Lincoln (Vidal)

Lincoln
Gore Vidal, 1984
Random House
672 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780795331824

Summary
Gore Vidal's Lincoln opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him.

During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee's armies beat at the gates. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals.

The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. Vidal's portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists.

To most Americans, Abraham Lincoln is a monolithic figure, the Great Emancipator and Savior of the Union, beloved by all. In Gore Vidal's Lincoln we meet Lincoln the man and Lincoln the political animal, the president who entered a besieged capital where most of the population supported the South and where even those favoring the Union had serious doubts that the man from Illinois could save it.

Far from steadfast in his abhorrence of slavery, Lincoln agonizes over the best course of action and comes to his great decision only when all else seems to fail. As the Civil War ravages his nation, Lincoln must face deep personal turmoil, the loss of his dearest son, and the harangues of a wife seen as a traitor for her Southern connections. Brilliantly conceived, masterfully executed, Gore Vidal's Lincoln allows the man to breathe again.

Lincoln is the cornerstone of Vidal's fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., Empire, and Hollywood. The Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post-World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, knowing, and ironic observers. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Also named—Edgar Box (mystery writer)
• Birth—October 03, 1925
• Where—West Point, New York, USA
• Education—Phillips Exeter Academy (Prep school)
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award, 1982; National
   Book Award, 1993
• Currently—lives in Ravello, Italy; Los Angeles, California

As a prominent post-WWII novelist, socialite and public figure, Gore Vidal has lived a life of incredible variety. Throughout his career, he has rubbed shoulders and crossed swords with many of the foremost cultural and political figures of our century: from Jack Kennedy to Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote to William F. Buckley.

From his early arrival on the literary scene, Vidal's fascinations with politics, power and public figures have informed his writing. He takes his first name from his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, a populist Senator from Oklahoma for whom neither blindness nor feuds with FDR could prevent a long, distinguished career (Incidentally, T.P. Gore belonged to the same political dynasty into which Al Gore was born). Vidal's best-received historical fictions, like Julian, Burr, and Lincoln, re-imagine the personal and political lives of powerful figures in history. In his essays, he frequently chooses political subjects, as he did with his damaging assessment of Robert Kennedy-for-President in an Esquire article in 1963.

At the same time, Vidal's assets as a writer have made him a dangerous public figure in his own right. His sharp wit has discomposed the unrufflable (William F. Buckley) and the frequently ruffled (Norman Mailer) alike, and did so terrify his congressional campaign opponent J. Ernest Wharton that the latter refused to engage Vidal in debate. Even since he's left his aspirations as a politician behind, Vidal's attraction to controversial political issues continues in his provocative essays and public appearances. (From Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
Though Lincoln: A Novel is an obsessively political work, covering in exhaustive detail the bumpy course of the Civil War as viewed from the White House, its narrative pace is slow and leisurely; multitiered rather than sweeping, it accommodates a variety of characters in orbit about the President, or, like young David Herold (a potential co-conspirator of John Wilkes Booth), stationed across the street from him, in a pharmacy. Since it is the author's strategy to keep Lincoln mysterious and secretive, we are never privy to his thoughts, as we were to Aaron Burr's; but, by degrees, we come to know him well through the eyes of his witnesses."
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review

A portrait of America's great president that is at once intimate and public, stark and complex, and that will become for future generations the living Lincoln, the definitive Lincoln.... Richly entertaining...history lessons with the blood still hot.
Washington Post

Lincoln is in Vidal's version at once more complex, mysterious and enigmatic, more implacably courageous and, finally, more tragic than the conventional images, the marble man of the memorial. He is honored in the book.
Chicago Tribune

Vidal's book is a potpourri of his own inventions and bits and pieces he has picked up from other authors—bits and pieces mostly long discredited.... At many points it is hard to know whether his version of Lincoln's life and times is an outright invention, a dubious interpretation, or simply a mistake. He is wrong on big as well as little matters. He grossly distort's Lincoln's character and role in history by picturing him as ignorant of economics, disregardful of the Constitution, and unconcerned with the rights of blacks.... Vidal has created an oversimplified and fragmentary character, while the nonfiction writers come much closer to depicting him as he really was, in all the complexities and ambiguities of his life and times. Readers who want to know the real Abraham Lincoln (as well as he can be known from a single volume) will turn to the biography by Benjamin P. Thomas or the one by Stephen B. Oates. Readers who prefer the fantasizings of a fictionist will continue to pick up Vidal's book. They are welcome to it.
Richard N. Current, historian - New York Review of Books

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Lincoln:

1. You might start by reading the (very long) exchange in the New York Review of Books between Vidal and two Lincoln historians, from which the above critical excerpt by Richard Current is taken. A good question, then, is how important is it for historical fiction be factual? Is "poetic license" fair or ethical...or does the reader understand that fiction is, well...fiction, and that a degree of embellishment is expected?

2. How—and why—do the men in Lincoln's cabinent underestimate him? Does Lincoln encourage their underestimation...intentionally? What advantages would he gain by doing so? Do any of the cabinent members change their opinions of Lincoln? 

3. Talk about General McClellan—how is he portrayed in this book? Why is he so beloved by the public? Why does he refuse to prosecute the war more aggressively? Why does Lincoln put up with him...and why does he finally dismiss him. 

4. How is Ulysses S. Grant protrayed?  Compare him to McClellan?

5. Talk about Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln's marriage?  What do you think of Mary Todd? Is she a good helpmate for her husband? Was she fairly treated by the press?

6. What is Lincoln's attitudes toward African-Americans, slavery, and emancipation?  Why was he so tardy in emancipating the slaves?

7. What did you learn from reading Vidal's Lincoln ... what new insights did you gain into Lincoln as a man and as a president? ... and into the Civil War period?

8. If you haven't already, you might consider reading Doris Kearn Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005).  It would be interesting to see how Goodwin's historical account compares with Vidal's fictional approach.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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