Abe Lincoln and the clutch of life

Lincoln in the Bardo

By George Saunders

343 pages

Available at National Book Store

We know much about Abraham Lincoln, but one minor incident in his life birthed the National Book Award-winning novel by George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo.

One night, the American president is said to have crept into the crypt of his recently deceased son Willie, and held the body tightly in his arms. Nineteenth century reporters noted it, and Saunders has taken this small anecdote of a parent’s suffering and crafted a hugely inclusive and embracing novel about what it means to be human on earth.

It is not simple reading. Though there are supernatural elements, it is no Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. However, it is deeply moving to those who wonder about the human condition in this life and in our world, and what may happen afterward.

In Tibetan Buddhist thought, a bardo is a way station between lives — it is where spirits linger about, sometimes near their former bodies, and try to make sense of it all before transitioning to rebirth. Lincoln was no practicing Buddhist, but in the language and imagination of Saunders, an American short story writer (this is his first novel), we are all Buddhists: clinging to a world that is beset with sorrow and suffering, even as we glimpse that this is only the first step in our journey.

With elements of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the dead populate the gravesite of young Willie Lincoln, the US President’s elder 11-year-old son who succumbed to typhoid fever one evening; the story goes that the Lincolns were holding a dinner party downstairs while the son was feverish upstairs; he died that night. When Willie’s body is later kept in a mausoleum for burial, the President can’t stop himself; he cradles the dead boy in his arms. He is wracked with grief and guilt. He bears the nation’s sorrow and suffering on his shoulders as well: two years into the Civil War, his approval ratings are at an all-time low; he receives countless letters and media reports blaming him for stopping the South from seceding by force, leading to untold carnage.

Underneath this tale of spirits wondering why they can’t go home and why their surviving relatives no longer visit them are threads of America’s modern struggle today: slavery and racial hatred, division and class warfare, sexual identity and the effect of sexual assault — all as timely as today’s headlines. The many portraits of the dead that Saunders weaves into his story represent a cross-section of America. Using an oral history format — the novel unfolds like a play, with each character reciting dialogue — the novelist takes us deeply into the struggles that the dead have in letting go of this world.

Remarkable moments lift right off the paper. Upon seeing Lincoln cradling his dead son, the other spirits in the bardo are dumbstruck: “And yet no one had ever come here to hold us, while speaking so tenderly,” notes the spirit of Hans Vollman.

Indeed, Lincoln’s simple reflexive action in that graveyard might have confirmed for many that the President had a morbid or melancholic disposition. Nowadays, we might consider it simply processing grief in a very personal way.

The miracle of a book like Lincoln in the Bardo is the ways it helps us understand the minds of other people, which is something literature is supposed to do; you may never have personally experienced the loss of a child, or perhaps you have, but you can’t help feeling Lincoln’s ceaseless tattoo of grief as he recalls the clothes in which his deceased child was buried (“Little jacket little jacket little jacket.”). We feel what a black woman felt to be constantly raped by her slave owners and traders, over and over, used until even the thoughts of slave Litzie Wright are silenced and reduced to “***********”. It’s a literary tour de force.

The language is often beautiful, and there is not a note out of place, whether Saunders uses the vernacular of the 1700s, the 1800s, the blue-streak cursing of the working class, the hifalutin oration of the overly educated (which causes other dead observers to groan and ask that one “Speak more simply!”), the hatred of a Revolutionary War bigot who regards black people as “SHARDS,” and particularly the increasingly enlightened mind of Willie and the hard-pressed mental state of a president bearing a country’s grief.

(Oh, and there is humor as well. The Saunders wit is intact, especially with the crosstalk of the constantly swearing Eddie and Betsy Barron. Saunders’ turf is almost always the ways that strangers interact in humorous ways, whether living or dead.)

The strange state of the dead in the Oak Hill Cemetery is described almost in gothic horror style — their limbs are entangled with marble and tree branches; their eyes and mouths multiply; they become enmeshed in the instrument of their own fiery deaths, as with a young woman woven into a train crash and unable to escape to the next life. Remarkably, we feel greater and greater empathy for these fictional souls trapped in an ever-recycling state of regret, fear, and inability to let go.

Lincoln himself is presented as a wise, multidimensional figure (can one even imagine the current US president wrestling with his conscience in such a statesmanlike manner, instead of simply reaching for the Twitter button?). He is a leader facing an unprecedented crisis — the literal dividing of America — in addition to battling the normal ravages of loss and parental guilt. It is only Lincoln’s moment of clarity about his son’s current condition in the grave (“Say it, though, for truth… Oh my little fellow… Absent that spark, this lying here, is merely — Say it — Meat”) that allows not only the president to move on from grief, to embrace even more fully the challenges of his life, but for his son’s equally bound spirit to pass on into the next life as well.