Edmund Wilson on Abraham Lincoln

Having indirectly slagged Edmund Wilson the other night when writing about Viktor Shklovsky, I think it's only fair to point out how good Wilson is in his book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) when writing about another regular preoccupation of this blog, Abraham Lincoln.

Wilson doesn't really break new ground in his study of Lincoln, and he gets Reconstruction wrong (which I suppose can partially be excused by the fact that Wilson was writing before historians in the 1960s and after began arguing for Reconstruction's value--and its eventual, necessary continuation in the Civil Rights movement). But as usual, when Wilson pays close attention to texts--in this case Lincoln's writings and speeches--his responses are insightful and compelling.

He's also good on Lincoln's dreams and visions, one of my favorite aspects of Lincoln history and folklore, which, he notes,

add an element of imagery and tragic foreshadowing that one finds sometimes in the lives of poets--Dante's visions or Byron's last poem--but that one does not expect to encounter in the career of a political figure.

Later, in tying Lincoln's fatalism with his sense of his public role as the suffering but stalwart face of the nation--and therefore of democracy--Wilson writes,

The night before Lincoln was murdered, he dreamed again of the ship approaching its dark destination. He had foreseen and accepted his doom; he knew it was part of the drama. He had in some sense imagined this drama himself--had even prefigured Booth and the aspect he would wear for Booth when the latter would leap down from the Presidential box crying, "Sic semper tyrannis!" Had he not once told Herndon that Brutus was created to murder Caesar and Caesar to be murdered by Brutus?

So far as I remember, Borges never wrote about Lincoln, but that last line makes me think he would have found a rich subject in Abe's morbid fatalism.

But the most fun in Wilson's essay is found early on, when he's doing the work that all writers on Lincoln seem to have to do before setting sail: clearing the deck of a century of accumulated nonsense.

There has undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe.

Before I let Wilson go any farther: I doubt anyone's surpassed Lincoln since 1962, but surely someone's surpassed Poe? Ernest Hemingway, maybe? Jack Kerouac? Okay, back to it:

[T]here are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg. Yet Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln, insufferable though it sometimes is, is by no means the worst of these tributes. It is useless if one tries to consult it for the source of some reported incident, but it does have its unselective value as an album of Lincoln clippings. It would, however, be more easily acceptable as a repository of Lincoln folk-lore if the compiler had not gone so far in contributing to this folk-lore himself. Here is Sandburg's intimate account of the behavior of Lincoln's mother, about whom almost nothing is known: "She could croon in the moist evening twilight to the shining face in the sweet bundle, 'Hush thee, hush thee, thy father's a gentleman!' She could toss the bundle into the air against a far, hazy line of blue mountains, catch it in her two hands as it came down, let it snuggle close to her breast and feed, while she asked, 'Here we come--where from?' And after they had both sunken in the depths of forgetful sleep, in the early dark and past midnight, the tug of a mouth at her nipples in the grey dawn matched in its freshness the first warblings of birds and the morning stars leaving the earth to the sun and dew."

Lincoln's mother's nipples! Sandburg imagined Lincoln's mother's nipples! And he compared baby Abe's chewing on them to the singing of birds! I can picture a writer--especially one who is a folksy poet at heart--getting caught up in a rush of words and penning that line. But how on earth does he read it over later without deciding to put the whole manuscript to the match?

It's fun to contrast that silly romantic picture with one of the few things we actually do know about the real Mrs. Lincoln: that she may have been the source of her son's youthful prowess as a wrestler. In Honor's Voice, Douglas L. Wilson quotes testimony from Usher Linder, a neighbor of the Lincolns in Indiana:

His mother, whose maiden name was Nancy Hanks, was said to be a very strong-minded woman, and one of the most athletic women in Kentucky. In a fair wrestle, she could throw most of the men who ever put her powers to the test. A reliable gentleman told me he heard the late Jack Thomas, clerk of the Grayson Court, say he had frequently wrestled with her, and she invariably laid him on his back.

Occasionally I enjoy suspending my disbelief in an afterlife long enough that I can picture unlikely meetings between the dead. Tonight, I'm picturing that day in 1967 when Carl Sandburg joined the heavenly host:

Greeted just inside the gates by Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Sandburg was surprised to quickly find himself being seized by the wings and wrestled to the ground. Confused, he accepted the victorious Mrs. Lincoln's offer of a hand getting up, and as she pulled him to his feet, she introduced herself in her Hoosier drawl and said, "You shouldn't ought to have written that about my nipples."

Dusting off the speechless Sandburg's robes, Mrs. Lincoln smiled and continued, "But you did like my boy, and I have to admit I did enjoy that whole 'hog butcher of the world' bit, so maybe we can be friends after all."

The Death of the Detective

On the recommendation of my former coworker, Jim, I picked up the Northwestern University Press reissue of Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective (1974) expecting a dark noir tale. And that's what I got . . . for a while.

The Death of the Detective is set in Chicago at some vague point between the late fifties and the closing of the Riverview amusement park in 1967. The postwar boom has faded and is beginning to be replaced by urban decay, white flight, racial and ethnic strife, and a creeping sense that the city is beginning an irreversible decline. It opens with a madman intent on murdering a dying Lake Forest millionaire, and we quickly meet the detective who will oppose him, Arnold Magnuson. In his fifties and essentially retired, Magnuson is famous for the detective agency he founded, which now makes most of its money supplying the ubiquitous Magnuson Men, a sort of combination of Andy Frain ushers and the Pinkertons. Called in by the millionaire, who anticipates the murderer's arrival, Magnuson finds himself deeply enmeshed in what quickly becomes a confusing web of murder and deception.

But that's just the basic plot that gets the book moving; after a while, it becomes clear that the plot is the least important part of The Death of the Detective. To have a sense of the thick, textured concoction this novel really is, you need to blend that story with Carl Sandburg's hog butcher, steep the result for a few decades in a broth of Dickens, Kafka, and Melville, and then salt it with a bit of the prose styles of James Jones, Nelson Algren, and W. M. Spackman. From Dickens, Smith takes a love of the grotesque and a fascination with the patterns of urban life: the unpenetrated neighborhoods rife with secrets, the endless hiding places to be found there, the unexpected and unsettling meetings with people one has known in other contexts. Kafka supplies the gaping horror at the fact that we can never quite do what we mean to do, perpetually distracted trying to catch up to what we should have done already--overlaid with the gnawing fear that there is no hope for any true justice because guilt is showered liberally on us all. Melville, meanwhile, provides the unstinted ambition and raging, unbridled prose: the full, complete story of every part of this brawling city can be told, and Smith is determined to make the attempt.

So he puts us perpetually, restlessly, in motion. We travel to the 31st Street Beach, a meat-packing plant, the Gold Coast, a West Loop Skid Row, Evanston, Edgebrook, Uptown, Bughouse Square, a topless bar in unincorporated Niles, Rogers Park, Bronzeville, the West Side, North Avenue Beach--the list goes on, covering every conceivable Chicagoland location. Yet somehow Smith never gives the sense that he's checking items off a list; rather, the wanderings of his characters seem to make a crazed sort of sense, like they, too, need to see the city as a whole in order to begin to understand how its corruption, decay, and sickness have damaged them--and yet how its underlying vitality has enabled them to keep up the fight.

Throughout, the characters see Chicago in its past and present incarnations simultaneously, casting dark shadows on its uncertain future:

What a change from the old days when ironmongers and rag-pickers would cruise up and down the alleys in horse and wagons or those high ancient trucks like ornate indestructible stagecoaches, each man with his own unique, recognizable, unintelligible cry; as would the trucks and wagons delivering coal and hawking whatever fruits and vegetables were in season, produce from the truck farms just to the north and west of the city and no that far from the neighborhood. And the residents themselves, man, woman, and child, would walk the alleys, preferring them to the sidewalks or the streets, using them like a secret network of footpaths and short cuts that traversed the neighborhood.

Throughout, there is a sense that the city may have in the past made sense, with everyone and everything in its place--but the future is uncertain, its categories shifting in unexpected ways. Smith spends a lot of time exploring the city's simmering racial and ethnic divisions, and his characters find themselves frequently confused both about their own identities and where those identities, if it's possible to stabilize them at all, could fit in the ever-shifting mosaic of the city. Large-scale change is on the way, and even the vague intimations of it the characters feel are unmooring them. At times, it seems all of Chicago is slowly going mad.

Smith crams the book's 600 oversized pages with description and digression, and he drags dozens of characters through multiple overlapping plots. I can't deny that The Death of the Detective could have used some editing: some portions drag, some characters never amount to much, and some scenes are repetitive. But Smith's ambition is so vast, and the tapestry he weaves so detailed and compelling, that I'm willing to forgive him the occasional lapse. I imagine that the book's length is one of the reasons it stayed out of print for so long--upon its release in 1974 it was a best seller and a National Book Award finalist, but it spent more than twenty-five years out of print. It's tough to print such a big book economically, and it can be similarly tough to convince readers to pick up such a huge book by a little-known author.

I think that neglect is also a reflection of Chicago's second-city status: had this book been set in New York, I have no doubt that it would have remained in print and would be regarded as a true American classic. But that's fine by me. Everyone knows New York's glories; us Chicagoans get to keep many of our city's treasures to ourselves, secret recompenses for living through February and August. The Death of the Detective definitely belongs on that list, Chicagoans.

[I see the writer of Neglected Books agrees with me; you can find some more information there about the book's critical reception.]