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Maybe to the top of that hill
I meant to post this earlier today, but somehow an unexpected quantity of my time went toward things like shoveling (and watching the men's figure skating, all right? It's one of the few Olympic sports I follow). It was not quite the snowpocalypse we were promised, but certainly a respectable late-winter storm. Fortunately, I also got around to making ginger cookies from a new recipe: molasses and black pepper.
On Monday, for President's Day, I went with my family to see John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) at the Harvard Film Archive. It's one of the most interesting biopics I have seen in either years or ever—it is a piece of pure mythmaking, but not hagiography. I do not mean that it's revisionist of Lincoln. As played by Henry Fonda (who I never knew could look so gawky and so indissolubly alone), the thirty-four-year-old Lincoln is honest, intellectual, profoundly moral and profoundly troubled by a world in which lynchings are the sport of righteous citizens and the veterans of old wars are merely an excuse to get blotto on moonshine and set some tar barrels afire. He moves within an atmosphere of silence, out of which he gathers simple words and speaks them directly. No extrovert, he looks most comfortable reading in various undignified positions, his long legs angled up a tree or propped out the window of his law office; he has a habit of settling, cranelike, on stairs or doorsills. But he's not a naïf. He's not a holy fool. He's not the second coming of John Brown. He is gangly and (famously by the standards of the 1830's) unhandsome, self-educated, an effortful fingernail up from dirt poor, and never unaware of his status as an outsider; his direct, folksy charm is genuine and it is also a learned behavior. It is very likely that he is frighteningly more intelligent than anyone who shares a floor with him, a fact which opponents overlook at their own risk—and yet they do, consistently, until the last moments of the trial reveal just how many steps ahead of the game this skinny self-deprecating lawyer always is. And he's no good at courtship behaviors. He waltzes like a paralytic yak.1 He gets out of a game of tug-of-war by cheating, unconcernedly wandering off with the leftovers of the pie-judging contest and another book. There is a line about slavery that is jawdropping if you are expecting the Great Emancipator. If the film is a portrait of a great man, it's a splintery one; and I thought it was wonderful.
Its only misstep, for me, came at the very end. I thought it was going to close, after a flash of summer lightning, on the image of the young Lincoln moving off right—into history—as the rain looses in a curtain around him, the eye of the storm that will encompass the Civil War and presently his own shattering death; but instead "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" rose up from the soundtrack and the rainy absence of a living man was replaced by the whited sepulchre of the Lincoln Memorial: the concrete legend, deified by his truth is marching on. And after ninety-eight minutes of a three-dimensional person, whatever resemblance he bore to the actual Abraham Lincoln, I really felt the last two had missed the point. But it was this abiding annoyance with the last scene which enabled me, hours later, to identify the aspect of the movie (aside from the fact that it was excellent: in a different year, Henry Fonda might have taken an Oscar for his performance) that made me respond so instinctively to it. Biographical films fictionalize their subjects all the time. But they usually do so within conventions: a love interest, a hard-knock hero's journey, a glossing of less sympathetic or more contradictory traits, etc. etc. and so forth. Young Mr. Lincoln does none of this. It creates a fictitious event in consonance with the historical character—an untried lawyer's against-the-odds defense of two brothers accused of murdering a deputy sheriff of Springfield, IL; the central legal trick is drawn from a case Lincoln defended in 1858, but the rest is straight out of Lamar Trotti's head—and the result is nothing like Amistad (1997) or Inherit the Wind (1960) so much as it is like The Sword in the Stone (1938). It's an entirely invented prologue to a narrative so well-known, it does not even need to be alluded to.2 And so what I think Ford is doing is actually engaging with Lincoln as an American myth: and as we all know from experience, a myth can be retold. Again, this is not the same as historical revisionism. The film doesn't mine back through deposits of tradition, it doesn't contradict the prevailing image; for all the humanity he and Fonda reflect into their subject, Ford isn't interested in discovering the "real" Lincoln. But that's not a failing, unless you're prepared to say the same against Mary Stewart for her Merlin of The Crystal Cave (1970). I'm not sure how often I've seen this approach to American history; or at least consciously, God knows there are enough myths freighted to this country. But here it works beautifully, and now I'm not surprised that no one has done a movie biography of Lincoln since. It would have to be something entirely different. And it might still be in the shadow of a jack-legged lawyer from Kentucky, walking to the top of that hill, out of this world.
1. He is told afterward by Marjorie Weaver's Mary Todd, "Mr. Lincoln, at least you're a man of honor. You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you've kept your word. That's the worst way I've ever seen."
2. Hence the real problem with the closing shot of Lincoln's statue: we don't need it. As our single presentiment of the future, the storm is enough.
On Monday, for President's Day, I went with my family to see John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) at the Harvard Film Archive. It's one of the most interesting biopics I have seen in either years or ever—it is a piece of pure mythmaking, but not hagiography. I do not mean that it's revisionist of Lincoln. As played by Henry Fonda (who I never knew could look so gawky and so indissolubly alone), the thirty-four-year-old Lincoln is honest, intellectual, profoundly moral and profoundly troubled by a world in which lynchings are the sport of righteous citizens and the veterans of old wars are merely an excuse to get blotto on moonshine and set some tar barrels afire. He moves within an atmosphere of silence, out of which he gathers simple words and speaks them directly. No extrovert, he looks most comfortable reading in various undignified positions, his long legs angled up a tree or propped out the window of his law office; he has a habit of settling, cranelike, on stairs or doorsills. But he's not a naïf. He's not a holy fool. He's not the second coming of John Brown. He is gangly and (famously by the standards of the 1830's) unhandsome, self-educated, an effortful fingernail up from dirt poor, and never unaware of his status as an outsider; his direct, folksy charm is genuine and it is also a learned behavior. It is very likely that he is frighteningly more intelligent than anyone who shares a floor with him, a fact which opponents overlook at their own risk—and yet they do, consistently, until the last moments of the trial reveal just how many steps ahead of the game this skinny self-deprecating lawyer always is. And he's no good at courtship behaviors. He waltzes like a paralytic yak.1 He gets out of a game of tug-of-war by cheating, unconcernedly wandering off with the leftovers of the pie-judging contest and another book. There is a line about slavery that is jawdropping if you are expecting the Great Emancipator. If the film is a portrait of a great man, it's a splintery one; and I thought it was wonderful.
Its only misstep, for me, came at the very end. I thought it was going to close, after a flash of summer lightning, on the image of the young Lincoln moving off right—into history—as the rain looses in a curtain around him, the eye of the storm that will encompass the Civil War and presently his own shattering death; but instead "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" rose up from the soundtrack and the rainy absence of a living man was replaced by the whited sepulchre of the Lincoln Memorial: the concrete legend, deified by his truth is marching on. And after ninety-eight minutes of a three-dimensional person, whatever resemblance he bore to the actual Abraham Lincoln, I really felt the last two had missed the point. But it was this abiding annoyance with the last scene which enabled me, hours later, to identify the aspect of the movie (aside from the fact that it was excellent: in a different year, Henry Fonda might have taken an Oscar for his performance) that made me respond so instinctively to it. Biographical films fictionalize their subjects all the time. But they usually do so within conventions: a love interest, a hard-knock hero's journey, a glossing of less sympathetic or more contradictory traits, etc. etc. and so forth. Young Mr. Lincoln does none of this. It creates a fictitious event in consonance with the historical character—an untried lawyer's against-the-odds defense of two brothers accused of murdering a deputy sheriff of Springfield, IL; the central legal trick is drawn from a case Lincoln defended in 1858, but the rest is straight out of Lamar Trotti's head—and the result is nothing like Amistad (1997) or Inherit the Wind (1960) so much as it is like The Sword in the Stone (1938). It's an entirely invented prologue to a narrative so well-known, it does not even need to be alluded to.2 And so what I think Ford is doing is actually engaging with Lincoln as an American myth: and as we all know from experience, a myth can be retold. Again, this is not the same as historical revisionism. The film doesn't mine back through deposits of tradition, it doesn't contradict the prevailing image; for all the humanity he and Fonda reflect into their subject, Ford isn't interested in discovering the "real" Lincoln. But that's not a failing, unless you're prepared to say the same against Mary Stewart for her Merlin of The Crystal Cave (1970). I'm not sure how often I've seen this approach to American history; or at least consciously, God knows there are enough myths freighted to this country. But here it works beautifully, and now I'm not surprised that no one has done a movie biography of Lincoln since. It would have to be something entirely different. And it might still be in the shadow of a jack-legged lawyer from Kentucky, walking to the top of that hill, out of this world.
1. He is told afterward by Marjorie Weaver's Mary Todd, "Mr. Lincoln, at least you're a man of honor. You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you've kept your word. That's the worst way I've ever seen."
2. Hence the real problem with the closing shot of Lincoln's statue: we don't need it. As our single presentiment of the future, the storm is enough.
no subject
I have the Criterion edition of Young Mr. Lincoln, but like too much else in my collection, haven't seen it yet; it's queued up with the handful of other Ford films I have, biding. But during 2008 I read portions of three or four Lincoln biographies, and mean to return to and finish all of them. I was most moved and instructed by William Lee Miller's Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography (2002): Lincoln seems to have developed the uncanny gift at an early age to see himself and his fellows with abnormal clarity, to understand where he stood in relation to his own beliefs and perceptions and in relation to those of others and never to confuse the two, to truly keep his own counsel -- and what counsel! And having written the foregoing sentence I can only consider it woefully inadequate to capture the core and nuance of Lincoln's character or of Miller's portrait. But your description of Ford and Fonda's portrayal of Lincoln resonates perfectly with Miller's, or so it seems to me, variably removed, and if they were not seeking to portray the "real" Lincoln it may well be they manged to do so anyway, or nearly enough, at least at the ultimately crucial characterological level. As for the seemingly inappropriate ending, I was struck with the thought that the transition from three-dimensionality to two does accurately mimic the nature of the transition from Lincoln's actuality as a human being, as a soul, to the malleable, changeful, myth-inflated, myth-flattened character we are now forever (mostly but not entirely) left with. I am grateful for recent biographers, who do seem to be doing a fine job of carving away the layers of myth, or errant myth, that mires the man; but of course all those layers only and instantly re-accrue, in the larger public sphere as in most minds. Still the thoughtful can find something a little closer to briefly fill his irremediable absence.
And how did Fonda do with the voice? Did he pitch his higher, center it in his sinuses? Did it crack and squeak?
For me, speaking Lincoln's words aloud, and practicing them (with no attempt at imitating reports of how his voice sounded), was a revelatory experience. In the only video of me on YouTube, I read selections from two of Lincoln's speeches and the entirety of a third. (I have to admit, I've been pretty shy about sharing the link; though I've probably lost twenty pounds since that video was made, I'm still a big man in a culture that's often unkind to big men. Unlike Lincoln, I sometimes confuse my own beliefs and perceptions with those of others.)
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You're welcome! I was so much more impressed by the film than I expected to be. I had no particular preconception of it, but my experience of John Ford has been mixed; I love The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is not only Steinbeck, but Dorothea Lange—the Harvard Film Archive is showing it in March and I am definitely going back—but I find The Quiet Man (1952) a weird puddingstone of a movie and Stagecoach (1939) completely failed to light up my brain. Young Mr. Lincoln, however, I still seem to be thinking about.
I was most moved and instructed by William Lee Miller's Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography (2002): Lincoln seems to have developed the uncanny gift at an early age to see himself and his fellows with abnormal clarity, to understand where he stood in relation to his own beliefs and perceptions and in relation to those of others and never to confuse the two, to truly keep his own counsel -- and what counsel! And having written the foregoing sentence I can only consider it woefully inadequate to capture the core and nuance of Lincoln's character or of Miller's portrait.
Possibly, but it is a good sentence nonetheless.
But your description of Ford and Fonda's portrayal of Lincoln resonates perfectly with Miller's, or so it seems to me, variably removed, and if they were not seeking to portray the "real" Lincoln it may well be they manged to do so anyway, or nearly enough, at least at the ultimately crucial characterological level.
I will have to read Miller's biography. I have never studied Lincoln except through his writings, and even then not formally; I was given a book of his letters and speeches in grad school and I liked them.
As for the seemingly inappropriate ending, I was struck with the thought that the transition from three-dimensionality to two does accurately mimic the nature of the transition from Lincoln's actuality as a human being, as a soul, to the malleable, changeful, myth-inflated, myth-flattened character we are now forever (mostly but not entirely) left with.
But it reinforces that myth-mask, because the last image we are left with is not the face brought alive by Henry Fonda, but the one sculpted by Daniel Chester French. (Of which we have already been reminded: the low-angle shots in the courtroom show us that same stern and sorrowful, distant gaze, as if he can contemplate his own marble end.) I would have preferred the director's trust to remember either the actor or the historical figure for myself.
Still the thoughtful can find something a little closer to briefly fill his irremediable absence.
I would like to see Raymond Massey's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), which I otherwise know nothing about. Just that Massey did indeed resemble Lincoln, because every now and then Henry Fonda made me think of him. I imagine it will be more conventional, but I'm curious.
And how did Fonda do with the voice?
He reminded me frequently of John Sweet in A Canterbury Tale. Worked for me.
In the only video of me on YouTube, I read selections from two of Lincoln's speeches and the entirety of a third.
Cool! Excuse me while I go listen to that.
no subject
Makes me wonder what pressures he was under to undertake the films he did, and how those pressures changed over the course of his career.
Possibly, but it is a good sentence nonetheless.
Thank you. I felt it was too, but then I was struck by the thought that, even if true, it guaranteed nothing. Is it possible that good sentences can speak truths that exist nowhere outside their own boundaries? "In their shape is their meaning," to misquote Virginia Woolf.
I will have to read Miller's biography. I have never studied Lincoln except through his writings, and even then not formally; I was given a book of his letters and speeches in grad school and I liked them.
I look forward to reading more of Lincoln's writings. Your essay did send me back to Miller; since our exchange I've read another thirty pages of Lincoln's Virtues. I find the ways Miller parses Lincoln both illuminating and delightful. His analysis of the Temperance Address, delivered 168 years ago tomorrow (and 95 years to the day before the birth of Joanna Russ), is just jaw-dropping, and he traces a crucial parallel with Lincoln's later anti-slavery speeches: in both, Lincoln is careful to make clear his belief that his own stance, in favor of abstinence and against slavery, in no way makes him, or anyone else who shares his beliefs, morally superior to those he opposes or might hope to reform; quite the contrary. And his insistence on making that point again and again makes opponents of many who might otherwise support him.
"They are just what we would be in their situation," Lincoln says in 1854. But in 1842, speaking of drunks not slaveholders, he added a peculiar caveat: "Indeed, I believe, that if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant, and the warm-blooded, to fall into this vice. The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity." (Interesting, just as an aside, to note the presence of an unambiguously vampiric metaphor.)
To which William Lee Miller responds, not in alarm or censure but, clearly from the context and his tone throughout, with the most delighted mimicry of the horrified whispers that no doubt broke out in Lincoln's audience:
"What? What? What is that young politician saying up there in front of the crowd of temperance advocates in the Second Presbyterian Church? Not only that we nondrinkers don't get any moral credit for superiority -- but that (can this be?) drunkards are not only like the rest of us but better? More brilliant, more warm-blooded, more generous? Can it be that he is saying that?"
Indeed! No wonder that I grow to love Lincoln, and am grateful to have Miller among my guides to his life and thought. (I should mention that Miller's is a two-volume biography; the first takes us to the brink of Lincoln's presidency; the second is President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, and it was this that I started reading first, and found so fine that I postponed it to seek out the earlier work.)
I would have preferred the director's trust to remember either the actor or the historical figure for myself.
I don't doubt you're quite right; however defensible a choice it may or may not have been, it seems more was lost than gained by it.
Thank you for alerting me to the John Cromwell film; both its pedigree and a glance at the reviews make it seem quite promising.
He reminded me frequently of John Sweet in A Canterbury Tale. Worked for me.
Ha! That's wonderful. And I suspect we would be entirely justified in feeling confident that Sweet saw the Ford, and may even have thought of Fonda's Lincoln when caught up in creating his own later role. Ha!
Cool! Excuse me while I go listen to that.
Thank you for that; you made me laugh in the best way. So how did I do?
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You have a good voice. I'd like to hear you read your own work sometime.
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I've never seen this movie, but now that you've mentioned it I suppose it is surprising that there are aren't many film biographies of Lincoln, and I suspect that your hypothesis might well be correct.
I hope you've enjoyed the figure skating, and that you've not had more snow to shovel. (We had none last night nor today-so-far, for which I'm grateful as it allowed me to clear the snow from under and about the one car that lives in the driveway.)
The cookies sound delicious--I often use black pepper in things like pumpkin or sweet potato bread, and there's a recipe for olive oil cookies with black pepper, red wine, and rosemary which I ought to make again sometime soon.
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There seem to have been two within a year of each other; I don't think there's been another since. IMDb indicates that Spielberg is currently working on one. With Liam Neeson. Interesting.
I hope you've enjoyed the figure skating, and that you've not had more snow to shovel.
So far, so good. Just a lot of slush to walk through.
olive oil cookies with black pepper, red wine, and rosemary which I ought to make again sometime soon.
What makes them cookies as opposed to some sort of delicious biscuit?
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Hmm, that would be interesting. I'm not sure if Liam Neeson is lanky enough for Lincoln (I've no notion how tall the man actually is, but he just doesn't have the build that I associate with Lincoln), but he's a good enough actor that I suppose he might be able to pull it off.
So far, so good. Just a lot of slush to walk through.
Better slush than some of the alternatives, I reckon. We had a little dusting of snow that fell tonight, but no accumulation worth the mention.
What makes them cookies as opposed to some sort of delicious biscuit?
Well, they're thinner than the usual American sort of biscuit, but obviously they'd be appropriately called biscuits for certain audiences.
I got the recipe from one of Mark Bittman's columns or books, and put it up a couple of years ago in this post.
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Our local NPR station did a series of interviews with biographers of Lincoln, and I caught a bit of one yesterday, with a guy who'd written a biography of, precisely, young Lincoln. I wonder if he was inspired by this film. In any case, it was fascinating: he said that Lincoln wrote very carefully and consideredly; he would spend long hours just thinking over things and jotting down notes to himself and then storing (famously) the notes in his hat (and one other place; I forget where). The biographer said that Lincoln didn't keep a diary, but that these notes were rather like a diary. He said you could see his thinking evolve over time. I'll have to go back and see what the book was...
In any case, though, the movie sounds excellent.
And your cookies with pepper sound great!
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That is very neat. Please let me know its title; I think I am taking Lincoln-related recommendations now.
And your cookies with pepper sound great!
I'll send you the recipe!
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You can hear the interview here: http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1470779§ionID=231
(It's about 16 minutes long)
no subject
It might still be good. Thanks!
In return, have some cookies:
Stir together two and a quarter cups flour, two teaspoons baking soda, a heaping teaspoon of cinnamon, a heaping teaspoon of ginger, a half-teaspoon ground cloves, a quarter-teaspoon allspice, and a quarter-teaspoon finely ground black pepper. In another large bowl, either by hand or mixer, cream one and a half sticks butter (if salted, you don't need to add a half-teaspoon salt to the dry ingredients); add one cup dark brown sugar, tightly packed, and beat well. Add one egg, a quarter-cup molasses, and beat until evenly colored. Gradually add dry ingredients, making sure to scrape the bowl between rounds, and beat only until incorporated. The dough will be extremely sticky; refrigerate ten to fifteen minutes until it can be safely handled. Roll into generous tablespoon-sized balls, roll in granulated sugar; bake for about thirteen minutes at 375° F. The cookies will flatten out noticeably, so make sure to place them at least two inches apart on the baking sheet. I found that I preferred mine at a larger size, when they baked less into gingersnaps than gingerbread, but your tastes may very; experiment with the first sheet and make them however you like after that. Eat more or less all at once.
Enjoy!
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--I do think the biography may be quite good! I liked the interview. (Just the title was boring...)
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...
These look brilliant. I'm looking forward to trying the recipe sometime in the not-too-distant future. Thanks!