`He is Crafty'

On linguistic grounds, I resent an invitation to a place called 3-2-1 Bounce. A plague of whimsicality is loose in the land. On Sunday I met a couple with a kid named “Caden,” and I still don’t know the child’s gender. My 5-year-old (“David,” by the way) was invited to a classmate’s birthday party in a warehouse equipped with inflatable playthings resembling Claes Oldenburg’s trash. Birthday parties have become as ritualized as a Japanese tea ceremony: For an hour the kids run around, then spend another hour eating cake and ice cream, and whining. Then it’s time for dinner, which they won’t eat, and more whining. Everyone is miserable, in particular the birthday boy. Normally, I sit with the other parents throughout the ordeal and commiserate. This time, I drove home and read Jacques Barzun’s essay “Lincoln the Literary Artist” (collected in A Jacques Barzun Reader), at the suggestion of Dave Lull.

Two aspects of Lincoln’s literary gift are of interest: Its ongoing neglect by thoughtful common readers and others who ought to know better, and its unlikely appearance in a man who entered the world with few advantages (reminiscent, in music, of Louis Armstrong). Rigidly categorized thinking accounts for much of the first. Who today, after decades of entrenched mediocrity in American public life, can conceive of a president writing like an angel? Writers write and politicians -- well, politicians spend money and blithely ignore what is best for the nation. Here’s a favorite example of Lincoln’s concision and vitriol, cited by Barzun, from a telegram written to General McClellan:

“I have just read your despatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”

For sheer pugnacity, the note recalls Harry Truman. I’m also reminded of Anthony McAuliffe’s famously pithy reply to the German demand for surrender during the Battle of the Bulge: “Nuts!” Straight talk, at least until recently, was an acknowledged American tradition. So is Barnumesque buncombe. Here’s Barzun’s gloss on Lincoln as literary artist:

“…his style, the plain, undecorated language in which he addresses posterity, is no mere knack with words. It is the manifestation of a mode of thought, of an outlook which colors every act of the writer’s and tells us how he rated life. Only let his choice of words, the rhythm and shape of his utterances, linger in the ear, and you begin to feel as he did – hence to discern unplumbed depths in the quiet intent of a conscious artist.”

Barzun might be speaking of a poet, which Lincoln was, under the sway of Lord Byron, as a young man. He could be swooningly romantic and as funny as Byron in Don Juan. It shouldn’t surprise us, though it does, that some of our finest presidents were excellent writers – Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt -- and so was one of the worst: Ulysses S. Grant. Barzun draws an implicit comparison between artists and statesmen:

“The artist contrives means and marshals forces that the beholder takes for granted and that the bungler never discovers for himself. The artist is always scheming to conquer his material and his audience. When we speak of his craft, we mean quite literally that he is crafty.”

I have not read deeply in Barzun’s work but whenever I return to it, I regret my negligence. His prose has clarity and vigor. His thinking is logical and skeptical of accepted ideas. What Barzun writes in “William Hazlitt” (excerpted from From Dawn to Decadence) applies as well to himself and, with qualifications, Lincoln:

“…in whatever his mind lights on, Hazlitt finds the deep source of the matter and traces its implications and ramifications; he sees how the event, the impulse, or the vision took shape; he relates what is there to other parts of the same work, to the work of others, to the author’s life, to life in general, to his own life. It is not analysis, it is judgment encompassing its object, leaving it whole and illuminated.”