1876

by Gore Vidal

  It is late. I am tired. I am—but it is not possible!—sixty-three.

  Seven

  1

  NORDHOFF CAME to the suite this morning with a long telegram from Jamie, requesting more “snap” in my pieces “because you are much too cool, just like the recording angel.”

  “Well,” I turned to Nordhoff, “that is what I try to be while you are the snappy one.”

  “Ignore him,” was Nordhoff’s good advice. I had not seen Nordhoff since my White House evening over a week ago. He had been amused by my confrontation with the President.

  “I suspect that’s the first political statement any guest has ever got out of him. Usually, he goes on and on about the war and who was where and when and why, or about his horses. You know, some years ago, Grant is supposed to have told General Sherman that he had decided, deliberately, to interest himself in horses because, he said, ‘If you don’t pick your own hobby, the press will pick one for you, and then you’re really in for it.’ ”

  “Like drink?”

  “Or like the ladies.” Nordhoff is disapproving of loose morals, as are so many ex-sailors.

  “There are those who deny Grant was ever drunk.”

  Nordhoff shook his head. “I know for a fact that there were times in the war when he was never sober. But now he seems all right, though a few years ago at a dinner in New York with Jim Fiske and some low-life cronies, Grant got so drunk that he put his cigar wrong way round in his mouth, and singed his beard.”

  Nordhoff gave me the day’s scandal as I waited for Emma to return from a visit to Mrs. Fish (the ladies have now met but I have yet to set eyes on the Secretary of State and his wife). “The President’s younger brother Orvil is mixed up in the Babcock affair. He’s scheduled to go before Clymer’s committee…”

  “And lie?”

  “What else?” Nordhoff’s glee at the wickedness each day revealed alternates with gloom as he then contemplates the meaning of the wickedness revealed. That is why his style is so much more vivid, more journalistic than mine. I try for balance, to consider the true nature of this Africa, while he plunges wildly through the jungle, amazed, horrified, outraged by exotic flora, dangerous fauna.

  The Garfields had proposed a picnic if this day, Sunday, proved to be pleasant. The day was lovely and so apicknicking we went beside the Rock Creek, a charming small river that winds between laurel-covered hills in a forest at the edge of the city.

  The Garfields had also invited Baron Jacobi and Madame José García. This extraordinary lady is the wife of a Peruvian diplomat, the daughter or niece of some South American autocrat, and the authoress of a number of novels, including Love in the Pampas, a gorgeous trashy work that Emma dearly loved when it was published some years ago. Madame García is very rich, very lavish in her entertainments and very, very fat even by the lenient standards of this plump society.

  We were deposited by our carriages on a mossy bank just above the creek where, beneath slender trees in newest leaf, Lucretia Garfield and Emma unpacked the picnic hamper. Seated on a fallen log, Madame García allowed her many diamonds (small picnic ones) to take the air, to sparkle in April light, while their large owner praised nature: “The air! So fresh. And the amusing flowers! Look, Baron Jacobi, a primrose, no?”

  “No, my dear. A poppy.”

  “And, hark, the sound of water purling over rocks.”

  “Purling, yes.” Baron Jacobi gave me his quick amused lizard’s glance. “I have never before heard anyone actually say that word.”

  “In that case, we must celebrate.” Garfield was most charming. He opened a bottle of wine and we all drank to “purling.”

  “A common English word surely.” Madame García flashed her black eyes at the company. “I encounter it every day—in poetry, of course. I read nothing else. I find that poetry makes me more alive, more quick to seize the passing moment! To extract from it true pleasure, made by art divine.”

  Between the sly wit of Baron Jacobi and the sheer splendour of Madame García’s person and pronouncements, Emma and I were much amused, as the Garfields had intended. Later, Baron Jacobi napped in the warm sun while Madame García nodded over a volume of verse (not slim but every bit as fat as she). Emma and Mrs. Garfield spoke in low voices of important matters. I looked at General Garfield expectantly. Nothing here is ever done at random, even a picnic.

  “Shall we take a stroll?” Garfield is a restless, active man. I am neither. I said that nothing would please me more. Heart sinking (and pounding), I accompanied my host through the woods. I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.

  But I do feel better for that stroll; when I shut my eyes, I can still see the shimmering vivid green effect of sunlight filtered through new leaves, emphasizing the darker green of low-growing laurel. I am beginning to write the way Madame García speaks. “I revel in all of glorious nature!” she had confided to me, methodically killing ants with a small rock.

  At the top of a low hill, we paused. There was not much view, just more hills similarly wooded. Behind a hedge of lilac bushes I could make out a small dilapidated cabin. “An ex-slave lives there. A nice old man who is supposed to make a most superior whisky.”

  “What an incredible institution, slavery.” I don’t know why but the sight of the slave cabin made me actually think of the fact of slavery, something difficult to do, since the word itself (like the institution) has for so long been made meaningless by too much furious prose, both for and against, not to mention by all the killing done in its name. When one hears too much of a subject, one ceases to comprehend it at all.

  “We are well rid of it. Now we must worry about the Chinese who are being imported by the thousands, and taking jobs away from our own people.”

  A few more remarks on the Chinese; then we sat on two tree stumps, only a few feet apart. As we smoked cigars my host gradually came to the point. “I read your last piece…”

  “Filled with errors, I know.”

  “I saw only one which might not be an error, after all, if…” There was a pause. A new beginning. “You seemed fairly certain that our party will nominate Mr. Blaine for president.”

  “I thought that was your opinion too.”

  “It’s my wish, certainly. But…well, I must tell you in all confidence, there is about to be yet another scandal.”

  “Involving Blaine?”

  Garfield nodded. “We have not had much luck these last few months, have we?”

  “Perhaps your party has been too long in power.”

  “Perhaps. Though I don’t think your friend Tilden will order things any better.”

  “But between a Babcock, say, and a Bigelow you must admit there is a world of difference.”

  But Garfield is not much interested in what the reform element calls “good government.” He is a conventional party man whose only singularity is his reputation for honesty. Except for that one small slip with Crédit Mobilier, no scandal has ever been attached to him (for the record, I must add that all-important word “yet”).

  Garfield came to the point. “About seven years ago when Blaine was Speaker of the House, he became involved with a Mr. Warren Fisher, a Boston contractor who was to build a railroad called the Little Rock and Fort Smith.” Garfield’s mind is such an orderly one that he was able to make what must be a very complicated business so plain that even I am now able to understand it…up to a point (up to the point intended?). “Mr. Blaine thought very highly of Mr. Fisher and of his railroad. So he sold a number of the railroad’s first mortgage bonds to some friends.”

  “Was Mr. Blaine a bond salesman before he went to Congress or only after?” This small pleasantry did not charm my companion, who puffed very hard at his cigar and looked above my head, as though expecting to see a storm cloud in the bright sky.

&n
bsp; “Mr. Blaine is much too good-natured a man.” Garfield’s answer was not to the point. “Also, he is casual in his business affairs. Certainly, he ought never to have involved himself with Mr. Fisher. In any case, shortly after the bonds were sold, the railroad nearly failed.”

  “And the bonds he had sold his friends were worthless.”

  “Until the Little Rock and Fort Smith was bought by three other railroads, of which one was the Union Pacific.” It was with real distaste that Garfield said the name of his only known corrupter. “As a result, the bonds of Mr. Fisher’s railroad regained their value. But there were—there are—those who think it was Mr. Blaine who persuaded the three railroads to help out Mr. Fisher in order to save his friends.”

  “I see no harm in that,” I said, beginning to make out the vague shape of a familiar crime.

  “Nor do I. The reverse, in fact. Mr. Blaine was embarrassed. He felt he had let down his friends. So he set out to save Mr. Fisher’s railroad and succeeded.”

  “On the other hand,” I was now able to make out certain features of that no longer so vague shape, “there will be those who think that Mr. Blaine may have done some favour for the three rescuing companies. Otherwise they would not have wanted to buy a worthless railroad.”

  “Far from worthless, Mr. Schuyler. I am told the Little Rock is as sound as any road in the country.” Garfield exhaled blue smoke slowly, and through the haze I saw resting on the branch of a tree a red bird, known in these parts as a cardinal. I decided to regard this bird as a good omen.

  “So you believe that this transaction is going to be used to damage Mr. Blaine.”

  Garfield let his cigar fall to the ground; then with the heel of his boot, he buried the stub deep in soft moist earth. “Yes. And it’s going to be used against him in a most diabolical way. Just before the Republican Convention, in June, the…the enemy will make those charges, figuring that by the time Blaine has been able to prove himself innocent, the convention will have chosen someone else.”

  “Senator Conkling?”

  “Probably. Certainly, we will never nominate Mr. Bristow.” The usually mellifluous warm voice was suddenly flat, nasal, hard.

  “And you think that Mr. Bristow is behind these charges?”

  “Who else? He wants desperately to be president. And in his mad way, he thinks that by destroying, one by one, the leaders of our party, he will be nominated on a wave of reform. Well, he will be greatly surprised. Meanwhile…” Garfield stopped.

  It was now my turn. I took it. Did what was expected of me.

  “You think that if I were to write this story for the Herald and publish it next week, say, that Mr. Blaine would then have nearly three months in which to defuse, if I may use a military metaphor, the scandal.”

  “I see no reason why you should be helpful, Mr. Schuyler.” The bright April blue eyes were moist, sincere, quite irresistible. I felt, for a moment, as if I were in the presence of the handsome son that I never had (or, for that matter, wanted). “I know that you are a Democrat and a friend of Governor Tilden. I also believe that you are a fair historian and that you would not like to see a…well, a great man, as I think Blaine is, not only falsely accused but unable to defend himself until it is too late for him, and for the country.” Garfield was absolutely winning, and so I was won, though not absolutely.

  We made our way back to Rock Creek. Madame García was reading from her book of verse; the powerful voice echoed against the rocks, the hills. In the trees frightened birds chattered warnings to one another. Then suddenly the sun went behind a hill and the blue shadows turned cold.

  “Time to go!” Lucretia Garfield was on her feet at the sight of us. “I think I’m getting a chill.”

  Baron Jacobi helped Emma to her feet while Garfield and I used our combined strength to set Madame García upright.

  “What a successful picnic!” exclaimed Baron Jacobi. He looked closely at Garfield and me. “I suspect a plot, gentlemen.”

  “Tonight,” said Garfield to me, “the Atlantic cable will bear a message to the Bulgarian government of the most sinister portent, in cipher.”

  “Except that my secretary mislaid the cipher and I’ve sent no messages for a month. Your plots are safe with me, gentlemen. Besides, what the Balkans do not know will not harm them.”

  We then divided ourselves so that Baron Jacobi and I were with Garfield while the three ladies travelled in the second carriage. Had Madame García been less large we could all have travelled in a single victoria. Lucretia insisted that the men travel together because, “They will want to smoke like chimneys.”

  But we did not smoke. We spoke instead of history. Garfield is a devoted reader of the classics. Baron Jacobi has read the classics but is not devoted to them as history—“only as literature. Who, after all, believes a word that Julius Caesar wrote? His little ‘history’ was simply a sort of leg up for his political career.”

  “But if we can’t believe those classical writers whose works have come down to us, then how can we ever know any history?” Garfield is passionate on the subject.

  “I think, General, the answer to that is very simple. We cannot know any history, truly. I suppose somewhere, in Heaven perhaps, there is a Platonic history of the world, a precise true record. But what we think to be history is nothing but fiction. Isn’t that so, Mr. Schuyler? I appeal to you, perversely, since you are a historian.”

  “And therefore a novelist?”

  “Malgré vous.”

  “I agree, Baron. There is no absolute record. When I was trying to write about the Communards in Paris—and I was there at the time—I could seldom find out just who was killed by whom.”

  “But surely, gentlemen, there is a winnowing process. History is distilled from many conflicting witnesses. We do know that President Lincoln was murdered, that General Grant commanded the Union army.”

  “But no one knows the name Achilles took when he hid himself among the ladies or the lyrics of those songs the sirens sang. If Mr. Schuyler will forgive me, I prefer fiction to history, particularly if the narrative involves people that once lived, like Alexander the Great.”

  “I must disagree,” I said, thinking of those dreadful novels by Dumas. “I always want to know what is true, if anyone knows it.”

  “But no one does except the subject, and he—like Caesar—is more apt than not to lie.”

  “But,” said Garfield, “we now have letters, diaries, newspaper cuttings—”

  “Dear General, is there a newspaper in the United States—other than The New York Times—whose reports you believe?”

  Garfield saw the humour. He laughed. “Well, if future historians will read only the Times—”

  “They will think that the Grant Administration was absolutely superb—as does the minister from Bulgaria,” added the Baron quickly, “and entirely free of corruption. As for letters, journals, who ever writes the truth about himself?”

  “You are too cynical for me, Baron,” said Garfield, himself every bit as cynical but in the agreeably open American way.

  “I would make a bonfire of all historians, except Mr. Schuyler, and the early fabulists like Livy…”

  “But how then would you learn about the past?”

  “From Dante, Shakespeare, Scott—all fiction writers.”

  “But Shakespeare’s history is always wrong.”

  “But his characters are always right. Anyway if you want to know what Julius Caesar or James G. Blaine or our own delicious James Garfield is really like, then look into a mirror and study with perfect attention what is reflected there.”

  After supper, I sat with Nordhoff in the rotunda at Willard’s and repeated to him what Garfield had told me about Blaine.

  “Very clever,” was Nordhoff’s verdict, delivered through a half-dozen amused barks.

  “Then Blaine did do—favours for the t
hree railroads?”

  “Favours! He is in their pocket. He is also in Fisher’s pocket. When Blaine sold his friends all those Little Rock and Fort Smith bonds, Fisher made him a present of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of land-grant bonds and thirty-two thousand five hundred dollars of first mortgage bonds.”

  Also, I learned that Blaine had used his influence as Speaker of the House to see that Fisher’s railroad was awarded a crucial land grant by the Congress. “Then he’s in very deep,” was the most I could think to say.

  “Over his head, I’d say. But you can never tell in Washington.”

  “Garfield seems to think Bristow is behind this.”

  “The Stalwarts think Bristow is behind everything. But if Blaine is destroyed, it won’t be the work of Bristow. It will be because for the first time in years there is a Democratic majority in the House and they are out for blood.”

  Blood Red. I thought of the red bird on the green bough, my good omen. “Garfield is clever, then, to want me to tell the story now, in his version.”

  “Yes. Because then the scandal will have come and—he hopes—have gone before the convention in June.”

  “I think I must write it, don’t you?”

  Nordhoff was thoughtful. “Certainly it is very useful for us—for you—to have General Garfield as a friend.”

  “Then I should write the story in such a way as to please both him and Blaine.”

  “Yes. Then I shall follow up, day after day, with all the terrible details.”

  “And that will be the end of Blaine?”

  “That ought to be the end, but he is very shrewd, as well as the most intelligent, most likable man down here.”