Category: Books

Writing the Civil War

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features

[Boston Globe]

In this week’s Boston Globe — and exactly 150 years after the start of the Civil War — I’ve got a feature on the war’s impact on American literature. For pretty much all of those 150 years, people have been wondering why the Civil War didn’t produce any great contemporary works of literature. What gets overlooked in this is the number of great authors who did live and write during the 1860s: Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and more. The history of American war writing stretches back at least to 1638, when Captain John Underhill chronicled the Pequot War in Newes from America. I learned that in Cynthia Wachtell’s excellent War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature. Still, the focus of my feature is Randall Fuller’s From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature. Taken together, Wachtell and Fuller’s books suggest that, while the Civil War lacked a true literary masterpiece, it did clear the way for the antiwar writing we recognize today.

I want to expand on two things I didn’t have space for in my feature. First, the role of photography in the Civil War. Plenty of scholars have argued that this newish medium — notably through Mathew Brady’s 1862 gallery of Antietam — went a long way toward making the Civil War the grisly, realistic, and transformative experience it so surely was. But Fuller connects this idea to literary authors. While in Washington reporting “Chiefly About War-Matters” (the essay remains a great read and can be found here), Hawthorne sat for two visual portraits. The first (pictured above right) was a painting by none other than Emanuel Leutze, who remains best known for his Washington Crossing the Delaware and Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. The second (above left) was a photograph by Alexander Gardner, the Brady photographer who supplied many of the Antietam shots.

The contrast between these two portraits gets at how transitional this moment was for visual culture.  But it also gets at the difference between painting and photography — a difference that played out in the war coverage, where, for the first time, people could choose between the sanitized, sentimental drawings in publications like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and photographs. When the New York Times wrote up Brady’s gallery, it praised its “terrible reality and earnestness.” “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets,” the Times continued, “he has done something very like it.” Hawthorne looks a lot better with the help of Leutze. The same was true of the Civil War’s violence.

Second topic: Walt Whitman’s taste in opera. At the start of my feature, I tell the story of Whitman walking out of the opera on the night of April 13, only to learn about the attack on Fort Sumter. Scholars love this anecdote for all the obvious reasons, but they disagree on the show Whitman attended. Most say it was Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera. But a few, like Mark Caldwell, in his cultural history New York Night: The Mystique and Its History, say it was Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix. Curious, and wanting to get this right, I emailed Professor Caldwell to ask him why he went with Donizetti.  In a gracious and detailed reply, he explained that according to the listings Verdi was a matinée on April 13, while Donizetti was an evening performance on both April 12 and April 13.

Now, the news about Fort Sumter arrived in New York via telegraph on the afternoon of the 12th. This means neither show matches up perfectly with Whitman’s own account of hearing the news — an account he wrote more than a decade after the fact. Professor Caldwell told me he placed more weight on Whitman’s description of reading the news at night than on his specific mention of the 13th of April. That makes perfectly good sense. I did some more reading around — I didn’t see anyone air this debate out fully, though someone surely has — and decided to put more weight on the documented lag between telegraphs and newspapers and on Whitman’s ability to kill a few hours in Brooklyn. I hope that makes sense, too. Either way, Whitman had seen more than 20 opera performances before this one. He would have been happy with Verdi or Donizetti or both.

Reprinting Reagan

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera, Politics

I’m switching gears to work on some long-term projects, which may mean fewer story links and deleted scenes. That said, I want to keep writing regularly, so the plan is to do more short, standalone posts. They might be a little dated, but I hope they’ll also be interesting. Expect lots of presidents, publishing history, and weird-slash-strangely familiar stuff from old media sources.

So, in that spirit: while researching Jack Cashill’s crackpot theories about the real author of Barack Obama’s books, I came across the following web ad:

It seems that, in honor of Reagan’s birth centennial, Simon & Schuster has decided to reissue An American Life, his presidential memoir, in hardcover. Immediately after his death, in 2004, the publisher also rushed out a fresh batch of 10,000 copies. But this is something new. First, there’s the targeted online ad campaign. (I saw this one here.) Then there’s the brand new online book trailer. “Thousands of books have been written about Ronald Reagan’s presidency,” the trailer opens. “Only one in his own words.”

Most interesting of all, though, is Simon & Schuster’s release of a new “enhanced ebook” that combines Reagan’s text with contemporary videos. It’s a smart and relatively easy move since Simon & Schuster is now owned by the CBS Corporation, which of course owns all the news footage one would ever need. But political books often end up in these sorts of multimedia experiments. Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland was Simon & Schuster’s first “enhanced ebook,” with 27 videos interpolated into the almost 900 pages of text. Sarah Palin and Ted Kennedy’s plain old ebooks became important data points in the publishing industry’s attempts to delay ebooks in order to goose hardcover sales. And way back in 1990, for its original release, Reagan’s An American Life became the first presidential memoir audio book.

In a forthcoming academic article, I’ve got a lot more to say about Reagan’s career as an author, which is much more interesting — and much more rewarding — than you might initially think. I’ll post a .pdf of it when the journal issue comes out. Let’s hope that happens in 2011, so we can keep riding the birth centennial wave.

James Kloppenberg vs. Jack Cashill

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera, Politics

[Washington Post]

In Sunday’s Washington Post, I’ve got a long review of two books about the books of Barack Obama — James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama, which reverse-engineers the ideas in Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, and Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama, which advances his theory that Bill Ayers actually wrote Dreams. Kloppenberg’s book is pretty good. Cashill’s is pretty grotesque, and, by the end of my review, I suggest that its mere existence says some troubling things about the modern publishing industry.

Despite all that, I still don’t think my review comes down hard enough on Cashill. I say he “bends and invents evidence to fit his theories,” but lacked the space to really prove it. So let me do that here, first with a more developed example, then with a few quick hitters. I’m not trying to be pedantic, and I’m not trying to be political. But I am trying to stand up for some common standards of fact and argument and discourse — even if Cashill, and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, do not.

One thing to admire about Cashill is his comprehensiveness. It’s not enough for Ayers to have written Dreams. For Cashill, he must also have written parts of Audacity and even Obama’s famous 2002 speech against the Iraq war. I’ll run down Cashill’s reasoning on this latter point, to which he devotes an entire chapter, and put my counterarguments in bold parentheses. Cashill begins by describing Obama’s speech as cowardly and calculating. (In reality, Obama talked frankly about a “dumb war” and a “rash war.”) Cashill pauses to note that Obama praised his grandfather’s service in World War II — and that he would later assign this to an apocryphal uncle in 2008. (Here’s Cashill frantically defending Sarah Palin’s “Korea” gaffe.) Cashill also cherrypicks statistics in order to dispute Obama’s description of a struggling economy. (Obama mentions “a stock market that has just gone through the worst month [September] since the Great Depression”; Cashill counters that “the Dow Jones would gain more than 10 percent in that very October of Obama’s discontent.” Which statistic better captures the reality?) But Cashill soon gets to the business at hand: “Despite Obama’s claims to unique authorship,” he writes, “one senses a radical contribution to the speech.” What catches Cashill’s attention? The fact that Obama singles out the Defense Department’s Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz for censure — “two names in common parlance only on the hard left,” Cashill writes. (A year later, David Brooks devoted an entire column to the idea that everyone was giving Perle and Wolfowitz too much credit.) Cashill also uses the mention of Perle and Wolfowitz to implicate Ayers, who attended Obama’s speech and whom Cashill believes to be virulently antisemitic. At the end of the chapter, Cashill unveils his masterstroke: Obama later told a reporter that “it was a hard speech to give. And it was just, well, a well-constructed speech” — and in this phrasing, Cashill argues, Obama lets slip that the text “had been handed to him” by none other than Bill Ayers.

Again, this kind of nonsense saturates Cashill’s book. Let’s switch to bullet points for some of my favorite examples.

  • Cashill keys onto the word “ballast,” which Obama and Ayers both use in their memoirs. When the word is “flat-out misused” in Audacity — Obama describes religion as “a ballast against the buffeting winds of today’s headlines” — Cashill sees it as proof that Ayers has been replaced by Obama’s speechwriters. Throughout his book, Cashill makes much of Ayers’s nautical background, writing here that “no one in the know uses the phrase ‘ballast against’ in reference to a ship.” Perhaps not, but plenty of people use it in reference to “a balloon or airship” (the OED’s second definition), including Obama here.
  • For someone whose arguments depend in large part on his literary sensibility, Cashill writes quite poorly. In particular, he struggles with pacing — or, if you want to be cynical, with filling up enough pages to merit a book. At one point, Cashill spends a page on “an eye-popping documentary” about Africa, which leads to another page on his seven-year-old spat with Thomas Frank — and all this by way of introducing the reader to Sarah Palin. Even more egregious are Cashill’s frequent and lengthy asides about the editors who won’t publish him, the allies who don’t have his back, and all the usual enemies in modern conservatism’s paranoid style.
  • Speaking of those enemies: Cashill attacks a Politico reporter for taking “as gospel” David Axelrod’s defense that Obama and Ayer’s kids “attend the same school,” but never mentions that Axelrod was responding to that same reporter’s 1800-word exposé on Obama’s early relationship with Ayers — an exposé Cashill cribs from later in his book.
  • And speaking of comprehensive: I haven’t even mentioned Cashill’s most absurd arguments, such as the one that “Pop,” Obama’s youthful poem, is both by and about Frank Marshall Davis — and that the poem’s “amber stain” may allude to an act of oral sex between Obama and Davis. I could also mention that, earlier in his book, Cashill spends several pages demonstrating that Obama’s early writing sucks (it does), which makes the “Pop” theory seem superfluous. But I think I’ll just let its insanity resonate all by itself.

I also wish I had had more space to talk about Kloppenberg’s book. While Cashill would surely seize on to the New York Times report that Kloppenberg’s work has received “prolonged applause” from his fellow professors, Kloppenberg actually defends Obama from both the right and the left. (For example, Kloppenberg chastens those professors who want to see Obama’s Christianity as political calculation: “Like the overwhelming majority of Americans outside the small subculture of academic life, Obama locates the foundation of his own moral principles in his religious faith.”) Kloppenberg also outworks his conservative counterpart. Where Cashill worries about (and actually line edits) Obama’s youthful essay on nuclear protesters in the Sundial, a student publication at Columbia, Kloppenberg combines his discussion of that essay with an interview with a professor who remembered Obama writing a paper that advocated for a moderate form of nuclear nonproliferation. (Kloppenberg also digs up another Obama Sundial essay that Cashill missed.)

Still, the story here is Deconstructing Obama. Cashill’s opus should remind us that the book industry, for all its virtues, still has a lower filter than other media. Publishing doesn’t fact-check like magazines. It doesn’t possess a newsroom’s institutional culture. In fact, in each and every book contract, it puts the burden of truth (and the threat of lawsuits) on its authors. Publishers sell this as the result of limited resources, but it also means anything that sells is fit to print. Even if it’s as grotesquely padded, delusionally argued, and comprehensively paranoid as Deconstructing Obama.

Getting Wallace Right

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

The literary blogosphere’s been circulating Rebekah Frumkin’s defense of David Foster Wallace’s fiction, and this has to be a good thing. Frumkin seems like a sharp and precocious writer, and I agree with her essay’s goals, though I think it makes the same mistake many associate with Wallace: telling instead of showing us how to feel. (Here’s how much I agree with its goals: last week, at the university where I’m working on a Ph.D., I gave a guest lecture on Wallace and John Barth to a contemporary fiction course. It shocked me how few of the students knew Wallace’s nonfiction, much less his fiction. I’m talking maybe 20 out of the 90 and 5 out of 90, respectively, which suggests Wallace’s current vogue may be a generational phenomenon.)

Anyway, there’s a lot to like in Frumkin’s essay. But I do want to point out that she gets some stuff about Wallace flat out wrong — and often in tendentious fashion. Take her statement that Infinite Jest received reviews that were “bemused, irritated, and downright negative.” Now compare it to three or four of the reviews collected at this early HTML wonder of a website. It gets worse. Frumkin quotes a Walter Kirn review of Wallace’s Oblivion: Stories at length because his snippy opinion “most closely matches that of the vox populi.” Well, in 1996 and in New York magazine, Kirn also reviewed Infinite Jest. Here’s what he had to say.

Next year’s book awards have been decided. The plaques and citations can now be put in escrow. With Infinte Jest, by David Foster Wallace . . . the competition has been obliterated. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy! The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good.

Again, I agree with Frumkin’s larger point — that Wallace’s fiction doesn’t get enough attention, especially when compared to his nonfiction. The students I lectured to are proof of that. To right this wrong, though, it’s going to take two things: carefully explaining how and why Wallace’s fiction works (for the unconverted) and defending it honestly and dispassionately (for the nonbelievers). Frumkin’s essay does neither.

A Review of Scott Brown’s Against All Odds

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Politics

[Boston Globe]

Here’s one way to chart the improbable, accelerated rise of Scott Brown: in his new memoir, Against All Odds, Brown remembers laying in bed, thinking he could win Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat if his campaign managed to raise $1,000,000. Well, there’s a good chance Brown’s book deal topped that number by itself. I’ve got a review of Against All Odds in today’s Boston Globe, and I call it “an incredible life story, told in the most safe and surface-level terms possible.” The book doesn’t talk much about Brown’s politics, but he’s shown terrific political savvy in rolling it out. Did you know Senator Rand Paul also had a book come out this week? Neither did anyone else.

As I mentioned in my review, some of the weirdest moments in Brown’s book come when he adopts a bizarrely literary tone. Here’s my favorite example: “The air was hot, that sticky, humid July heat, where the sky turns thick and white and presses back down upon you until each breath seems liquid, like sucking pool water into your lungs.” I’m not sure whether this stems from Brown’s desire to dress up what is essentially a personal autobiography, or from his (and other politicians’) anxiety about writing a memoir in a post-Obama age. Another weird quality of Against All Odds is Brown’s constant hedging; every factual statement gets a “probably” or “I remember.” In my favorite example of this, Brown’s reasons seem pretty clear: “Behind Al Di Santo’s house,” Brown writes of another one of his stepfathers, “was a sheer rock wall that I scrambled up and down, rocks that were probably the legacy of millions of years of glaciers, advancing and retreating across the Massachusetts landscape.”