by Martin Amis
Elle October 1989
Lincoln by David Herbert Donald
He is more to our taste than he ever was to theirs. Lincoln now commands a consensus of sober admiration and gratitude that was quite unavailable to him or to anybody else during America’s bloody adolescence. Changes in aesthetic fashion have even rehabilitated his physiognomy, and drastically. Old Abe was not a plug-ugly (a thug, a ruffian), but that’s how everyone thought he looked: plug ugly. ‘The ugliest man I ever put my eyes on,’ said one well-disposed observer, who could discern only a ‘plebeian vulgarity’ in his gaunt and haunted face. To us, nowadays, that face is a vision of forbidding authenticity.
Bark-hard, slanting and angular, Lincoln stands like Geronimo among his slackly epicene contemporaries; in comparison, supposed heart-throbs such as General McClellan and, indeed, John Wilkes Booth are no more than mustachioed doughboys. In 1854, Lincoln resembles a man of the frontier, but one sent there by Hollywood: lean, calmly illusionless – Robert Ryan rather than Ronald Reagan. A later photograph, taken in February 1865, two months before Lee surrendered his sword to Grant at Appomattox, shows the mouth and the eyes still human and humorous, while the rest of the face has been entirely parched by war.
This new Lincoln is a utilitarian biography of detail: a desk job about a desk job. David Herbert Donald, of set purpose, has denied himself the broad contexts, the big pictures of perspective and hindsight. America, convulsing and pullulating in the background, remains strictly undynamic; the South is altogether unexamined, and its president, Jefferson Davis, is merely a named adversary; the origins and aftermath of the civil war are not examined and neither is its strategic course. This is a history of memos and dispatches and late nights in the White House. The great social torments and exhilarations of these years do not buffet the narrative. What Professor Donald offers is the verisimilitude of marathon anxiety.
But before we get 300 pages of that, first we get 300 pages of this: Lincoln’s obscurity. ‘It is a great piece of folly’, Lincoln once said, ‘to attempt to make anything out of my early life.’ And in truth only a few dabs of colour survive Donald’s grinding chronicle. Kentucky, then Indiana, then Illinois. Hogwallows called Sinking Spring Farm, Pigeon Creek, Posey’s Landing. The young Lincoln wrote with a buzzard’s quill. He briefly attended a ‘blab’ school, where you chanted your lessons: ‘No qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond “readin, writin, and cipherin.” ’ He worked the rivers, he slaughtered hogs, he split rails; he fought (or marched) in the Black Hawk War; village postmaster; surveyor; lawyer. Stuart & Lincoln, Logan & Lincoln, Lincoln & Lamon. Donald’s method, here, often seems frivolously assiduous. Lard factories, waterwheel patents; Lincoln represents Robert Nuckles, who is suing Elijah Bacon for damaging his corn; Lincoln defends John P. Singleton, who is being sued for nonpayment of a debt to Pearly Brown. The reader sits there with Kent’s Commentaries and Chatty’s Pleadings coming out of his ears, or coming out of the ear they aren’t going in at. Moreover, Donald seems to have got hold of The Complete Shopping Lists of Mary Lincoln: ‘her purchases … included needles, buttons, thread, muslin, calico, cambric, whalebones, and corset lace’. Soon she will be wallpapering their little home in Springfield, Illinois: dark and boldly figured for the bedrooms, but with a lighter pattern for the parlours.
Lincoln’s sudden political ascendancy was largely accidental and back-door. Donald’s account of it, as we might expect, cleanses the tale of any vestigial glamour. The historical moment of the Whigs had passed, and the Democrats were in their traditional ‘disarray’, when, in 1850, the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska were opened up for pan-American settlement; hostility to the extension of slavery saw the formation of a new and exclusively northern party, the Republicans. Ten years later, after much massaging at the convention in Chicago (exhaustively documented in these pages), Lincoln, ‘The Railsplitter’, the green and gawky populist, abruptly became the Republican nominee. He took the presidency without winning a single electoral vote in ten southern states. Secession was entrained by the simple fact of his victory. America had entered a mood resembling clinical dissociation, as democratic hardboileddom came up against the illusions of oligarchy. The American civil war has been called the War Between the States and the War About Slavery. Certainly, it was the war made inevitable by slavery. But there was nothing inevitable about Lincoln.
Once we are in the White House, Donald’s method (like Mary Lincoln’s shopping) really comes into its own. In tragedy, the hero is first isolated, and then pummelled; and this looked to be the president’s destiny. When the fighting began, Lincoln had insufficient troops to secure Washington. The Kansas frontier guards were quartered in the East Room of the White House. As defeat followed defeat, Lincoln borrowed military textbooks from the Library of Congress, attempting to master war in the same way he had mastered law – a measure of his desperation. His studies were interrupted when his two younger sons contracted typhoid. Tad survived, but Willie didn’t (joining his elder brother, Eddie, an earlier casualty). Stepping into his office, Lincoln said to his secretary, “Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone, he is actually gone!” ’ Then, and then only, Lincoln wept. The largest massacre of whites in American history (the Sioux uprising in Minnesota) was followed by the heaviest defeat in the history of its army, at Fredericksburg. Draft riots erupted in New York City. Republicans of all factions were agitating for Lincoln’s court martial. Lincoln faced mutiny everywhere but not within himself. Tragic heroes are meant to fall. Lincoln did not fall.
The internal drama, like the national drama, was unquestionably and indivisibly bound up with Lincoln’s evolving attitude towards the Negroes, or the African-Americans, as Donald calls them (anachronistically and perhaps provisionally, for they may soon be called something else). Lincoln was no congenital visionary. Like his father, he was always ‘naturally anti-slavery’, but he was by no means an abolitionist. America was formed ‘on the white basis’, and Lincoln was opposed to Negro suffrage, and to intermarriage. Well into his presidency he remained a colonizationist: Lincoln fancied Liberia, or some such spot, as a congenially sweltering homeland. Within sight of the (unfinished) Capitol, seven blocks away, stood the warehouse of Franklin & Armfield, the biggest slavetraders in the country. Lincoln seemed to accept this. He thought that slavery, if contained, would wither and die (soil exhaustion, overmanning). To him, apparently, slavery was above all legal: it was a given that the constitution could do nothing about.
War changed him. In the summer of 1862, on his way to the funeral of Edwin Stanton’s infant son, Lincoln announced that he ‘had about come to the conclusion that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued’. He then moved towards the Emancipation Proclamation and, crucially, towards black enlistment. At no point is the record wholly free of ambivalence and irresolution, but Lincoln’s sensibility had clearly undergone a decisive shift. In the summer of 1864, a subliterate Pennsylvanian wrote to Lincoln with the reminder that ‘white men is in class number one and black men is in class number two and must be governed by white men forever’. Lincoln replied, asking to be told ‘whether you are either a white man or a black one, because in either case, you could not be regarded as an entirely impartial judge’. This is the voice we hear and trust. As the fighting became dirtier and wearier and crueller, Lincoln needed an ideal, a palpable good, to counterbalance ‘the moral rot of war’, in Churchill’s phrase. He had to go back past the constitution to the Declaration of Independence.
Like the assassinated Kennedy, Lincoln was succeeded by Vice-President Johnson; but Andrew, unlike Lyndon, was a disaster. Donald’s narrative stops dead on the night of 14 April 1865, after the visit to Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street between E and F. Reconstruction and all the other great questions are still up in the air, but Donald is true to his brief. This book has been praised for its happy congruence of author and subject. Although Donald may be as methodical as Lincoln, he is his junior not least in literary talent. The prose is conti
nually defaced by that scurviest of false graces, Elegant Variation. Here is but one example of Donald’s futile dexterity: ‘If the president seemed to support the Radicals in New York, in Washington he appeared to back the Conservatives.’* Still, if merely by attrition, the book convinces us that only Lincoln could have found a way through the vast cluster of catastrophes, steering as the pilots on his western rivers steered, ‘from point to point as they call it, setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see’.
Sunday Times January 1996
It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton
Newt Gingrich called her a bitch. Rush Limbaugh called her a feminazi. One New York weekly called her a scumbag. William Safire, in the New York Times, called her a congenital liar. And the President himself, it is rumoured, calls her the First Liability. Rumour goes on to add that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a communist and a carpetbagger, a wowser and a fraud, a floozie and a dyke. It has been repeatedly suggested that she had an affair with her financial conspirator Vincent Foster, who died, mysteriously, in 1993. At this stage, we don’t want to know whether Hillary slept with Vincent Foster. We want to know how she killed him.
America is running out of patience with its First Ladies. In recent years, Barbara Bush alone has escaped whipping; perhaps because everyone assumed, subconsciously, that she wasn’t George’s wife but his mother. Similarly, the pious Rosalyn Carter came a poor second to Miss Lillian, who, in old age, symbolically reclaimed her virginity. If they’re not prigs, they’re tramps, like that Jackie, or that Nancy. It makes you wonder why we’re so soft on our First Ladies. Nobody ever accused Audrey Callaghan, say, of putting out for Frank Sinatra. Mrs Lincoln was the first First Lady (the phrase being coined in her honour); and maybe she was the worst First Lady (profligate, hysterical). But it should have been clear back in 1860 that First Ladydom was a terrible notion, reeking of fake precedence and popularity contests. Our baser instincts will always want to turn the First Lady into the Last Lady. And the resentment would seem to have its sexual component. What these women have in common is that they go to bed with presidents. Hillary, we may be sure, is no exception. Chelsea proves the point.
Still, Mrs Clinton is the most unpopular First Lady ever; and, more substantively, she is the first First Lady to stand before a grand jury. She is clearly the brightest and ablest of her line. And, in all senses, she is the most exposed. As the author of the failed health-care plan, Hillary assumed quasi-ministerial power while remaining unelected and unaccountable. And unsackable, it was said, though the President now seems to have kicked her upstairs. She came to Washington, with her new broom, and the institutions duly defeated and deformed her. Everything she touches turns out to have the word gate tacked on to the end of it: Cookiegate, Cattlegate, Travelgate, Fostergate, Whitewatergate; and now Thankyougate.
Thankyougate, or better say Nothankyougate, has to do with the book under review. Evidently, It Takes a Village took a village to write, and Hillary neglected to acknowledge the village elder: Barbara Feinman of the Washington Post. It appears that Hillary also sought to underpay that villager; but the facts of the dispute hardly matter. What matters is the way things can be made to look. In American politics, you go through the gates and you get to the doors: the doors of ‘perception’.
If this book had been written by someone with a different address, then of course I wouldn’t be reviewing it. And neither would anybody else. A chatty manual about raising children along voluntarist and communitarian lines, it might have got a mention in the Times Educational Supplement, or in Pregnancy magazine. But, as the jacket copy patiently explains, Hillary Rodham Clinton is ‘America’s First Lady’; ‘she lives in the White House with the President and their daughter, Chelsea’. Thus the book will be considered top-down rather than bottom-up. It Takes a Village looks like a book and feels like a book but in important respects it isn’t a book. It is a re-election pamphlet or a stump speech; it is a 500-page press release. At no point did I find myself questioning the benignity of the author’s original impulse; indeed, the book is as sincere, in its way, as anything I’ve ever managed to finish. And yet there is also something horrible about it. More subtext than text, ameliorative, harmonial, beamingly upbeat, it teaches an ugly lesson.
First, we have to imagine Hillary, in the Old Executive Office Building, with her staff of fifteen women (and one man: what is he doing there?), plus Barbara Feinman and other helpers ‘so numerous that I will not even attempt to acknowledge them individually’, marshalling her manuscript. Their object is to reduce it to a condition of pan-inoffensiveness. This is a big job, because being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture. Chapter by chapter, Village goes over to Bill’s people, to see if they have a problem with this or are uncomfortable with that, and Bill’s people bounce it back to Hill’s people with what they are unhappy about, and so it goes on, until in broad daylight and full consciousness you confront printed sentences which read:
A University of Chicago study showed that by the age of two, children whose mothers had talked to them frequently since infancy had bigger vocabularies than children from the same socioeconomic backgrounds whose mothers had been less talkative.
The 1990 Census showed that young people without college degrees earn significantly less on average than those with degrees.
Brisk walking, hiking and bicycling are all good exercise and are great ways to spend time together.
In addition to being read to, children love to be told stories.
By the time everybody’s done, we are out there on the cutting edge of the uncontroversial.
As for style, well, the First Lady should not be seen to be solemn. She can make jokes. But we don’t want her sounding like a flake. Every joke, therefore, must wear a joke badge: it must be accompanied by a plump exclamation mark. As in ‘Sometimes Mother knows best too!’ Or: ‘So much for her grasp of physics!’
Colloquialisms are appropriate only when they come with a tamper-proof set of inverted commas. To say ‘All of us blow our tops’ may give the impression that things sometimes get a little too ragged around here. But to say ‘All of us “blow our tops” ’ suggests that the tendency is under control. The stories about Bill and Chelsea, and Hillary’s ‘kinfolk’, establish the human context; we can then wind down into the sanitized anti-poetry of soft jargon, with its follow-up and outreach, its skills, tools, goals and roles, its giving and caring and ongoing caregiving.
Even the grammarian will remain unoffended by Hillary’s syntax, though one might enter a few quibbles. A ‘light-year’ is a measurement of distance, not time. ‘Nurturance’ is a neologism we can muddle along without. ‘Stomachachy’, finally, is not a campaign stop on the way to Poughkeepsie but Hillary’s epithet for a pain in the gut.
Properly decoded, then, Village is a portrait of a First Lady who deserves a second chance. And a second term. This is not the unsmiling feminist, the ballbreaking ambulance-chaser, who came to Washington four years ago. This is someone softer, gentler, homier, holier. As parents, Bill and Hillary could be said to have fallen at the first hurdle: they called their child Chelsea. But they’ve made up for it since. ‘From the time she was a baby, Bill and I took turns reading to her and praying with her’; and home life in the White House, it seems, is now a full-time trance of piety. Toiling through all the cuteness and cant, I was struck by one sullen sentence: ‘Life itself is the curriculum, as are history, literature, current events, and, especially, religious teachings.’ With that measured ‘especially’, Hillary blows a kiss of farewell to the secular intellect and falls into step with the philistines.
One keeps turning disconcertedly to the photograph on the back flap. With her pearls, her cloth-buttoned suit top, her spryly waved hair and glazed maquillage, she looks like the wife of some sulphurous video vicar (who, any day now, will be found in a motel somewhere, under a heap of prostitutes). America has taken Hillary Rodham and bent her into a different shape. She stands there, s
miling, dumbed well down, and purged of all quiddity.
Sunday Times March 1996
* I once discussed Mrs Thatcher’s feminine qualities with Christopher Hitchens, who had recently spent some time in her company. This was his verdict: ‘Oh, she stinks of sex.’ And this is my father, Kingsley Amis, in his Memoirs: her beauty, he writes, is ‘so extreme that … it can trap me for a split second into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2200. The fact that it is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty, and that sexuality is still, I think, an underrated factor in her appeal (or repellence).’ Helplessly I reach for the commonplace about the glamour of power. I could further infuriate my father’s shade by adducing another cliché: English nostalgia for chastisement. Philip Larkin shared his friend’s enthusiasm for the Prime Minister (‘I adore Mrs Thatcher’). Larkin was a great poet (see below), but in his personal life he was a clear example of UK toilet-training run amok. He once asked Mrs Thatcher, who had professed herself a fan, to quote a line of his. She blinked and said, ‘All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ The quoted poem, ‘Deceptions’ (1950), is addressed to a Victorian waif who has been drugged and raped.