Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
Winsor McCay: His Life and Art
by John Canemaker; Abbeville Press; 223 pages; $49.95.
Cartoon humor—like every other kind —ages poorly. The doings of Happy Hooligan are likely to bring ennui to the modern reader; those of the Katzenjammer Kids, despair. But Winsor McCay’s marvelous cartoons are as enchanting today as they were when he drew them eighty years ago. Partly this is because he relied more on fantasy than on jokes in his work, but mainly it is because McCay was a supremely fine draftsman.
He is best remembered today for “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” and he deserves to be: it was just what the author of this book says—“quite simply the most beautiful and innovative comic strip ever drawn.” Beginning in the New York Herald in 1905, the strip followed its hero through his fantastic nocturnal ramblings. But like all good fantasy, McCay’s visions were grounded in reality: even as Little Nemo and his dream friends, growing into giants as they try to escape King Morpheus, flee across the rooftops of a nighttime city, the city itself is magnificently rendered right down to the diminishing perspective on the buildings’ cornices and the streetcars beetling along far below. McCay not only gives us an exhilarating dream adventure; he gives us as good an artist’s view as we have of the turn-of-the-century American city.
McCay also did a slumberland for adults, “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” and many of these strips are genuinely nightmarish. In one, we get an unsettling corpse’s-eye view of his own burial, the mourners overhead saying things like, “Death in this case is a blessing not only to his wife but to the whole community,” and “He looks natural but who wouldn’t with the alcohol that’s in him.” Like Little Nemo, the grown-up victims always awake stunned and relieved in the last panel.
The tireless McCay also had a full career on the vaudeville stage as a “lightning sketch” artist and turned out animated cartoons of a quality not equaled until Disney’s day. Fortunately, an enormous amount of McCay family memorabilia has survived, and it is intelligently and engagingly presented in this extremely handsome book. The result is not only a portfolio of fine graphic art, but an intimate look at the tangy world of newspapering in Hearst’s day, the vaudeville stage, and American middleclass life in the first decades of this century.
The introduction is by Maurice Sendak, whose famous children’s work In the Night Kitchen is itself a book-length tribute to the enduring charm of McCay’s style.
Mary Todd Lincoln
by Jean H. Baker; W. W. Norton; 448 pages; $19.95.
Many Americans who are uncertain about what Abraham Lincoln’s wartime policies were, and who certainly couldn’t name his cabinet officers, have very firm opinions about his wife: she was detestable. Jean Baker’s revisionist biography of Mary Todd Lincoln explains this dislike as a classic instance of “male-ordered history” that is simply no longer acceptable.
Mary Lincoln was undeniably eccentric by the standards of her day. She was intensely interested in politics at a time when a woman who cared about public matters was considered a “meddling deviant.” She insisted on accompanying her husband in 1847 when he came to Washington as a freshman congressman; most of the wives stayed home, particularly those who had babies. Her taste in clothes was not only extravagant but ran to bright colors, considered more suitable for younger women, but her husband loved and praised her appearance. And even her grief was considered excessive, though during her lifetime three of her four children died and her husband was assassinated. Nor could it have eased her pain that her fourth son considered her insane and had her committed to an asylum.
Robert Lincoln’s persecution of his mother—as shown by sources Jean Baker has tapped for the first time— seems extraordinary, cruel, and self-serving, and the last chapters are therefore the most absorbing of this excellent biography. Mary Lincoln was indeed narcissistic, an unpleasant but hardly a psychotic condition. But the doctors who testified at her trial that she was insane did so without ever examining her. When she managed after a few months to smuggle out appeals for help, she was released as, even by the era’s vague definition of insanity, it was not possible to convince another judge that she was a certifiable lunatic. She never forgave Robert, and though she never formally disinherited him, for the rest of her life she considered herself childless.
Lee’s Lieutenants
by Douglas Southall Freeman; Scribner’s; three paperback volumes, $16.95 each.
After finishing his 1934 biography R. E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman wanted to step back a century and write about another great Virginian, George Washington. But he found, he said, “that mentally it was not easy to leave the struggle about which one had been writing for twenty years and more. A question plagued and pursued: In holding the light exclusively on Lee, had one put in undeserved shadow the many excellent soldiers of his army?” It took him the next ten years to lay to rest the ghosts of the men who labored for Lee.
The first problem was how to write the book at all without simply echoing his earlier study. Lee himself supplied the answer when Freeman remembered a letter the commander had written in 1863: ”…our Army would be invincible if it could be properly organized and officered. There never were such men in an Army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led. But there is the difficulty—proper commanders—where can they be obtained?” Freeman seized on this: “Might not the book be a review of the command of the Army of Northern Virginia, rather than a history of the Army itself?”
And so it turned out. Over the course of three long books, Freeman told the story of the Southern command through the character of the commanders. The first volume, Manassas to Malvern Hill, shows the struggles to work out an initial command, from the brief zenith of the egotist Beauregard to the emergence of Stonewall Jackson; the second, Cedar Mountain to Chancellorsville, ends with the irreplaceable Jackson dead after his great victory; and the third, Gettysburg to Appomattox, details the blows that led to the disintegration of the army.
Virginia had no more loyal son than Douglas Southall Freeman, but he writes of his subjects with balance and insight and without sentimentality. If the prose is occasionally old-fashioned, Freeman’s “study in command” is nonetheless absorbing and judicious, and it is good to have it back in print.
Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie
by John Mack Famgher; Yale University Press; 280 pages, $25.00.
The first settler in Sugar Creek was Robert Pulliam, who came with five others in 1817 to hunt, trap, and, early the following spring, tap the great sugar maples of the area for their sap. The following year the Pulliam family moved there permanently.
The sugar bush they claimed had always been harvested by the Kickapoo Indians, whom the settlers pushed out in the seemingly inevitable way of westward expansion. The region’s sugar crop was so rich that the sweetening became legal tender, an early settler recalled.
The families that followed—first the men and later the women, children, and livestock—mostly acquired their farms illegally by squatting on lands held in the public domain. And they came in clans—siblings and cousins and in-laws of the first pioneers lured to the Sangamon River area by the tales sent home of its bounty.
Faragher’s unusual study of how this small town started, grew, and formed itself into a community illustrates the whole process of frontier settlement. He is particularly perceptive about the life of women; nor does he neglect the Indians who were there first. Though many of the early settlers were illiterate, the author has assembled land deeds, court records, and any other written records that exist into an astonishingly intimate picture of the first sixty years of an American community.
