Fine Words

By John Skow

DEATH OF THE FOX by George Garrett. 739 pages. Doubleday. $10.

At around page 500 of this novel about Sir Walter Raleigh's last years, the reader is fending off the fine words with his free hand and shouting "Enough!" And yet ... and yet ... (as Novelist Garrett, whose prose is measled with portentous dots, might write) the gaudy style is grounded in intelligence, and it fits the character and the times. Raleigh, the last Elizabethan, had swagger and intelligence in excess. That being so, it was wise of the author to be liberal; excess carefully spooned would be absurd.

This flourish of a book takes Raleigh from the year 1603, when he was condemned to death for his supposed part in a plot against James I, the new king, to 1618, when James finally enforced the sentence. Raleigh was a complex figure--a scholar, poet, courtier, soldier, explorer, promoter, privateer. Garrett's narrative is appropriately various, a subtle play of moods and musings, expository fragments, incantations set in italic type, scenes from Raleigh's young manhood and middle years. But the sense is simple enough, as well as convincing; here were a man and an age the likes of which will not be seen again.

The Fox raised up by Garrett is an almost operatic hero. His single weakness is pride, but he is saved from the stiffness of pride by an ironist's self-knowledge. The author manages to make him credible and even more or less persuades the reader to accept such verbal acupuncture as this: "Old it is true. But mark you, sir, I shall never be so old or frail that I could not spit the likes of you on the point of a rapier like a poor sparrow. I would cut you clean from your high beard to your lower one, where all your brains dangle."

Such bombast raises a problem inherent in all historical novelizing. If Garrett had written a conventional biography of Raleigh--as he is certainly equipped to do--he would have marshaled evidence to support opinions, scrupulously noted where assumption bridged fact and mentioned in rebuttal any important contrary theories. The reader would have been left with a strongly argued view of Raleigh. That is quite different from what is to be found in Death of the Fox. The reader who lacks the specialist's knowledge necessary to see the seams between fact and assumption is robbed of the uncertain historical Raleigh and given Garrett's plausible Fox in his place. Bright, new-made legend envelops insufficient fact.

Raleigh, "a most satirical courtier," commands the book, but three splendid set pieces are the best of it. Garrett summons three ghosts--a sergeant, a sailor, a courtier. These winy wraiths testify singly and at bold length about Raleigh, but mostly about soldiering, flattering, storms and other things they know. The illusion is so good that the skin crawls. Here, for example, is the courtier taking his leave: "This ghost, an ageless young man, ever idle and restless, courteous and cruel, unchanging child of change, this man will say no more. He touches his lips to signal silence. He smiles and, miming the blowing out of a candle, he takes a thief's farewell, first the color fading, then the sad cold light of his eyes gone, and one last blinking of something--a jewel, a ring, a coin cupped in his palm, and darkness comes between us and is final."

A novel like Garrett's is pesty mischief because, even if it tells no lies, it cannot stick to provable truth. And the better the illusion, the more mischievous the book. Yet it would be hard to wish that he had written a different book.

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