The Public Burning by Robert Coover

First published: 1977

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: June 17-19, 1953

Locale: Washington, D.C.; Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, N.Y.; and New York City

Principal Characters:

• Uncle Sam Slick, a personification of the United States
• Richard M. Nixon, the vice president of the United States
• Ethel Rosenberg, a convicted spy

The Novel

The Public Burning is an exaggerated fictionalization of the actual execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Much of the book is narrated in the first person by a fictional version of Richard Nixon, but there are also folklore-like accounts of Uncle Sam, a larger-than-life mythic figure, in a life-and-death struggle with the Phantom, who symbolizes world communism, as well as actual documents from the Rosenberg case and contemporary news accounts, often adapted into the form of free verse or play scripts.

The novel begins with a prologue detailing the arrest, conviction, and sentencing of the Rosenbergs. This is the first indication of the book’s mixture of folklore and fact, as an accurate account of the historical workings of courts and law-enforcement agencies is counterpointed with a folk song about a groundhog hunt. As in history, the Rosenbergs are sentenced to die; in this version, their execution will take place not in the privacy of Sing Sing Prison but rather on a public stage in Times Square as part of a show-business performance.

The story proper begins on Wednesday, June 17, with Vice President Nixon’s account of the day’s events. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas has issued a stay of execution for the Rosenbergs, so President Dwight Eisenhower orders the Supreme Court into session to overturn the stay. Nixon encounters Uncle Sam at the Burning Tree Golf Course. Nixon knows that in this book’s mythic version of politics, Uncle Sam actually incarnates himself in the president, and Nixon longs to be the vehicle of that transformation. Nixon has no idea how that is done; he curries Uncle Sam’s favor and hopes to find out. This account of the events of Wednesday and Thursday is followed by an intermezzo, a mélange of quotations from Eisenhower’s public statements set as free verse.

On Friday morning, Nixon is chauffeured into Washington. Traffic has been all but stopped by the crowds, so he decides to walk. He finds himself in the middle of an angry mob, which frightens him until he realizes that it is on his side, cheering for the upcoming execution. He finally makes it to the White House, where Eisenhower announces that the Supreme Court has overturned the stay so that the Rosenbergs can die that evening. A second intermezzo presents Ethel Rosenberg’s plea for clemency and Eisenhower’s denial of it as a dramatic dialogue.

Nixon then takes a taxi to the Senate office building. The cab driver, who regales him with jokes and stories, is a mysterious figure. At first, he claims to be an old friend from Nixon’s World War II Navy service, but he gets stranger and more menacing; Nixon finally flees. Nixon is puzzled by the case: He does not understand the Rosenbergs, and he is by no means entirely convinced of their guilt. He is particularly fascinated by Ethel, whose background in some ways resembles his. As he ponders her story in his office, his thoughts grow lewd, and he may be about to masturbate. Uncle Sam catches him and orders him to go to Sing Sing Prison to speak to Ethel and perhaps find out the truth about the Rosenbergs.

After the final intermezzo—remarks of the Rosenbergs and Sing Sing’s warden presented as an opera—Nixon is admitted to Ethel’s cell. Ethel spurns Nixon’s offer to spare her and execute only her husband. Finally, Nixon makes a pass at her, and they kiss. She encourages him and even opens his belt, but before they can actually have sex, she says she hears the guards coming; she leaves him frustrated, his pants around his ankles.

Back at Times Square, the public burning is about to take place. There is a nationally televised warmup for the execution, led by Uncle Sam himself, and performers such as Jack Benny and the Marx Brothers do comedy bits about the case. Then Nixon arrives, his pants still down and the words “I AM A SCAMP” on his bare buttocks, written there in lipstick by Ethel. Nixon manages to turn this embarrassment into a public triumph, urging everyone to drop their pants for America. At the height of the excitement, there is a blackout, but the power is restored by Uncle Sam himself, and the Rosenbergs are electrocuted.

In the epilogue, Uncle Sam performs the ritual recognition of the future president in his usual fashion—by sodomizing Nixon and telling him, “You’re my boy.” Nixon finds the pain almost unbearable but finally says, “I love you, Uncle Sam.”

The Characters

The one character readers see most closely is Richard Nixon, presented through a continuing internal monologue that shows him at his worst and at his best. Throughout the book, he displays a single-minded pursuit of the presidency and a morbid concern with how he is being perceived. In a revealing moment, he muses on the fact that both he and Eisenhower had wanted to be railroad engineers when they were children, but he had done so merely because he knew that America considered such an ambition praiseworthy, while Eisenhower would actually have been willing to waste his life in such an unprestigious job. He is both fascinated and repelled by sex, and he is unwilling to face his feelings about the matter.

Yet for all these skillfully presented flaws, the book’s Nixon is by no means an entirely unpleasant figure. He is, within his limits, a person who cares about his family and generally wants to do good as he perceives it, so long as it will not interfere with his ambitions. His desperate efforts to understand his situation give the reader a certain sympathy for him. Coover skillfully weaves into the narrative actual writings of Nixon’s, from the explanations of public events Nixon included in his autobiographical Six Crises (1962) to a letter he wrote to his mother when he was a child in which he took on the persona of a long-suffering dog.

Uncle Sam is presented as mythical, if not actually godlike. Like a trickster god, he creates bounty but often victimizes those who try to seek it. He is presented in his public statements and his conversations with Nixon; in both, he speaks less like an actual person than like a character in a tall tale. He is vulgar, trashy, grandiose, and boastful. Uncle Sam’s rival, the Phantom, who personifies communism as Uncle Sam personifies America, is an enigma. Appropriately enough, he makes no open appearances in the text, but it is suggested that the taxi driver Nixon encounters is really him.

Ethel Rosenberg is also distantly presented. She is encountered primarily through melodramatic public discourse, phrased in the rhetoric of the left. Readers get no view within her, no knowledge of whether she actually did what she was charged with having done. Even when she appears onstage and interacts personally, she speaks mostly in political rhetoric, and readers cannot be sure whether her near-sexual encounter with Nixon actually arouses her or is merely part of an effort to embarrass him.

Critical Context

The Public Burning was Coover’s third novel, following The Origin of the Brunists (1967), which satirically detailed the founding of a new religion with marked similarities to Christianity, and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), in which a lonely man playing a tabletop baseball game of his own invention may have succeeded in bringing to life his imagined players and their world. He was also known for experimental short stories, including those collected in Pricksongs and Descants (1969). The audacious imagination, verbal and stylistic invention, and sexual explicitness of The Public Burning were unsurprising to those familiar with Coover’s early work, though all these qualities may have reached their peak in the novel. In Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (first published as a novella in 1975, revised version in book form 1987), Coover imagined another Nixon, one who failed in politics but found success in football and sex, both of which he mastered through sheer repetitive effort despite a lack of aptitude for either. This Nixon meets a sad end when he mindlessly follows one of his old football signals at a political demonstration. Other Coover novels, like the complex mystery Gerald’s Party (1985), have their admirers, but The Public Burning is generally deemed Coover’s masterpiece.

The Public Burning came out in 1977, three years after Nixon had been driven from the presidency in disgrace. Some saw the book as further picking on a defeated figure, while others thought the book and the recent events shed light on each other. The book was praised by some critics for its inventiveness and condemned by others for its sexuality and alleged leftist bias. The guilt of the Rosenbergs was still a controversial topic in 1977. Later evidence, including apparent Soviet spy records, makes the case for their guilt stronger, but questions about the case remain unresolved.

Bibliography

Anderson, Richard. Robert Coover. Boston: Twayne, 1981. This thorough presentation of Coover’s work for a prestigious American literature series includes a remarkably condescending treatment of The Public Burning (Chapter 4, as part of a general discussion of “the later works”), grudgingly praising its inventiveness but accusing it of lack of emotional range.

Cope, Jackson I. Robert Coover’s Fictions. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. This study relates Coover’s work in general, and The Public Burning in particular, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “dialogic novel,” in which the single authorial persona of traditional fiction is replaced by a multiplicity of voices, with the reader left to choose among them.

Gordon, Lois. Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. A detailed study of Coover’s methods. Chapter 4 looks at mythical, linguistic, and social aspects of The Public Burning.

Viereck, Elisabeth, “The Clown Knew It All Along: The Medium Was the Message.” Delta 28 (June, 1989): 63-81. As the subtitle suggests, this essay applies Marshall McLuhan’s theories to the view of the media presented in The Public Burning.