Seekers of Presidential frisson cherish the synchronous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, on July 4, 1826, a temporal thrill doubled by the date’s being the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Another eerie conjunction belongs to February 20th, which delivered to the White House, on two occurrences a century apart, some of the keenest joy and deepest sorrow to enter the building.
At 4:10 P.M. on Tuesday, February 20, 1962, John F. Kennedy was on the phone congratulating John Glenn, who had just completed three orbits of Earth. Amid a clamor of national pride, the President quietly observed, “I have just been watching your father and mother on television, and they seemed very happy.” A hundred years earlier, almost to the hour, the set of parents then occupying the White House, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, were being plunged into an extreme grief by the death of their third son, Willie, who was eleven years old.
The boy had been seriously ill, probably from typhoid fever, for more than two weeks. On the evening of February 5th, the Lincolns had shuttled between his upstairs sickbed and the East Room. Signs of improvement several days later engendered only false hope. “Well, Nicolay,” a weeping Lincoln said to one of his secretaries on the afternoon of the twentieth, “my boy is gone—he is actually gone.” Four days after that, Willie’s body lay in the Green Room, next door to where Lincoln’s and, eventually, Kennedy’s would lie.
Willie’s fairness of face and sweetness of disposition made him his parents’ darling. After his death, both mother and father tended to view him as having been a sort of extraterrestrial visitor. “He was too good for this earth,” Lincoln remarked. Mary, in a letter to the painter Francis Carpenter, recalled the boy’s “always unearthly” nature. Hours before the assassination, during their afternoon carriage ride, the President invoked not only the just ended war but also Willie’s death as what he and Mary must finally try to rise above. Willie’s coffin was entombed for three years in Georgetown’s Oak Hill cemetery; it then shared the eighth car of Lincoln’s funeral train home to Springfield, where both father and son were laid to rest.
Willie’s temporary afterlife in Oak Hill has become the subject of George Saunders’s first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo” (Random House), now being published after a half-dozen books of accomplished, high-concept short fiction. The idea took hold, Saunders has said, when a friend told him how “newspapers of the time reported that Lincoln had returned to the crypt several times to hold his son’s body. As soon as I heard that, this image sprung to mind: a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Pietà.” The novel that has resulted is anything but a quiet tableau. It depicts a ferocious, keenly felt, and sometimes comic struggle over Willie’s spirit while he is in a Bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist transition from death to rebirth, during which one’s next life is very much up for grabs.
The premise of the book is like many that give rise to historical fiction: intriguing and a little shaky. The prolific Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer believes that the President did visit the Oak Hill mausoleum but did not handle Willie’s body, whereas, he points out, the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, had once exhumed the coffin containing his infant daughter so that her corpse could stay for two years inside his house. Whatever the exact case, Abraham Lincoln’s active engagement with Willie’s post-mortem existence is a multi-sourceable matter of record. Bishop Matthew Simpson, in his funeral sermon for the President, cited Lincoln’s remark, “Since Willie’s death I catch myself every day involuntarily talking with him, as if he were with me,” and David Herbert Donald, in his biography of Lincoln, offers evidence that in the period after Willie’s death “he increasingly turned to religion for solace.”
Ever since the President’s assassination, on Good Friday, there has been an emotional and literary yearning to see him in terms of resurrection, to have him consort with the living and the dead and even the undead. (Several years ago, Seth Grahame-Smith’s genre novel, “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter,” which also mentions Lincoln’s reopening of Willie’s casket, achieved a wide, weird popularity.) Saunders cites the influence of “Our Town” on his cemetery imaginings, but they are also surely underpinned by Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology” (1915), in which the spirit of Ann Rutledge, Lincoln’s legendary first love, insists from her Illinois burial plot on historical credit: “Bloom forever, O Republic, / From the dust of my bosom!”
Saunders’s witty and garrulous graveyard is filled with semi-spirits in a state of denial. They believe that their dead bodies are merely a “sick-form,” and that the coffins and crypts containing them are “sick-boxes,” as if Oak Hill were a hospital instead of a cemetery. They have chosen to resist passage to a genuine afterlife, and with their defiance has come boredom: “Each night passed with a devastating sameness,” Hans Vollman, one of those who have adamantly “soldiered on,” says. A printer with an enormous penis, he was, back in the eighteen-forties, just beginning to experience the joy of bedding his much younger wife when a ceiling beam fell and killed him. Vollman’s best posthumous pal is the campy, once closeted Roger Bevins III, now sporting multiple limbs like a Hindu god. The two are frequently in the company of a straitlaced “old bore,” the Reverend Everly Thomas, the closest thing to a Stage Manager in Saunders’s netherworld. Unlike Vollman and Bevins, he knows he is dead, as well as damned.
Saunders does a fine job—and has a fine time—quickening his little necropolis to literary life, supporting his three codger principals with figures like Mrs. Blass, a once miserly widow; Jane Ellis, a woman wearied by her husband, enchanted by her daughters, and killed by some “minor surgery”; and a slave, Thomas Havens, who was reasonably content until he remembered that the few truly “discretionary” moments he had are what “other men enjoyed whole lifetimes comprised of.”
It is not Willie’s arrival that causes a sensation but what occurs during a subsequent visit from his father. “It was the touching that was unusual,” the Reverend Thomas explains. It becomes the talk of the cemetery, a kind of redemptive validation for its self-loathing inhabitants: “To be touched so lovingly, so fondly, as if one were still—.” To his new neighbors, Willie becomes a “prince,” and his as yet unmartyred father a sort of savior.
But the young “are not meant to tarry” in Oak Hill, and Saunders’s three main characters are astonished to find Willie continuing to sit “cross-legged on the roof” of his own tomb, refusing to depart, awaiting another visit and tender touch from his father. Even Vollman believes that the boy’s remaining, in the face of inevitable “degradation,” is unwise. “We wished the lad to go, and thereby save himself. His father wished for him to be ‘in some bright place, free of suffering, resplendent in a new mode of being.’ ” And so the shades of Vollman and Bevins venture into Lincoln’s body and attempt, with spectral willpower, to urge him back to Willie’s tomb; once he gets there, they can insert “the lad into the gentleman” and thereby convince Willie of his father’s desire for him to proceed toward a new realm of peace.
Only during this extramural errand do Vollman and Bevins realize that Lincoln is the President, five or six chief executives after Tyler and Polk, the incumbents they remember. They will also learn that there is a civil war going on (and going badly for Lincoln’s side), that theatres have been transformed by gaslight, and that the railroad extends past Buffalo. And, to the Reverend Thomas’s surprise, the two men succeed in returning Lincoln to the tomb:
Saunders has downplayed his mid-career move to the larger form of the novel. (He says he’s still “just trying to let the story tell me how long it wants to be.”) Although readers may feel that “Lincoln in the Bardo” has little in common with the author’s dystopian short stories, there’s actually quite a lot of similarity in preoccupation and technique. Saunders often pays imaginative attention to corporations, bureaucracies, and nomenclature (Pfizer should hire the coiner of Docilryde™, Bonviv™, and Darkenfloxx™ the way the Ford Motor Company once enlisted Marianne Moore), and he has a predilection for creepy theme parks: the title stories of “Pastoralia” (2000) and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (1996) involve troubled attractions where caveman life and the American Civil War are reënacted; the latter venue is replete with ghosts and apparitions.
In Saunders’s hands, Oak Hill, too, is a kind of theme park, with various rules and precincts and spectacles, as well as opportunities for the author’s parodic gifts. There is the jargon he loves (“this serendipitous mass co-habitation”); the comic grandiloquence (“Had he offered any hope for the alteration of the boy’s fundamental circumstance? If so, might said hope extend to us as well?”); and a species of his usual interoffice communications in the form of a fictional watchman’s logbook.
Seizing on the possibilities of his subject and period, Saunders indulges Lincoln’s own love of bawdy humor when a clutch of spirits invade the President’s body (“Mrs. Crawford entered, being groped as usual by Mr. Longstreet”), and he gives the precocious versifying that Willie practiced in life a Whitmanic afflatus when the boy ponders the possibilities of the hereafter: “Swinging from the chandelier, allowed; floating up to the ceiling, allowed; going to window to have a look out, allowed allowed allowed!”
Though Saunders has frequently taken pleasure in the bravura display of grotesque agonies, tenderness is much more fundamentally his line. He likes to create desperate people trying their best to be dignified and gentle, and is drawn to the rescue of children from impending disaster: the fantasy-prone boy doesn’t finally freeze to death in “Tenth of December”; the sweet girl in “Victory Lap” ultimately doesn’t get raped, and the boy next door manages to rescue her without killing the assailant.
In his essay collection, “The Braindead Megaphone” (2007), Saunders cites Esther Forbes, the author of the venerable Y.A. historical novel “Johnny Tremain” (1943), as his “first model of beautiful compression,” someone whose work suggested that “with enough attention, a sentence could peel away from its fellows and be, not only from you, but you.” “Lincoln in the Bardo” may be Saunders’s longest work of fiction, but it is also his most compressed—a series of snippets labelled with the identity of their speakers, almost as if the gravestones in this particular theme park have a push-button audio function for visitors:
Other brief narrative utterances are taken from memoirs and histories, ranging from the reminiscences of Elizabeth Keckley (Mary Lincoln’s African-American dressmaker) to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” A number of authentic-feeling ringers have also been mixed in. At its most solemn moments, the effect is akin to hearing the tagged, voice-overed quotations in Ken Burns’s “The Civil War”; in more antic places, one might be reading the creative nonfiction of David Shields.
Even with this granular structure and its comic interludes, the book gathers a satisfying momentum, enough to reveal what Saunders has called, in one of his essays, a novel’s Apparent Narrative Rationale—“what the writer and the reader have tacitly agreed the book is ‘about.’ ” “Lincoln in the Bardo” has great matters on its mind: freedom and slavery, the spirit and the body. But it is, finally, “about” Abraham Lincoln, that great spectral presence in a whole subgenre of American fiction.
Obliquity has led to greater success in novelizing the sixteenth President than have attempts to see him from the inside out and through his own point of view. Lincoln’s murder kept him from writing a memoir, but it is doubtful that he would have undertaken one in any case. Shrewd caution made him dislike, as he put it, “getting on paper, and furnishing new grounds for misunderstanding,” and whatever autobiographical impulses he may have experienced seem to have been satisfied by the few abashed or just-the-facts campaign bios he wrote in 1859 and 1860, one of them in the third person, for potential supporters.
Even the most commercial novelists have instinctively known to stay away from Lincoln’s consciousness, as if it were the “tired spot” that the exhausted President, in the middle of the war, deemed to be unreachable. Honoré Morrow (1880-1940), the wife of the publisher William Morrow, brought forth a trilogy of Lincoln novels between 1927 and 1930. The first is essentially a spy yarn involving a Virginia slaveholder and Confederate agent named Miss Ford, who manages to insinuate herself into the Lincoln White House and then fall in love with the President. Cross-dressing, racial disguise, and suicide reduce Fort Sumter and Bull Run to minor matters. And yet, overheated as everything might be (“ejaculated” is a favorite speaking verb), the novel shows a curious restraint when it comes to dealing with Lincoln himself, an inclination to keep his inner life at arm’s length, as if to do otherwise would be a profanation. When his son dies (in Miss Ford’s treacherous arms), Lincoln’s grief is presented via an oddly distant narrative “telling” rather than interior dramatization: “Willie’s death was, it seemed to Lincoln, the greatest grief of his life. Even the death of Ann Rutledge, that most poignant loss of his youth, had not torn at his very vitals as did this.” Though unafraid of almost any preposterousness and presumption, Morrow cannot allow herself much lèse-majesté with Lincoln. Even when we learn about his amalgamation of “ruthlessness,” “sweetness,” and “patience,” we hear of these things, as Lincoln does, from an analytical speech made by Mary.
One authorial approach has been to present Lincoln as the secondary character in a novel that nominally belongs to someone else. Mary Lincoln is the protagonist of Irving Stone’s “Love Is Eternal” (1954), an overdecorated but non-flimsy piece of historical fiction, its author in command of his material even when he’s unable to animate it. In Stone’s telling, the Lincolns’ relationship remains close and conspiratorial for longer than it probably did, and the husband—ambitious, often defeated, and melancholy—can be neglectful of his wife. When Willie dies, after making a saintly last request (“Dr. Gurley, please give the money in my savings bank to the missionary society for the Sunday school”), the President’s grief, with Mary as its springboard, reaches loftily toward the war dead: “ ‘It’s not only Willie, it’s all those boys on the battlefields . . . Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, others to come . . . dying so senselessly, so needlessly.’ ”
The underrated Stephen Harrigan uses a version of Stone’s technique, with more sophistication, in “A Friend of Mr. Lincoln” (Knopf), published early last year. An invented character, the poet Cage Weatherby, serves as a sort of Nick Carraway to a rising and rather slippery Lincoln during his early days in New Salem and Springfield. Harrigan’s future President remains believably enigmatic to both the ostensible protagonist and the reader. By deciding not to get too close, Harrigan effects a tentative advance toward greater, if still speculative, understanding. The shrewd, careful talker he presents, ethically ambiguous but credibly breathing, feels very much an extension of the epistolary Lincoln. This is how we see him in a moment of Weatherby’s close-third-person anger: “Here was a man who would happily fill every newspaper in Illinois with anonymous attacks upon political enemies, who had nimbly avoided time and again taking any sort of meaningful stand on slavery, whose moral self-evidence made his endless partisan fights over internal improvements and specie payments and tariffs nothing but puzzling distractions.”
Through Weatherby’s monocular lens, Harrigan achieves with Lincoln’s early career something of what Gore Vidal accomplished with his Presidency in “Lincoln” (1984). In that novel, the crucial points of view radiate from apostles and antagonists instead of Lincoln himself. Willie’s deathbed is projected to us through the eyes of John Hay, another of the President’s secretaries. Amid Mary’s “eerie keening, addressed to the underworld itself,” Lincoln pulled back the sheet:
He was recommending a strategic feint, a mental foray into the future in order to avoid a present reckoning.
As recently as 2014, Jerome Charyn tried to avoid adding to the sonorous Lincolns of fiction and film with a novel, “I Am Abraham,” that sometimes lurches into an overcompensating rusticity and doubles down vocally by presenting all four hundred and forty-nine pages in the first person. “I didn’t take kindly to him monsieuring me,” Lincoln thinks of a cosmopolite’s greeting. “I felt every bit a backwoodsman, and it threw me off the mark.” Making Lincoln sound a little like Asa Trenchard, in “Our American Cousin,” may save him from his repeated fictional fate of talking like a marble statue, but Charyn’s depiction ends up being only dully daring. He does, though, appear to anticipate Saunders’s Bardo battles when Lincoln looks into his dying son’s blue eyes: “I could feel the Almighty lurking in that pitiless color, as my son was wrassling with the angels.”
If the posthumous Lincoln, like the crucified Christ, seems to say noli me tangere to the novelist, Saunders has both followed and boldly violated the admonition. Narrative indirection, the time-honored choice, often governs “Lincoln in the Bardo,” as when Saunders clips dozens of different and sometimes contradictory sources to handle Lincoln’s physical description:
But he also elects to venture into Lincoln’s awareness and perceptions, and, when he does, it’s an all-in enterprise, a physical incursion undertaken not only to extract characterizing thoughts but also to influence them. After Lincoln says, hesitantly, of Willie’s remains, “Absent that spark, this, this lying here, is merely—,” the inserted shade of Hans Vollman orders, “Think it. Go ahead. Allow yourself to think that word.” A tremendous struggle for Willie, one with effects worthy of a Tim Burton movie, still lies ahead—“demonic beings” will soon trap him inside a stubborn carapace—but when his father lets go, accepts the boy’s death and helps to usher his spirit to a real afterlife, the consequences are world-shaping. Vollman and Roger Bevins perceive a Lincoln who now fully understands and embraces suffering, and feels a new bloody-minded determination to win the war.
The historical evidence for such cause and effect is debatable. David Donald asserts something like the opposite in his biography: “At about the time of Willie’s death Lincoln’s optimism about military affairs also began to vanish.” But Saunders is giving us an imaginative truth in keeping with a number of startling and benevolent short stories he has written, ones that end with characters reaching a low point and then pulling themselves back up. Vollman and Bevins, momentarily conjoined with Lincoln, may know that all three men are guilty of “wishful thinking” about a galvanized President, but all are equally certain of the wishing’s necessity:
These are the voices of fiction, not history, but they are also the voices of history still having to be made, with whatever hopelessness, in whatever time. ♦
