Newspaper Article

TALKING WITH / RICHARD SLOTKIN / Imagining Abe Lincoln

Benjamin Kunkel. Benjamin Kunkel is a writer in New York

2000

Overview

PEOPLE OFTEN ADVISE writers to write what they know. Richard Slotkin goes them one better: He writes what he has a PhD in. The author of Abe [Lincoln]: A Novel of the Young Lincoln (Henry Holt & Co., $27.50) is also a professor of history at Wesleyan University whose scholarly studies of the mythology of the American frontier have received two National Book Award nominations. \"Abe,\" which is Slotkin's third novel, does have its scholarly component: The only path to the forests of frontier Indiana is through the library. For his book, Slotkin says, he researched \"what newspapers people were reading, what kind of slang was in use, what ginseng roots were selling for in New Orleans-everything, the works.\" \"Abe\" offers us a Lincoln who has not yet submitted his emotions to discipline and diplomacy. Slotkin's Lincoln is prone not only to his famous melancholy, but to bouts of frightening, nearly murderous rage. When Abe \"whups\" a young man who has been bullying his stepbrother, the surrounding crowd sees in Lincoln \"a Thing there was no stopping nor pleading with, a Thing huge and raging, face of bone eyes of mica, No man gets vurry far in this life if he can't kill a man when he needs to.\" At length, of course, this Thing of righteous anger will lead to the Civil War and will bear out John Brown's prophecy that \"the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.\" It takes fiction rather than history to examine this angry young man. \"I've speculated about the sort of thing a scholarly or analytic biographer wouldn't spend much time on,\" Slotkin says. Not only was Lincoln rather guarded about his childhood, but \"as a grown man, he was passionate about repressing emotions. Because he protests so much, I believe he must have had some very powerful emotions to control. The fact that as a grown man he refused to go to his father's deathbed tells me that he was capable of a deep and abiding anger.\" In \"Abe,\" Lincoln thinks of life under his father's thumb as \"The Kingdom of Pap,\" a preserve of the sort of irrational and unaccountable authority that it is the job of enlightened Republican government to overcome. Pap even forces Abe to wrestle strangers in order to lay bets on him: \"The way Pap done things didn't set right. He ought to have asked Abe did he want to.\"

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