Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest
by Jan Morris
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jan MorrisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-03-27
ISBN: 0306810328
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Book Reviews of Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest
Book Review: Doggedly Tracking Abraham
Summary: 5 Stars
Grape Jelly, Jan Morris tells us at the outset of Lincoln, A Foreigner's Quest, was what she first intended to call her book of reflections on Honest Abe, grape jelly and Abraham Lincoln being the two things that had most infuriated her in the course of her young explorations of the United States during the Eisenhower fifties. "They seemed to represent all that I distrusted about America: synthetic, over-sweet, slobbery of texture, artificially coloured and unavoidable." Hence we are warned from page one that we are not likely to meet quite the same Abraham Lincoln we had been taught to respect and adulate in the public schools of Winnetka, Illinois. Hers would not be the retold tale of the log cabin kid who worked hard, never told a lie, and as a young man, horrified by the sight of Negroes being sold like animals in the slave market of New Orleans, decided to tackle the job of abolishing The Peculiar Institution from the American Republic. Morris, we suspect from the start, aims to knock a few hats off, debunk perchance a homespun American shibboleth. Visiting Lincoln's haunts, nearly all the places Lincoln was known to inhabit or visit, Morris, a Welshman, paints perceptive, impressionistic pictures of Lincoln's places, an art in which she has long experience. (Morris's monumental Venice, first published 34 years ago, now is in its third edition. In her exhaustive Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, she avers first-hand acquaintance with most of the Imperial countries large and small, and all the places of signal importance in the life and death of the Empire.) Through the interstices of her stage sets of Lincoln's Springfield, Washington, or Richmond, Morris weaves--like filigree, to use a favourite Jan Morris image--the lively scenarios that together describe the arched, coherent life of this singular American who, in the eyes of all the world, reached true greatness. At Beardstown, offered free run of City Hall one lonesome Sunday morning, Morris makes a bee-line for the courtroom, seats herself behind the bench (as she once did the Doges' throne) and presiding over a room packed with vivacious ghosts, re-enacts the Great Almanac Trial that Lincoln, with all the dramatic panache of Perry Mason, won for the defence, saving, in the act, an innocent man from the gallows. At Lincoln's log-cabin birthplace in Kentucky, Morris casts an ironic eye on the sixteenth president's white trash milieu, ever present in the local inhabitants of this day. But where in Lincoln's time these rural Kentuckians would have been emaciated from their distressing poverty, their heirs are immensely obese people of the same lowly social class, bulbously fattened on malnutritious junk food. Yesterday's log cabin communities are today's trailer parks. Resolutely refusing to genuflect before the American saint--or, for that matter, to saints of any denomination, I imagine--Morris sometimes engages in bemused impiety as, for instance, when she chooses what is possibly the road less travelled for her retreat from the Sinking Spring shrine. "If the heaviest of the pilgrims have found those fifty-six steps too much for them, they may return to the Park Visitor Center by way of a more accommodating boardwalk, called the Pathway of a President. I am a foreign agnostic, though, trying to work out for myself the true nature of Abraham Lincoln, and I prefer to take the symbolical staircase--restraining myself, in deference to the National Park Service, from skipping down it whistling 'Yankee Doodle Dandy.'" On the question of slavery Morris reasonably draws the conclusion that the Great Emancipator surely had to be familiar with the sight of manacled slaves passing on the country roads of Kentucky or toiling in the fields, and was probable indifferent to the sight. Later on, at Mary Todd Lincoln's family home, Mastah Lincoln's bath would inevitably have been drawn for him by his personal slave. There is no evidence that Lincoln ever considered Negroes equal to Whites. Nor was he even much of an abolitionist. Though he disliked slavery, he did not at first want to do away with it altogether, his hope being that slavery would end on its own, which of course it would have, as machines replaced manpower. To this reader, Morris's Lincoln largely resembles the sixteenth president portrayed in Gore Vidal's eponymous historical novel, someone more human than the towering giant of unbounded humanitarian goodness we were taught to adulate at Crow Island, Skokie School, and New Trier High. Though he emancipated the slaves, he did so with considerable reluctance. And being a politician, the Great Rail Splitter must inevitably have had something of the sly opportunist in his character. From Grape Jelly the author of this thoughtful biography arrives, at the end of her diligent pursuit of the blood-and-bone substance beneath America's foremost icon, at a portrait of Lincoln The Artist, whose greatest achievement was the Gettysburg Address, and agrees with Karl Marx that Lincoln was a rare example of a great man who also was good. Some four score days ago I had the pleasure of conversing with Jan Morris while seated at adjacent tables at a small outdoor eatery in a remote Slovenian village in the shadow of Triglav. Upon reading Lincoln, A Foreigner's Quest, I immediately recognised the same quick perceptiveness and natural curiosity I had apprehended in the course of our conversation in Stara Fuzina, al fresco on a sunny spring afternoon, over jota and curds. A serendipitous meeting, I feel, for otherwise I might have missed the delight of discovering her lively, insightful prose. Never does Morris try to assume the role of the objective biographer. She weaves her tale by narrating her personal research along the trail of Lincoln's steps from Sinking Spring to the Ford Theater. In an easy-going, almost conversational style, often packed with irony and wit, Morris charmingly--convincingly--exposes by way of what she sees and smells and hears and reads, an altogether believable Abraham Lincoln, mole and all.
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