Another's Civil War

Taking the briefest of breaks from my Lincoln reading, before taking on the newest full biography, A. Lincoln, by Ronald C. White Jr. (to be released January 13th,) I turned to Walt Whitman tonight, and his experience of the War, it's devastation's and losses, personal and public.   A new book, Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, by Robert Roper, tells not only of the great poet, but of his family, and in particular two younger brothers who fought in the war.  It is a valuable story, and well told by Roper.

Like most American families, Whitman's was deeply effected by their experience of the War.  Unlike most American families though, the Whitman family had a genius among them.  While the letters, largely unknown to me before, exchanged between the brothers and with their mother and reproduced here, are poignant and very interesting, it is of course to Walt and his poems that one turns to find their experiences, and the experience of our people, memorialized in unforgettable verse.

And Walt Whitman's own experience, nursing and caring for, and genuinely coming to love the soldiers he met in the army hospitals he visited every day, as detailed in an earlier and wonderful book, The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War, by Roy Morris Jr., produced in Whitman, our greatest poet, some of his greatest, and most heartfelt work.

So tonight I find myself reading and rereading Whitman's poems.  And one poem, "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," haunts me as I see our soldiers again in war; young, older, even my age, and for the most part never seen but in a formal photograph, in uniform, in the paper when they die.  Here is Whitman's poem:

A Sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunk about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step -- and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third -- a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you -- I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here he again lies.  

Lincoln Q & A

Back in 2000, Gerald J. Prokopowicz published All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio 1861 - 1862. Now that is exactly the kind of Civil War title I actively avoid; military history, narrowly focused, the kind of title marketed to Civil War "buffs." Well, I'm no kind of war buff. Having read Shelby Foote's 3 volumes, I really have no interest in reading other titles on the subject. And yet...

I think someone gave me the Prokopowicz. I don't remember how long I had it. Finally, one very long weekend, for want of other history to read, I picked it up and read it straight through. It is not a brief book. It was, however, a fascinating story, crowded with well-intentioned disaster, interesting men, and beautifully told.

Now Professor Prokopowicz has done another very good thing indeed. Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln, from the Vintage Civil War Library, has just been published and, as the title explains, it does a great service by answering all the questions, large and small, that tend to needle readers, teachers and anyone interested in Lincoln. Well illustrated, well organized, and well written, it is, at only $14.95, a considerable resource for so reasonable a price. Drop into it anywhere, and you're likely find something you either didn't know, couldn't remember or never thought to explain with such brevity and sense.

Taking an Old Friend to Bed

Opening to an essay called "My Books," I find the following:

"Sitting, last winter, among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me; to wit, a table of high piled books at my back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet; I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books, -- how I loved them, too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them."

I love Leigh Hunt.  He makes me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them.  I'm taking my Essays of Leigh Hunt upstairs with me now, to read a bit more before I go to sleep.

Happy New Year! -- from Charles Lamb

A favorite I reread every year at this time, for obvious reasons, is Charles Lamb's classic essay "New Year's Eve." I'd tell you to buy it, but the latest reprint of Lamb's Essays has never come back despite repeated attempts to reorder.

So instead, I offer a link to the essay online:

http://www.angelfire.com/nv/mf/elia1/newyears.htm

" -- And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters"

William Lee Miller's Lincoln

William Lee Miller is my favorite living American historian. If you don't know him, you should. His book from 1998, Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress won the D. B. Hardeman Prize for the best book about Congress and is a book I've read and reread. I've read a good deal about John Quincy Adams, including the latest biography by Joseph Wheelan, Mr. Adams Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress, which is a fine book, but I've never read a better book on Adams than William Lee Miller's. (It's available for order now as a "Lightning Print" book -- this means a book that can be ordered, prepaid and nonreturnable from the distributor. This is a newish thing in publishing that keeps titles available that would otherwise go out of print.)

Miller has written -- to date -- two books on Lincoln. Neither is a straight-forward biography, they are instead profound considerations of Lincoln as a statesman and moral force in our history.

The first, Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, traces Lincoln's development as a politician and political thinker, using a close reading of what Lincoln actually said and wrote to create one of the most thoughtful portraits I've ever read, not of a Great Man, but of a man who became great.


The second, only now out in paperback, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, shows how Lincoln, as President, transformed both himself and the office to become our greatest President since Washington.

William Lee Miller is a national treasure; politically engaged, a teacher of great reputation, a writer of great verve and wit, an ethicist and an historian of truly remarkable gifts. I can think of no one better qualified to explore the true nature of Abraham Lincoln and his unique place in our history.

A Quote From a Friend for Another

Supper's done, and good it was too.  Just the two of us to eat it this year, so a quiet day, but a very pleasant one.  Each with his own book, the Christmas tree lit and still fragrant, my eye wanders to the cards arrayed before the fireplace.  (Lovely cards, from lovely people -- and the dentist, but such a nice card it was kept with the others.)  Cards from the four corners, or nearly so, certainly from far and near.  On this one two lovely kittens curled together.  I've met them myself and was glad to find them come to visit in an envelope the other day.  Another card from an old friend, an old man now, old even when I knew him better.  Now his hand's grown as light and spidery as a cobweb, but still that penmanship I envy.  And another and another... 

We were remiss this year, due to the weather mostly.  So many cards we didn't send, and yet the cards came to us none the less.  I'm so glad of them.  

One in particular I take up again.  It is the usual kind of family photo: mother, child and father.  The little girl, sweet Cecelia, is so beautiful, her father, my friend, so obviously proud, her small hand 'round his neck.  She is so beautiful that I wish, again tonight, her uncle, my dearest friend Peter, had lived to see her.  I saw her only once, when she was but a baby still, but I've loved her since and love her still, for her father's sake and for Peter's.

Christmas is for me in the company of my friends; present and absent, near and far.  So for a friend I turn to Charles Lamb.  He was a good friend to many in his lifetime and is still to me and to any reader lucky enough to find him.  Opening a book of essays I find the following, and offer it tonight as a gift to my friends, big and little; to shy Blix, and to bright Sam, to angelic Cecelia... and in memory of the man who loved Christmas best, and children ever, my dearest friend Pete, who sadly never saw his niece, and died with his own childhood still in his eyes.  

"I know not whether it be the dotage of age coming over me, but when I see or think of these little beings, I feel as a child again, my heart warms to them, I enter into their joys and sorrows, their pastimes and their thousand imaginings; and I fancy I could fly a kite or wield a bat with the best of them; nor is any thing more refreshing to me after much intercourse with the heartlessness and affectation of the world, than the society of intelligent and amiable children."

-- from Holiday Children, "by an Old Boy," Charles Lamb

Remembering Phyllis McGinley... More Snowbound Reading

Do you remember the American poet Phyllis McGinley?  No less a poet than W. H. Auden wrote a foreword to her collected poems.  She's gone out of print, as the saying goes, but that is no reflection on her.  Do please search out her books.  She is a consistent delight.

She was born in 1905 in Ontario, Oregon and died in 1978, in New York City.  In between she married, moved to the then new "suburbs," raised children and wrote some of the best light verse of the last century.

Herewith, a Christmas favorite from 1948.

What Every Woman Knows

When Little boys are able

  To comprehend the flaws

In their December fable

  And part with Santa Claus,

Although I do not think they grieve,

How burningly they disbelieve!

They cannot wait, they cannot rest

For knowledge nibbling at the breast.

They cannot rest, they cannot wait

To set conniving parents straight.

Branding that comrade as a dunce

Who trusts the saint they trusted once,

With rude guffaw and facial spasm

They publish their iconoclasm,

And find particularly shocking

The thought of hanging up a stocking.

But little girls (no blinder

  When faced by mortal fact)

Are cleverer and kinder

  And brimming full of tact.

The knowingness of little girls

Is hidden underneath their curls.

Obligingly, since parents fancy

The season's tinsel necromancy,

They take some pains to make pretense

Of duped and eager innocence.

Agnostics born but Bernhardts bred,

They hang the stocking by the bed,

Make plans, and pleasure their begetters

By writing Santa lengthy letters.

Only too well aware the fruit

Is shinier plunder, richer loot.

For little boys are rancorous

  When robbed of any myth,

And spiteful and cantankerous

  To all their kin and kith.

But little girls can draw conclusions

And profit from their lost illusions.

Books I'd Recommend If They Were Still In Print

New feature!

This weekend I found a copy of Farragan's Retreat at The Couth Buzzard. (We will miss you, Buzzard.) I've been looking for some Tom McHale for a little while—ever since I read a piece by Richard Grayson on him on Filthy Habits (neé Return of the Reluctant) a while back. That appreciation is no longer there, but Matthew St. Amand has some stuff to say.

Sixty pages in, and I'm really enjoying it. And I'd love to tell you to read it. And tell you to pick up a copy here at University Book Store. And all that.

But the book is out of print. (Of course, University Book Store now buys USED books. Not just textbooks through the BuyBack program. We have people looking for used and rare trade/general/whatever you want to call them books as well. We just don't have a copy of this one, yet.)

The book concerns a father whose son is a dodging the Vietnam war draft. Arthur Farragan (said father) is being pressured by his siblings to chase the son up to Montreal and kill him for besmirching the family name—among the son's crimes are his open letter of apology to Ho Chi Minh, and his avoidance of a war that has taken the life of one cousin and the arm of another.

Really smart book. Someone should bring it back.

What about you? Do you have any favorite out-of-print books you'd like to recommend? Let's start a list.

UPDATE:

Ed commented to direct me to the Filthy Habits archived article on McHale by Grayson. Thanks, Ed! I did a lousy, cursory job searching for it.