A Madman, Terrorist or Saint? : A fictional John Brown is a bit of all three : RAISING HOLY HELL, <i> By Bruce Olds (Henry Holt: $22.50; 333 pp.)</i>

On Sunday, Oct. 16, 1859, John Brown led his doomed raid on the Harpers Ferry federal arsenal and armory. He was sure the guerrilla action would spark a slave insurrection in Virginia and Maryland and thus, by contagion of terror and violence, bring down the whole institution of slavery.

A month and a half later, on the day of Brown’s execution, at a memorial service in Concord, Mass., Henry David Thoreau proclaimed him a martyr to the cause of abolition. “Some eighteen hundred years ago, Christ was crucified,” said Thoreau. “This morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are two ends of a chain that is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”

Abraham Lincoln, also speaking on the day of the execution, but in Topeka, Kan., near the scene of Brown’s first bloodletting, the Pottawatomie massacre, could find no excuse for his acts of “violence, bloodshed and treason.” Brown’s noble intentions were beside the point: “It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.”

Horace Greeley, antislavery editor of the New York Tribune, defended the Harpers Ferry raid as “the work of a madman for whom I have not one word of reproach.”

Madman, terrorist or saint? In “Raising Holy Hell,” Bruce Olds gives us a John Brown who is something of all three. A whirl of furious contradictions, Brown is the mongrel creature of slavery, as though the horror of human bondage had spawned an avenging enemy in its own image: insane, murderous, self-righteous.

“Raising Holy Hell” is fiction laced with history, although if it didn’t announce itself as a novel, we could just as easily see it as history stretched by the author’s imagination.

By collating quotations from letters, journals and memoirs, from the document-jumble of historical record, and then invoking a chorus of invented voices (including Brown’s own, speaking from beyond the grave), Olds has constructed a cut-and-paste monument to the interpenetration of fact and fancy in historical legend. He finds room for lists, poems, chants, interview transcripts and imaginary interviews. Even as he tells Brown’s story, Olds un-tells it: the narrative broken down in bits and pieces, the familiar postmodern splintering. Here’s a novel with no disassembly required.

Brown can be a saint only to those who feel some part of the monstrosity of slavery. To quicken that feeling, Olds shuffles into the textual mix fragments meant to evoke the sheer evil of the “peculiar institution,” as it was euphemistically known. He revisits the atrocities of the middle passage and catalogues the tortures inflicted by slaveholders. He compiles a list of racist slurs still common in our day.

The strategy works in the short run; the particulars of the slave trade are especially strong poison. But then you realize that nobody, not Olds, not Brown’s biographers, can fully understand how Brown came to hate slavery with such murderous intensity. Frederick Douglass, who knew him well, claimed that he was, “in sympathy, a black man . . . as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”

Brown was otherwise notably lacking in compassion. A flinty, domineering Calvinist, born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Ohio, he had no early contact with slaves and very little contact with runaways or freedmen. And yet at age 37 he vowed to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. How did he sprout a perfect fellow feeling for the slave? If the source of his killer commiseration is a mystery, its consequence is not.

Brown’s antislavery agitation began in earnest only when he was in his mid-50s. Until that time, he was too busy trying and failing and failing again to support his huge family (his two wives bore him 20-odd children). In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, five of his sons trekked west to the Kansas Territory. Brown followed and was soon caught up in the cycle of attack and reprisal between free-state and proslavery factions.

Olds paints a portrait of Brown the militant abolitionist decked out in an ankle-length white linen duster: “Navy Colt six-shooter revolvers . . . roost prominently aslant each hip. A pair of bandoleers crisscross his chest. A Bowie knife juts from a boot top.” He’s the outlaw from a spaghetti Western, emblem of the American romance with violence.

Olds’ disjoint narrative technique is well suited to the feverish chaos of the midnight slaughter Brown orchestrated in the name of freedom. The five victims of the Pottawatomie massacre, “proslavery” settlers who owned no slaves, were dragged out of their houses and hacked to death with broadswords, their bodies mutilated.

Olds has Brown justify the atrocity as a righteous act. “Millions were then being held in bondage,” intones the disembodied voice that is Brown’s posthumous commentary. “The moral arithmetic was entirely on our side.”

After this taste of blood, Brown spent the rest of his life as a quasi-fugitive, plotting war against slavery, raising money from rich New England abolitionists, issuing proclamations, training recruits. All his plots turned on one fatal delusion: He was convinced that the slaves, given the ghost of an opportunity, would rise up and fight for their freedom. As he told Douglass when he begged him to join the attack on Harpers Ferry, “When I strike, the bees will swarm and I must have you there as honey to help me hive them.”

The plan would have failed even had Douglass not wisely declined. Thirty-six hours after he crossed the Potomac into Harpers Ferry, Brown was the prisoner of a company of U.S. Marines under the command of Col. Robert E. Lee. More than half of Brown’s 18 raiders, including two of his sons, had been killed in the fighting; the rest had been captured or were on the run. The insurrection was over and not a single slave had risen.

For his depiction of the raid, Olds strings together about 30 pages of almost uninterrupted narrative. Like the scenes at Pottawatomie, the Harpers Ferry passages are vivid and convincing, flashes that illuminate dramatic moments in a confused action. Unfortunately, whenever Olds slips into his novelistic mode and starts to tell his story in a conventional manner, his prose twitches with a hideous tic: He can’t stop verbing innocent nouns.

Surrounded by militia units, Brown is “showerstalled” in the engine house of the armory with his hostages and a handful of men. The Marine lieutenant who delivers the terms for surrender “mailchutes” the note through a crack in the doors. Brown, refusing the terms, “poolcues” his rifle through the same crack. The Marines batter the doors down, and one raider is “shish-kebabed” by a bayonet; Brown is “cutlassed to his knees” by a sword stroke to the shoulder. A little of this goes a long way, but Olds keeps it coming.

He is moderately successful at inventing monologues for Brown and for other historical figures, like Douglass and Lincoln. The problem is that their own words, the words of 1859--which Olds furnishes in snatches here and there--are much more compelling. Olds simply doesn’t write as well as Douglass or Lincoln. Even the best of writers would have trouble matching Brown’s weird, untutored eloquence.

But stylistic infelicities don’t cancel out Olds’ powerful material; despite its high-tech literary apparatus, “Raising Holy Hell” is a novel driven by content, not style.

The day after the Harpers Ferry raid, a gory, bandaged Brown managed to turn the impromptu inquest staged by a governor, a senator and a congressman into a kind of prisoner’s press conference. A reporter for the New York Herald asked him if he had any statement to make. Here is the mad and bloody martyr’s prophecy, fulfilled within 16 months and still haunting us today:

“I wish to say that you had better . . . prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. . . . You may dispose of me very easily--I am nearly disposed of now--but this question is still to be settled, this Negro question I mean. The end of that is not yet.”