Vidal’s canvas is large. In over 600 pages the book takes in Lincoln’s career as president beginning with his arrival in disguise on the eve of the first inaugural and concluding with an epilogue set about a year after his assassination. The ambitious scope of the novel allows for two remarkable developments, the first lets us witness his awareness of the enormous burdens of the effort he must undertake to preserve the Union, as he wears out a succession of unsatisfactory commanding generals. The second development is his learning the lessons of war-making, exhibiting an endurance that’s required to pull oneself up by the bootstraps after numerous falls.
The dimensions of this tale portray the tremendous reserves of energy, determination and dissimulated intelligence concealed beneath his ‘cracker-barrel’ speech and his appearance. We track the accumulated parliamentary ambushes, outflanking of Congress’s backstairs manoeuvring sufficient to bring shrewd men such as cabinet members like Seward, Chase, Thaddeus Stevens and Stanton in recognising Lincoln’s consummate sophistication as a politician and wielder of a party. Gore’s result by working up to the level of his subject is like food for a grown men rather than the thin scraps from which contemporary fiction and drama are whipped up and eked out….. an unknown critic of the times, pointed out.
I love Vidal’s spasms of moral vigour, in describing Lincoln’s spiritedness and his sense of purpose, such as Lincoln’s fondness for outlandish ‘down home’ anecdotes that come across as shrewd rhetorical jamming deployed to disarm his listeners. Gore takes great pains to point to the man’s humour as a necessity of Lincoln’s soul, his means of restoring himself to balance in his moments of discouragements. At a time, the present, where we find American literature afflicted with characters who scarcely represent the mixed human moral condition, Vidal can discriminate between interesting men of no character, such as Secretary of War, Cameron, men possessing character but no great self-understanding like Salmon Chase, and figures whose essential goodness combine with damaging yet understandable weaknesses, like Mary Todd Lincoln.
Vidal wants at all costs to avoid the sentimentalisation of an “honest Abe” that’s featured in a line from Whitman to Sandburg in the popular media. This way he loses no opportunity to present truth about Lincoln, the loved, as the hard, relentlessly, intriguing, party boss. Various characters make reference to Lincoln’s high-handedness as though disregard of the Constitution has become daily business for the Commander-in-Chief. There is nothing unconstitutional in refusing to stay executive action until the Supreme Court has passed on a statute, even the suspension of habeas corpus, though Vidal hints that Lincoln must have overreached the constitutional limits of executive authority. The author does not stop at making his Lincoln a Caesar cum Cromwell cum Macbeth, but he has expiated his crimes of ambition.
About half way through his 1984 novel, LINCOLN , Gore Vidal has the notoriously long-legged and honest U.S. president springing an all-timer of a trap. His victim Salmon Chase, an accomplished former governor of Ohio who for weeks had been duplicitously back-channeling with his friends in the Senate, setting in motion his own plan to unseat Lincoln and run for president as the Republican nominee in 1864. Needless to say, it didn’t work as Lincoln saw through the scheme and ended Chase’s bid by making a fool of the former governor and all his friends at a carefully orchestrated cabinet meeting. It was a political master stroke that was so well-sprung that it sunk whatever intra-party putsch the conspirators had cooking. It is but one example, among many, of him outmanoeuvring foes and entrenching his power through his instincts as a predator. Something most doubted the humble and unassuming Illinoisan capable of. There are so many different Lincolns because in him we see so much of our selves and through his words try and understand the terrible Civil War. However, Lincoln also speaks to us in some strange way when he calls us to our “better angels” inviting us to be transcendent versions of our selves and that we all have it in us to be a little larger than life.
Vidal, a keen, critical, often irreverent and absurd captures the shifting nature of wealth, power, and politics in American life. He cut the Founding Fathers down to size, casting Lincoln as a shrewd actor, unafraid to show his teeth, despite presenting Lincoln as a pragmatic white supremacist who abolished slavery as a wartime measure politically. LINCOLN’s hefty 600-plus-page testament to the artful craft of politics enmeshed in the parlours of Washington with their constant intrigue and gamesmanship, carries the story all the way to the only place, it could end—a bloodstained box-suite in the upper balcony of Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865.
Gore Vidal’s biography of Lincoln was published in 1984.
