Sherry Chandler

A “common man writ large”

I must tell you about one more sequence of narrative sonnets I’ve been reading this summer, Richard Taylor’s Rail Splitter, Sonnets on the Life of Abraham Lincoln (Larkspur, 2009). This collection of 55 sonnets was begun in response to a call from the Kentucky Arts Council that each of the Kentucky poets laureate contribute poems for an anthology celebrating Lincoln’s bicentennial in 2009.

Occasional poems are notoriously difficult, especially about a figure as iconic as Abraham Lincoln. I would hazard that more books, plays, movies, have been produced about Abraham Lincoln than about any other figure from American history. However, I can’t think of anyone better qualified to write such poems about Lincoln. Richard Taylor is a poet immersed in Kentucky’s history. In addition to his several collections of poetry, he has written Sue Mundy (Univ Press of Kentucky 2006), a historical novel about one of Kentucky’s notorious Civil War guerrillas and Girty (Wind, 2006), an experimental combination of poetry and prose about the life of the Revolution’s “white Indian.” With Neil O. Hammon, he has co-authored a historical study of the American Revolution in the west, Virginia’s Western War 1775-1796 (Stackpole Books, 2002).

I have talked here about sonnets as a vehicle for strong emotion, but Richard’s sonnets strike me as more quiet and philosophical. These are not “voice” poems. Impossible to do poems in the voice of Lincoln, whose words are so widely recorded and whose life is so often enacted. The point of view in these sonnets is strictly third person. We are outside, looking in. We are two centuries on, looking back at a time of high passions through the calm lens of the historian. We look not just at Lincoln but at a range of characters: Frederick Douglas, Cassius Clay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckly, Walt Whitman. McClellan, John Wilkes Booth.

These are larger-than-life characters who talked a lot in their own right.

Richard uses his sonnets almost in the service of anecdote, of parable, of good-humored folk tale, almost in the way Lincoln himself is thought to have done. These poems don’t try to transform our view of Lincoln but they do try to show us glimpses of the real human being. The last five sonnets in the sequence, perhaps the best poems in the book, focus on our mythmaking. Poems with titles like “Theories about Who Knew Lincoln Best,” “The Shaping of an Icon,” “Losing the Diamond in the Stew,” and

The Tyranny of Myth

Lies and fabulations cling to the great of soul
like starlings to fresh excrement of crows. We thrill
in revelation, marvel at the gods we find in things,
each splinter of his natal logs a portion of The Cross.

. . . Myths father myths, Lincoln himself might
tell us, tall tales, tales taller. Truth, in the telling,
extends beyond what can with certainty be told.
The cabin he was born in was any cabin, crude,
the rails in question any that might serve to fence.

Larkspur Press has handset this limited edition book, which was then printed on a hand-fed C & P using Mohawk Superfine paper and handbound. Design, composition, printing and binding were done by Leslie Shane, Carolyn Whitesel, and Gray Zeitz. The book is decorated by wood engravings cut by Wesley Bates and printed from the wood.

Lincoln himself might have felt at home with this book designed, not just for slow reading, not by a great corporate press, but as a work of art made by common folk. Let me end this post with the last couplet in the sequence:

Lincoln, choking on “Great Captain,” might feel
more at home with “common man writ large.”

“First Lady of Controversy”

A Springfield, Massachusetts, journal complained that Mary was a “dreadful woman” who forced “her repugnant Individuality before the world.”(Mrs. Lincoln, p. 275

I have always felt a little protective of Mary Todd Lincoln, as though by my tenderness I could somehow change the outcome of her story or at least find a reason to argue against the bad reputation she has carried down through history.

I’m not sure why this should be so. Maybe I identify with her a bit, as a woman from a border state, culturally of the South yet alienated from it.

Mary felt scapegoated by both South and North and, no doubt, she was. She received horrible press, as reference the quotation above, from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln. A Life (Harper-Collins, 2009), in reaction to the so-called Old Clothes Scandal, in which She tried to sell off some of her White House wardrobe. She always felt cash strapped, though she was not ever as poor as legend has it. Such shenanigans so embarrassed her sole surviving son that he has been accused of conspiring to have her institutionalized to save his own political career.

(Robert Todd Lincoln served as Secretary of War under James Garfield and was, rather poignantly, an eyewitness to Garfield’s assassination.)

This particular fiasco fed into accusations, á la the Clintons, that Mary Lincoln had sacked the White House. It’s true that she left D.C. with an astounding number of trunks — think of the weight of clothing Victorian women wore — but Clinton puts most of the actual damage to the Executive Mansion down to the hundreds of mourners who came through to view Lincoln’s body and left carrying a small souvenir.
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The 19th century housewife

Even that most notorious of Southern Belles, that most notoriously pampered of wives, Mary Todd Lincoln, had a heavy (literally) work load. This was especially true for Mary while she was wife of that poor rising lawyer in Springfield. Here is Catherine Clinton’s description of a 19th century middle class urban housewife’s duties, from Mrs. Lincoln. A Life (Harper-Collings, 2009, pages 70-71):

Even a woman with servants [Mary Lincoln's were Irish for the most part] had a long list of chores to perform. Someone was expected to check the mattresses for fleas and bedbugs. While servants might make beds, empty chamber pots, dust and polish, swab and sweep, most housekeepers prepared their own family meals.

Lincoln was notorious for missing his and Mary often had to send one of the children to fetch him. Wives of men of genius seldom have it all that easy. Lincoln loved to hang out and talk and politic and lose all track of time. Clinton tells a story of how he was once pulling the baby along the street in a wagon. When the baby fell out and lay crying in the street, Lincoln didn’t noticed, but walked on, deep in thought, pulling the empty wagon.

Monday was one of the most challenging of weekdays, as it was traditionally laundry day. The household laundry was an onerous task, and women were expected to not only use starch and bleach, but to hang clothes to dry and press most of the washing with hot irons, as well. Thus the “Monday blues” had an additional meaning for most housewives, alluding to the compounds used to counteract the yellowing of white fabrics.

Monday washdays like this were still a fact of life when I was a child, though my mother had a wringer washer with an electric motor that, no doubt, made her life somewhat easier than Mary Lincoln’s. Though, on the other hand, my mother had no servants of any kind to do the heavy lifting. Anyway, I remember the washer and two rinse tubs on a raised frame. The wringer would swing on its axis so you could wring clothes from washer to first rinse and then from first rinse to second, and finally into the basket for hanging. The second rinse always had blueing in it to whiten the sheets.

I’m not sure my mother starched sheets.

Food preparation was a constant daily and seasonal burden. Yes, the woman in town, unlike her rural sister, did not have to slaughter or pluck, plunge her arms up to the elbow in brine, or grind her own flour. But many kept chickens to collect the eggs, and cows to ensure unadulterated milk. The Lincolns kept both a cow and a horse (for Lincoln’s travel) housed in one of the outbuildings on the property.

My mother did a fair amount of slaughtering and plucking. See my poem “How to Dress a Chicken.”

There’s a lot more, some of which sounds very similar to the way life was lived in mid-twentieth century rural Kentucky. Some interesting facts from the Clinton book: the Mason jar was introduced in 1850; the metal eggbeater was also a 19th century innovation. And the Lincoln children were given a Saturday night bath.

A perversely cruel press

Over at Salon, Joan Walsh has this to say about press coverage of Bill Clinton:

“The Clinton Tapes” makes clear that from start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media — from the New York Times’ lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free “opinion” journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn’t shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever. . .

Lately I’ve been reading in Catherine Clinton’s biography Mrs. Lincoln, A Life (HarperCollins, 2009), and I am struck by the similarities in the way the Lincolns and the Clintons were treated. Certainly, one can’t carry such a comparison too far, but I see it especially in the treatment of the two wives, Mary and Hillary.

Washington, D.D. was just as much an insider society in 1861 as in 1991. It was referred to as The Cave and The Cave found the Lincolns a bit uncouth, just as D.C. found the Clintons:

Harriet Lane [James Buchanan's niece and White House hostess] met with Mrs. Lincoln in advance and arranged a meal for the Lincolns following the inauguration. But she was not impressed and wrote cattily tht Lincoln resembled the Iris doorkeeper, Thomas Burns, and reported, “Mrs. Lincoln is awfully western, loud & unrefined.” [p. 124]

I don’t know whether Abraham Lincoln ate lunch at his desk, as did the Clinton White House staff, but Lincoln himself was prone to work through meals if his wife didn’t insist that he eat.

D.C. was also a southern city. Mary Todd Lincoln was also southern, of course, but the fact was no advantage to her. She was viewed as a traitor by the D.C. social elite with southern sympathies and accused of being a southern spy by those whose sympathies lay with the north.

The press was particularly vicious with Mary Lincoln. They accused her of extravagance, of buying expensive china to match the livery of the White House servants (the White House had no liveried servants but that was a mere detail), of having affairs with members of the White House staff, and, as I have said, of spying. When Mary insisted on a daily drive or entertaining friends, she was painted as demanding and self-centered. But it is also possible that she was trying to protect her husband from his own habit of overwork to the point of collapse. She was the one who could draw him out of his depressions.

She was unfortunate in her rivals for Lincoln’s ear and his time. She made enemies somehow of his secretaries (male) whom Clinton calls “the couriers nattering on the second floor of the Executive Mansion.” These courtiers referred to Mrs. Lincoln as the Hellcat. During the period when she was prostrated with grief over the death of her son Willie, John Hay wrote of her:

Madame has mounted me to pay her the Steward’s salary. I told her to kiss mine.

and

The Hellcat is getting more Hellcatical day by day.

Granted, Mrs. Lincoln was not stoical in her grief. Lincoln himself warned her that she might wind up institutionalized if she didn’t pull herself together.

Another unfortunate enemy was Kate Chase, daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. Consider this anecdote:

One day, when an African-American teacher came to call on Mrs. Lincoln at the White House, having been invited to tea, she was escorted around to the kitchen entrance by the doorman [who may have been a lighter skinned African-American]. Mary was infuriated by this sight. The First Lady became especially solicitous during tea with her guest in the Red Room. Afterward, her black guest enjoyed the First Lady’s promise to bring the cause of African-American education to her husband’s attention. Then she was cordially escorted to the formal entrance, where Mary pointedly shok hands with her while bidding the woman good-bye. This gesture was observed by both the Chases, who just happened to be driving by the Executive Mansion at that very moment. Naturally, Chase’s daughter spread the story—willing to use it to her father’s political advantage by portraying Mrs. Lincoln as someone who was “making too much of the Negro.”

This jab at Mary Lincoln was particularly hypocritical coming from Kate Chase, whose father was a staunch abolitionist. Chase had long promoted emancipation as part of his political agenda, and criticized Lincoln for being weak on abolition. But when his wife made a gesture toward racial equality, the Chases made political hay by broadcasting Mary’s liberality among unsympathetic listeners.[p. 171]

The press seemed willing to believe anything of Mary Lincoln without bothering to think that some of the rumors contradicted others.

To this day, Lincoln biographers seem eager to heap calumny on Mary Todd. And unlike Hillary Clinton, Mary Lincoln was not in a position to hold high office herself, to make for herself a reputation o counter the slanders.

Abraham Lincoln

Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society

Every blade of grass is a study;
And to produce two,
Where there was but one,
Is both a profit and a pleasure.
And not grass alone;
But soils, seeds, and seasons –
Hedges, ditches, and fences,
Draining, droughts, and irrigation —
Plowing, hoeing, and harrowing –
Reaping, mowing, and threshing –
Saving crops, pests of crops, diseases of crops,
And what will prevent or cure them –
Implements, utensils, and machines,
Their relative merits, and [how] to improve them –
Hogs, horses, and cattle –
Sheep, goats, and poultry –
Trees, shrubs, fruits, plants, and flowers –
The thousand things of which these are specimens –
Each a world of study within itself.

— Abraham Lincoln

I stole this “found poem” from Lance Mannion who in turn got it from Fred Kaplan’s book Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (Harper Collins 2008) I figured this being Lincoln’s bicentenniel and Kentucky’s celebration being in full swing, well, it would be appropriate to approprate Lincoln as a Kentucky poet this National Poetry Month.

Shakespeare — Portraits

The Shakespeare portrait newly unveiled by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust shows us a man with a twinkle in his eye and a Mona Lisa smile just beginning to curve on his lips.

Methinks he would have been a jolly man with whom to quaff a glass of ale.

Certainly he looks lively and intelligent enough to have written his own works and he is handsome enough to have charmed a virgin queen.

Shakespeare has been showing up in my reading lately. Adam Gopnik — yes, I’ve been back at my stack of old New Yorkers — says

There�s another rhetorical style that runs like the Mississippi right down the middle of the mid-nineteenth-century American mind, shaping phrases and supervising thoughts, flowing as strong as the classical, the Biblical, and the lawyerly, and that is the Shakespearean. Lincoln�s love of Shakespeare is familiar, but is usually treated as a delightful character trait, like his fondness for ice cream or the comedy of Artemus Ward. But Lincoln�s taste in Shakespeare was narrow, significant, and almost obsessive. He didn�t love �A Midsummer Night�s Dream� and �As You Like It�; it was the histories and three of the tragedies that held him. In 1863, he repeatedly went to see �Henry IV� when James H. Hackett was playing Falstaff, with all the Falstaffian black comedy against conscription and the cult of honor. He took volumes of Shakespeare out of the Library of Congress; went to a Washington theatre to see the famous E. L. Davenport in �Hamlet�; attended private recitations of Shakespeare; sought out a production of �Othello�; watched Edwin Booth, John Wilkes�s brother, in �Richard III,� and the greatest American Shakespearean, Edwin Forrest, in �King Lear,� at Ford�s. Just five days before the assassination, on April 9, 1865, steaming up the Potomac in the Presidential yacht, he spent �several hours� reading aloud from Shakespeare to those on board. Reciting from his favorite plays was a weakness of his; on August 22, 1863, [his secretary] Hay records in his diary that he fell asleep at the Soldiers� Home while listening to Lincoln recite Shakespeare.

The idea of Abraham Lincoln boring the help with recitations of Shakespeare pleases me. But it was not Shakespeare of the Giaconda smile that Lincoln loved. Gopnik continues:

But even stranger and more striking is Lincoln�s identification or, at the very least, fascination with the figure of Claudius. In that same letter to Hackett, Lincoln insisted that Claudius�s soliloquy beginning �O, my offense is rank� was superior to any of Hamlet�s, and we know that he committed it to memory, and would recite it at length even to acquaintances�an artist who had come to paint his portrait, for instance. Lincoln�s evaluation was as unorthodox then as it is now. And what is the burden of Claudius�s speech? It is about guilt and ambition, and about the fraternal blood-dealing that that produces. As Kenneth Tynan has pointed out, Claudius�s tragedy is that he is clearly the most able man in Denmark, but he has got his throne through blood and cannot be free of the taint.

As it happens, we have just been watching the 1980 BBC production of Hamlet, in which Derek Jacobi plays the antic cherub and rolls his barrel basso provocatively over some of Shakespeare’s most delightful lines. Jacobi’s Hamlet is truly mad, and his scene-chewing rather overpowers Patrick Stewart’s quieter Claudius. A member of my household was also moved to giggles by the wig Stewart is wearing for the production. It does tend to reduce that great dome of skull to silliness.

Still, Claudius cannot be completely denied his moments. And Stewart is a masterful actor.

Just as an aside, before I go on to more serious matter, Lalla Ward, onetime Romana (the only woman Time Lord) to Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, made an aggressive and affecting performance as Ophelia.

But here’s the speech in question, from Hamlet Act 3, Scene 3:

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain th’ offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but ’tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.

Mr. Darwin also has a 200th birthday

�There is grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.� — Charles Darwin

And it is being celebrated big in the UK. I even heard that the Church of England issued an apology to the man. You can check out The Guardian for a nice video overview of Darwin’s life. The Guardian reminds us that Darwin enjoyed reading Lord Byron and William Shakespeare.

I will remind you that you can read Darwin’s Beagle Diariy online here. February 12, 1834 found Darwin in the Straits of Magellan:

With very baffling winds we anchored late in the evening in Gregory Bay, where our friends the Indians anxiously seemed to desire our presence. During the day we passed close to Elizabeth Island, on North end of which there was a party of Fuegians with their canoe &c. They were tall men & clothed in mantles; & belong probably to the East Coast; the same set of men we saw in Good Success Bay; they clearly are different from the Fuegians, & ought to be called foot Patagonians. Jemmy Button had a great horror of these men, under the name of “Ohens men”. “When the leaf is red, he used to say, Ohens men come over the hill & fight very much.”

And you can find the complete works of Darwin online here, including audio of the Beagle Diary.

And it might be a good time to re-post Langdon Smith’s poem:

Evolution

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into life again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man�s hand;
We coiled at ease �neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was passed.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing sod
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o�er the plain
And the moon hung red o�er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Than I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west to east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O�er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o�er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Til our brutal tusks were gone.

And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico�s.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet �

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnish�d them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world�s dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men made war
And the ox-wain creaks o�er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O�er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.

__________
Update: By way of Lance Mannion, see also this film from the Vancouver Film School.

Update 2: Michael Lind, writing in Salon, says that Abraham Lincoln “believed” in biological evolution but did not particularly believe in Jesus Christ:

While Lincoln did not believe that Jesus was the son of God, he did believe in biological evolution. His law partner Herndon recalled that Lincoln took great interest in “Vestiges of Creation” (1844) by Robert Chambers, a book that popularized the idea of evolution even before Darwin published his theory of natural selection as its mechanism: “The treatise interested him greatly, and he was deeply impressed with the notion of the so-called ‘universal law’ — evolution; he did not extend greatly his researches, but by continued thinking in a single channel seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine.”