The Secret Court of David Stacton

 

The Secret Court of David Stacton 

In 1963, Time Magazine included author and sometimes-historian David Stacton in its list of the best American writers, alongside the likes of John Updike, Joseph Heller, Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Ralph Ellison.  These authors were identified as the future of American literature in the wake of Hemingway and Faulkner.  (Harper Lee merely got an honorable mention and James Baldwin is only noted through a comparison to Ellison, the only black writer on the list). 

Of these chosen authors, several would fall out-of-print or into obscurity.  Sometimes both.  As is the curious case of David Stacton.  Dead by the age of 44, Stacton still managed to pump out more than a dozen literary novels, several books of history (most widely known is his biography of the Bonaparte family, as in, Napoleon Bonaparte) short stories, poems, and numerous mid-century pulp fiction books under various pseudonyms ('David Stacton' is itself a name of his own invention, although the man born as Arthur Lionel Kingsley Evans would eventually adopt it as his legal name, saying it was the one he liked best).  Always more popular in the U.K., Stacton was finally gaining traction in his native United States when Time took notice.  Five years later he would be gone. 

When an artist dies two things can happen.  Their stock may suddenly rise or, regrettably, the sun sets on any further critical attention or commercial engagement.  Stacton's legacy grew cold in the decades following his death in an Amsterdam hotel in 1968 of a stroke, apparently of natural causes despite his relative youth.  His 1950s and 60s hardcovers gathered dust on forgotten shelves until 2011 when The New York Review of Books reissued The Judges of the Secret Court, his 1961 novel about John Wilkes Booth and the assassination of President Lincoln.  The editors declared it a "long lost triumph of American fiction as well as one of the finest books ever written about the Civil War."   They're not wrong.

This trip to the archives must have proved a success. Soon after, Stacton's original London publisher, Faber & Faber, reprinted most of his literary novels under their "Faber Finds" collection.  The collection starts with two contemporary noirs set in or around San Francisco and the Northern California mountains.  Faber wanted more of the same, but Stacton had enough self-awareness to realize that his tendency to grandiose themes and melodrama simply "went down better with historical sauce" and he never wrote about his own time and place again. 

David Stacton was as close to an 'out' gay man as I imagine possible in the 1940s and 50s America.  A penchant for drag personas is reported by contemporaries.  In everything he wrote a bold, fearless, but often sad voice emerges.  The voice of an outsider who knows exactly why they are not part of society's inner circles.  Accepting this limitation on one hand, while plotting dominance through alternative means on the other.  

It is not surprising, given the alienation he must have felt , that Stacton was drawn to the inner life of tragic (or perhaps infamous) historical figures and the cosmic events that surrounded and entangled them.  There is always a sense of doom and impending downfall that follows his characters even as they seem to be on an upward trajectory.  They know inherently that even though the world demands this of them, requires this life of them, it will simultaneously never allow it. 

I'm an avid reader and always have been. I discovered David Stacton completely by accident, or maybe one can say it was serendipity.  A trip to Munich and a visit at the incomparable Neuschwanstein Castle of King Ludwig II of Bavaria inspired research for a never-realized book I fancied I would someday write about the "Mad King".   (I did write a killer prologue and epilogue for my abandoned novel - perhaps to be shared at a later date, reworked as a short story).   But if the time and effort invested in that temporary fixation did anything it was to lead me to Stacton's own novelization of Ludwig's final years, which he titled Remember Me.   

I immediately wondered why I did not, in fact, remember any writer named David Stacton.  Indeed, I don't think I had ever encountered the name at all.   No matter. By the time I was done with the book, or perhaps even Stacton's prologue to the book, I was a fan.  That this writer was obscure (to the general public, at least, and even to many fiction lovers like myself) only piqued my interest.  I've always been fascinated by the concept of kindred spirits.  What they are and how we find them, and why.  Do we invent them as needed?  A thought for another time.  

In Remember Me, Stacton would describe his attraction to the Ludwig myth in a way that reverberated through me and still leaves a electrical charge:

It sometimes happens that when we can find no comfort among the living, we turn for advice to the dead.  Most of us have friends in history.  But the dead are eager for life.  As soon as they sense our sympathy, they invade us and take us over utterly, until we can no longer tell whose life we are living, ours or theirs.  Yet the tyranny of history is not without certain benefits.  It can teach us wisdom.  It can soothe us tenderly.  It can console us for the burden of ourselves.

I soon collected more of Stacton's work, taking great enjoyment hunting down original copies, sometimes signed by the man himself, throughout the English-speaking world.  Nothing is truly lost and the internet, for all of its evils, allows us to find whatever hidden treasures for which we search.  (The title of this blog even takes its name from Stacton's final unfinished manuscript, Restless Sleep.) 

The broad range of historical characters and events covered in Stacton's novels show a man whose view was utterly bent on finding universality.  From Ancient Egypt to Medieval Japan to the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, Stacton claimed his books to be part of a larger series, no matter how disparate in time and space they may seem.  He sought the biggest events in history then subjected its actors to intense scrutiny of the heart and mind to reveal what made important people tick.   The most succinct statement of his intention may be found in A Dancer in Darkness, a novel about the Duchess of Amalfi: 

The one thing kept from the masses is that the great ones of the world are freaks.  They have been so pulled about by eminence that they no longer have a shape of their own. Greatness is a cancer.

In selecting Stacton a part of the bright future of American letters, Time noted, "The prose of David Stacton is like that of no other writer.  It suggests a corridor in a dark Gothic tower, ill-lit by tapers, at one end of which a gong sounds incessantly.  Stacton's gong-clashes are malevolent aphorisms, asides spoken to Nemesis, hard little explanations of motive."  

 If Stacton sets up the court by which we as readers can hear the evidence of history's witnesses, and try the notorious, infamous or accused, he refrains from being anyone's judge.   Stacton knew that the real verdict will only be delivered by that secret court of opinion which has no official rules and no beginning or end.  There is no final appeal because a review of the sentence can always be undertaken.

Published in 1961, The Judges of the Secret Court is centered around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the flight, manhunt, and (spoiler!) eventual death of John Wilkes Booth.  Perhaps more importantly, it is interested in the kangaroo court hastily set-up to try and execute Booth's accused conspirators - seemingly more for political expediency than justice.  

Lincoln becomes a martyr and in the process Stacton makes a compelling case that he was loved by neither the North nor the South after the war. He was an unpopular figure enjoying little of adulation that one might think he received from the citizens of the Union.  He had won the war, but the cost was high.  But events set in motion by Booth's thirst for notoriety would succeed in forever lionizing Lincoln as an American God.  Did Booth fail, then?  No.  He succeeded in his ultimate mission. His name also lives on in perpetuity.  He and Lincoln are forever intertwined and passed into myth as seamlessly as any legend before or since. 

For a novel written 60 years ago, one can't help but wonder at its relevancy to contemporary pop culture.  The Insta-Models of today would likely find a soulmate in Stacton's Booth.  Like anything timeless, Stacton identifies those things that will repeat with each new age.  Booth here is a preening narcissist, determined to be famous, even if it is for murder.  Infamy will do just fine.  Who cares what they say, as long as they are following me, thank you very much.  Lacking basic empathetic capability, Booth is consumed with appearances and attractive poses. He views others' value only in the ways in which they might support his starring role in life.  It is not political animus that motivates Booth, it is personal ambition to be a celebrity no matter the cost.  

We meet his brother Edwin Booth who is also an actor and a much better and more successful one.  Edwin would eventually be credited with the enduring portrayal of Hamlet being dressed in all black on stage - a groundbreaking choice that would influence generations of future Hamlets.   (Neither here nor there, but I went to theater school in the 90s with a young woman claiming to be a direct descendant of these Booths.  Whether she was telling the truth I have no idea - but she was quite dramatic and her last name was indeed Booth).

Additionally we are introduced to the various people that Booth met and used to carry off his plot to assassinate the President.  Some more wittingly than others.  Even lone wolves can rely on a pack to survive and make a kill. 

But probably the most striking portrayal in Judges is the portrayal of the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, and his own deadly political ambitions.  A hastily assembled military court that seems to be as much above the law as it is a subversion of it.   As the legal machines grinds, bodies are stripped of their rights and barely afforded a defense.  Some of them are guilty (but, again, guilt comes in degrees), others are innocent.  None have any hope of acquittal.  Ruthless ambition, whether in the form of murderer or a politician, can alter a nation forever.  The wheel of time keeps turning, spinning its threads.  

Great examples of Stacton's scathing prose can be found throughout Judges.  A personal favorite of mine is this description of the pompous old gasbag of a lawyer called to defend some of Booth's accused conspirators:

He had a mouth modified by too much sucking at the public tit, and the result was an angry and petulant expression.  On one hand, he posed as a person of probity.  On the other, he wanted more.

 You could tell just by looking at him that he was not happy to be there.  He had chosen the wrong lost cause.  To get a reputation as a fearless champion of lost causes, you must be canny to choose only that lost cause which people secretly long to find again.

 One look at the judges said he was in the wrong room.

And of Mrs. Surratt, an innocent woman who was doomed because of her son's association with Booth:

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 so charmingly instinctive, and the ageing body does something to our habitual gestures, it twists and confines them, so that we cannot make them with grace anymore.  

What had once been the craning of a coquettish girl had turned somehow into the snappish head-turning of a turtle surprised by an enemy it cannot see around the protective bulk of its carapace. 

                                                           

(Original 1961 Hardcover)

I hope more people discover, or rediscover, David Stacton.   Contemporary reading tastes probably do not trend towards the personal style Stacton had nearly perfected by the late 1960s.  One wonders if any more space needs be given to a white male writer from mid-century America.  God knows, they've had their time and their voice.  Yet it seems a shame to lose a unique voice that was cut off too soon.  But even Stacton would realize that history's secret court is always in session, waiting and watching.  His legacy may one day receive what it is due. 

Of all of his books The Judges of the Secret Court  can be the most easily found.  You can also buy it from The New York Review of Books online shop. 

Stacton's cousin, Joy Martin, has written an invaluable piece about him, entitled What Really Happened to David Stacton.  It is the best source of personal information available until someone (perhaps me, someday) gives him the full biographical treatment.