A Messenger of Freedom: Esther Forbes's Canny Portrait of the Real Paul Revere

PAUL REVERE AND THE WORLD HE LIVED IN. By Esther Forbes. Houghton Mifflin Company. $3.75

“IT WAS young flood, the ship was winding and the moon rising. . .” In these words, Paul Revere’s own, the adventure starts — the crossing of the Charles on the night of that famous ride from Boston out to Lexington. They are good words for the start of an adventure, whether for a Boston silversmith or for a nation. They are good words to find in a book today. Paul Revere has not left us many words. He was an artisan, not a philosopher; a creator, not a talker. But the words he has left are enough, in sympathetic hands, to bring him to life as he was, and he is solid, human, and refreshing.

Esther Forbes has done well by Paul Revere — the actual Revere, a Boston workman of French descent, cool, canny, successful, the husband of two wives and the father of sixteen children, loving his home and the skill he wrought with his hands, a maker of silver, bells, ships’ bottoms, and artificial teeth. The legendary Revere, he of the upraised arm and the rearing horse at the farmhouse door, succumbs with surprising ease. Miss Forbes does no debunking. She simply tells the truth, and the truth is more real in her telling of it than any legend could be. Perhaps it is not suited so well to oratory and high-school declamations, but Paul Revere shrewdly picking out his route on the Sunday before his ride, Paul Revere forgetting his spurs, Billy Dawes falling off his horse at Lexington, and the forty-ish, family Paul Revere carrying his half of John Hancock’s trunk around the corner of a house as the first shot snaps across the Lexington Green give the picture a nearness to us - and an understanding which the legend with its heroics never had.

The real Revere is more of a problem for Miss Forbes. “He seems,” she says, “to have been a man of no spite, envy, or vindictiveness.” And when she adds that there is something about this quality which is hard to dramatize, those of us who write can detect the wistfulness in her tone. If the real Revere does not at first glitter for us, or strike imaginative sparks, if some parts of his biography even verge toward the dull, that is his fault, not Miss Forbes’s — and ours, who come at him with the legendary vision.

There is wisdom in Miss Forbes’s title. The world he lived in rounds out Paul Revere. The French and Indian Wars, the crash of the Land Bank, the ringing of church bells over Boston, and the splendor of King Hancock fill the gaps in Revere’s own life and give a satisfying sense of dimension. They give sharp details, too, sharply etched and revealing and provocative of thought. If Captain Goldfinch of the Fourteenth, for instance, had not owed the French barber Piemont so that the barber set a greasy apprentice to bawl insults at the dapper captain, would the Boston Massacre have flared up into that fatal volley? If Sam Adams, backstair politician and ruler of trained mobs, had not got the ear of John Hancock, and his money — If Thomas Hutchinson had had less financial foresight and had not unwittingly ruined the family of James Otis — These are the details, the rational, explanatory, interlocking cogs our history needs, and they are given skillfully and their moral is not labored. Only when the author shifts from the past to point obvious parallels and contrasts with the present does the narrative falter—and loses its flavor considerably by doing so. But the details are there for us to see, and it is time we saw them. It is time, too, that we saw Sam Adams muttering, after the war, “ People are not worth saving when they have lost their virtue.” Sam Adams is well drawn. So is John. And Joseph Warren. Thomas Hutchinson stands out clear and acute. He is the most tragic figure in the book, the old order passing, intelligent, courageous, and so desperately near to being right.

Paul Revere and the World He Lived In is a book we should have had long ago. The book rings genuine, even without the Help of its notes and a long bibliography. Best of all, it rings auspiciously, for in it is the life of a man who more than any other bridged the gap between the old world and the new—a steady man, a man who worked with his hands, a man who could trudge on.

“ It was young flood, the ship was winding and the moon rising. . . .” It carries a heartening sound. Paul Revere is still a messenger. BURKE BOYCE