Jubilee Jim

by Hubert H. Fuller. New York: The Maemillan Co. 1928. 8vo. vii+ 566 pp. Illus. $3.50.

MR. FULLER'S initial decision was responsible for a weakness in his book which does much to neutralize very real excellences. Facing the problem or characterizing a mail whose reputation was not pleasant, but whom he believed to be maligned, he elected In briny the methods of fiction to the support of biography. The proceeding is not. to be sure, an innovation, though contemporary biographers have sometimes failed to inform their readers that the two genres were being fused. The potential gains are greater vividness and a more plausible freedom in speculative interpretation. But in Jubilee Jim, a biography of Jim Fisk which is a recital in the first person by an invented confidant of the principal, the method actually inhibits its own purpose. Wholly undocumented, an ex parte pleading by one who uncritically admires the florid buccaneer, it lacks the persuasiveness of fiction and the factual reality of history. One does not know, one cannot know, whether any given incident is based upon fact or is merely a friendly exculpation.

The reader s powerlessness to appraise the evidence for himself is a serious defect in Mr. Fuller’s book. It is the more annoying in that Mr. Fuller’s ideas about Jim Fisk are unusually interesting, novel, and unorthodox. He conceived the partner of Jay Gould, the friend of boss Tweed, the manipulator of Erie, and the conspirator Of Black Friday as, essentially, a white-headed boy, a popular product of the democracy whoso hero he was, an incarnation of the jovial energy of America’s flush age. Morality, according to this view, is hardly a concept that one can use in judging Jim Fisk. Simply, in those incredible years that, followed the Civil War the yeasts of America were at work, and one of their growths was Jim Fisk. Vermont, in producing him, had endowed him with a vast love of spectacle and an impulsive shrewdness in business and in the manipulation of his fellows. These endowments he put to work in the hectic, wholly amoral anarchy of the post-war decade. He fitted thelie late sixties as perfectly and as garishly as the lithographs of the day. The bravura that made him a millionaire made him also an object of popular homage. In the conflict between a rising plutocracy and a declining aristocracy of culture and traditions the mob was enthusiastically on the side, of the plutocracy. Jim Fisk conducted his financial escapades and his amours, his orgies of extravagance and Ids military spectacles, in full limelight and to the accompaniment of thunderous applause.

Such a man so runs the unspoken commentary of Mr. Fuller-cannot be judged by the canons of a private or a public or even a commercial morality. He was an expression of his times, a symbol, an earth spirit. He was a jovial man who was good to his father and, in his way. to his wife also. Remember, the great heart of the people loved him; and fifty million democrats cannot be wrong. And also, his mistress, after great publicity, betrayed him-which was tragic and brought on an annoying scandal.

Mr. Fuller was, in some degree, right: such characters as Jim Fisk need treatment in fiction. But first they need explicit treatment in biography-in biography that must be hard-minded, impersonal, factual, and documented to the last comma.

BERNARD AND DEVOTO