped, and before I could get him to expand on those theories he had begun the day’s dictation.

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