We thus have, in these current adventures into history by two celebrated American novelists, an interesting case study for an old and not very simple problem. Where does the obligation of the historian and scholar leave off and the license of the fictional artist begin? Is there such a thing as “good” historical fiction? Can a sharp line be drawn between history and fiction, or is the past essentially unrecoverable, so that even the most solemn and scrupulous historian unavoidably writes a good deal of fiction? “I often think it odd that it [history] should be so dull,” Jane Austen makes a character say in Northanger Abbey , “for a great deal of it must be invention.”

Mr. Vidal, like his hero Burr, would rather be found dead than dull, and he has executed some clever ploys to keep things entertaining. The narrator is a young man, Charlie Schuyler, who works in Aaron Burr’s law office in New York. It is 1833, and Burr, at seventy-seven, is three years from the end of his life (which comes before the end of the book). Yearning to be a writer and sucked into the muddy whirlpool of party politics as practiced in the New York of that era, Charlie undertakes to discover as much as he can about Colonel Burr’s connection with the Vice President, Martin Van Buren, and also to write Burr’s biography. There is a thin thread of plot involving Charlie’s odd affair with a prostitute whom he liberates from a bordello and wants to marry, but, as Vidai obviously intended, Burr is the real protagonist. Anyone who reads the book all the way through—and this is quite a job—will have a fairly complete idea of Burr’s tempestuous career. Vidai achieves this biographical compass by interrupting the narrative with long, numbered sections called “Memoirs of Aaron Burr,” a document supposedly dictated by Burr to Charlie Schuyler to promote both a correct version of his life and Charlie’s literary

And there’s the rub, when it comes to history versus fiction. An unwary reader could be forgiven for supposing that Burr: A Novel is a kind of literary birthday cake, with layers of fictional frosting alternating between solid slabs of real history, namely, “Memoirs of Aaron Burr.” In the afterword the author gives no hint that he, Gore Vidai, actually composed these “memoirs”; he jauntily waves aside the need for a bibliography, asserting that “it would be endless.…” This gives the impression that he has spent the last ten years, at least, in large libraries researching his novel, but it does not explain where “Memoirs of Aaron Burr” came from.

There is, of course, ample internal evidence in the “memoirs” to suggest that one is not reading the autobiographical reminiscences of any gentleman writing (or dictating) in 1833 or 1834. For one thing, the prose doesn’t ring true, instead resembling that of a stylish modern writer: “As we sat over peach ice-cream, drinking more chilled wine than was entirely necessary, watching the long shadows stretch across the lawn, the first fireflies glow in the shrubbery, Jefferson told us the reason for the dinner.…” For another, Burr has been endowed by Vidai with unusual psychic powers: he seems to know many historical facts that he could not possibly have known at that time; and he reproduces long, complicated conversations that took place thirty or forty years earlier with not a syllable lost. With a mind like that, who needs tape recorders?

This is not to charge that Mr. Vidal invented most of the contents of the alleged “Memoirs of Aaron Burr.” He has read and digested the standard sources and used them, on the whole, ingeniously; no doubt he has also poked an inquisitive thumb into more esoteric documents and pulled out, here and there, a juicy plum or two. One suspects that there could be found among Mr. Vidal’s collection a well-marked copy of the earliest serious biography of his hero, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr by James Parton (1857). This remarkable work, which has fallen into undeserved neglect, enjoyed the advantage of having been written when there were still scores of people alive who had known Aaron Burr and who were more than willing to talk about him. Parton supplied Vidai with some of his best material, not only for livening up the “memoirs” with anecdotes but as grist for some of the scenes involving Charlie Schuyler and his notorious mentor. One of Vidal’s most exciting and convincing chapters describes how Burr and Charlie boat across the Hudson to the exact spot where the most famous duel in American history occurred in the summer of 1804. There on the narrow ledge beneath the Palisades of New Jersey the old man not only retells the story but relives it, making Charlie stand just where Hamilton stood when he took the fatal ball from Burr’s pistol and

The charge against Gore Vidai is not that he has failed to use good sources but that he has sometimes abused them. There is copious evidence in reliable sources that Aaron Burr was not fond of Thomas Jefferson, for example; but what is the reader to make of a statement like this, attributed to Burr in the “memoirs” concocted for him by Vidai: “Jefferson was a ruthless man who wanted to create a new kind of world, dominated by independent farmers each living on his own rich land, supported by slaves”? Jefferson was a strong President, but “ruthless” is a very strong word, and few scholars who have spent their lives studying Jefferson would be willing to approve the epithet. He looked toward a new and better world, to be sure; but to say that he “wanted to create” it raises a vision of autocracy that is foreign to Jefferson’s hopes and expectations. “Led” would be more appropriate than “dominated” when it comes to his ideal of the independent farmer; and “supported by slaves” is simply untrue. Jefferson was a slave owner—a large one—and can be justly accused of a personal failure in never freeing himself from the bondage, so to speak, of slaveholding; but there is no doubt whatsoever that he abhorred the institution and looked eagerly forward to a time when all men would be free. Thus Vidai represents Burr as having said things about Jefferson that (a) Burr never actually said; (b) Burr might not have fully agreed with; and (c) misrepresent the historical Jefferson. The reader is left with false impressions of both Burr and Jefferson, reinforced by a vague notion that valid documents (Burr’s “memoirs”) support these impressions.

Burr was, on good evidence, an accomplished gallant, and Mr. Vidai—although he resists the temptation to paint lascivious scenes with a discretion hardly to be expected of the author of Myra Breckinridge —pegs the whole plot of his novel on the supposition that Martin Van Buren was one of Burr’s illegitimate offspring; he also advances the idea that what finally brought on the great duel with Hamilton was Hamilton’s having accused Burr of incest with his only legitimate child, the marvelous Theodosia. It would be nice to have his bibliography if only to learn the basis for these intriguing bits of alleged fact.

But if Gore Vidal has insufficiently honored the muse of history in Burr: A Novel , it may be that John Updike has been too reverential in