"If there's time to lean," or, What better time to think about the workplace than when you've taken a week of vacation to sit at home and read?

In Sam Lipsyte's coruscating, acid-tongued, and hilarious novel The Ask (2010), narrator Milo Burke describes his position in the ecology of the college development office in which he works like this:

I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence, bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgment.

Since Jean Edward Smith's Grant (2001) has had me thinking about Ulysses Grant's many good qualities as a boss, I started imagining what Grant would do with that sort of employee. If his approach to the slackness he found in the Army of the Potomac on taking over as general in chief in 1864 is any indication, Milo may want to commence worrying:

Virtually half the soldiers in Federal service were holding down rear-area jobs, guarding supply lines, providing garrisons for cities and forts in occupied areas, and were not available for battlefield duty. . . . Grant instructed Halleck to forward all new recruits to the field immediately, and to strip each department "to the lowest number of men necessary for the duty to be performed." By summer, Grant had cleaned out the rear areas and had reduced the ratio of garrison to combat troops by half, an accomplishment no previous general in chief had considered possible.

That change seems to have pleased the frontline troops immensely, impressing them immediately with Grant's seriousness and fairness. As for the folks ejected from their relatively cushy rear-area jobs, I expect enthusiasm was a bit more tempered.

Maybe Milo Burke should just go into retail . . . or, at least, retail like it used to be, the independent sort, before the chains and changes of habit forced even the most idiosyncratic of locally owned stores to hire employees who actually, you know, work. One of the many quiet pleasures in James Hynes's stunning new novel Next (2010) is this brief glimpse of the back-in-the-day retail life, record store phylum:

"The sixties were very, very good to Mick," the manager told Kevin once, when they were taking a break in the alley behind the store. Though the circumstances of the observation strike Kevin as ironic now--they had been sharing a joint at the time--the disjunction between the remark and its context went unnoted back then. In a hip, regionally famous, independent record store in Ann Arbor in the late seventies--long gone now, of course, strangled by the chains and the Internet and iTunes--reliability and even competence weren't necessarily the first things you looked for in an employee. Entertainment value counted for a lot, and McNulty had entertainment value to burn. During the long reaches of slow, midweek midsummer days when Big Star was nearly empty, Kevin would stand with McNulty behind the counter or in the back of the store by the jazz section, and McNulty would smoke and slouch and, from the depths of a heavy-lidded midafternoon coma, relate fantastic stories from his youth.

All of which, really, is just an excuse to share two of my favorite retail stories, neither of which is from my own experience.

The first comes from baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra (whose pithy daily rundown of baseball results for NBC sports's Hardball Talk should be part of every baseball fan's morning). Soon after Calcaterra was hired as a full-time blogger last fall, he wrote a post for his personal blog, "Jobs I've left: an inventory," that, in the midst of descriptions of fast-food jobs and office jobs, all of it worth reading, told of his time at the Ohio State University Bookstore, where he worked with a character who will be familiar, at least in outline, to any retail veteran:

Office supplies counter: I had this job for the balance of college. It was about half student employees, half-lifers. The lifers were a bit scary. One of them said that the worst thing that could ever happen to him would be for him to win a lottery when the jackpot was below $20 million. Why? "Because there are certain things I'll need to do if I win, and I'll need all of that money." His expression when he said that was serious, approaching dire.

And finally, there's my friend Jim, whom I've known since back in my own days as a bookseller, who said he once had a bookstore coworker from Russia who said to him, more than once,

The question you have to ask yourself is, "Which Karamazov am I?" We are all one of the Karamazovs, all of us. Only, which one are you? Which one are you?

I'm willing to assume that his expression at that moment was, to borrow from Craig Calcaterra, "serious, approaching dire."

Two Generals

Jean Edward Smith's big biography of Grant, like all Civil War books, is full of memorably strange characters, many of whom will be familiar to the casual student of American history. Two that I don't remember from earlier reading in the period, however, have jumped out at me this time around: Brigadier General William "Bull" Nelson and Major General John McClernand, two Union generals who had very different styles--and relationships to Grant.



Bull Nelson plays only a small part, but as you can tell from the photo, he's such a striking figure that he stands out nonetheless. When he joins Grant just after Grant takes Fort Donelson, Smith describes him this way:

Six foot five and pushing 300 pounds, the foul-mouthed, hard-driving brigadier shared the fighting spirit of Foote and C. F. Smith. . . . No fight was too big for Nelson and he admired the audacity of Grant's plan. Told that ammunition for two of his brigades had been sent mistakenly to Cairo [Illinois], Nelson said not to worry. "I will endeavor to find the enemy with the bayonets of my division."

Later, Nelson was the only officer--including Grant--to realize that Grant was in danger of being attacked at Shiloh:

The not-so-genial giant was sitting on the north bank of the Duck River on the afternoon of March 27 watching the bridge-building efforts when he learned that the Tennessee no longer stood between Johnston and Grant. "By God," he exclaimed to a startled staff officer, "we must cross that river at once or Grant will be whipped."

In the absence of a bridge, he issued detailed orders instructing his men and equipment to ford the two hundred yards of the flooded Duck, "their pantaloons, in a neat roll . . . carried on the point of the bayonet." Which they did, without the loss of a single man or wagon; his arrival near the end of the first day of fighting at Shiloh proved decisive.

A footnote on Nelson's fate gives yet another operatic touch to this outsized character:

Nelson's fighting career ended abruptly September 29, 1862, when he was shot and killed by Indiana brigadier Jefforson C. Davis in the corridor of Galt House in Louisville, Kentucky. Nelson had insulted Davis the week before. When Davis demanded satisfaction, Nelson slapped him in the face with the back of his hand. David procured a pistol from a bystander and shot Nelson. General Philip H. Sheridan said, "the ball entered Nelson's breast just above the heart, but his great strength enabled him to ascend the stairway notwithstanding the mortal character of the wound, and he did not fall till he reached the corridor on the second floor. He died about half an hour later."

Then there's the truly bizarre story of General McClernand, which unfolded just before the attack on Vicksburg:

Grant, for his part, was energized by rumors, soon confirmed, that the second-ranking officer in his command, Major General John McClernand, was back in Illinois raising volunteers for an independent assault on Vicksburg. in one of hte more bizarre episodes of the Civil war, McClernand [was] a prominent Illinois lawyer, Democratic member of Congress, and close friend of Lincoln's. . . . [F]ueled by dreams of military glory and critical of Grant's ability to command, the politically ambitious McClernand persuaded Lincoln that he could rekindle the patriotism of Democrats in the old Northwest Territory if given the opportunity to raise a new army of volunteers, descend the Mississippi, capture Vicksburg, and "open navigation to New Orleans." Without informing Grant, Lincoln approved the scheme. McClernand left Washington in late October armed with a confidential order dictated by the president authorizing him to proceed to the Middle West and raise a separate force to capture VIcksburg.

Ultimately, McClernand's gambit was foiled and he was brought back under Grant's command, though not before forcing a direct appeal to Lincoln, who, perhaps recognizing his mistake, sided with Grant. Even leaving aside the strange subterfuge at the heart of this story, I love it for the boundlessness of McClernand's confidence in his own abilities: he, with a newly raised volunteer corps, would simply go and do what Grant and the entire western half of the Army of the Republic had been planning for months.

That pair of characters only reinforces a thought I've been entertaining a lot lately: that if only Tolstoy had somehow become an American Civil War buff, oh, what a novel he could have written about it! From the limited research I've done thus far, I can't determine whether Tolstoy was even aware of the war--anyone want to lend me their time machine so that I can go correct that?

Grant in the saddle--sort of

Today I want to share a scene from the life of Ulysses S. Grant that, it seems to me, should be much more widely known. Not that it's a secret or anything--it turns up in every biography of Grant--but it's so over-the-top that if I had my way, it would come to mind every time anyone pulled out a fifty-dollar bill and saw his gloomy, bewhiskered mug staring back at them.

It's a moment from the Mexican War, a war that young Lieutenant Grant thought (appropriately, it seems at this distance) was unjust, but in which he offered valuable service nonetheless, while also learning many lessons that would help him in the Civil War. The U.S. forces under Old Rough and Ready, Zachary Taylor, had moved into the outskirts of Monterrey and were beginning to squeeze the Mexican army that was holed up in the city's central plaza. After a day of heavy fighting, ammunition began to run low--and from here, I'll let Jean Edward Smith, whose captivating bio of Grant I'm currently reading, tell the story:

The brigade urgently needed to be resupplied, but sending a messenger back to division headquarters would be hazardous. Mexican musket fire raked every intersection and the air was filled with grape shot. Colonel Garland called for a volunteer. Grant said he would go. Like a trick rider in a rodeo, he hooked one foot around the cantle of his saddle, one arm around the neck of his horse, Nelly, and with his body clinging to the sheltered side, galloped away at full speed. "It was only at street crossings that my horse came under fire, but these I crossed at such a flying rate that generally I was past and under cover of the next block of houses before the enemy fired."

Horse and rider reached headquarters safely, and Grant, according to friends, responded to praise with his typical modesty, appearing "to look upon Nelly's conduct as more courageous than his own."

What neither this account, nor Grant's own in his memoirs, is able to tell us is how the officers and soldiers around Grant reacted when they saw how he'd decided to approach his mission. Even knowing, as they surely did by then, what an uncannily great horseman Grant was, could they have reacted in any way other than by dropping their jaws and staring?

Evolutionary invective

All winter, my entertainment while I run along the lakefront has been podcasts of David Blight's introductory course on the Civil War and Reconstruction from Yale. I'd recommend them heartily to anyone interested in the subject: as someone who found it almost impossible to stay awake in lectures as an undergrad, I've found Blight's class to be a pleasant reminder that a good lecturer can add substantially to what can be learned from books (to say nothing of how well he can distract from the cold and fatigue on long-distance runs in the depths of winter!)

In one of the final lectures, he shared a great description of Ulysses Grant from Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams. As you read this, don't forget that Adams wrote his autobiography in the third person, so the "him" referred to is Adams himself:

Grant fretted and irritated him . . . as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called--and should actually and truly be--the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President! Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins.

The glorious viciousness of that description is outdone only--to this Grant apologist--by its absurdity. By most accounts, Grant was far more refined than nearly any general who came before him: while he had little patience for the trappings of civilization, dressing abominably and having no interest in ceremony, he understood that the soldiers under him were real people, and he knew just what he was asking of them and their families and their nation as he sent them, time and again, to their deaths. If, as the southerners said, he was a butcher, then he was at least a butcher who knew the details of his bill, and who was willing to take responsibility for the pain that had gone into assembling it. It would, certainly, be far more civilized to have had no war, but given the war, the idea that America would have been better served by replacing Grant's grim determination with a more superficially refined or intelligent leader is hard to countenance.

That's not meant to take away from my appreciation of Adams's invective, which borders on genius; it's hard to top an insult that is based on the idea that someone "should have been extinct for ages."

"A continuity of labour deadens the soul," or, Thoughts for a Friday night

{Photo by rocketlass.}

At the end of what has, for me at least, been a long and busy week, tonight I offer you some thoughts on the importance of leisure, from an entry titled "Amusements of the Learned" in Isaac D'Israeli's inexhaustible Curiosities of Literature (1791):

Among the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling. When Petavius was employed in his Dogmata Theologica, a work of the most profound and extensive erudition, the great recreation of the learned father was, at the end of every second hour, to twirl his chair for five minutes. After protracted studies Spinosa would mix with the family-party where he lodged, and join in the most trivial conversations, or unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other; he observed their combats with so much interest, that he was often seized with immoderate fits of laughter. A continuity of labour deadens the soul, observes Seneca, in closing his treatise on "The Tranquillity of the Soul," and the mind must unbend itself by certain amusements. Socrates did not blush to play with children. Cato, over his bottle, found an alleviation from the fatigues of government; a circumstance, Seneca says in his manner, which rather gives honour to this defect, than the defect dishonours Cato.

Seneca's take on Cato reminds me of the quip attributed to today's birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln, when people were nattering at him about Ulysses Grant's drinking:

I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

D'Israeli, as is his wont, continues in that vein for a couple of pages, laying example after entertaining example before the reader, and thereby demonstrating the very pleasures of leisure he describes. One other account that's worth pointing out, if only because it presents such a striking contrast to the stern, dangerous character established for the ages by Dumas in The Three Musketeers, is this picture of Cardinal Richelieu unbending a bit:

Cardinal de Richelieu, amongst all his great occupations, found a recreation in violent exercises; and he was once discovered jumping with his servant, to try who could reach the highest side of a wall.

And the very next sentence, too, is worth sharing, for it offers a reminder that we must ever be aware that even as we're playing, we can be sure that someone is working:

De Grammont, observing the cardinal to be jealous of his powers, offered to jump with him; and, in the true spirit of a courtier, having made some efforts which nearly reached the cardinal's, confessed the cardinal surpassed him This was jumping like a politician; and by this means he is said to have ingratiated himself with the minister.

But it is Friday night, and while we may have left the office behind for another brief spell, and leisure may thus appropriately beckon I'll let Seneca have the last word--a reminder that our jobs don't represent the only work to which we should attend, or its paycheck the only rewards on offer:

Seneca concludes admirably, "whatever be the amusements you choose, return not slowly from those of the body to the mind; exercise the latter night and day. The mind is nourished at a cheap rate; neither cold nor heat, nor age itself, can interrupt this exercise; give therefore all your cares to a possession which ameliorates even in its old age!"

And with that, I'll take Seneca's advice--halfway, that is--and twirl in my chair for a while with a book . . . and a martini.

Tolstoy's general

In his introduction to the translation of War and Peace that he made with his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear, in the course of pointing out a paradox that is obvious to readers of the novel--that

the most real and even, in Tolstoy's sense, historical figures in War and Peace turn out to be the fictional ones; and the most unreal, the most insubstantial and futile, the historical ones.

--notes that the one important exception to that rule is the supreme commander of the Russian forces, Field Marshall Kutuzov, "who for Tolstoy is 'historical' in both senses of the word and thus becomes a touchstone figure in the book."

Kutuzov--old, half-blind, tired of both the trappings and the reality of war--is a character who has stood out in each of my readings of the novel. His weariness, if not his lack of resolve, is familiar from photos and accounts of Ulysses Grant,the reluctant destroyer. Before the battle of Austerlitz, Kutuzov sleeps through a high-level council of generals, knowing its pointlessness; only at the end of the meeting,after various impossible alternative battle plans have been proposed, more for the glory of their designers than for any hope of their actual implementation, does he rouse himself:

Kutuzov woke up, cleared his throat loudly, and glanced around at the generals.

"Gentlemen, the disposition for tomorrow, for today even (because it's already past twelve), cannot be changed," he said. "You have heard it, and we will all do our duty. And there's nothing more important before a battle . . . " (he paused) "than a good night's sleep."

General Grant comes to mind again when Prince Andrei reflects on a meeting with Kutuzov in the early days of Napoleon's invasion in 1812:

How and why it happened, Prince Andrei could in no way have explained, but after this meeting with Kutuzov, he went back to his regiment relieved with regard to the general course of things and with regard to the man to whom it had been entrusted The more he saw the absence of anything personal in the old man, in whom there seemed to remain only the habit of passions, and, instead of intelligence (which groups events and draws conclusions), only the ability to calmly contemplate the course of events, the more calmed he felt over everything being as it had to be. "He won't have anything of his own," thought Prince Andrei, "but he'll listen to everything, remember everything, put everything in its place, won't hinder anything useful or allow anything harmful. He understands that there is something stronger and more significant than his will--the inevitable course of events--and he's able to see them, able to understand their significance, and, in view of their significance, is able to renounce participating in those events, renounce his personal will and direct it elsewhere."

But the moment when Kutuzov most fully comes to life as a character is in a quiet moment with Prince Andrei earlier that day. The general, "flabby and swollen with fat," tired from a day in the saddle, dismounts:

He straightened up, looked around with his narrowed gaze and, glancing at Prince Andrei, obviously without recognizing him, strode towards the porch with his dipping gait.

"Phew . . . phew . .. phew," he whistled and again glanced around at Prince Andrei. Only after several seconds did the impression of Prince Andrei's face (as often happens with old men) connect with the remembrance of his person.

"Ah, greetings, Prince, greetings, dear boy, come along . . ." he said wearily, looking around, and went heavily up the steps, which creaked under his weight. He unbuttoned his jacket and sat down on a bench that stood on the porch.

"Well, how's your father?"

"Yesterday I received news of his passing away," Prince Andrei said shortly.

Kutuzov looked at Prince Andrei with wide-open, startled eyes, then took off his cap and crossed himself: "God rest his soul! His will be done with us all!" He sighed deeply, with his whole chest, and fell silent. "I loved and respected him, and I sympathize with you wholeheartedly." He embraced Prince Andrei, pressed him to his fat chest, and did not let go of him for a long time. When he did, Prince Andrei saw that Kutuzov's swollen lips were trembling and there were tears in his eyes. He sighed and took hold of the bench with both hands in order to stand up.

The mix of sincere emotion and ritual performance, the sense one gets of Kutuzov calling up and deploying reserves of genuine sadness generated by other, more important losses--it all serves to make Kutuzov believable and memorable in a way that Tsar Alexander and Napoleon simply can't ever be.

Mark Twain and the Civil War

I'm about a third of the way through Ron Powers's Mark Twain (2005), which has given me my first real acquaintance with Samuel Clemens's early years. Previously, all I'd known of his life was his riveting account of his brief career as a river pilot in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and bits and pieces of his later years, when he was famous and palling around with people like William Dean Howells and Ulysses S. Grant. It's been fun to get to know Clemens as an ambitious young man, fired with the joy that comes from transforming the heterogeneous stuff of the world into words.

What has struck me most forcefully so far, however, has been learning that Clemens pretty much sat out the Civil War. I assume that's commonly known, but I somehow hadn't realized it before. Clemens was twenty-five when the war began, and, despite (or perhaps because of?) growing up in Missouri, an area of sharply divided loyalties and great strategic importance, he seems not just to have avoided service, but to have as much as possible avoided even taking a position on the conflict.

To the extent that his loyalties can be reconstructed, they seem to have lain with the South, which I suppose makes some sense: though Lincoln was able through a combination of deft management and brute force to keep Missouri in the Union, it was a slave state that was culturally more Southern than Northern. It's also easy to imagine the high-toned moralizing of the abolitionist movement causing someone with Clemens's temperament to get his back up a bit; add in the casual racism that shows up in his youthful writings (and which he would spend a lifetime attempting to outgrow and overcome), and Clemens as a Confederate sympathizer is fairly easy to picture.

His only military service in the war was brief and essentially comic. Here's Powers's description of the homegrown, anti-Union militia that Clemens volunteered for in 1861:

The Green Berets, they were not. No two dressed alike. Weapons ranged from hunting knives to shotguns to squirrel rifles. . . . [Clemens's friend Absalom] Grimes recalls that Sam showed up for war on a four-foot-high yellow mule, clutching a valise, a homemade quilt, a frying pan, a squirrel rifle, twenty yards of seagrass rope, and an umbrella. . . . The outfit called itself the Ralls County Rangers. Sam was elected second lieutenant, and gave a speech standing on a log. Then they all went haring around the country, cadging meals at farmhouses, sleeping in the rain, and laughing at nay passing officer who dared give them an order.

The closest the unit came to combat was a late-night scare sparked by imaginary Union pickets and another false alarm that led to one of the men accidentally shooting his own horse. Clemens quickly fled the unit, and the war entirely, decamping to the Nevada territory, where he began writing the Western sketches that would first make his name. Even out there, though he got into a few arguments over the question, his occasional pro-secession remarks appear to have been at least as much the product of a needling contrarianism as of deeply held beliefs.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what I would have had him do differently. While I'd obviously rather he had seen the evils of slavery and the rightness of the Union cause, given his background that's difficult to imagine. And after all, it's not as if even all northerners were jumping at the chance to serve; the draft riots and the practice of paying for substitutes testify otherwise. Similarly, I'm not willing to take him to task for perceived cowardice: five minutes of reading about the carnage at Cold Harbor or the Battle of the Wilderness is enough to make anyone understand why a person would hope to avoid serving. Clemens wasn't yet a public figure, so it's not as if he had even an implied responsibility to be or do something larger than himself. Would I have been on the right side of the issue had I been in his shoes? I'd sure as hell like to think so, but it's impossible to know.

I guess I'm just surprised that when it came to the defining question of his age--an age for which he himself would end up as a defining figure--it appears that Clemens didn't even give it much thought. In a time when the fate of the nation was at stake in a war that with each passing year was being more clearly defined as an essential moral struggle, Clemens blithely stayed away. Am I wrong to expect more? Does it even matter? It doesn't seem to have mattered to his public as he rocketed to fame in the postwar years. (One wonders whether, like John Wayne, who also became a symbol of his nation despite avoiding service, Clemens in later years ever found himself in fights with those who had served. Did the question occur, for example, to Grant?)

But given that Clemens the writer still matters these days largely because of his ability to perceive and convey, however fitfully, the humanity of an escaping slave named Jim, his absence on the larger question of the fate of Jim and his brethren in the years before Huckleberry Finn does seem important. It's yet another inescapable complicating factor in our attempts to understand the man, his work, and his times.

A return to Abraham Lincoln, about whom one can never read enough

From "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" (1865), by Walt Whitman:

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my soul for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds blown from the east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

My post last week on dreams featured a pair of dreams attributed to Abraham Lincoln that supposedly foretold his death, which led a friend to admit to having been obsessed with Lincoln as a girl. In particular, she was fascinated with the better-known of the dreams I wrote about, the one known as Lincoln's Dream. She says:

i came to lincoln's dream when i was about six and a half--very shortly after i could read books with chapters--my precocious childhood obsession was politics, elections, and presidents, paired with the moody irish catholic fascination with the supernatural. i used to drape a comforter over my head (and body) to leave my room at night so that lincoln wouldn't recognize me as one of the living. the neighborhood kids and i would stage plays in our garage and yell out, "who is dead in the white house?" this lent itself, of course, to a healthy adult fascination with spiritualism as the product of the hybrid forms of 'experimental' 'feminine' consciousness available in the 19th century & many attempted postmodern sonnet sequences on the life of mary todd lincoln.

Yes, I suppose that is where an obsession with Lincoln's dream is likely to lead a smart and book-loving young woman, isn't it?

Meanwhile, in searching out accounts of Lincoln's Dream, I came across a poem called "Lincoln's Dream" by Dan Chiasson that in the New Yorker this spring, 142 years to the week after Lincoln's assassination. It jumbles Lincoln and Chiasson and all of us up in a vertiginous reminder of mortality--while simultaneously replicating the air of the uncanny that the dreaming Lincoln seemingly felt as he wandered the mourning White House. It's worth a trip to the New Yorker's site.

And then there's Walt Whitman, whose pen was busy in the weeks following Lincoln's death:

This Dust Was Once the Man

This dust was once the Man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute--under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of These States.

It's easy (especially living in Illinois) to get overly wrapped up in and impressed by Lincoln, to allow oneself to be gobsmacked by his moral seriousnes, his dedication, his determination, and his preternatural deftness at reading people and situations. As Ulysses Grant, no mean leader of men himself (his presidency aside), said, "I have no doubt that Lincoln will be seen as the conspicuous figure of the war. He was indisputably the greatest man I ever knew."

Yet much as I admire him, I know of course that Lincoln was far from perfect--and I know that remembering that no person or leader can or will be perfect is essential to avoiding the short-circuiting of thought that is a first step on the road to totalitarianism. Analyses of Lincoln's shortcomings--his questionable stances on civil liberties and the prospects of America's freed slaves, for example--are worthy and important.

But for today, as we approach yet another Independence Day with that dishonest, callous, dismal wreck of a man battened down in the White House, I need a reminder that real leaders, truly good men, once walked those same halls. So for today I'll stay with the Lincoln of grade school, the Lincoln who saved the Union, the Lincoln who in his Second Inaugural had the temerity--unthinkable in our current political climate--to suggest that our view of right may be clouded.

We may not know, in his construction, that we understand the will of God, that we do the right thing or are on the right side. But that by no means lessens our responsibility to hew to what we believe to be the correct path, no matter the obstacles, at the same time as it increases our awareness of our responsibility to always recall the humanity that we share with even our fiercest opponents. Bush's blustering attempts to claim the mantle of such stalwart leaders as Lincoln and Churchill are perpetually belied by the complete absence of any of the compassion, humanity, or humility that ring through Lincoln's words:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Caesar and the Romans

Reading the excellent new Caesar: Life of a Colossus (2006), by Adrian Goldsworthy, I was reminded of Cato the Elder, who ended each speech in the Roman Senate, no matter its topic, with "Moreover I advise that Carthage must be destroyed." Some days I feel that I should end every post, no matter its topic, with "Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now."

Goldsworthy is best known as a military historian, and his accounts of Caesar's campaigns and feats of generalship are detailed, clear, and always interesting. Caesar's confidence, inventiveness, and willingness to try unusual tactics put me in the mind of Ulysses Grant (though without Grant's crucial willingness to invest trusted subordinates with great freedom and power (and yes, I realize I'm drawing the line of influence in the wrong direction)). Caesar himself remains, necessarily, something of a cipher: he is, as expected, smart, canny, and ferociously ambitious, and he inspires great loyalty in his soldiers, but he is also at various times brutal, merciful, egalitarian, authoritarian, friendly, and cold. The gaps in historical knowledge, along with the uncertain motivations of those of his near-contemporaries whose writings have reached us, force those contradictions to remain unresolved and Caesar, thus, to remain a complicated figure.

Throughout the book, Goldsworthy draws on Cicero, to whose copious writings we trace so much of our knowledge of the period, and who is one of the most perpetually interesting Romans. Brilliant and ambitious, and with a deep understanding of human nature and the uses of power, he is forever building and maintaining alliances, like a man who lives in the shadow of an enormous dike and knows the dangers of inattention. But his principles are only as strong as his backers, and in his craven willingness to blow with the prevailing winds, to change in whatever way is needed to preserve himself, his power, and his image as a statesman, he reminded me of no one so much as Joe Lieberman. Cicero at least lived in a time in which to fail to make self-preservation a priority might mean one's life; all Lieberman gets out of the deal is an occasional kiss from the Derelict in Chief and a ready chair on the Sunday morning blowhard shows.

Goldsworthy also does well with what is, for me, the most important job of the Roman historian: relating the detailed anecdotes that make the individual Roman leaders, and their ridiculously dramatic lives and deaths. For example, here's how he tells of the gruesome end of Cato the Younger, who, defeated by Caesar in the Civil War, found himself with the choice to flee, surrender, or commit suicide. Retiring to his room,

He complained when he noticed that his son and servants had removed his sword, and insisted that they return it, but then went back to his reading. His choice of work was significant, Plato's Phaedo, a discussion on the immortality of the soul, but throughout his life he had pursued the study of philosophy. Finally, without warning, he stopped reading, took up his sword and stabbed himself in the stomach. Teh wound was bad, but not immediately mortal, and once they heard the commotion his son and slaves rushed to him. A doctor was brought and Cato's wound cleansed and bound up. However, he had never lacked determination or courage, and once they had gone the forty-eight-year-old tore open the stitches and began ripping out his own entrails. he was dead before they could restrain him. When Casear heard the news he said that he bitterly begrudged the opportunity of pardoning his most determined opponent, but to a great extent Cato had acted out of a desire to avoid his enemy's mercy.

Of such detail, a remarkable amount of which has come down to us through the millennia, are the attractions of Roman history woven. Its mix of personalities and events makes it inexhaustible; the more I read about the classical world, the more easily I understand early curricula that focused on it to the exclusion of all else. At the very least, you'd never be bored.

Lincoln or TR?

On the eve of this splendid, historic Election Day, I faced a reading choice, one that seems to confront me every couple of years: Lincoln or TR? I find both endlessly fascinating, but it’s hard to imagine men of more different temperaments. So which president should accompany me through this election week? So far, I’ve dithered, reading bits of some books about each, unable to choose.

Reading about Roosevelt is, it seems, a lot like being with Roosevelt: fascinating and fun, but draining. He was exactly who he seemed to be, a big, boisterous, energetic, smart, willful, needy man who, in the words of his children, “longed to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” There are virtually no unplumbed depths there—as biographer Patricia O’Toole puts it, he “galloped away from introspection.” So the pleasures of reading about Roosevelt lie in a combination of the joys of reading about someone of such indomitable will and awe at the sheer number of his accomplishments, good and bad. O’Toole’s book, When Trumpets Call (2005), which is the one I have before me, promises to be of particular interest on both fronts, as it focuses on Roosevelt’s post-presidential years, when his will began to be thwarted and his own sense of accomplishment began to waver.

To read about Lincoln, on the other hand, is to yaw between shivering admiration (bordering, this life-long Illinoisan will admit, on reverence) and deeply felt sympathy for the obviously human, familiar man trying not to be crushed by the unimaginable pressures brought to bear on him in the last five years of his life. In his knowledge of himself, Lincoln seems to have been the opposite of Roosevelt. Doris Kearns Goodwin explains in her book about Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals (2005):

Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to alleviate sadness and stress. Indeed, when he is compared with his colleagues, it is clear that he possessed the most even-tempered disposition of them all. Time and again, he was the one who dispelled his colleagues’ anxiety and sustained their spirits with his gift for storytelling and his life-affirming sense of humor. When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s cause.

Yet he remains somewhat mysterious; as Richard Carwardine relates in Lincoln (2003),

Lincoln had dignity, considerable reserve, few real intimates, and a proper sense of the private; as John G. Nicolay and John Milton Hay, his White House secretaries [both quite young men, who would go on to write the first major biography of Lincoln], later remarked, in personal relations with him, “there was a line beyond which no one ever thought of passing.” But he was hardly aloof. He cultivated no airs and graces. In the words of a fellow lawyer, “in the ordinary walks of life [he] did not appear the ‘great man’ that he really was.”

Yet, like TR, Lincoln got people to do what he wanted and needed them to do—including his star-studded, fractious cabinet. And he was clearly a shrewd judge of character (a characteristic he definitely shared with General Grant, though, not, sadly, with President Grant). My interest in that aspect of Lincoln, of his deep understanding of personal relations and how to work with people, may tip the balance this week in his favor, and in favor of Team of Rivals.

But on the other hand, When Trumpets Call, because it treats TR’s post-presidential years, necessarily delves into the many failures of President Taft and the vexed relationship between Roosevelt and his hand-picked successor:

[Taft biographers] have wondered in exasperation how Roosevelt ever could have considered him fit for the presidency. Taft was indolent, irresolute, dependent, and undone by opposition and criticism—a dooming combination. But the Taft that Roosevelt knew had distinguished himself as governor-general of the Philippines, problem-solver in Cuba and Panama, and secretary of war. Under Roosevelt’s energetic leadership, Taft kept his lassitude in check, and his other shortcomings easily could have manifested themselves as virtues. A dependent man makes an excellent lieutenant, for he is happiest when carrying out the orders of others. And a man who shies away from conflict can be an exceptionally agreeable colleague. TR thought his friend Will had “the most loveable personality” of anyone he had ever known.

If that’s not a recipe for a fascinating book, what is?

So TR or Lincoln? Taft and TR or Lincoln and his cabinet? How to choose?

Maybe I should change the name of this blog to too many books, too little time?

"Thank God, I have done my duty."

I'm in full sail right now with Adam Nicolson's account of the battle of Trafalgar, Seize the Fire, and until I'm done with that--or have a couple of non-work hours available to write about other books I've read recently that require more complex treatment, I'll give you just this description of Admiral Nelson's approach to the battle, and his command in general.

Nelson wanted a conflict that was indescribable, not in the sense of moral revulsion, but as a plain narrative fact. The pell-mell battle, the anarchy in which the individual fighting energies of individual ships and men were released, could not submit to narrative convention. The fleets become their ships, the ships their men, the men their instinct. Decision-making, moves from admirals to captains, to gun captains, to the powder-monkeys, the surgeons and their assistants buried in the bloody dark of the cockpits. Life—and deat—in Nelsonian battle is atomized, broken into its constituent parts, made to rely not on the large-scale maneuvering of destructive force, but the will to kill and to live. . . . Every ship in all fleets considered that they fought Trafalgar almost entirely on their own.

It's a similar decentralization to what enabled Grant to win in the American Civil War: you find good subordinates, make sure they understand the overall goals, and turn them loose.

Seize the Fire is a sharp book, and it's getting better towards the end, as Nicolson reveals himself to be very good at illuminating important and interesting details of the battle. It reminds me, yet again, that everything about war is hideous and repugnant, and it leaves me, again, wondering how anyone can actually go through it sane, let alone, as some people seem to, come out wanting more.