Tattletale

Though there are many sordid similarities between William Safire’s new novel and illicit recent events in the White House, the trials of William Jefferson Clinton are only the most obvious target of this fact-based drama. When Safire says his fiction is historical, he means it: The list of notes and sources, what he calls the “underbook” to his latest novel, lays bare the factual underpinnings to his readable, scrupulously detailed narrative, in which Safire presents the life of James Thomson Callender, “America’s first scandalmonger.” As it happens, this story also encompasses Alexander Hamilton’s extra-marital affair, which ruined his chances of becoming president and provided fodder for one of America’s first press wars.

“Scandalmonger” opens in 1792, 11 years after the war for independence and four years after the Constitution was ratified, narrowly and through questionable means. The resulting antagonism between the Federalists, who supported a strong central government, and the anti-Federalists, who favored the authority of individual states, forms the turbulent backdrop of the story.

The speaker of the House is investigating allegations made by an imprisoned miscreant that Hamilton, then secretary of the treasury, has been enriching himself and his friends with inside treasury information. Hamilton denies any financial wrongdoing and instead produces evidence that he was coerced into an affair with the accuser’s wife, Maria Reynolds, and that the couple proceeded to extort money from him. Rather than be thought to have committed a breach of office, Hamilton admits to an “indelicate amour.” “My crime is moral, not pecuniary,” he says. “I have cheated my wife, and am profoundly ashamed of my behavior, but I have never cheated the public.”

The accusations go unpublicized for a few years until an ousted congressional clerk who holds copies of the notes on the investigation sends them to the pamphleteer Callender. Callender, fleeing sedition charges in his native Scotland, is eager to fan the flames of personal liberty being stoked by Thomas Jefferson and the anti-Federalists. The publication of the charges of financial wrongdoing prompts Hamilton to issue not only a firm denial but a public admission of the affair.

Events so far generally follow history. However, Safire’s legerdemain soon becomes apparent. There are many provocative dramatizations, such as one in which he has Hamilton quietly questioning his own motives. After he has claimed publicly that he was entrapped by the Reynoldses, he remarks to himself that “[t]hough he had savaged [Maria] privately in his defense, he had never intended to brand her a whore and a blackmailer publicly,” a foul deed he attributes to James Monroe’s and Callender’s forcing of his hand. Hamilton is still in awe of the beautiful Maria, as Safire seems to be. By giving Maria a prominent role and creating a fictionalized romance between her and Callender, the author allows the issue of the affair to shadow other, more important, events.

Callender answers Hamilton’s denial (also in print) with the charge that Hamilton has merely tried to conceal his corruption with a peccadillo. Even so, Hamilton’s presidential prospects are dashed. As Safire has in the past made no secret of his thoughts on the Clintons and their alleged misdeeds, it comes as no surprise that he lingers over this commingling of financial and sexual turpitude so that it, rather than Callender, becomes the pivot around which other events turn.

The narrative eventually moves away from Hamilton and more to the life of James Callender. The penurious Scot continues to be prodded (and secretly funded) by the anti-Federalists to keep both guns blazing at the Anglophile Federalists in his publications, even on the pain of deportation (under the Alien Acts) or imprisonment (under evolving libel laws). He meets and falls in love with Maria, and her “story,” unfolding mostly in flashback, once again draws the readers’ sympathy to her rather than Callender.

It all makes for a gripping tale, a controlled and captivating web of carefully chosen truths and imagination. Journalists fire off liberty pamphlets from jail cells; a beautiful woman rolls from the bed of one high official into a party frock and onto the sofa of another; the elusive Vice President Thomas Jefferson thinks grand thoughts from his Monticello aerie while quietly financing a pamphleteer’s assault on President George Washington; men face each other on the “field of honor” over the code duello; and all the while, laws and liberties are being debated, fought over and wrested from the grip of one faction only to serve the machinations of another.

When Jefferson eventually comes to power and finds the scandalmonger’s bilious approach unsuited to his kinder, gentler administration, Callender feels used and abandoned by the anti-Federalists. Turning his sights on Jefferson, he publishes rumors about the president’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and the children he purportedly sired, as well as other deeds of apparent sexual misconduct. In Safire’s tale, Hamilton wonders about Jefferson’s iron-clad popularity: “Adultery, the admission of which had dashed Hamilton’s dream of the highest office, seemed not to shake Jefferson’s hold on the people.” The facts of this story couldn’t be more fascinating or ironic if he had invented them.

To be sure, the fictions that Safire injects do serve his own vision, but they also make for a rollicking tale. While those Virginia gentlemen--Washington, Jefferson, Madison--appear cartoonish, Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Callender and the Federalist editor Peter Porcupine are wrought in pleasing complexity, as is, fortunately, the paramour herself. Hamilton is the most confident and consistent of the cast, also competing for the dramatic lead. However, Safire muddies the water himself with his obvious fondness for Hamilton and his simultaneous admiration for and belief in the scandalmonger and Maria Reynolds. If Safire’s motives for digging up this fallen historical figure are clear, it is less obvious though perhaps more intriguing why he gives the woman what she never had in her lifetime: not exactly a book deal but a forum for her defense.