Seeing Crimson

In 1971, toward the end of the collegiate reign of terror, Garrett Epps was president and Robespierre of the Harvard Crimson, a politically engage student newspaper. Now he has written a novel about anti-fascism and Southern gentlemanliness and, at a deeper level, about how he feels very angry.

The hero of The Shad Treatment is young Mac Evans, a recent Harvard graduate working as an aide in the 1973 Virginia gubernatorial campaign of liberal Democrat Thomas Jefferson Shadwell—who resembles the actual Democratic candidate of that year, Henry Howell—against former Governor Miles Brock—who resembles both the actual Governor Mills Godwin and the contemporaneous Spanish head of state, Francisco Franco. A note on the book jacket says that the author’s family has a long Virginia history, and it turns out that the hero’s family has one too. Great-great-grandfather Evans was an antebellum tycoon who found his fair treatment of a black employee misunderstood in racist Richmond. Grandfather was an Episcopal bishop and a founder of St. Cyprian’s School, where the motto is, “We all can’t be scholars, but we can all be gentlemen.” Young Mac’s father, Colonel Joshua Tutelo Evans, represented as counsel a friend in volved in labor agitation in the early Thirties and as a result was socially ostracized and asked to leave his Establishment law firm (“If he hadn’t been rich, he would have starved”). With the coming of the New Deal, Evans is given the U.S. consulship in Seville, just in time for what he refers to as “the so-called Spanish Civil War . . . nothing less than a full-scale invasion of Spain by the Fascist powers, Germany and Italy.” (Inserted in the novel here are seven pages of the fictional consul’s congressional testimony on the invasion.)

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Whit Stillman

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In 1971, toward the end of the collegiate reign of terror, Garrett Epps was president and Robespierre of the Harvard Crimson, a politically engage student newspaper. Now he has written a novel about anti-fascism and Southern gentlemanliness and, at a deeper level, about how he feels very angry.

The hero of The Shad Treatment is young Mac Evans, a recent Harvard graduate working as an aide in the 1973 Virginia gubernatorial campaign of liberal Democrat Thomas Jefferson Shadwell—who resembles the actual Democratic candidate of that year, Henry Howell—against former Governor Miles Brock—who resembles both the actual Governor Mills Godwin and the contemporaneous Spanish head of state, Francisco Franco. A note on the book jacket says that the author’s family has a long Virginia history, and it turns out that the hero’s family has one too. Great-great-grandfather Evans was an antebellum tycoon who found his fair treatment of a black employee misunderstood in racist Richmond. Grandfather was an Episcopal bishop and a founder of St. Cyprian’s School, where the motto is, “We all can’t be scholars, but we can all be gentlemen.” Young Mac’s father, Colonel Joshua Tutelo Evans, represented as counsel a friend in volved in labor agitation in the early Thirties and as a result was socially ostracized and asked to leave his Establishment law firm (“If he hadn’t been rich, he would have starved”). With the coming of the New Deal, Evans is given the U.S. consulship in Seville, just in time for what he refers to as “the so-called Spanish Civil War . . . nothing less than a full-scale invasion of Spain by the Fascist powers, Germany and Italy.” (Inserted in the novel here are seven pages of the fictional consul’s congressional testimony on the invasion.)