Yellow Fever & Green Turbans

LYDIA BAILEY (488 pp.) -- Kenneth Roberts--Doubleday ($3).

Poor thing, they said, she died only last year, young and far from home, carried off by the yellow fever in French Haiti. Lydia Bailey, late of Philadelphia, looked as pure and demure in her portrait (by Gilbert Stuart, of course) as only a heroine in a historical novel can look. Handsome young Albion Hamlin stared at the portrait, shivered, felt "something intimate and personal" catch at his throat. The time: 1800-05. The range: post-Revolutionary U.S., the troubled Haiti of Toussaint L'Ouverture, North Africa at the time of the Barbary Wars.

Irascible, fact-conscious Kenneth Roberts, a heckler of historians and probably the most widely admired of U.S. historical novelists, is said to have spent six years on Lydia Bailey, grubbing details from archives, translating French sources, writing and polishing the text. Even so, Lydia is a pretty light-weight performance. But the first printing (including Literary Guild) is rumored to be 1,000,000 copies. Hollywood's 20th Century-Fox has already bought the story for $215,000. As a narrative it lacks the fire and dramatic punch of Northwest Passage, the unity and cogency of Oliver Wiswell, but as history it is packed with enough facts to fill a college course lasting two semesters.

Minor Mission. Author Roberts is best known as a novelist with a vengeance, or at least a mission: in Rabble in Arms he argued the forgotten merits of Benedict Arnold, in Wiswell he made an earnest case for colonial Loyalists and Tories. In Lydia, the mission is a minor one. Roberts' main aim seems to be to expose the incompetence of Tobias Lear, onetime private secretary to George Washington.

Author Roberts finally pins Lear to the mat as one of the culprits in our "disgraceful as well as heroic" Tripolitan War. To do so he follows Lear from Haiti to the Mediterranean, dragging Albion and Lydia along to make love on the way. Albion reaches Haiti, finds Lydia not dead from yellow fever at all, and as pretty as her picture. He also finds Napoleon's troops trying to put down Toussaint's revolution, and willy-nilly mixes in on Toussaint's side. By page 300 Haiti is left far behind; Albion and Lydia languish as prisoners aboard a Tripolitan xebec manned by ruffians in green turbans, and Lear has become U.S. Consul General in Algiers.

Roberts' fans are most likely to enjoy the Haitian chapters, many of which bubble with the heat and smell of the country, the tragicomic chaos of the days of Toussaint, Henri Christophe and Dessalines. Lydia's standout character: King Dick, giant, uninhibited Sudanese ex-slave who figured in Author Roberts' The Lively Lady and who swaggers happily around Haiti with pearls as big as birds' eggs, a harem of doting wives and a 5-ft. bamboo shillelagh. Lydia Bailey is the stuff that sells, but doesn't survive.

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