All Too Brief a Life -- Two brief Lives of Lincoln

I'm a big fan of brief lives. From Plutarch's Lives to Johnson's Lives of the Poets, to the wonderful Penguin Lives. I've been collecting the Penguins since they started the series. It is exactly the kind of project that hooks me every time; famous contemporary authors picking their own subjects and then writing a short biography. Because of the quality of the authors and the writing, I've read Penguin Lives of everyone from Elvis Presley, by Bobbie Ann Mason, to Pope John XXIII, by Thomas Cahill. Thomas Keneally, the Australian novelist, author of Schindler's Ark, wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln for the series. And a good book it is too.

Now James M. McPherson, the preeminent American historian of the Civil War, has written a brief life of Lincoln for the Oxford University Press. McPherson's Abraham Lincoln: A Presidential Life is everything a brief life should be; concise, accurate, carefully written, and at only 65 pages plus notes, a genuinely brief life. Priced at only $12.95 in hardcover, it is the easiest Lincoln to hand to anyone expressing an interest in the 16th President, no matter how limited the time the time of the reader.

Procrastinating in the New Year

I intended to greet the New Year here last night, first thing after our private celebrations, but I didn't get to this until tonight.  And now it's already late again, and I find I don't have the book I wanted to use so that I might start the year with an appropriate quote.  Typical.  What have I done with all of today?!

The truth is, as the New Year came quietly in, I've been reading Samuel Johnson.  Not always an easy thing to do, not, as has so often been suggested, because of Johnson's stately style, but because I have access to so little of Johnson's actual work.  I have a little, two-volume edition of The Lives of the Poets, from the wonderful Oxford World Classics -- long out of print.  I have an anthology from 1964 called A Johnson Reader, from the editors that did my edition of the Dictionary, or who, rather, excerpted entertaining bits therefrom.  Both the Reader & the Dictionary are likewise out of print.  But reading Peter Martin's  Samuel Johnson: A Biography, and finding a reference to an essay from The Rambler, #134 on procrastination, I naturally wanted that particular essay -- but I don't own it.

The anecdote from the biography told of how Johnson wrote this essay, amusingly enough, "hastily" at a friend's house, the boy from the press standing by, waiting for copy.

How could I not want that essay, written under those circumstances?

Well, it's not in any book I own, because I've never been able to find, or afford the kind of Samuel Johnson books I want.  I've looked at the Yale edition of The Rambler online, but a full run of all nine volumes sells for, at least, seven hundred and fifty dollars!  I'm about to spend eight hundred dollars repairing my car.  I think that that will have to come first.  (When, oh when, well I ever get an edition of the complete Rambler of my own?!  I'm greedy for more of Sam J.)

It's getting later and later, so should I just put off my first blog of the year until the 2nd?

Finding Johnson's essay online, I find this in the first paragraph:

"...I grew every moment more irresolute, my ideas wandered from the first intention, and I rather wished to think, than thought upon any settled subject; till at last I was awakened from this dream of study by a summons from the press: the time was come for which I had been negligently purposing to provide, and, however dubious or sluggish, I was necessitated to write."

Comrade!!

The New Standard of David Herbert Donald

What makes a biography the “standard life?” Most obviously, if the biography eventually eclipses the subject in fame – think of Boswell’s Johnson – then all subsequent biographies, no matter the additional information they contain, or the quality of the writing – and again Samuel Johnson comes first to mind – will always be something less than the standard. Generally though, if the fame of the subject is sustained across generations, then each generation will produce a new standard life to replace those that preceded it. And here no better example exists than the biographers of Abraham Lincoln.

From Nicolay & Hay in 1890, to Ida Tarbell in 1900, to Beveredge, to Sandburg, to James G. Randall, our 16th President has never lacked a standard life in print for each passing generation.

So what makes David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln the standard life for our times? First, Donald had access to the Lincoln Papers, which previous biographers did not. As a result of the materials available to him, but perhaps more importantly, because of the man who emerged from those sources, Donald’s portrait is of a very different, and much more accessibly modern man than the one we know from the earlier portraits.

I’ll let Donald (from his preface,) speak for himself:

“In focusing closely on Lincoln himself – on what he knew, when he knew it, and why he made his decisions – I have, I think, produced a portrait rather different from that of other biographers. It is perhaps a bit more grainy than most, with more attention to his unquenchable ambition, to his brain-numbing labor in his law practice, to his tempestuous married life, and to his defeats. It suggests how often chance, or accident, played a determining role in shaping his life. And it emphasizes his enormous capacity for growth, which enabled one of the least experienced and most poorly prepared men ever elected to high office to become the greatest American President.”

David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln is still our Lincoln, but in the hands of this extraordinary historian and biographer, Abraham Lincoln is once again his own man as well; flawed, sad, brilliant and profoundly human.

I will NOT buy another book about Samuel Johnson... okay, maybe I will

There are two new, well reviewed, biographies of Doctor Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson. This is marvelous news -- if I didn't already own half a dozen biographies of same. What to do?

Now the curious thing about Sam Johnson is that he is, of course, the subject of the greatest biography in the English language: James Boswell's Life. I own two editions of this (that I remember;) an Everyman's Library edition and a six volume edition, edited by Augustine Birrell, from 1901 that I've painfully had to "restore" at least twice, having read it almost to bits. In addition, though it's out-of-print, there is the almost equally wonderful memoir of Johnson's great friend and last love Hester Thrale Piozzi.

Not enough though. I own two delightful out-of-print books by James Lowry Clifford; Young Sam Johnson and Dictionary Johnson, both worth finding and reading still, Liz Picard's book on Johnson's London, and on and on...

So why contemplate reading and buying two more? Well, Jeffrey Meyer's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle may prove too juicy not to want to swallow whole. I took it to lunch yesterday and took a bite or two. I looked up Oliver Goldsmith in the index -- my first rule when considering a book about Johnson and his circle is always to check the biographer's attitude to sweet, silly, brilliant Goldsmith -- anyone who doesn't love Goldy is no friend of mine. Good rule. Meyers passed. I then moved on to read the bits about Johnson's sexual peculiarities that are getting Meyers so much press.

Shocking, my dears, wonderfully, delightfully shocking. And touching. And, damn, now I think I have to own the Meyers.

Today for lunch I'm having a slice or two of Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography. Recommended by Harold Bloom (oh dear,) but also by Henry Hitchings, who wrote a very good book I also own, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book That Defined the World. I read Martin's introduction, and now, I fear, I may have to have this one too.

What's wrong with that?! I will have to try and sneak them home if I do, as I'm already being frowned at in that quarter for the haul I brought home on Employee Shopping Days.

But this is Dr. Johnson! How can I not? Right?! right?