The Insides of a Novel

by BRUCE LANCASTER

1

THE historical novel must be laid at some crucial time in a nation’s history. It will probably embrace some form of strife, for crises usually engender violence. And the crisis must be removed in time from the experience of the bulk of living readers, else it falls into mere reporting.

The crisis must have significance beyond the actual stage on which it takes place. If it hasn’t, then it sinks to local chronicle. The rather artificial fever which brought on the War of 1812 has never lent itself to significant treatment; but such fundamental urges as those which reached full expression in the Revolution or the Civil War provide inexhaustible fields.

We are, of course, first concerned with raw materials—the settings and the subject matter which bears on them. I should hate to estimate the number of hours that my wife and I have spent pulling one setting to pieces and then another, or to guess at the number of topics we have explored and finally discarded with regret.

Looking back, our choices seem to have been almost inevitable. I had been looking about for a medium that would show the free man — as we in America conceive that man; and as soon as that idea was established, the resultant steps fell out in almost mathematical precision. Where was the best place to set the story? The Revolution. How to show the idea? To whom, at that time, would the idea have come as an actual novelty? Not to the Colonists. Not to the British, for actually the Colonists felt that they were fighting, at the start, for an Englishman’s rights. To whom, then? Obviously, the German troops who fought against us. So, through some German’s eyes we would watch the conflict.

The first researches yielded well. The average peasant in the petty German states was probably worse off than a Russian serf prior to the emancipation. The gap between the city of Hanau and the city of Boston was immeasurable, whereas Nottinghamshire, while irritated by Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, could understand them.

Having settled on our German, where were we going to send him? Hessian troops served on Long Island, in the Jerseys, about Yorktown. But, better than that, nearly half the force that followed Burgoyne down the Champlain and Hudson Valley were Germans — Brunswickers with a sprinkling of Hessians. They would do.

And the end of the campaign. As captives, these men saw the rebels as farmers, shopkeepers, professors, having met them as soldiers. The cycle was complete. The setting, the Revolution. The incident, Burgoyne’s campaign. The hero, a German. I really wanted to make him a Brunswicker out of sheer cussedness, because most books refer to Burgoyne’s men as Hessians. But, to vary the usual pattern, which favors infantry or cavalry, I decided my man would be a gunner, and Burgoyne’s German artillery came from Hesse-Hanau.

Casting about for the next finished product to follow Guns of Burgoyne took me far afield. This scene was tested and that. Then the late Frederick Stokes, my publisher at that time, said that in the fiftyodd years that he had been in the book business he had always wanted to bring out a novel about Lincoln. Would I do it? That was quite an invitation. So much has been written about Lincoln that I had never given him a thought. It would take a heart like Himmler’s to say no to Mr. Stokes, but the field did seem played out. Of course, the free man motif could be carried through anything that remotely touched Lincoln, but — and but — and the Civil War had been used so much —

Then I saw how it could be done. Lincoln’s early years had been largely neglected until my classmate, Bob Sherwood, did so superbly with them. But there were years, and important years, that preceded New Salem and the Sangamon Valley. That was my hold. I’d show the free man struggling along in a milieu that only democracy could produce. I’d show Lincoln in the years when the picturesque, the exciting, the colorful, had largely gone from pioneer life, leaving such imponderables as transportation, crops and stock, sickness, education. At the first glance, it seemed dull.

But it couldn’t be dull. Here was democracy in the test tube. I’d try to show that and, in showing it, project the youth of the greatest figure that American democracy has produced. Then — how to show it? By following Lincoln, step by step from early teens to manhood? That would be just another Lincoln book, which was not my aim. And besides, just what was Lincoln in those days in Indiana and Illinois? He was just another of the thousands who swarmed in those strange areas that lie between the rifle of the Indian fighter and the tall buildings of civilization. There was little to mark him out from a thousand others, barring his Homeric ugliness and an attested burning wish to figure out just how men were supposed to live. There were doubtless plenty of other backwoods philosophers and reasoners. Why single out Tom Lincoln’s boy, Abe?

So I would not do a book about Lincoln. I’d do one about a boy of nearly equal opportunities, living along the same river bottoms and in the same clearings, a boy who would know the Clarys and the Rutledges and the Armstrongs and the Purkapiles — no more, no less, save that our hero’s closest friend, in that strange drifting life of a mover, is the gangling Lincoln boy. So, in telling Hugh Brace’s story in For Us, The Living, that of Lincoln told itself for the reader’s foreknowledge of what the tall, homely boy would be, and provided its own underscoring and italics.

2

IN THIS general way, raw materials pour into the workshop. The next step is the presentation of scene and hero. I have already traced out how Lt. Kurt Ahrens of the Hesse-Hanau artillery came into being. The next problem war to reconstruct that eighteenthcentury gunner. How had he spent his time before coming to America? What was his background? What did he think about people, war, politics, nationals of other countries?

It will help t he story if he can be bilingual. That’s easy, as the first Georges brought many retainers to England. They even brought German troops. So Ahrens’s father is a minor court official, now retired, who brought up his son in England. The father, a Saxon, lived in Dresden, and his son, growing up in the Europe of Frederick the Great, has little choice for advancement. The young man, consequently, turns mercenary and hires out to the Count of HesseHanau. For all these steps, of course, precedent has to be checked.

As for his thoughts, he could logically be tinged by the wave of humanism that was sweeping out of France. He would be well within his time if the problems of the less privileged appealed to him. His arm was to be artillery and there were many difficulties to be solved if I was to be accurate. I wanted to give the Hessian gunner every bit of equipment current in 1777 and not a thing beyond that. The point may seem trivial; but if you lapse on such things, you’re going to lapse on the more obvious. Your men are going to handle that equipment and it will react on them.

Recently I came across a reference in a novel to fixed ammunition at Gettysburg. If there had been fixed ammunition at Gettysburg, Pickett’s charge could never have been set in motion. Such slips are as immoral as placing a typewriter in Lincoln’s Springfield office or sending gas masks to Bunker Hill. Fortunately, gunnery problems were solved in one stroke by the labors of a prisoner in a French chateau in the mid-nineteenth century. He published his volumes, Etudes sur le passé et l’acenir d’artillerie, after his release — and the author’s name, Emperor Napoleon III, appears on the title page.

Diaries of the time give us opinions, thoughts, prejudices, oddities (like my old friend Captain Pausch of the gunners, a sturdy die-hard German who insisted on mentioning von Burgoyne, von Washington, von Stark, von Glover). As to more intimate problems — food, fatigue, sleep, health — letters and diaries again came to the fore. Thus we will have our men eating well at Ticonderoga and scraping along on moldy bread at Freeman’s Farm. They will be straining at the leash in July and suffering from clearly rcognizable shell-shock in October.

Maps, too, play a great part in reconstruction. You want, let us say, to send a party to Bennington, and source books are vague as to route. Your map shows you possible ways, short cuts, traps. Then the map, if it is a modern one, must be checked by the past. This line of hills looks possible on today’s map. The contours are the same as in 1777, but you find that the country was then heavily wooded and the narrow valley that looks so tempting was undoubtedly a swamp in 1777. And to use a wrong route knowingly is as immoral as watching Lincoln fill his fountain pen.

The handling of actual characters might seem easier than the handling of invented ones. Often, it is more difficult. The more prominent they are, the more is written about them and the very profusion leads to pitfalls, to the dressing up of a lay figure. The actual character must be studied from the human angle. His later importance must be forgotten unless the book hinges entirely on him.

Sometimes, however, your actual character is not well documented in the light of the time of which you are treating. When I began exploring the preSpringfield days of Lincoln, I found a nearly hopeless maze. There had been little or no interest in Lincoln’s youth until after his death, when Herndon began his not too accurate investigations. Few records had been kept and Herndon was forced to rely on hearsay that spanned a great many years.

I did not, however, limit my reading to the Indiana and New Salem years. My wife and I dug out all that we could about the old Wilderness Road, the people who traveled over it, how they traveled, and what they took with them. There was no thought of beginning our story with those days, but to know the characters with whom I was dealing, I had to know how they had come into their present theater and the circumstances and conditions of their pilgrimages — that experience was all part of them. I planned to end the book in 1832, but research went on up to the gaslit stage of Ford’s Theatre — I had to know what my people had done after I left them, for the germs of their future doings were alive in earlier periods.

For simpler details—housing, diet, health — there was very plain sailing, thanks largely to the work of the historical societies of the region. From a dozen descriptions and drawings the sort of cabin which the Braces might have occupied was reconstructed, along with the Lincoln homes. And what the two families ate in those houses, how they cooked it, what was scarce (and why), were pointed out to me.

Tools and possessions puzzled me at first until it became clear that such things were limited by the factor of transportation. If an object was bulky, it would not be found in an Indiana clearing in 1816, for the average pioneer could not pay river tolls. What he owned, he carried on his own back and on his own pack horse. Ten years later, one might introduce an iron-toothed harrow, but not much earlier.

Pioneer health may be deduced from a knowledge of climate, terrain, diet (which may be governed by both the others). In addition to the usual ills, we were confronted by the terrible “milk-sick.” Now the “milk-sick” might not touch Hugh and Abe, but it would touch many about them, would take cattle and create economic problems that would affect life very directly.

Has this visitation ever been explained? Has it ever cropped out in other parts of the country?

What sort of climate would the boys experience? The carefully collected pioneer records showed this, including such phenomena as the winters of the Deep Snow and the Sudden Change. Here I took what may be forgiven as a pardonable liberty and placed them both in the same year, to show their effect on a struggling settlement in the Sangamon Valley.

How was life forming along the rivers and clearings ? In early years, men measured by the distances from cabin to cabin. As navigation improved and roads began to creep on through the wilderness, our characters took their places in a larger world that measured by villages, by counties, and then by states.

What men talked about and what men thought about are matters of clear record, and in old letters and old books can be found the same burning belief in democracy as we know it that flowered in Abraham Lincoln and set him studying and figuring on problems which, in the book, he might logically discuss with Hugh Brace and later with Dr. Allen and Bowling Green and Offut in New Salem.

What Abraham Lincoln and other settlers had experienced, Hugh Brace would have known as well, and slowly his character began to form against the background of the time. As he was always to be shown in relation to young Lincoln, it seemed wise to give him no advantages that Tom’s boy did not have. In fact, it seemed better to give him fewer.

In this way Hugh Brace emerges with a shiftless, utterly worthless father. More than this, he suffers a physical handicap in the shape of a stunted arm. In all ways he is less blessed even than Tom Lincoln’s boy. And we may logically infer, from the known character of Lincoln, that the latter would be drawn, semi-protectively, to his less fortunate fellow of the clearings — and the unconscious, inborn tact of the frontier would keep Hugh from realizing the protection.

For secondary characters there was a wealth to draw from. Few of the names in Gentryville or New Salem are fictitious. Of the created characters, perhaps the most strange was the old Napoleonic sergeant, Rose-Adrien Gregoire. I thought a long time before introducing him, but his appearance was possible. Many of Napoleon’s soldiers came to this country after Waterloo. One of them, landing at New Orleans, might well in the course of the years drift north via river landings and end up in Jacksonville, Cahokia, or New Salem. “Papa” Neef was a Napoleonic officer, as was, much farther north, old Antony van Egmond of the Huron Tract, who was to die in the Canadian Rebellion of 1837. So why not find Sergeant — or rather, Maréchal de logis — RoseAdrien Gregoire along the Sangamon? To many of the valley people he would seem bizarre. But to Abraham Lincoln he was another man who might have “figgered out” something and hence was kin.

3

So, little by little, the river world and its inhabitants took shape and the spotlight of research had to be centered on the principal figure who was not to be principal. What about Abraham Lincoln himself?

First of all I wanted to find out what Lincoln looked like in his teens and early twenties, and back I went through old volumes of recollections. I emerged a little dizzy. One neighbor said that until young Abe was twenty he was rather short and fat. Another called him roly-poly. A woman claimed that at fourteen he looked forty, was lean with a heavily lined face. When sources disagree, a novelist is free to choose the interpretation that suits him best. I used his earliest known photographs, considered his measurements, and came to the conclusion he was a not uncommon type that has grown too fast and had become somewhat muscle-bound through heavy work in his youth, his principal strength being in arms and shoulders.

The haze that surrounds the Lincoln family is too well known to touch on here. I was not unprepared for it. But the “authentic” accounts of where they lived and how, all widely varying, were a shock. The original Lincoln farm in Indiana is located by at least six different people all of whom knew thal farm well, at six different places. The question was solved by finding the survey of the land and plotting it out on an ordinance map — which gave a seventh site.

So with Lincoln’s comings and goings, the conditions under which he lived. One of the greatest obstacles here was the school of students who have tried, seemingly through idolatry, to streamline Buckhorn Valley or Goose Nest Prairie. One, in speaking of the blab-schools, makes the statement that the itinerant teachers of the area were “true gentlemen of culture and refinement”; to depict them as barely literate, often drunkards, would, it seems, reflect adversely on Lincoln.

The classic case, I think, is an English attempt to make Lincoln acceptable to a particular public. In that instance the author wrote that “Lincoln was a good shot and good horseman,” conjuring up the picture of Honest Abe in pinks riding to hunt with the Goose Nest Prairie hounds, or going to his shooting box in Egypt for a go at the grouse-birds. But beyond this type of wishful writing, it is hard to reconcile statements concerning those years. Did Lincoln actually go to New Orleans by flatboat in the early twenties? One says yes, another no — and these are people who knew him, who grew up with him, speaking. And whatever was said, was said vehemently.

So with other incidents. For example, I had always accepted as gospel the story of the Ann Rutledge romance. But the more I read, pro and con, the more it seemed to me that, despite its universal acceptance, there was a very good chance that there was no romance. The type of letter, elicited by the inquiries of Herndon and others, that rang truest was the type that said: “Guess Abe liked Ann well enough.”

So, in building up those years, I was guided by what seemed to me probable or logical in view of known conditions. Where there was no evidence, I felt free to choose any course of action that answered logic or probabilities. I ruled out Ann Rutledge from my story, for I didn’t feel that evidence in favor of the romance was strong enough to makes its inclusion obligatory.

I sent Lincoln to Robert Owen’s New Harmony settlement. There is no evidence that he ever went there. But, also, there is no evidence that he did not go — and he might well have. Perhaps some day documents will turn up to show that he did. If he didn’t, it is a pity, for the place would have interested him, and the fact that he never mentioned it in known writings is, of itself, little proof. There is much in his early years that he did not mention.

His Black Hawk War years give pretty solid ground. We know now that he did meet Robert Anderson, later commander at Fort Sumter. We know that he could not have met Jefferson Davis, pretty as is the idea of showing the backwoods militiaman uttering homely thoughts to the rigid West Pointer. But to use such a scene is on the same moral level as giving Azel Dorsey’s blab-school a Gothic tower and a subsidized football team.

Once For Us, The Living was fairly launched, I waited in a certain amount of trepidation for what the mail might bring. There are few subjects about which Americans feel so strongly as the life of Abraham Lincoln and things that touch it. To my surprise, while plenty of letters about the book came in and even now are still coming in, no one wrote to me in anger, save one gentleman on the West Coast — and he wrote more in sorrow than in wrath. He took me to task for putting profanity into the mouth of young Lincoln, something which I had scrupulously refrained from doing. Moderation in speech is one of the few points on which contemporaries seem to agree.

This has not been the case in other books. After Guns of Burgoyne, someone went into a rage because I called Colonel Morgan a Pennsylvanian instead of a Virginian. I could only reply that, if Dan Morgan wasn’t a Pennsylvanian, then he was a New Jerseyman, the doubt lying in a disputed borderline.

It seems to take our own Revolution to bring out real peevishness on the part of readers. For example, a letter like this may come in: “In your very illconsidered account of the battle of Hubbardton, you make no mention of my great Uncle Eliphalet. While it is true that his name appears on no muster roll of the times (owing to local prejudice) and as he had nominally no rank other than that of private (owing to his captain’s jealousy), it is well known to all real students that he and he alone won that battle.” It is, of course, useless to point out that said battle was so confused that no one man could have affected it very much — or even to point out that we didn’t win it. We lost it.

Flora and fauna, their presence or absence, send readers’ temperatures climbing feverishly. But nothing compares to fish. In fact, I’ve almost decided to leave fish out of my books. Typical of the fish fever was a letter from a gentleman in the deep South — a most interesting letter pointing out the influence of the captive Germans on Southern life, such as our debt to them for the so-called Virginia formal garden. This letter pleased me greatly until I came to the last line, “I note that on page so-and-so you state that there were salmon in Lake George in the year 1777. There were no salmon in Lake George in 1777. I have the honor to be, Sir, your obedient servant. . . .”

I could only reply, “Sir. I did not place salmon in Lake George in 1777. They were placed there by Ensign Hadden of the Royal Field Artillery. I have the honor to be, Sir, your obedient servant. . . .”