PASSING THE WORD Of History and Hagiography : Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln’s invention of himself and, in the process, us.

In the beginning, there was the spoken word. The first narration concerned the doings of gods and kings, and these stories were passed on from generation to generation, usually as verse in order to make memorizing easier. Then, mysteriously, in the 5th Century BC all the narratives were written down and literature began.

From Greece to Persia to India to China there was a great controversy. Could a narrative be possessed that had been committed to writing rather than to memory? Traditionalists said no; modernists said yes. The traditionalists lost. Now, 2,500 years later, there is a similar crisis. Modernists believe that any form of narration and of learning can be transmitted through audio-visual means rather than through the now-traditional written word. In this controversy I am, for once, a conservative to the point of furious reaction.

In any case, we are now obliged to ask radical questions. What is the point to writing things down other than to give directions on how to operate a machine? Why tell stories about gods and kings or, even, men and women?

Very early, the idea of fame--eternal fame--afflicted our race. But fame for the individual was less intense at the beginning than for one’s tribe. Thucydides is often read as a sort of biographer of Pericles when, indeed, he was writing the biography, to misuse the word, of their city, Athens. It is the idea of the city that the writer wants us to understand, not the domestic affairs of Pericles, which he mentions only as civic illustrations. Love had not yet been discovered as opposed to lust. Marriage was not yet a subject except for comedy (Sophocles did not care who got custody of the children, unless Medea killed them--or they were baked in a pie). For more than two millennia, from Homer to Aeschylus to Dante to Shakespeare to Tolstoy, the great line of our literature has concerned itself with gods, heroes, kings, in conflict with one another and with inexorable fate. Simultaneously, all round each story, whether it be that of Prometheus or of a Plantagenet prince, there is a people who need fire from heaven or land beyond the sea. Of arms and of the man, I sing, means just that. Of the people then and now, of the hero then and his image now, as created or recreated by the poet. From the beginning, the bard, the poet, the writer was a most high priest to his people, the custodian of common memory, the interpreter of history, the voice of their current yearnings.

All this stopped in the last two centuries when the rulers decided to teach the workers to read and write so that they could handle machinery. Traditionalists thought this a dangerous experiment. If the common people knew too much might they not overthrow their masters? But the modernists, like John Stuart Mill, won. And, in due course, the people--proudly literate--overthrew their masters. We got rid of the English while the French and the Russians--ardent readers--shredded their ancient monarchies. In fact, the French--who read and theorize the most--became so addicted to political experiment that they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy and five republics. That’s what happens when you take writing too seriously. Happily, Americans have never liked reading all that much. Politically ignorant, we keep sputtering along in our old Model T, looking wistfully every four years for a good mechanic.

Along with political change--the result of general literacy and the printing press--the nature of narrative began to fragment. High literature concerned itself, most democratically, with the doings of common folk. Although a George Eliot or a Thomas Hardy could make art out of these simple domestic tales, in most hands crude mirrors of life tend to be duller than Dumas, say, and, paradoxically, less popular. Today’s serious novel is apt to be a carefully written teacherly text about people who teach school and write teacherly texts to dwindling classes. Today’s popular novel, carelessly, recklessly composed on--or by--a machine, paradoxically has taken over the heroes and kings and gods, placing them in modern designer clothes among consumer dreams beyond the dreams of Scheherazade.

This is a strange reversal. The best writers tend to write, in a highly minimal way, of the simple and the dull, while the worst give us whirlwind tours of the house--I mean home--of Atreus, ripping every skeleton from the closet and throwing back every Porthault sheet. The fact that this kind of bad writing is popular is not because the reading public--an endangered minority--cherishes bad writing for its own sake but because the good writers fail to interest them. As a result, everything is now so totally out of whack that the high academic bureaucrats have dropped literature, with some relief, and replaced it with literary theory, something that one needs no talent to whip up. As a result, in 20 years, enrollment in American English departments has fallen by 60%. Writers and writing no longer matter much anywhere in freedom’s land--Mr. Emerson, he dead. Writers are just entertainers--and not all that entertaining either. We have lost the traditional explainer, examiner, prophet.

The universities have established hegemony over every aspect of literature--except the ability to make any. They have also come to believe that a serious novelist deals only with what he knows and since our educational system is what it is he is not apt to know much about anything.

One of the absolutes of book-chat land is that the historical novel is neither history nor a novel. On the other hand, a literal record of a contemporary murder is, triumphantly, a novel. This is what I call the Capote confusion, his monument. No one can say what a novel ought to be. But history is something else. Although I try to make the agreed-upon facts as accurate as possible, I always use the phrase “agreed upon” because what we know even of a figure as recent as Theodore Roosevelt is not only not the whole truth--an impossibility anyway--but the so-called facts are often contradicted by other facts. So one must select; and it is in selection that literature begins.

A case in point: After alleging numerous historical blunders in my novel, “Lincoln,” Prof. Richard N. Current, a leading Lincoln biographer, declares that “Vidal is wrong on big as well as little matters. He grossly distorts Lincoln’s character and role in history.” Current has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a Final Truth revealed only to the tenured in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. Current seems to seethe with resentment and I can see why. “Indeed, Vidal claims to be a better historian than any of the academic writers on Lincoln (‘hagiographers’ he calls them).”

Now it is true that I have been amazed that there has never been a first-rate biography of Lincoln, as opposed to many very good and--yes, scholarly--studies of various aspects of his career. Academic historians too often drudge in bureaucracies solemnly aware that their agreed-upon facts must constitute--at least in the short term--a view of the republic that will please their trustees. Since all great Americans are uniquely great, even saints, those who record the lives of these saints are hagiographers. This is quite a big solemn business, not unlike the bureaucracy of some huge advertising firm, handling a hallowed account like Ivory soap.

Although my book is based upon agreed-upon facts, on the subject of Lincoln and blacks, I do not follow this year’s academic line. Lincoln always wanted to colonize the freed slaves outside the united states. Yet Current, a professional saint-maker, wrote: “There is no convincing evidence” for Vidal’s contention that “as late as April, 1865, Lincoln was still planning to colonize freed slaves outside the United States.” This is a delicate point in the 1980s, when no national saint can be suspected of racism. I turned to one of my authorities for this statement and realized that I may have relied on suspect scholarship after all. Here is the passage I used:

“Lincoln to the last seemed to have a lingering preference for another kind of amendment, another kind of plan. He still clung to his old ideas of postponing final emancipation, compensating slaveholders, and colonizing freedmen. Or so it would appear. As late as March of 1865, if the somewhat dubious Ben Butler is to be believed, Lincoln summoned him to the White House to discuss with him the feasibility of removing the colored population of the United States.”

This is from a book called “The Lincoln Nobody Knows” by Richard N. Current. What is going on here is a deliberate revision by certain professionals, not only of Lincoln but of themselves, in order to serve the saint in the ‘80s. But Lincoln must be viewed in his own time and not altered to fit ours. He was also the most complex of our great men.

All through the passion-play of Lincoln’s presidency, as I wrote the book, I could hear his own words, spoken at 29, reverberate in my head. In a speech at Springfield, he had praised the Founding Fathers and their republic; then he went on: “This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they too will seek a field. It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true to suppose that men of ambitions and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passions as others have done before them. The question, then, is can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot.” Thus, Lincoln warns us against Lincoln.

“Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions unexplored . . . . It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the path of any predecessor however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.”

Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln’s invention of himself and, in the process, us. What the Trojan War was to the Greeks, the Civil War is to us. What the wily Ulysses was to the Greeks, the wily Lincoln is to us. I am neither Homer nor even Virgil. But it is of those arms that I have tried to sing, and of that man--not plaster saint but towering genius, our haunted and haunting sole begetter.