Fateful Lightning

Reads from early 2011 and 2021. A great film I watched on Presidents' Day 2021.

The first three books I read in 2011 were The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer, The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe. I revisited all of these writers in subsequent years, reading Mailer’s leviathan CIA novel Harlot’s Ghost that same spring, Parker’s Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker in 2013 and a Poe collection called Great Tales of Terror in 2020. I went so far over those years to commit several poems by Parker and Poe to memory and found that all of these books are worth a read.

Some of my reads so far in 2021 include a refurbished collection of Krazy Kat comics from 1916 to 1918 by the master newspaper cartoonist George Herriman, William Blake’s experimental illuminated poetry collections Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and a novel from 1968 called Out of the Dead City by the science fiction luminary Samuel R. Delany. I also got around to a first reading of the often-assigned The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, an 1895 novel of the Civil War that was supposedly so convincing in its verisimilitude that readers who were Civil War veterans could at first scarcely be convinced that Crane wasn’t one of them.

The Red Badge of Courage is a good story predicated on an interesting moral premise: how does a raw recruit know in advance how he’ll hold up against the fear of death in battle? Crane’s protagonist grapples with uncertainty until the moment of confrontation when his nervous system overrides his decision-making capabilities and his body flees on his behalf. Eventually he finds that his disgust at his having skedaddled in the face of the enemy can itself serve as a rite that delivers him to glory through a combination of shame, serendipity and good timing.

In reading the scholarly introduction to the edition I got from the Library I was enthused to learn that Crane based the battle in his story on accounts he read of the Battle of Chancellorsville. I’ve read several short factual descriptions of Chancellorsville in Civil War history books, and in 2016 I read Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave by Ernest B. Furgurson, a former Marine Corps officer and reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Furgurson’s book-length examination of a battle that is of ongoing fascination to military history buffs is evocative and engrossing, and while Crane never mentions Chancellorsville by name, it was fun to imagine his fictional story’s action unfolding in that historical context, even if to do so is to somewhat miss the point of the broader and more universal questions Crane invites the reader to confront.

On Presidents’ Day 2021 I watched the 1939 John Ford film Young Mr. Lincoln. I was genuinely impressed with how Lincoln-like Henry Fonda was able to look. (I think the nose was a prosthetic, but the cheekbones and black hair are pure Fonda.)

I enjoyed reading about Ford’s World War II exploits in Mark Harris’s great book Five Came Back but I know little firsthand of Ford’s film work. I’ve seen Fonda twice in the excellent 1941 Preston Sturges comedy The Lady Eve and once in 12 Angry Men; evidently his regular beat was playing handsome nerds with kind eyes and a steely inner strength, making him ideally suited to play Lincoln. This picture, and Fonda’s career generally, couldn’t have worked as well without his subdued confidence, convincing line-delivery and natural rapport with the camera.

Young Mr. Lincoln sets aside our implicit conception of Lincoln as the brilliant statesman and leader he turned out to be so that it can make good drama out of the attributes that got him there. Based on historical fact but liberally fictionalized and condensed for dramatic purposes, it amounts to an album of references to well-known parts of the legend of Lincoln’s early biography, winking to the audience in a foretelling of the greatness predestined. Lincoln’s honesty, humble origins, autodidacticism, natural leadership ability, skill as a lawyer, deep sense of fairness and renown as an aw-shucks raconteur are on prominent display, as are his famously bumbling courtship of Mary Todd and the seed of the historically influential Lincoln-Douglas relationship. In its silliest moment the film has Lincoln making up the tune for “Dixie” nearly twenty-five years before the onset of the Civil War, but this can be forgiven in good humor if generously thought of as a sort of echo of the future. There are several more moments like this at the very end of the film, when young Mr. Lincoln in stovepipe hat walks with stern determination to the top of a hill and into a gathering storm. Fateful lightning indeed, and genuinely affecting as a dénoument.

All of this is draped over the scaffolding of a courtroom drama, where Lincoln has to prove to himself his mettle as a professional and gets an opportunity to prove to everyone else in Springfield, Illinois his shrewdness, charisma and honor by fighting for a good family beset by bad luck. It’s tempting to imagine that the film might be more enjoyable to a modern viewer if it comprised only the highlight reel of Lincolnalia, but it has to be admitted that the structure and momentum with which the courtroom story imbues the film is part of why it moves along at the sprightly canter that keeps every moment of it interesting.

It also looks great, full of lush, quiet black-and-white compositions. I was struck by an early one before Lincoln moves to Springfield in which he is framed by a broken section of fencing and a tree curling above and behind him against the river and horizon just beyond. This makes a noteworthy contrast with a shot towards the end, just after Lincoln has achieved legal victory and must leave the building to face the adulation of a waiting public. In this shot he is enshrined against a door, within a stark square of light thrown on the wall by another door, and finally by the four edges of the overall image, laying before him a corridor of rectangular framing. In the earlier scene, rural Lincoln walks toward the background of the tree and river with a forlorn glance over his shoulder toward the viewer. In the latter, having gone through a literal and figurative trial, Mr. Lincoln, now prepared to face the grave challenges we know await him, seems almost to walk out of John Ford’s movie theatre towards the viewer and into his destiny. Such subtly, care and artfulness seem to have gone into nearly every choice in great old studio pictures like this one, which is what enables them to so fully captivate our attention as they glide along. The writing, performances and mise en scène are never unrestrained enough to draw attention to themselves and never second-rate enough to give us a chance to check our watches.