This historical novel about John Brown was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. At the time he was writing the novel, Russell Banks lived near North Elba, New York, the Adirondack community where Brown was buried. A decade before his execution for attempting to provoke a slave uprising through an attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Brown had relocated to the North Elba area. A New York philanthropist had financed the establishment of a farm settlement called Timbuktu, where African Americans could politically, socially, and culturally define themselves within their own community. Brown wished to support this experiment, but his temperament was too radical for an extended rustic idyll. The title of Banks’s novel is taken from the English translation of the Iroquois name for the mountain overlooking the Brown homestead. The name aptly describes the career of the zealot long said to have provoked the bloodiest conflict in American history.
Almost 800 pages long, Cloudsplitter is narrated by Brown’s son Owen, now an aged recluse. The ambiguities in the historical record surrounding Brown and the equally great ambiguities in Brown’s character stem from his deification by some and vilification by others. Even within a novel, it is difficult to enter the interior life of John Brown through historical accounts alone. Banks may have considered a first-person narration but perhaps did not wish simply to replicate the approach of William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner. The relatively sparse historical record on Nat Turner gave Styron greater freedom in imagining Turner’s inner life than Banks possessed in reconstructing Brown’s.
Banks’s decision to have Owen narrate the novel offers important advantages. While it permits an intimate glimpse of Brown, the question of Brown’s true character is filtered through Owen’s recollections. This issue becomes even more complicated because of Owen’s advanced age, his isolation, and his admission that he has often fabricated stories about his father. Furthermore, Owen’s feelings about his father and his participation in the raids at Pottawatomie and Harper’s Ferry are deeply ambivalent. That the narrative ultimately functions as one of the longest suicide notes in literary history reinforces the idea that Owen’s story cannot be separated from his father’s. Likewise, Brown’s story cannot be separated from the historical and extra-historical attempts to tell it. Thus, Owen’s narrative is composed in response to a historian’s request for information about the Brown family.
The novel vividly depicts the complexities of mid-nineteenth-century life in both the North and South. One of these complexities lies at the heart of Brown’s story. Free African Americans involved in the abolitionist movement warned Brown that enslaved people, brutalized by generations of oppression, might not be psychologically prepared to seize the opportunity presented by the Harper’s Ferry raid. They feared that a failed uprising would only worsen conditions for enslaved people, as even minor acts of self-assertion would thereafter be viewed as signs of rebellion. In this context, Brown’s determination to carry out the raid can appear less like strategic activism and more like a quest for martyrdom. While some have argued that Brown understood the abolitionist cause needed a martyr, Banks suggests that Brown may also have been driven by a personal religious obsession with proving his own righteousness.
Even if Brown was not clinically insane, his religious fervor often made him appear so. When Owen was a child, he fell from a roof and broke his arm while trying to escape his father’s intense Sabbath observance. Rather than comfort him, Brown angrily reset the broken bones himself, permanently crippling the arm. The physical injury symbolizes deeper psychological wounds. The fates of Owen’s brothers, especially the self-destructive Fred, reveal the devastating effects of Brown’s increasingly unrestrained zeal.
Banks has noted in interviews that, to reproduce Brown’s speech authentically, he restricted his vocabulary to words found in the King James Bible and the 1853 edition of Webster’s Dictionary. Some critics, however, have argued that Owen’s voice occasionally sounds too contemporary to be historically convincing. Among modern novels, the closest companion to Cloudsplitter is Joyce Carol Oates’s Angel of Light.
Sources
Appleby, Joyce. “After Harpers Ferry,” TLS (May 22, 1998): 7.
Banks, Russell. Cloudsplitter, A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
———. “The Art of Fiction CLII.” Interview by Robert Faggen and Barry Munger. Paris Review 40 (Summer 1998): 50–88.
———. “In Response to James McPherson’s Reading of Cloudsplitter.” In Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), edited by Mark C. Carnes, 67–76. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
———. “A Conversation with Russell Banks.” Interview by Lewis Burke Frumkes. Writer 111 (August 1998): 18–20.
Gussow, Mel. “John Brown Lives Anew as a Writer’s Inspiration,” New York Times, 27 April 1998, p. E1.
Kazin, Alfred. “God’s Own Terrorist,” New York Review of Books, 9 April 1998, pp. 8–9.
Kirn, Walter. “The Wages of Righteousness,” New York Times Book Review, 22 February 1998, p. 9.
Malcomson, Scott L. “The Color Line.” New Yorker, 6 April 1998, pp. 102–104.
McPherson, James M. “Russell Banks’s Fictional Portrait of John Brown.” In Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), edited by Mark C. Carnes, 61–66. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.
Niemi, Robert. Russell Banks. Twayne United States Authors Series, 680. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Scott, A. O. “Abraham and Oedipus.” Nation, 16 March 1998, pp. 27–29.
Wylie, J. J. “Reinventing Realism: An Interview with Russell Banks,” Michigan Quarterly Review 39 (Fall 2000): 737–753.
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