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?
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?