I’ve finished Napoleon’s Memoires, Machiavelli’s Arte of Warre and The Prince, The Discourses, some Clausewitz and am ready for a break from all that. I don’t think Machiavelli was as evil as he is portrayed, He was a true Renaissance man and he was into everything. Napoleon found his advice on Republicanism as useful as his warnings to “new” (first generation, non-heriditary, or usurping) princes.
I’m about 100 pages into The Last Refuge of Scoundrels, Paul Lussier’s first novel (2001). I usually don’t read historical novels, but this one was gripping from the first page where he uses a unique device to pull you in. His extremely unflattering portrayal of the Founding Fathers I found disturbing and certainly rare in American literature. Too bad there are no footnotes or appendices, because if there is any truth in what Lussier says, it’s important. So I check him out and found an interview from 2001:
”...John Adams’ own diary. All those observations come from a variety of sources and that includes Samuel Adams’ diary, John Hancock’s writings — however slim. These men were dishing each other like crazy as they were writing to each other. As a matter of course when we study these men we study the documents that they wrote for public review. We traditionally don’t think it reliable or necessary to the story — that behind the scenes Samuel Adams was trashing John Adams and John Adams was embarrassed by Samuel Adams. Somehow that is not considered relevant. And the reason is that as a rule the story of the American Revolution only concerns the story of the American Revolutionary Founding Fathers as they were public figures. It’s no different if two hundred years from now if you were to base a biography of Clinton on his own approved autobiography or a few mainstream press stories on everything that happened in the Clinton Era. What you would walk away with, two hundred years from now, was an account that wouldn’t remotely capture the e-mail version of that same experience. It would be sanitized. It would be too respectful. It would not be reproachful. And it wouldn’t be sensual.”
Turns out Lussier spent ten years doing research on this book, burying himself in source documents on both sides of the pond. But don’t think he is just another unhappy, muckraking critic of American history. In this book, he heroically champions the common man, the American peasantry, and disses the upper class leadership unmercifully in their unenlightened self-interests and their money-making schemes at the expense of the lower classes—not much different than the British Lords they demonized but (according to Lussier) wished to emulate. I wish this man would write a non-fiction work on the same period, but his novel has given me leads on where to look for the darker, more human side of these people we have heretofore beatified as our national saints. It’s one of the most absorbing things I’ve read in ages.