Vidal, Gore. Lincoln. Random House, 1984.
Reason read: Gore Vidal’s birth month is in October. Read in his honor.
Read Lincoln carefully and you will discover that Gore did not care all that much for the sixteenth president of the United States. His remarks about Abraham Lincoln are backhanded and contemptuous; rarely complimentary. People like David Herold knew of earlier assassination plots (poisoning, a loose carriage seat, and shot at twice) and said nothing; Lincoln participated in illegal activities such as removing two million dollars from the Treasury, refusing to take responsibility for his state’s debt and suspending habeas corpus; he arrested men and held them without offense. Lincoln’s detractors thought the man was “dangerously weak” (p 37). Even his wife’s family thought of him as a scrub. Most obvious was Gore’s attack on Lincoln’s character; how his insincerity was an art form; how he was not a proper Christian; Lincoln was a strategic manipulator and not the “honest Abe” of history books. He was racist, corrupt and strange. Lincoln was uninformed and naive; a dictator and a prejudiced racist. There were rumors of mental illness. He suffered from anxiety, constipation, and indecision. Lincoln was unpopular and friendless; he was begged not to run for a second term.
Gore was also fascinated with Lincoln’s physical appearance, often describing the president’s long fingers, long legs, a beard like an old bird’s nest, touches of gray hair like straw, a haggard face with one eye lid higher than the other. Lincoln was disheveled; made of glass, fragile, frail, a stick figure, a scarecrow, wooden, and sickly.
Gore literally dissects the origins of Lincoln’s political ambition to subtly suggest he was not worthy of the role. For all if Lincoln’s greatness, he was also a hated man. What makes Lincoln worth the 600+ pages is the supporting characters like John Hay, Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Mary Todd Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth. The conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln in trade for Confederate soldiers was brilliant. The mega detail Vidal applies to their narrative is impressive (right down to the types of oysters Kate enjoys with her companion, David Harold).
Lines I liked, “When two hunters stare at each other, it is the women who will weep at the end” (p 166) and “The overreacher soon to be felled by his own hubris – if not by the gods vox populi” (p 556).
Author fact: Gore Vidal passed away in 2012.
Book trivia: there is no doubt Lincoln was controversial when it was first published.
Music: “Dixie,” “Listen to the Mockingbird,” “Rock of Ages,” “Hail to the Chief,” “Columbia, “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Gem of the Ocean.”
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the interesting chapter called “Gore Vidal’s Historical Novels: too good To Miss” (p 237).
