The Judges of the Secret Court Read Free

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.
    It’s irrelevant to a proper understanding of a novel written in 1961, and yet it’s inescapable that we in 2011 will respond to Stanton and his role in the story in the light of recent events. The ruthless search for hidden enemies; the men and one woman gathered into Stanton’s net, kept hooded and shackled in their cells in what we might call “stress positions”; a rapidly assembled military court set up to try them, some guilty to a degree, some not, but all of them—given the national mood and Stanton’s ceaseless drive for vengeance and power—without a hope of understanding or effective defense; and in the end the country altered forever. “The Civil War had made it an Imperium.” Is it possible for fictions to become retrospectively allegorical?
    Even if you are generally well read in American fiction of the last century, it is very likely that this is the first book of Stacton’s you have opened; you may well never have heard of him. Even as Time included him in its list, the article noted that he was “as nearly unknown as it is possible for a writer to be who has written, and received critical praise for, thirteen novels.”
    He is “a Nevadan who wears cowboy boots, is fond of both Zen and bourbon,” the article said—but he was not a Nevadan, and his outfit was not exactly a working cowboy’s. (The only photograph I remember seeing of him when I was first reading his books was taken in London, and shows a handsome young man in all-white cowboy rig, sitting in a chair turned around Western-style, with a rugged smile and teasing eyes: I suddenly understood something about him, and perhaps about the books I’d read.)
    Stacton’s self-description for Contemporary Authors does say he was born in Minden, Nevada, to a couple he names Dorothy and David Stacton, but in fact he was born Lionel Kingsley Evans, or possibly Arthur Lionel Kingsley Evans, or later Lyonel, on May 27, 1923, in San Francisco, where he went to high school and, until World War II intervened, to Stanford. [2] In the war he was a conscientious objector, though on just what grounds I don’t know. In 1942 he began using the invented name “David Stacton”— he told a friend that a writer ought to have a two-syllable name with a staccato rhythm. It wasn’t a pen name—he changed his name legally. His first book (after a slim volume of verse) was a biography of an eccentric Victorian traveler; his first novel, Dolores , was published in London in 1954—British publishers regarded him as a more salable commodity than the Americans. His characteristic historical novels begin with Remember Me , a novel about Ludwig II of Bavaria, like Akhenaten a still being within an elaborate self-made prison-palace. The range of his others is remarkable: sixteenth-century Japan ( Segaki , 1958); Renaissance Rome ( A Dancer in Darkness , based on the same lurid story as John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi , and similarly nightmarish); the career of Wendell Willkie, of all people ( Tom Fool , 1962); the Thirty Years’ War ( People of the Book , 1965, his last published novel). Despite slight sales, he did attract a small but devoted readership—in Italy he was introduced to the critic and aesthete Mario Praz ( The Romantic Agony ), who was thrilled by his novels; he compared Stacton to Walter Pater, a high compliment in some circles, but wondered why Stacton, so tall