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Fictional Lincoln never feels real
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No president has written as well as Abraham Lincoln. He could thrill, reason, prophesy, mourn and crack jokes. Who wouldn’t want to read a book in his own words — all the more enticing if it scanted the political and administrative minutiae that fill his collected works and gave us a window into his inner life?
Even if Lincoln hadn’t been murdered, he would never have written such a book. For an often garrulous man, he was notoriously tight-lipped about anything he didn’t want to say in a proclamation or from a podium. Biographers and historians have labored to fill the gaps. Jerome Charyn takes the approach of fiction.
“I Am Abraham” is an interior monologue, with Lincoln surveying his own life. Charyn’s novel follows the course of known events from 1831, when Lincoln left his father and stepmother and struck out on his own, until April 1865, when he visited Richmond, Virginia, the conquered capital of the Confederacy. Only one character of any consequence — a female Pinkerton agent — is entirely invented, and Charyn assures us in an author’s note Pinkerton did use women agents.
Charyn’s best touch is Lincoln’s voice: thoughtful, observant and droll, good for the long narrative haul. Its ground bass is Kentucky rube. Lincoln says “the-ay-ter” and seems amused that he continues to say so even though he has become president of the United States. He varies this tone with echoes of the Bible, poetry and speeches from the the-ay-ter.
Readers may be surprised by how lewd this Lincoln can be. Do you want a recollection of the first time he felt a woman’s breasts? Of the first time he had intercourse? It’s all here.
Charyn’s Lincoln is a man of sorrows. Presiding over the Civil War would do that to anybody, but here the sorrows are traced back to an unsympathetic father and to the death of Ann Rutledge, his first sweetheart. Today we would call Lincoln depressed and give him pills. The man himself calls his bouts of gloom “unholies” and just tries to ride them out.
Some famous men appear in this Lincoln’s thoughts — Stephen Douglas, George McClellan, Ulysses Grant — but the main figures in “I Am Abraham” are family. Mary Lincoln is the Kentucky belle who charms and arouses him even after her fragile personality develops irreparable cracks. His eldest son, Robert, understands his mother and soothes her, but wants her committed. His youngest son, Tad, is an undisciplined imp who has a speech impediment.
What’s missing? The near absence of politics. Charyn presents Lincoln as stumbling into high office, guided by handlers. A real Lincoln transcript would read a lot like Machiavelli (if he were moral) or the morning talk shows (if they were intelligent).
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