The Commander in Grief
Lincoln in the Bardo and Love in the Presidency
“We were perhaps not so unlovable as we had come to believe,” says Roger Bevins III, one of the ghosts populating Lincoln in the Bardo, the first novel by short-story master George Saunders and winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Though dozens of specters and dozens more historical accounts share the burden of narration, most of the pages — and the reader’s affection — belong to Bevins, his friend Hans Vollman, and the Reverend Everly Thomas. They’re an unlikely and unlovely trinity: the would-be father, Vollman, struck by a falling beam before he could consummate his marriage; the not-quite-closeted son, Bevins, his wrists slit after being spurned; and the holy man transubstantiated, turned into a doubting spirit.
The three live — or rather, reside — in the Georgetown cemetery where, on a winter night in 1862, eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln is interred. Though Bevins and his companions don’t recognize the tall, bearded, weary man who visits his son’s crypt in the middle of the night, they are as needful of him as we are. Children don’t fare well in the cemetery, and the ghosts are worried for Willie. His father, they hope, might yet be able to save him. But Willie’s father doubts he can save anyone: certainly not his son, too soon gone, and not the thousands upon thousands of other people’s sons, buried this day in other graves, dead because of his infernal war.
The ghosts don’t know this. (“I knew with all my heart that Mr. Tyler was President,” Bevins says, while Vollman is certain: “Mr. Polk occupied that esteemed office.”) The ghosts don’t know they stand — or skim-walk, as Saunders puts it — in the presence of the most beloved occupant of the Oval Office, a man claimed today by both left and right. Isn’t Lincoln the closest we come to a secular, American god? “Lightning cleaved the dark sky outside,” one of Saunders’s (perhaps invented) historians recalls, “thunder as terrible as artillery fire made the crockery shudder, and violent winds charged in from the northwest.” The heavens themselves storm at Willie’s death, as they did for the cross-bound Christ — another dead son with a father capable of controlling the skies.
“What did it profit Him to switch this one off,” Lincoln thinks, holding his son’s body. Our friends Vollman and Bevin, floating within the president’s lanky frame, think along with him: “What a contraption it is. How did it ever run. What spark ran it. Grand little machine.” Grand, indeed: in Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders turns the full force of his skill and his empathy — is any living writer more often praised as humane? — to the central problem posed by life, which is to say: death.
“The fact of death colors (or should, anyway) every moment of our lives,” Saunders said in an interview. “Not in a morbid way, I don’t think, but in the same way that knowing we will have to leave a party makes the party more urgent and more beautiful.” We might neglect this simple, urgent fact, in life, but in the throes of Saunders’s postmortem accounting, it’s impossible to ignore. Populated by shades, every page reminds us: how absurd it is to love each other, when we are creatures so openly, so obviously doomed to die. So briefly here. How absurd, and yet, how inevitable. How foolish, and how tremendous. “Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another,” Lincoln thinks, his son dead in his arms. “Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond.”
I find my heart breaking at this line, this image of a president so wracked by grief, consumed by love.
The grieving Lincoln knows “his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his.” It is 1862, and the lists of the recent dead have just been published. The casualties of his war are piling up — literally, literally. “A mountain,” Lincoln thinks, “Of boys. Someone’s boys.” Saunders surrounds the sixteenth president with ghosts both near and far: they occupy his mind; they crawl and squat within him. The nation is thick with the dead, and its leader feels the weight of them on — no, in — his shoulders, sharing in his mourning.
Of course, our current state of sorrow is never uniquely ours. We don’t need to be at war to know: there are always hearts heavier than our own. (Although I would remind you, as I must remind myself — we are, in fact, at war.) But our personal griefs and grievances rage within us, petty or just, keeping the others who would enter at bay. This is a shame. The force of one’s story can drive and uplift, but it can also distract, at the expense of other, truer stories, equally or more in need of telling. In the cemetery of Lincoln in the Bardo, each ghost keeps up a running monologue, spoken or silent, a reminder of who they were and where they lived and what they did — they believe this is the only way to remain in the cemetery, and not move on to some other, unknown, and surely more terrible place. They cling to the past — their own, no one else’s — for fear of the future; they tell their stories constantly and at such volume, they can’t hear the words of their neighbors.
But it’s only when the whole ghostly and tumultuous populace set aside their soliloquies, putting their heads together (as it were) in an attempt to save Willie Lincoln — they leap one after another into the solid figure of the president, and into each other — that they have any effect on the world around them. Too weak as individuals to twitch even a living finger, they join to form, however briefly, a fist.
The effect of the ghosts’ communion isn’t only external — each member of the throng finds himself enlivened (if that isn’t too cruel a word to use) by the sudden simultaneity of his being and his neighbor’s. “What a pleasure,” thinks Bevins. “What a pleasure it was, being in there. Together. United in common purpose… How good it felt, doing this together!” Each ghost remembers, now, those times in life when he had felt such purpose and such pleasure, always in the company of and for others: “the showing up at church, the sending of flowers, the baking of cakes to be brought over by Teddie, the arm around the shoulder, the donning of black, the waiting at the hospital for hours.”
(Isn’t this a beautiful metaphor for the act of reading? We sidle our ghostly selves into the author’s head, or he sidles into ours. We set aside our own story for another’s, and find ourselves enlarged. What a contraption it is. But I’m foundering again, now, at the memory of a president who read.)
In another 2017 release, Reality Is Not What It Seems, the physicist Carlo Rovelli tells us: “It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.” Albert Einstein’s famous theories, Rovelli reminds us, are ones of relativity. This is hard, hard to accept and hard to enact: we would prefer, at times — times of glory or success — to be self-determined. We’ll take predetermined, in times of failure. In their quest to save Willie, Bevins and the others meet a group of ghosts tinier and more pitiful than themselves, creatures embedded within the cruel apparatus that tries to trap children in this dismal place. These wretched beings have committed grave crimes — rape, murder, massacre — but they show no remorse. “How could I have done otherwise?” one asks, adamant. “With time flowing in only one direction and myself made just as I was? … How was I (how are any of us) to do other than that which we, at that time, actually do?”
Our friends are having none of it: “a flicker of resolve, or defiance” passes over the Reverend’s face. He will not be grouped with these sodden, self-pitying things. Doomed as he knows himself to be, he will repent nevertheless; he will hope; he will act. “Perhaps,” he thinks, “this is faith: to believe our God ever observant of the smallest good intention.”
I’ve found myself more observant of my own intentions, good and bad, in the months since last year’s election, since first reading Lincoln in the Bardo in the aftermath of that event. The effects are most noticeable within the controlled environment of home, with its minimal variables: I’m more careful around the man I live with, as he is careful around me. We’ve grown more tender, more forgiving, more vocal with our affections. We put more effort into our love. It’s this way after any terrible news — any shooting, any threat — until the terror fades, and we grow absorbed again in our own small stories. That the present terror seems unlikely to disperse is little comfort. We shouldn’t need its blunt instrument to remind us of our fragility. We should always remember — every day, every hour — that we are but two puffs of smoke, grown mutually fond.
“Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public,” writes Michael Eric Dyson in his own most recent book, Tears We Cannot Stop. Lincoln, full of love and full of sorrow, emerges from the cemetery immersed in the love and sorrow of a thousand others, and prepared to speak. “Like anyone who gets to know Lincoln,” Saunders has said, “I fell in love with him.” Anyone who reads Saunders’s portrait will do the same. Lincoln is the ghost we crane to glimpse in this rendering, the one whose voice we strain to hear through the ether. As he leaves the graveyard, his mind turns to the thousands without, to the nation tearing itself apart. He imagines the smug rejoinder that will come from the kings of other countries upon America’s dissolution: “The rabble cannot manage itself.”
“Well,” Lincoln thinks, a rabble in his body and a rabble in his brain, a thousand souls grown — but weren’t they, always? — inseparable from his — “Well,” he thinks, “the rabble could. The rabble would. He would lead the rabble in managing.”
The man I live with plays his guitar around the apartment, singing: I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered / I don’t have a friend who feels at ease. He’s played Paul Simon’s “American Tune” often, through all the years we’ve been together, but these days, as you might imagine, it tends to make my throat clench, making it hard to hear. We come on a ship they call Mayflower / We come on a ship that sails the moon / We come in the age’s most uncertain hours / And sing an American tune.
Saunders’s president is not, of course, the real Lincoln. Simon’s country is not the America in which we live. But the truth of the latter lies, I think, not in some middle distance but in a direction only measurable in time. Settled in genocide and founded in slavery, hasn’t our nation always been aspirational? Isn’t the country, like its presidency, best defined as what it could be, rather than what it is? This is not always an optimistic thought: the current country, and its presidency, is one way it could be (and is). If we live in a constant state (and nation) of striving, sometimes the strain will show more heavily than others. At other times — or perhaps they are, inevitably, the same times — we surge forward, lifted as if by a crowd. We hear each other’s stories as clearly as if they sounded in our own fragile heads.
The better angels of our nature, the real Lincoln called them, the word comparative and not superlative, the best not yet in sight. It’s so very hard to put our faith in what we cannot see or know — perhaps this is one reason we mythologize the presidents of centuries past, rightly or not. It’d be far easier to do right, if we only had to look behind us, if again were all it took. But we have to look forward; we have to struggle for a country no one’s ever glimpsed but in a dream. We can only imagine how good we might be. It’s not an easy thing, at times, to imagine. At times — today, say — it takes a great and willful hope.
But the rabble could, and did, and will again —at least, I believe such hopeful things, reading and rereading Lincoln in the Bardo. “These and all things started as nothing,” Bevins says of his lovely, wrenching memories, of his life, “but then we named them, and loved them, and in this way, brought them forth.” We name our country, and we love it, and we will not have that love wrenched from us by death or diminishment, but will persist in it, though it is endless, this continual bringing forth.
