By Paul Carrier
The Lincoln Memorial is a breathtakingly beautiful tribute to our 16th, and arguably greatest, president. Anyone who has seen it firsthand can attest to the fact that the temple-like monument immortalizes Abraham Lincoln in all his nobel, wise, triumphant glory.
But as acclaimed novelist Jerome Charyn makes clear in I Am Abraham, Lincoln is far more compelling in the flesh, and amid his family, than as a marble commander-in-chief. His insecurities, rough edges, missteps and even lustful urges underscore both his complexity and his humanity.
I Am Abraham is billed by its jacket design and subtitle as A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War. It is that, and more. Charyn’s Lincoln, who narrates the novel, describes his years as a tough but somewhat aimless young man, a soldier in Black Hawk’s War, and a state legislator and lawyer, before moving on to the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 and, finally, the presidency and the Civil War.
Even in the early going, we catch a glimpse of things to come. Lincoln’s chronic melancholy first surfaces as attacks of what he calls “the blue unholies.” In the 1830s, he is appalled by slavery but hostile toward abolitionists, with their black hats, black coats, blind zeal and “pink little eyes.” And the reader quickly comes to appreciate Lincoln’s pained devotion to Mary Todd, despite her sudden and frequent rages, which grow worse following the death, in 1862, of her 11-year-old son Willie.
“I couldn’t console her. She was having one of her fits,” Lincoln says of his wife during one such incident in 1858. “I could feel the anger course through her, like a bundle of worms. A body might have thought she was possessed with demons — Mother did have a demon in her eye.” Still, Lincoln credits “Mother’ with remaking him, “even if I still had a hard time manipulating a proper knife and fork.”
Charyn’s unique voice, insight and soaring imagination, which made such novels as Johnny One-Eye and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson so memorable, is on display here. His Lincoln is very much alive, entirely credible, and fascinating. Lincoln grows in eloquence and sophistication over time, with a vocabulary that blends formality and echoes of Mark Twain: flibbertigibbet, fizzle-gigs, palaver, pantaloons and flub dubs.
Some of the luminaries and lesser lights of the era appear as secondary characters in I Am Abraham. Outgoing President James Buchanan “coddled the Southern Senators and let the Union slide into the wind.” Secretary of State William Seward is “like a manor lord with his fine Arabian mares,” while “Miss Kate” — socialite Kate Chase, the haughty daughter of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase — believes she should be living in the White House with her father, instead of having to visit as the guest of “a yokel from Illinois and his upstart wife.”
Elizabeth Keckly, the former slave who became Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress and confidante, makes a star turn. So does the Lincolns’ youngest son, Tad, who comes across as a wild child made all the wilder by his brother Willie’s premature death, probably from typhoid fever.
And some of Lincoln’s generals, most of them failures, march through these pages in comic or memorable fashion, with Lincoln’s sardonic humor nipping at their heels.
Winfield Scott is “the tallest man in Washington at six foot five, and also one of the fattest.” Irvin McDowell “could fart like a furnace and eat six roasted quail at one sitting” but he “didn’t have much of an appetite for war.” George B. McClellan is a “bantam rooster” and a “pretty little man.” The great Ulysses S. Grant, visiting Washington for his promotion to the rank of lieutenant general, walks out of the Willard Hotel “in his old travel uniform with missing buttons and a frayed cuff.” Grant “wouldn’t talk to civilians about the fake romance of blood.”
Charyn captures the essence of Lincoln as a great yet humble man who is wise and loving and compassionate, but also tough, unyielding and capable of Machiavellian calculation. After he signs the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln muses that he has robbed Jefferson Davis of “his greatest commodity — the South’s inexhaustible market of slaves — with one stroke of the pen. If my generals wouldn’t ride to Richmond, then I’d ride there with my writs.”
In an author’s note. Charyn describes I Am Abraham as a family chonicle, “where the fury of war and politics rumble in the background, while Lincoln does a macabre dance with his generals, feuds with his eldest boy, and tries to contain the furies of his wife.” A lesser man might have coped with family troubles or prevented the dissolution of the Union, but Charyn reminds us that it took a man of Lincoln’s caliber to juggle so much so well.
But as acclaimed novelist Jerome Charyn makes clear in I Am Abraham, Lincoln is far more compelling in the flesh, and amid his family, than as a marble commander-in-chief. His insecurities, rough edges, missteps and even lustful urges underscore both his complexity and his humanity.
I Am Abraham is billed by its jacket design and subtitle as A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War. It is that, and more. Charyn’s Lincoln, who narrates the novel, describes his years as a tough but somewhat aimless young man, a soldier in Black Hawk’s War, and a state legislator and lawyer, before moving on to the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 and, finally, the presidency and the Civil War.
Even in the early going, we catch a glimpse of things to come. Lincoln’s chronic melancholy first surfaces as attacks of what he calls “the blue unholies.” In the 1830s, he is appalled by slavery but hostile toward abolitionists, with their black hats, black coats, blind zeal and “pink little eyes.” And the reader quickly comes to appreciate Lincoln’s pained devotion to Mary Todd, despite her sudden and frequent rages, which grow worse following the death, in 1862, of her 11-year-old son Willie.
“I couldn’t console her. She was having one of her fits,” Lincoln says of his wife during one such incident in 1858. “I could feel the anger course through her, like a bundle of worms. A body might have thought she was possessed with demons — Mother did have a demon in her eye.” Still, Lincoln credits “Mother’ with remaking him, “even if I still had a hard time manipulating a proper knife and fork.”
Charyn’s unique voice, insight and soaring imagination, which made such novels as Johnny One-Eye and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson so memorable, is on display here. His Lincoln is very much alive, entirely credible, and fascinating. Lincoln grows in eloquence and sophistication over time, with a vocabulary that blends formality and echoes of Mark Twain: flibbertigibbet, fizzle-gigs, palaver, pantaloons and flub dubs.
Some of the luminaries and lesser lights of the era appear as secondary characters in I Am Abraham. Outgoing President James Buchanan “coddled the Southern Senators and let the Union slide into the wind.” Secretary of State William Seward is “like a manor lord with his fine Arabian mares,” while “Miss Kate” — socialite Kate Chase, the haughty daughter of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase — believes she should be living in the White House with her father, instead of having to visit as the guest of “a yokel from Illinois and his upstart wife.”
Elizabeth Keckly, the former slave who became Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress and confidante, makes a star turn. So does the Lincolns’ youngest son, Tad, who comes across as a wild child made all the wilder by his brother Willie’s premature death, probably from typhoid fever.
And some of Lincoln’s generals, most of them failures, march through these pages in comic or memorable fashion, with Lincoln’s sardonic humor nipping at their heels.
Winfield Scott is “the tallest man in Washington at six foot five, and also one of the fattest.” Irvin McDowell “could fart like a furnace and eat six roasted quail at one sitting” but he “didn’t have much of an appetite for war.” George B. McClellan is a “bantam rooster” and a “pretty little man.” The great Ulysses S. Grant, visiting Washington for his promotion to the rank of lieutenant general, walks out of the Willard Hotel “in his old travel uniform with missing buttons and a frayed cuff.” Grant “wouldn’t talk to civilians about the fake romance of blood.”
Charyn captures the essence of Lincoln as a great yet humble man who is wise and loving and compassionate, but also tough, unyielding and capable of Machiavellian calculation. After he signs the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln muses that he has robbed Jefferson Davis of “his greatest commodity — the South’s inexhaustible market of slaves — with one stroke of the pen. If my generals wouldn’t ride to Richmond, then I’d ride there with my writs.”
In an author’s note. Charyn describes I Am Abraham as a family chonicle, “where the fury of war and politics rumble in the background, while Lincoln does a macabre dance with his generals, feuds with his eldest boy, and tries to contain the furies of his wife.” A lesser man might have coped with family troubles or prevented the dissolution of the Union, but Charyn reminds us that it took a man of Lincoln’s caliber to juggle so much so well.
