American Renaissance & American Romanticism
New York Times, November 7, 2008
Books of The Times
Call Him Eloquent Abe, the Writer in Chief
LINCOLN
The Biography of a Writer
By Fred Kaplan
406 pages. HarperCollins. $27.95.
A former Illinois state legislator, with a short stint in Congress under his belt, comes to national prominence with speeches that showcase his eloquence. He is, according to the author of this new book, something of a cool customer: calm and graceful under pressure, “a difficult man to read, who loved jokes and stories” but who was otherwise remarkably self-contained.
This former lawyer runs as “a stoic moderate,” embracing the virtues of “balance, temperance and restraint”; as a campaigner he emphasizes a reasoned “analysis of issues rather than personalities.” His poetic gifts as a writer, shaped by a lifetime of avid reading, are matched by a lawyer’s appreciation of precision; his writings project “a persona of dignified but amiable authenticity,” and do so with a “concision of phrasing and logical tightness.” In his run for office he is criticized for being too inexperienced to be president and for failing to support the troops, because he’d questioned an American invasion of a country he claimed was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.” His vision of America is an optimistic one of reconciliation — to “help make strangers into neighbors,” in the words of this biographer, “to create sympathy between regions and nations, and, by inference, between the North and South.”
The man in question — and the subject of this fascinating new book — is Abraham Lincoln, not Barack Obama, who self-consciously invoked memories of the Civil War president in 2007 by announcing his candidacy for the White House in Springfield, Ill., Lincoln’s hometown for 17 years. Although Fred Kaplan, the author of “Lincoln,” never mentions Mr. Obama by name, it’s hard to read this volume without thinking of the current president-elect — who turns out to share a startling array of philosophical and literary qualities with his predecessor, as well as an equanimity of demeanor — and this book’s focus on the role that language and writing played in one president’s life promises to shed light on the role they may play in another’s.
Certainly Lincoln’s writings and literary gifts have been examined in detail many times before, most famously by Jacques Barzun — and Edmund Wilson, who argued that “alone among American Presidents, it is possible to imagine Lincoln, grown up in a different milieu, becoming a distinguished writer of a not merely political kind.” Garry Wills’s seminal 1992 book, “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America,” deconstructed that best known of Lincoln’s speeches, while Ronald C. White Jr. tackled the second Inaugural Address in his 2002 book, “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech.” More recently Douglas Wilson, in “Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words,” probed Lincoln’s often agonizing creative process, looking at the evolution of particular speeches and essays, and his capacity to grow as a writer and a leader over the years.
This new biography remains heavily indebted to these earlier works, as well as to Douglas Wilson’s 1998 book “Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln.” But Mr. Kaplan does a persuasive, highly perceptive job of explicating the influences that various authors had on Lincoln’s thinking, as well as the role that writing played in helping the young Illinois politician articulate an identity of his own. In fact, as Mr. Kaplan sees it, language “was the tool by which” Lincoln “explored and defined himself,” and as president he would try to find a language to “harness and implement” his political ideas “in a country whose alternative narrative would lead, he believed, to betrayal and disaster.”
Perhaps because so many previous scholars have focused on Lincoln’s best known writings as president, Mr. Kaplan devotes most of his attention to his subject’s earlier years, spending only one chapter on his time as commander in chief. Much of his attention is directed at the pivotal role that the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays had in shaping Lincoln’s poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. He writes that Lincoln knew Shakespeare’s body of work so well that quotations from the plays “came as naturally to him as breathing,” and that he came to see Shakespeare’s tragedies as a sort of correlative to the tragedy America faced during the Civil War.
During Lincoln’s presidency, Mr. Kaplan writes, “Shakespeare’s history plays now had special purchase, even more than they had always had, as exemplars of the drama of national destiny, great leaders contesting for dominance, the clashing of ambitions and wills, and the attempt to assert contradictory national visions. The second part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI sequence, dramatizing the brutal war between the houses of York and Lancaster, provided a linguistic equivalent of his own torn soul, his civil war also increasingly spinning out of control, the military murders, including the legal butchery, amplified for both sides.”
Shakespeare remained a primary touchstone throughout Lincoln’s life, molding his almost existential view of mankind’s plight in a random, unpredictable world, but a host of other writers would imprint his imagination as well. Aesop’s fables, which Lincoln learned as a boy, Mr. Kaplan argues, would feed his love of fables and inform his own fondness for storytelling — as a means of illustration and moral persuasion. Mr. Kaplan also tells us that the young Lincoln was riveted by “Robinson Crusoe,” drawing parallels between his own frontier world and “the shipwrecked Crusoe’s struggle against isolation and adversity” and that he probably regarded John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” in secular terms as a parable about upward mobility that resonated with his own efforts “to find a path out of the limitations of his father’s world” of manual labor. In addition, literary anthologies belonging to Lincoln’s stepmother introduced him to writers like David Hume, Edward Gibbon and Samuel Johnson as well as a sort of Enlightenment rationalism that Lincoln found more congenial than the Protestant emotionalism of his father, with whom he maintained a distant, even chilly relationship.
By most accounts, Lincoln vacillated between two emotional poles — between the melancholic and the irreverent, the stoic and the playful — and his taste in reading reflected these two moods. The poetry of Byron appealed to Lincoln’s pensive side, echoing his own familiarity with loss and grief (his mother died when he was a boy, and the untimely death of Ann Rutledge, believed by some scholars to have been his first love, reportedly left him emotionally devastated), while Robert Burns’s gift for satire and colloquial language informed the future president’s development of an economical voice pitched toward the common man.
Other presidents, like Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, were talented writers, but only Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson so far stand out as what Mr. Kaplan calls “canonical writers of American literature.” Unlike many politicians, Mr. Kaplan observes, Lincoln struggled throughout his career to “find effective, accurate language to express his ideas about a complicated reality that readily lent itself to evasion, self-deceit and linguistic trickery.” By the time he was president, at the height of the Civil War, Lincoln had not only achieved a voice wholly his own, a distinctive, American voice accommodating both oratorical heights and plain-spoken directness, but he had also demonstrated that he was no “mere stump orator,” as one news account put it, but a leader who had put his superior language skills in the service of a vision of a new nation that might emerge from the war — an America dedicated to completing the unfinished work of its founders, an America, in his indelible words, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”