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A Postmodern Portrait of President Lincoln
In the 1980’s and 1990’s the relatively stable edifice
of History was shaken by the seismic shock waves of such new methodologies
as New History, Psychohistory, and Postmodernism. Generally, these
philosophies tended to stress cultural diversity and class-consciousness,
upsetting many comfortable assumptions about the basic stories
of Western Civilization. Columbus, for example, was no longer
revered as the discoverer of the New World but was recast as the
villain who introduced venereal disease to Hispaniola. Many of
the towering giants, like Shakespeare, Washington, Jefferson,
and F. D. R., were showcased with all their warts and sometimes
dismissed as “dead white men.” These iconoclastic readings—or
misreadings—even blurred the distinction between academic
history and creative writing, as shown by Gore Vidal’s Lincoln
and Richard Slotkin’s Abe. As the new millennium approached,
fresh voices were being heard, and interesting approaches were
being tried, sometimes with brilliant results, as in the Lincoln
scholarship of Doug Wilson and Michael Burlingame.
The work of contemporary short-story writer Adam Braver fits
nicely into this overview of recent historical approaches because
he writes (for the most part) with a careful eye to Lincoln scholarship,
beginning each story with a Lincoln quotation, while simultaneously
breaking many of the rules of traditional story-telling. For starters,
it is hard to pin down the precise genre of his daring and fascinating
first book, Mr. Lincoln’s Wars: A Novel in Thirteen Stories
(William Morrow, 2003). The thirteen chapters are radically uneven
in length, ranging from a few pages devoted to the poignant final
story “A Rainy Night in Springfield, Illinois—1849”
to nearly a hundred pages for the novella-like tale, “The
Necropsy,” in which Braver shifts back and forth like a film
director between the story of John Wilkes Booth, the autopsy of
Lincoln, including the painfully dramatic scene when surgeons
chisel and saw into the slain president’s skull, and the
cameo appearances of Orville Browning, before and after the assassination.
Mr. Lincoln’s Wars, thus, is neither traditional history
nor traditional narrative. It is a kind of tragic Civil War opera,
with a few famous characters singing their arias (Stanton, Browning,
Booth, Abe, and Mary), all somehow addressing the crushing sadness
of Willie Lincoln’s death, which runs like a leitmotif through
all the scenes.
Braver opens the book with “No More Time for Tears,”
a scene occurring in the spring of 1865, three years after the
death of beloved Willie, a length of time which underscores the
lingering aftermath of his death. Mary still refuses to eat, bitterly
curses the president, and resorts to racist invective: “You
gonna go kiss some nigger babies now?” The grief and pain
behind her outbursts are shared by Lincoln, who can’t sleep
and is given to long, rambling discussions with the various low-life
and ordinary characters who populate the book. There is a great
deal of talking in this book as Lincoln interacts with soldiers,
mental patients, undertakers, politicians, and the Washington
citizenry. One of those everyday people is Seth Jackson, narrator
of “The Undertaker’s Assistant,” who recounts a
strange conversation he once had with Abe about Willie’s
death. Seth Jackson prepared both bodies for their final rest.
Using a razor, he slit the pants legs down the back and draped
them over the front of the legs to show his respect and maintain
some sense of decorum. He was in awe of the sacred bodies, touching
them as little as possible.
In “The Ward,” Lincoln has another long conversation
on the subject of Willie’s death. This time the exchange
occurs in Central Park in New York City with a mental patient
named Albert, who has received a letter from Lincoln informing
him of his son’s death in action. Lincoln decides to accept
responsibility for all the deaths in the war, and he understands
Willie’s death is part of his atonement. One of the strangest
exchanges takes the form of a letter written by the abused wife
of a dead soldier. As an act of spiteful revenge, she seduces
the young soldier who arrives on her doorstep to relay the news
of her husband’s death. Her letter is atypically graphic
for the period, but she seeks Lincoln’s approval and understanding
anyhow (“A Letter to President Lincoln from a Good Girl”).
Pushing the envelope of acceptability is one of Braver’s
stylistic traits, part of his postmodern legacy. In like manner,
the story “On to the Next Field,” briefly but powerfully
dramatizes Lincoln holding the hand of an unfortunate boy whose
leg was being sawed off by an overworked surgeon. “The Willie
Grief,” one of the best tales, allows Braver to continue
his focus on medical matters as Mary Todd Lincoln pays a nocturnal
visit to Campbell Hospital in Washington, D.C., comforting a young
soldier while trying to ignore the wheezing and moaning of scores
of other patients on a cold night in Washington. Braver is extremely
talented at evoking the ambiance of the hospital and the filthy,
overcrowded Capital as a whole—the dirty streets filled with
horse droppings and the dank interiors of cheap boarding houses.
Even the most casual reader will be jarred by Braver’s postmodern
ear for the language of the streets. The author transcribes a
great deal of profanity in the book, none of it inappropriate,
and all of it contributing to the gritty and sad spectacle that
the last weeks of the war presented to everyone. “Sonabitch”
seemed to be the all-purpose expletive, frequently on the lips
of soldiers and statesmen alike. Perhaps the most colorful narrator
in the book, Crybaby Jack in “Crybaby Jack’s
Theory,” is a fifteen-year-old groom who helps to clean and
curry the presidential stable of horses. The job has a certain
status, after all, because it brings him closer to presidential
power. Jack observes sardonically that “picking three-month-old
shit out of the ass of a horse was considered patriotism.”
But it is Crybaby Jack who correctly predicts the plot to assassinate
the president.
Some readers of this important book will note Braver’s occasional
historical lapses—his depiction of Lincoln as a consumer
of alcohol and morphine, for example. Everyone, however, who enters
this grim and rainy Washington of 1865 will believe and empathize
with Lincoln when he remarks to Browning, “This is me on
my way to dying.”
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