The Judges of the Secret Court
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DAVID STACTON (1923–1968) was born Lionel Kingsley Evans in San Francisco. He attended Stanford University before serving in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector during World War II, eventually graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1951. Stacton went to Europe after college and ended up staying, in his words, “because I liked it and because I could not get my books in print in America.” His first novel, Dolores, was published in England in 1954. Among the wide-ranging historical and biographical novels for which he would become best known are On a Balcony, about Nefertiti and Pharaoh Akhenaten; Segaki, set in feudal Japan; A Signal Victory, about the Spanish conquest of the Yucatán; Old Acquaintance, set at a film festival and telling of the loves of a star resembling Marlene Dietrich; and People of the Book, set during the Thirty Years’ War. Under various pseudonyms, Stacton also published Westerns, mass-market murder mysteries, and a soft-core gay novel. Twice the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he also received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1968 he moved to Fredensborg, Denmark, to work on a book to be called Restless Sleep, about Charles II and the diarist Samuel Pepys; ten days later he was found dead in his new home; he was forty-four years old.
JOHN CROWLEY is the author of a dozen novels and works of fiction, among them Little, Big, the Ægypt Cycle, and, most recently, Four Freedoms. He is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and a winner of the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Crowley teaches creative writing at Yale University. His reviews and critical essays have appeared in the Boston Review, The Yale Review, and The Washington Post.
THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT
DAVID STACTON
Introduction by
JOHN CROWLEY
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Contents
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X
Part Two
XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV
Part Three
XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLII, XLIII, XLIV, XLV, XLVI, XLVII
Part Four
XLVIII, XLIX
Epilogue
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
David Stacton’s Evidences
The Judges of the Secret Court tells the story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth; the subsequent flight, capture, and death of Booth; the roundup of anyone connected with him and his plot by the secretary of war Edwin Stanton; and the prosecution and hanging of a number of these as conspirators.
The book begins, however, many years after those events. Edwin Booth, the greatest American actor of his age and John Wilkes’s elder brother, in retirement now, has received the manuscript of a five-act tragedy by a Mrs. Henry Lee, a woman he doesn’t know. “The heroine, except, no doubt, in the dressing-table mirror of Mrs. Henry Ferguson Lee, could scarcely be said to live at all… He had only been turning the pages. But the title she had given it haunted him. She had called it The Judges of the Secret Court.”
It is a haunting title. Where did Stacton get it? Not from Mrs. Lee or her play, which are apparently imaginary. I find an unfinished opera by Berlioz, Les francs-juges, which title the lutenist Howard Posner translates as “the judges of the secret court”— the opera was to deal with medieval German courts whose judges met in secret and never revealed their decisions (though those they condemned to execution were later seen hung up in public places, an object lesson). Was that Stacton’s source? The phrase appears in an early poem of his; perhaps the coinage is his own.
It was something all the Booths were aware of, those judges … If we are too selfless to believe in God, and yet remain somehow devout, we are very much aware of the Judges of the Secret Court. We cannot see them, nor do we know who they are. But they are there: the whole world is a courtroom, every life is a trial; if we are guilty, we stand there condemned; if we are innocent … we have to prove it. But who can prove it? For in fact no man is innocent at that bar. He is always accessory, willynilly, before or after some fact.
All that happens in the novel proceeds from this awful sentence (awful, in the older sense; sentence, in both senses). The fairness or justice of the judges is not at issue, they too are guilty and they are to be judged as well as everyone else. It’s the author who places his characters, their world, and in a sense himself before that bar, where all their improvisings, their playacting, their loyalties, their belief in their innocence cannot win them reprieve. To know this is the only mitigation; and almost no one in this brief, harrowing novel is willing to face that knowledge, or has the means to grasp it.
In February of 1963, two years after The Judges of the Secret Court appeared, Time magazine named what its editors[1] considered to be the best American novelists to appear in the preceding decade. The list included Joseph Heller, John Updike, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, along with a couple of less perspicacious guesses (if enduring fame is the measure) like John Knowles (A Separate Peace) and H.L. Humes; but the oddest name to find on the list is David Stacton. The author at that time of nine novels under his own name (except that it wasn’t) and some crime and Western paperbacks under other names, Stacton had gained a little praise but sold few copies. His inclusion with other certified luminaries was perhaps the high-water mark of his literary reputation. I don’t remember reading that issue of Time, but I had been an admirer of Stacton since fortuitously discovering his 1958 novel On a Balcony, about the pharaoh Akhenaten and his sister Nefertiti. I knew only one other person in my generally literate set in college who had ever heard of him, and together we read The Judges of the Secret Court on its publication with a sense of exclusive privilege.
Stacton’s appearance in Time’s approved list helped induce G. P. Putnam’s Sons to do an American edition of Sir William, his novel about the love of Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton, which had been published by Faber in London. Romance, glamour, the Regency, and the precedent of a grade-A movie (That Hamilton Woman with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh) should have added up to a solid seller, but Sir William sold only some five thousand copies in the Putnam hardback. None of Stacton’s novels ever did much better.
In a sense—and as we will see perhaps not inappropriately—Stacton’s historical novels were passing, or in disguise, not really members of the genre. Historical novels come generally in three kinds: the ones that tell stories of fictitious characters against a general historical background (Gone with the Wind, for example); those that follow the adventures of invented characters who become involved with actual historical characters and events; and those that fictionalize real people of the past, or use the techniques of fiction to reveal or exhibit more of their insides. In all of them, richness of period detail is expected; characters are bold in outline, their conflicts vivid; the page count tends to be high. When Stacton’s historicals began to appear in the late 1950s the genre was dominated by such best-selling authors as Thomas Costain (The Black Rose), Samuel Shellabarger (Captain from Castile), and Lawrence Schoonover (The Burnished Blade). “Colorful” was the indispensable adjective. Stacton, in a literal sense, is often quite colorless: his is a world of grays and sables and pallid dimness. Instead of acting, many of his characters only pretend to act; they brood or are brooded on by the
author.
Stacton’s novel of Akhenaten (he uses the rarer form Ikhnaton) came only a few years after Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian, a huge international best seller that dealt with the same historical events—the attempt of Akhenaten (Waltari prefers Akhnaton) to establish a new monotheistic religion, and the consequent fall of his dynasty. The two books couldn’t be more different (I wonder if Stacton’s book might actually have been conceived in opposition to Waltari’s big one). Here’s Waltari’s description of Akhenaten’s new temple-city:
Thus Akhetaton rose from the wilderness in a single year; palm trees waved proudly along its splendid streets, pomegranates ripened and reddened in the gardens, and in the fish pools floated the rosy flowers of the lotus…Tame gazelles wandered in the gardens, while in the streets the lightest of carriages were drawn by fiery horses with ostrich plumes…[W]hen autumn returned and the swallows emerged to dart in restless flocks above the rising waters, Pharaoh Akhnaton consecrated the city and the land to Aton.
And Stacton’s:
Aketaten was really delightful. Even the servants were new … there was no one to remind him of the past. He had finally found a solution to the awful boredom of rank, or so he thought. One made the rank higher still. He was not the first nor would he be the last monarch to become a god out of ennui. For the gods must have some amusements … He looked at the city with animated eyes. It was simply wonderful to have so much to do.
All of Stacton’s historicals are centered on actual personages and stick closely to the known facts of their public lives (their secret souls are for Stacton to unfold, but even there he doesn’t contradict the standard sources). The Judges of the Secret Court amounts almost to a documentary novel: the events, down to the smallest, are all in the historical accounts, and Stacton hardly adds to them. He examines them, surrounds them in thought, tries to break into them in imagination. The plot is simply what happened, and Stacton accepts the constraints: he takes the almost perverse chance that readers will go along with him even though the central figure of the book, John Wilkes Booth, dies with a third of the pages remaining.
The assassination and death of Lincoln are narrated with a gripping cold attentiveness, from several points of view, amalgamated as though a prosecutor was assembling evidence, yet with an odd noticing of inconsequential detail. A certain Dr. Leale manages to get into the president’s box:
Leale sent for a lamp, got the body on the floor, and while men stood in a circle around him striking innumerable matches, he searched, by that dim flicker, for the wound… In a few minutes the floor was littered with charred sticks. The sound of scratching, as new ones were lit, was the sound of a nail drawn down a blackboard … The eye glistened in the light, but it was out of focus and the evidence of brain injury was plain enough. The matches smelled abominably of sulfur.
Soldiers try to clear the box of spectators. The dead matches “crunched under their boot heels as they moved about.” It may be that, like the other details Stacton relates, those eerie metonymic matches are in the record somewhere, but if so I haven’t found them.
Though Booth is its vagrant center, the novel moves among a half-dozen major and several minor characters, seeing events from within their variously limited points of view. This is the “distributed third-person-limited” narration that is, effectively, the default mode of contemporary popular fiction: a few pages of X, switch to Y’s point of view, then to Z’s, and back to X’s. Yet Stacton’s deployment of it is quite different from the workaday writer’s “show, don’t tell.” Always, on every page, a ruling consciousness is analyzing, weighing, telling truths, naming virtues and (more often) shortcomings. About the tragically ineffectual Mrs. Surratt when we first meet her:
In the mirror she saw the face of a woman of forty-five, which was not fair, for she was not forty-five. The body may grow older, but alas, we do not. So we have to corset ourselves in. We have to be staid. We have to remember to control what was once charmingly instinctive, and the ageing body does something to our habitual gestures, it twists and confines them, so that we cannot make them with the same grace any more.
It could be that it is Mrs. Surratt who is pondering in this way, though it would seem beyond her. It is more likely the narration itself thinking, brooding over her case. When that narration considers Booth, its task is more complex; it acts like a recording angel—like a judge—installed in his heart. Without comment the angel records Booth’s opinion of Lincoln: “And though the niggers may have followed that tall, shambling, plug-hatted nemesis, no one else had but his own troops.” It records Booth’s feelings on that assassination Good Friday:
So far the day had not pleased him. His boots squeaked, and that was annoying. It is impossible to get the squeak out of a pair of boots once it has gotten in, and these were new and expensive ones. He was conscious of himself all over in that way, down to the last handkerchief or disconcertingly renascent pimple.
But then the same analyzing voice shifts a distance away:
That was because he was an actor. He had no repose. He did not exist, unless he kept moving, and the nature of his own existence was something he had never been able to face, even in sleep.
Then it passes judgment:
People like that can be dangerous, for though they are bad at planning, who can tell what they are apt to do on the spur of the moment? They do not know themselves. They are dandies. For them life is immediate. They have no time for thought. And yet they think they think.
Throughout the novel, and in others of Stacton’s, this is the movement: from the interior of a consciousness to an exterior judgment, cast in what is termed the gnomic present: “Everyone is ambivalent about his profession, if he has practiced it long enough.” “An actor is limited. He has no right to make the world his stage, for then he reminds us of what we do not want to know, that we are merely players.” “When a corrupt man becomes incorrupt, that merely means that he uses the forces of corruption for incorrupt ends. Unlike a man born good, he is hard to dislodge.” Time in its 1963 article described Stacton’s work as “masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood.” But unlike true epigrams, these judgments arise in connection with a certain person, a specific soul (Vice President Johnson is the corrupt man become incorrupt, though “as yet nobody had had the chance to find that out”). They reach from particularity to generality, a generality that is sometimes withdrawn or brought down to earth again or even contradicted, as though a fluid situation is changing before the author’s gaze.
Many of these authorial judgments are cast in terms of acting, actors, and the stage. The entire novel is concerned with performance—acting a part, changing parts, not being who you seem to be. The Booth family is central to it (John Wilkes’s brothers Edwin and Junius Brutus, his sister, and her husband are all suspected in the assassination plot and only reluctantly exonerated). To picture a fictional John Wilkes Booth as acting a part—Southern hero, Byronic avenger—would be a natural tack to take; what’s more interesting is how everyone in the story is seen as acting a part. The narration is at once observing the performances and looking out through the performers’ eyes at the intended audience—which is sometimes only the performer himself, or herself, the audience that needs to be convinced, from whom the real self must be hidden. The failed conspirator Atzerodt—whom the narration has already labeled a “miserable troll”— has funked, pawned his unused revolvers, and is on a five-day drunken spree, going by the name of Atwood. “That was the name he always took on his drinking expeditions, when he impersonated a normal man.” The climactic moment of Booth’s role-playing, a moment at once appalling and horribly comic, is his last:
An officer bent over Booth. Booth could see him plainly. He could also see Mary Ann [Booth, his mother]. “Tell my mother I died for my country,” he whispered.
“Is that what you say?” asked Conger [the officer]. He was aware of himself, was Conger, kneeling there. He felt sorry for the poor fool.
; “Yes,” said Booth. It was only play acting, after all.
The officer is capable of a moment of self-perception, but Booth, even after dreadful suffering and the approach of death, can only exist in the terms of popular melodrama.
One figure—he is at once more and less than a character—is impersonating no one: Abraham Lincoln. “As he lay dying, under the dry shimmering jet of the gasolier, the tact drained out of [his face], and one could see, what usually that tact concealed, the awful marks of knowledge.” In physical and moral stature Lincoln bestrides the narrow earth like a colossus, as Caesar is said to do in the Booths’ warhorse play; fallen, borne on his funeral train, he is like a great dead god, in whose passing all moral reality is evacuated from the world. There are judgments and judges galore in this book, but only one man fitted for the work: “About Lincoln there was always the reserve of a kindly judge who, kind or not, still sits up there, fingering the dossiers of both sides of the case, whether he admits to doing so or not.”
A kindly judge, who, whether kind or not, will know both sides, whom we could hope would judge with charity for all and malice toward none. With him gone, the open court becomes a secret one, driven by the only other character in the book who is not pretending, though he lies often: the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton. Both literally and figuratively a midget compared to Lincoln, the paranoid bully Stanton instantly assumes a huge conspiracy and has the power—martial law is still in force—to arrest, incarcerate, and try in a military court anyone he likes. The great disaster that has suddenly come upon the nation is at once his duty to meet with overwhelming force and an opportunity he won’t let slip. He considers legal restraints cowardly. He hated Lincoln. He holds Johnson in contempt. Whatever his actual official status, he is in charge.