NON-FICTION: Sandburg’s Lincoln*

NON-FICTION

Sandburg’s Lincoln*

The Story begins in a Kentucky log cabin with one window, one door and a dirt floor. Lying on a pallet of cornhusks and bearskins, on Feb. 12, 1809, a slight, dark, grey-eyed woman with an accented chin and high cheekbones is delivered of a boy baby. A neighbor’s kid runs down the road to see. “What you goin’ to name him, Nancy?” Nancy Hanks Lincoln says, “Abraham, after his grandfather. . . . Be keerful, Dennis, fur you air the fust boy he’s ever seen.”

Tom Lincoln, a big, slow-spoken man, slick at hunting and swapping, but not clever, moves his family up to Knob Creek on the Louisville-Nashville pike. Young Abe walks four miles to school, a one-room school with no windows, a “blab” school where you say your lessons to yourself out loud until time to recite to the Irish Catholic teacher. At home little Abe is chore-boy, toting water, billets, ashes and the things for beer-making. He rides (without pants, he’s a “shirttail boy”) the horse drawing the “bull-tongue” plow; he tends his father’s stallion and brood mares. Sometimes it is warm and there are good “vittles”; sometimes it is cold as a dead snake.

Abe is seven when his “paw” builds a flatboat, loads on it his tools and ten “bar’ls” of whisky for which he has traded his farm, and floats to the Ohio River. When he comes back he reckons they’ll winter up in “Indianny.” He’s bought and cleared a new farm in the black-soiled Buckhorn Valley. Up there they build another cabin. Relatives join them. Gentryville gets settled. Abe’s walks to school with his sister Sally are 18 miles a day through virgin timber. But his school days total only four months. He teaches himself mostly, his “mammy” helping.

This “mammy” gets “the milk sick.” Her tongue turns white, her stomach hurts, she wastes and dies in the wilderness cabin. Abe whittles pegs to pin together her whipsawed plank coffin, remembering the wistful sweetness of her and the mysterious joy she took in Scripture. He guesses that when she ran her fingers through his coarse black hair at the last she meant he was was to grow up good and be kind.

His father gets another wife quickly, large, rosy, and loving. Abe grows on up to his full six-feet-four at 17. Neighbors say, “He can sink an axe deeper into wood than any man I ever saw.” He takes a 600-lb. chicken-coop on his back. He is county wrestling champion. He hurls a man from a bareknuckle fight ring and calls to the crowd, “I’m the big buck of this lick!” Once he swaggers, “I’m going to be President of the United States.”

He is alone a lot, working in the whispering wilderness. In summer his soles are bare against the clay. It may be that the earth tells him in her own tough gypsy slang one or two knacks of living. He is alternately the drollest, “ganglin’est” big colt ever seen, and a boy of mystery, “solemn as a papoose.” His wit endears him; it is cool, slow and trenchant, expressing itself in retorts chiefly, sometimes in doggerel verse. He is an expert butcher, but does not like to see rabbit blood. He reads early and late with his underlip stuck far out. He sees his sister die in childbirth, his friend go insane. “Thar’s suthin’ peculiarsome about Abe.” He broods in the wilderness.

When he is 21, fourteen young oxen haul the Lincoln menage to Goose Nest Prairie, Ill. Abe has been down the Mississippi; he goes again, sees a slave auction. His notion of his nation grows. His deep nature goes out to auburn-haired Ann Rutledge, who dies, leaving Abe Lincoln a lost man, a victim of such melancholy that he dares not carry a pocketknife. He goes in debt, fights Indians, keeps store, rises in politics, from here the story grows more and more familiar, but he is an irresolute, apathetic puzzled man at heart right up to his election as 16th U. S. President, where this story ends, on the train to Washington. Words of his youth will haunt him always: “Time! What an empty vapor ’tis.”

The Significance. Lord Charwood’s Lincoln was a foreign statesman. Ida Tarbell saw a noble countryman and gave him his just due. Nathaniel Stephenson, the most perceptive biographer before Sandburg, wrote in analytical prose. Now there is the Lincoln of a vagabond poet of the cornlands where Lincoln lived. It is a “stalking and elusive” human being, brought out of all the biographies, out of unexamined files of newspapers and drawers of letters, out of old people’ memories and reconstructed conversations, out of Lincoln’s personalia and the revisited places of earth that knew him, by a poet who can feel all the coarse and fine stuff that men are made of, feel the broad, unfinished patterns that great men take.

The Author. Swedish immigrants made Carl Sandburg, at Galesburg, Ill., in 1878. He left school at 13 to help on a milk wagon. He polished spittoons in a barbershop, shifted scenery, trucked bricks, made balls in a pottery. He worked on railroad gangs, like his father; he scoured dishes in Denver and Omaha, shocked Kansas wheat. He fought Spaniards in Porto Rico, paid his way to Lombard College, whence after a year he headed for West Point. Arithmetic flunked him, so he went back and janitored his way through Lombard. He was graduated a burning humanitarian, mounting now the seer’s mountain, now the demagog’s soap box. He campaigned for LaFollette and redder men. He hoarded brutal words and gentle, and began setting them down in Whitmanesque cries of plains and cities. In 1921 his poems, Smoke and Steel, shared a national prize.* He is an indigenous voice of this country. He has been living with his Lincoln for 15 years.

Fish

TALES OF FISHING VIRGIN SEAS Zane Grey Harpers ($5.) There are finer fish in the sea than ever came out of it. The biggest ones always get away. No fisherman is ever satisfied.

A pioneer angler of Catalina Island like onetime dentist, wild-west yarner Zane Grey, may be depended upon to know that piscatorial narratives failing to make these three assumptions are likely to be uninteresting and certain to be doubted. Angler Grey makes all three, the fantastic nature of his experiences magnifying the first two to astonishing proportions, his fine sportsmanship minimizing the third.

He writes of waters where few white men have ever wet a line. Cruising the Pacific out of Balboa in a three-masted Nova Scotiaman, he and his brother visited the swarming depths off Cocos Island, Galapagos, swung back to the Chilean coast, then north to Cape San Lucas, L. C. With their rods and reels they whipped game fish of species and sizes unknown to sporting annals. Gleaming, leaping, churning, rocketing across the pages go golden dolphins, milling swarms of sharks, giant redsnappers, plunging blackfish, Marlin swordfish, porpoises, amber jack, groupers, rays, devilfish, crevalles, tuna, yellow-tails, “wahoos,” magnificent “bars of bronze,” the Pacific sailfish. . . . Whatever his fame as a novelist, Mr. Grey excels himself in these firsthand accounts of exciting action. His periods wax Homeric in the sun-shot spray of mighty encounters on the bosom of the father of oceans. Cameras were there to enhance his record.

Cicerone

LET’S Go To FLORIDA. Ralph Henry Barbour. Dodd, Mead ($2). “For those who haven’t been but are going, those who have been and are going back and those who don’t expect to go but will,” here is a cicerone to “Crackerland.” Mr. , Barbour, aged 55, has been going there for 40 years. Minding how disappointed he was when he first saw Barnum’s behemoth, Jumbo, he : does not splash on his color and sunshine too thickly. He describes a credible peninsula, its roads, : hotels, golf courses, frogs and land booms, with the knowing air of one who owns part of it.

To find Mr. Barbour writing glorified real estate publicity is not astonishing. He is versatile. While he was a schoolboy at Worcester Academy he must have played on every athletic team, for soon after graduation he began endearing himself to the wholesome, sport-loving youth of America with boys’ books too numerous for mention in Who’s Who. His boys won their “Y’s,” triumphed for “Yardley,” wore the crimson sweater. Lately, with a tremendous burst of energy, he gave the world biographies of an entire football eleven. Titles: Left End Edwards, Left Tackle Thayer, Left Guard Gilbert, Center Rush Rowland, Full Back Foster, Quarter Back Bates, Left Half Harmon, Right End Emerson, Right Guard Grant, Right Tackle Todd, Right Half Hollins, My Dog’s Story.

FICTION

Black Harvest

BLACK HARVEST I. A. R. Wylie Doran ($2.50). If you were a publisher and a lady told you she was about to construct a book involving: the Rhine occupation, a German prostitute, a Senegambian trooper, a miscegenative rape; then (A.D. 1945) a mulatto titan with a German brain educated in the Congo, U. S. universities and the French army; the wealthiest man in the world as the mulatto’s fanatical foster-father; an “ageless woman who believes him the Messiah as the mulatto’s mother; a mobilization of the world’s Negro population; a secret vengeance party of German militarists seeking world dominion; a German scientist with an all-annihilating ether wave; a signal pyre on the right bank of the Rhine; the superman crucified for his blackness, you would be inclined to murmur, “But, my dear lady! . . .”

Publisher Doran has received such a book from Miss (Ida) Wylie, and published it as “the most startling book ever published under our imprint.” It is difficult to recall a more startling book under any one’s imprint. It is a smashing good story, a monstrous grotesque, and it intends a passionate protest against militarism. To cope with her array of towering improbabilities, the author works with swift, shadowy flashes of prose, impressionistic in arrangement but tersely, concretely descriptive in content. This prose has been seen before (Towards Morning, The Dark House). Its phrases sound depths in man’s heart and spirit like plummets of mercury dropping down a dark crevasse.

Black Valley

BLACK VALLEY Raymond Weaver Viking Press ($2). Mr Weaver has succeeded no better than other pagans in burlesquing, caricaturing, grotesquing a group of missionaries in Japan.

He has been desperately serious, partly because this is his first novel partly because he owed a debt of beauty and philosophy to Japan which he was evidently stewing to repay. His Japanese detail is good but is rarely more than still-life, He rings temple-bells, but they cannot be heard. He makes Japanese servant girls walk, but the slipslop of their slippers is in audible.

But Mr. Weaver is surprisingly powerful when he writes his big scenes. They are not essentially connected with either missionaries or Japan. One has to do with love: an old maid stumbles through the darkness of a garden upon its visible consummation. Another has to do with death: an elderly woman kills another elderly woman with a fan, an ordinary fan, tenderly. They are big scenes, finely done.

Young Lady

THE DIARY OF A YOUNG LADY OF FASHION IN THE YEAR 1764-65.Cleone Knox (Edited by Alexander Blacker Kerr) Appleton ($2.50). The mettlesome Irish nymph of these confessions reveals herself teetering a-tiptoe upon the springboard of chastity in a day when only a very slight push was required to set a young thing splashing for dear life. Her papa removes her from the bold and importunate proximity of her enamored kinsman, David Ancaster, who has literally essayed to climb into her boudoir. In London and on the continent she finds gallantry galore, some of it quite as much to her taste as was her “Mr. A.” By better luck than judgment she keeps her perch until the entries end with: “Stupendous Discovery! Mr. A. is in Venice.” There, an envoi assures us, she eloped at last, later mollifying her parent and bearing Mr. A. a round dozen of lusty offspring.

*ABRAHAM LINCOLN The Prairie Years (2 vols.)*Carl Sandburg Harcourt, Brace ($10). *The Poetry Society’s Prize was awarded also that year to Stephen Vincent Benet for Heavens and Earth.