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Telling Too Much: The Hamilton Affair

26 Monday Nov 2018

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Review: The Hamilton Affair, by Elizabeth Cobbs
Arcade, 2016. 403 pp. $26

He’s illegitimate, an orphan born to poverty in St. Croix; she’s the daughter of one of upstate New York’s first families. He, though a devoted family man who yearns for the warm, close-knit hearth he never had, loves nothing more than a fight, whether on a battlefield or in a political assembly. She, though she picks up the pieces — her lot as a woman — resents her husband’s role as a lightning rod and correctly predicts that they’ll suffer for it.

This is the romance between Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler, and a tragic, touching tale it is. Cobbs begins the narrative with each protagonist as a child. Alexander struggles against the shame of his birth, and you don’t need to be told (though Cobbs does) that he’ll grow up touchy about his honor, in an era when the concept already has a rigid, constraining definition.

James Sharples’s pastel portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, 1795 (courtesy Smithsonian Institution, via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, Eliza feels like the odd one out too, awkward, unschooled, incapable of knowing what to say or how to act. An early passage recounts her visit with her father to a conclave of the Six Nations:

The shadowy interior smelled of wood smoke and roasting meat. Shelves burdened with gourds and lidded baskets lined the walls, and ears of drying maize tied by their silks hung from the rafters. Groups of men lounged on rugs, some made from bearskin, others from cloth. The translator showed them to a bench facing a low table made from a single plank. Thank goodness, Eliza thought, since she hadn’t the faintest idea how to sit on a bearskin with the dignity she knew her father expected.

The description reveals a major strength of The Hamilton Affair. Cobbs, a noted historian, renders the scenery, sensations of everyday life, mores, and issues in vivid, economical prose. You can see, for example, how the North-South divide over slavery, banking, manufacturing, trade, and foreign policy crops up the minute the Revolution ends, setting up the Civil War. Cobbs does a great service paying due homage to Hamilton, whom I had always thought a man of ability but an elitist. I’ve now learned that this is the viewpoint his detractors left to history, because they had the last word.

But it’s how he got those enemies that makes Cobbs’s narrative of interest. Her Hamilton doesn’t suffer a fool gladly, but there’s much more to it. How ironic that his opponents cast him as beholden to patrician interests when they’re the patricians — the Virginia planters like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, or the New York gentry like Burr or Clinton. As a largely self-taught polymath, a nobody who rises to be Washington’s right hand—his accomplishments are truly mind-boggling–Hamilton poses a threat to men who feel they have the right to rule. Throw in his intense dislike of slavery, and he’s doomed.

What a fascinating story, but as a novel, The Hamilton Affair seldom escapes a mechanical, ordained feel. Eliza, a woman much put-upon, would have been much more sympathetic (rather than an object of pity) had she more depth, as in a serious flaw or three. She represents important feminist ideals before they had that name, but she’d symbolize them all the better as a rounded character.

The narrative structure is the crucial weakness, though. Cobbs chooses key dramatic events for many chapters, which is fine, but the intent to cover her protagonists’ entire lives sets up gaps of time and circumstance, which in turn involves playing catch-up so that the reader doesn’t get lost. As a consequence, the author throws dozens of facts into dialogue and internal narrative, which land with a dull thud; and many chapters start at pivotal moments, only to backtrack, covering so much material that the forward narrative stalls. It’s just too much to fit, especially when the two principals don’t meet until about page 120.

If fact, description, and the march of history take precedence here, that leaves less space for emotions, and Cobbs surrenders to the temptation of telling rather than showing them, even at make-or-break moments. During the courtship, for instance, when Hamilton sees that he can’t put off telling Eliza about his birth and early life, you’d think he’d feel intensely pent-up. Here’s a man passionately in love with a beautiful, adventuresome, understanding young woman, yet he fears she’ll reject him once she knows the truth of his origins. This emotional moment, surely among the most significant of Hamilton’s life, receives a brief, rote paragraph.

I’ll say this for The Hamilton Affair: The book prompts me to put Ron Chernow’s highly regarded biography of the great man on my to-be-read pile. But as fiction, Cobbs’s novel tries to tell too much, and winds up showing too little.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Affair of Honor: The Lost Season of Love and Snow

12 Monday Mar 2018

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Review: The Lost Season of Love and Snow, by Jennifer Laam
St. Martin’s, 2017. 334 pp. $17

He’s almost thirty, already Russia’s greatest poet, passionate, witty, and joyfully charismatic. She’s sixteen, gorgeous in the way that inspires poems, and yearns to free herself from a stifling household and a cruel, domineering mother. Poet and beauty are immediately attracted, and their wish comes true. Yet their marriage turns tragic, for Alexander Pushkin dies after a duel fought to defend his wife’s honor. History has blamed Natalya, because, as this novel argues, no matter what the truth, the woman’s always at fault.

Laam has written biographical fiction from Natalya’s first-person point of view, to set the record straight, and I think she largely succeeds. Yet in service to the argument, the novel occasionally suffers, so though I admire and recommend The Lost Season of Love and Snow, several parts mar the total effect.

Alexander Brullov’s watercolor of Natalya Pushkina, ca. 1831 (courtesy National Pushkin Museum, St. Petersburg, via Wikimedia Commons)

The novel begins with Alexander on his deathbed. Since everyone who knows anything about Pushkin knows he lost his life to a duel — and if you don’t know, just read the jacket flap — this puts the author in a bind. Does she reveal this out front, or does she attempt to leave the ending a surprise? Obviously, she chooses the up-front approach, and as prologues go, this one works better than most. Yet the choice demands that all tension thereafter resides entirely in the how, and since we’re told who the killer is, that places a further obstacle in the storyteller’s way. A retrospective risks making every scene superfluous until the villain enters the narrative.

To her credit, Laam does her best to overcome this problem. The courtship sections offer plenty of reversals, and Natalya suffers doubts as to her suitor’s fidelity and whether he sees her only as a bauble to possess. These anxieties create some tension and amplify the theme. Yet I was impatient to get through these scenes, and not only because the real story comes later. Natalya’s mother and two sisters are flat characters, each unfailingly mean-spirited or warm. Though the meanness provides the chance for conflict, we already understand that Natalya can’t wait to escape, so, in a sense, drawing this out serves little purpose. If, however, the author had begun the story with the courtship and suggested foreboding about the upcoming marriage, neither she nor the reader would have had to work as hard.

But the two principal players carry the show, and once they marry, their passion for one another comes through loud and clear. And as a married woman making her way in St. Petersburg society, Natalya feels the danger escalate, and so do we. This web of gossip and intrigue centers on the czar, Alexander’s patron but also a known womanizer, who woos Natalya while thwarting her husband. (Known to history as the Iron Czar, Nicholas I unfortunately comes across in these pages as wooden instead, but at least he’s plenty threatening.) Further, she acquires a reputation as a flirt, not entirely undeserved, though of course nowhere near the way jealous tongues would have it.
Besides, Natalya’s motives are more nuanced than anyone could have understood. As she observes late in the narrative:

More and more, I sought escape from our little family dramas in masquerades.… When I wore my costumes, I was no longer a wife and mother with debts and a distracted husband, but a character from a fairytale, a figure from history — a goddess. Once a group approached me at a ball to tell me how fine I looked, I longed for more people to do so. I was no longer the decorative poet’s wife. For once in my life, I felt valued for myself, not for how well my presence reflected someone else’s glory.

I like this psychological observation, which doesn’t go too far toward feminism for the time, yet sends a message. Even better, I like another gambit Laam tosses out during a flirtation between Natalya and the man who eventually forces Alexander to challenge him to a duel. Distressed by her husband’s spendthrift ways and haphazard work habits, she briefly fantasizes life with the worldly, handsome, wealthy philanderer — unconsciously killing off Alexander, if you will. Natalya immediately draws back, but I wish she’d toyed with her fantasy more persistently, for it would have engaged the boundary between thought and action that causes so much trouble in public misperception. Nevertheless, Laam is being very brave, here, risking her heroine’s reputation in the reader’s eyes. That is the author’s theme, and The Lost Season of Love and Snow tackles it forthrightly.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Man Divided: A Friend of Lincoln

22 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, by Stephen Harrigan
Knopf, 2016. 411 pp. $28

On a recent trip to the nation’s capital, my son and I visited the place where Lincoln died, a boardinghouse across the street from Ford’s Theater. It’s a museum now, as you might expect, whose exhibits testify to the immense power Lincoln’s memory exerts, regardless of political belief. Conflicting visions of his motives and character roll off the presses year after year. In fact, the museum has built a pile of books two stories high, a brave project, given that sooner or later, the historical Babel must punch through the roof. What a fitting metaphor for the man who towered above his contemporaries in more ways than one.

Consequently, it’s fair to ask, “Why another?,” even as the echo rebounds, “Why not?” But Stephen Harrigan has made a  strong case with his novel about the political formation of his hero in 1830s and 1840s Illinois. However, for better and worse, the story begins just after his assassination in 1865, as the town of Springfield mourns over the coffin that has made its sad voyage from Washington. Two friends of his–one fictional, one real–talk about setting the record straight about their late friend, a task that Harrigan seems to have zealously taken up. That too, is for better and worse.

Thomas Hicks painted this portrait of Lincoln in 1859, a lithograph made from it figured in presidential campaign literature in 1860 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Thomas Hicks painted a portrait of Lincoln in 1859. This lithograph made from it figured in presidential campaign literature in 1860 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Narrating this tale is Micajah (Cage) Weatherby, a Springfield poet and businessman, the author’s brilliant creation, a man who befriends Lincoln during the Black Hawk War of 1832. As a convinced abolitionist, freer with his passions, less concerned with how things look than how they feel, he’s a perfect foil for Lincoln, who’s always looking over his shoulder to see what the electorate thinks and binds his heart to be ruled by law. It’s not that Lincoln the politico lacks any sense of right and wrong; on the contrary, he’s got a very highly developed one. However, it’s always subservient to his belief in order and justice, which is where he thinks honor lies, and honor means everything to him.

It’s no small task to write Lincoln’s character, but Harrigan does marvelously well, I think, partly by contrast to the young lawyer’s friends, all young men on the make:

Most . . . were smoother than Lincoln, not as raw, not as striking in appearance, not as obviously self-invented. During the [Black Hawk] war, when everyone had been clothed in rags and shriven by scant rations, he had not seemed so remarkable. Now that he was more or less respectably dressed, something in his appearance betrayed him. He looked like a man who did not quite fit in, whom nature had made too tall and loose-jointed, with an unpleasant squeaky voice and some taint of deep, lingering poverty. He seemed to Cage like a man who desperately wanted to be better than the world would ever possibly let him be. But in Lincoln’s case that hunger did not seem underlaid with anger, as with other men it might, but with a strange seeping kindness.

But to describe A Friend of Lincoln as a character study, even of such a momentous nature, does the book injustice. Harrigan has re-created the period and its tensions, whether over slavery, who gets what government contract, or who’s murdered whom. Everyone must take sides, which causes both personal and political animosities. Harrigan offers court cases, romances, near riots, a duel, and, most vividly, Lincoln’s stormy courtship of Mary Todd. Cage helps his friend through terrible bouts of depression and saves his life on at least two occasions, for which, one may argue, he was poorly repaid.

I dislike prologues and retrospective first chapters. I understand why Harrigan begins his story in 1865; he wants to show how the Lincolns, chiefly Mary, have thrust Cage out of their lives when once he was intimate friend to both. But that chapter is entirely unnecessary, and the “set-the-record-straight” talk is a timeworn device for telling a story. This one needs no excuses.

More seriously, I think, is Harrigan’s apparent ax to grind. He seems determined to accent the less attractive parts of Lincoln’s character, and though I like that as an antidote to the legend, I think the author may have gotten too caught up in his cause. What’s more, he often tells you what he wants you to think, perhaps as with the passage quoted above, when he’s more than capable of showing it. And from time to time, these statements confused me, because I’d come to a different conclusion entirely.

Nevertheless, I like this novel a great deal. As Lincoln himself might have said, it reminds me of a story; this one’s from the museum. When one of the president’s enemies accused him of being two-faced, he replied, “If I had another face, why would I show you this one?”

Stephen Harrigan has indeed shown us another face of Lincoln.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Blood and Honor

08 Monday Dec 2014

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Review: Child of Vengeance, by David Kirk
Doubleday, 2013. 321 pp. $26

Like his father before him, Bennosuke trains to be a samurai, a killing machine sworn to carry out his lord’s commands, no matter how vain, narrow, or immoral they may be. To fail means dishonor, redeemable only through suppuku, ritual suicide; but success means stifling compassion, sensitivity, trust, or emotional connection.

General Akashi Gidayu preparing to commit Seppuku after losing a battle for his master in 1582. He had just written his death poem. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

General Akashi Gidayu preparing to commit seppuku after losing a battle for his master in 1582. He has just written his death poem. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Remarkably for a thirteen-year-old boy, or, as David Kirk so vividly describes, just about anyone in seventeenth-century Japan, Bennosuke rebels against this choice. Following his father’s instructions but also the teachings of his uncle, a monk who raised him during long years of parental absence, the boy believes he can be a loyal samurai and a moral, righteous, feeling man.

Bennosuke’s inner struggle is the premise, but there’s as much action as introspection here. Kirk sets Bennosuke’s search within the context of outward battles, whether between father and uncle for the boy’s soul and future, against enemies who bait father and son into mortal combat, or to survive the political tempests of feudal Japan.

I have no patience for hidebound warrior codes or the concept of killing to save face, but I read Child of Vengeance despite its subject matter. I’m glad I did. Not only does Kirk know his ground and how to make it coherent and understandable, he presents moral dilemmas inherent in the samurai way of life. Bennosuke never asks himself whether he’d have preferred to be a peasant, but the story plumbs both sides of this question.

The peasant, forbidden to bear arms, will never have to defend his honor–it’s assumed he has none–nor go to war. However, war will come to him, and he pays, either in taxes or by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is it better to be able to defend yourself, even in someone else’s service? Is the right to bear arms, and the duty that goes with it, a freedom or a curse? The only characters Bennosuke meets who think for themselves, starting with his uncle, aren’t samurai–samurai can’t afford that luxury. So who’s happier in the end, warrior or peasant?

There’s never a dull moment here, and Kirk writes with psychological insight, always a pleasure. However, too often, he tells you what the characters feel–that old devil explanation, again–and Bennosuke’s insights toward the end seem unearned, as if the author has gotten ahead of his character’s development. Sometimes, too, the language feels laden with portent or skating just this side of cliché. Consider this passage:

History is changed by the smallest of things; a single drop of rain, say, is blown by a freak gust of wind into the eyes of a ship’s captain, so that in the blink that follows he misses the sign of the reef ahead. . . . What left Arima’s mouth was no more than a pale green gob of phlegm, but within it was the catalyst that put fire in Bennosuke’s soul.

I like the images, yet I’ve read this before in other guises. Maybe the weak point is that the Arima in the passage fights for an archvillain clan, who–unlike anyone else in the novel–show little depth.

But these are relatively small issues, and I believe David Kirk will write better novels. Meanwhile, Child of Vengeance is worth your time.