In bed with Mr Lincoln
Gore Vidal, wit, essayist, playwright, historian, author, provocateur, gay icon, would-be-senator and former resident of Ravello on the Amalfi Coast... Anyway, Lincoln: A Novel is numbered among the celebrated works of the great Gore Vidal so who better then to assess C. A. Tripp's much-discussed, hotly-disputed new book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln? In Vanity Fair, Vidal ponders the big question: Was Lincoln Bisexual? It's full of good bits, especially this one:
"The young Lincoln had a love affair with a handsome youth and store owner, Joshua Speed, in Springfield, Illinois. They shared a bed for four years, not necessarily, in those frontier days, the sign of a smoking gun — only messy male housekeeping. Nevertheless, four years is a long time to be fairly uncomfortable."
The peerless, wicked Gore Vidal there. He rounds off the piece with an observation filled with admiration and acidity: "Finally, without this great ethical Lincoln there would be no United States and despite our current divisions, we should be forever grateful not only to him, but of course to his Creator, who, on our behalf, brought him to an early puberty; thus, making our restored Union God's country." Well worth a read, then, Vidal's Was Lincoln Bisexual?
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Also well worth a read is Philip Nobile's Honest, Abe?. Nobile is a historian who was to was to have collaborated with Tripp on the book, but the collaboration foundered when Tripp refused to permit an acknowledged Lincoln expert arbitrate their differences, and Nobile realized that "Tripp would never give up his homosexual bias or observe the customary standards of historiography". After apparently shelving the project, Tripp completed it without Nobile's knowledge.
Nobile charges Tripp with three things: (1) drawing firm conclusions from evidence that doesn't warrant them; (2) suppressing counter-evidence to Tripp's thesis; and (3) plagiarizing Nobile's work in the book published only under Tripp's name. Several examples of Tripp's plagiarism are offered in the article.
Nobile's conclusion in the article:
The Gay Lincoln Theory, for all its jagged edges, may be a more satisfying explanation for the president's weird inner life than the Utterly Straight Lincoln Theory. "I have heard [Lincoln] say over and over again about sexual contact: 'It is a harp of a thousand strings,'" Henry Whitney told William Herndon in 1865. Leaving aside Tripp's bad faith, it is not utterly beyond imagining that Lincoln may have played a few extra strings on that harp.
But the fraud and the hoax of C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln are no way to explore the hallowed ground of history.
Vidal in his article derides the eye of faith as being "most selective and ingenious when it comes to the ignoring of evidence." I wonder just how hard Vidal tried to find and deal with critical assessments of Tripp's work. Whether he didn't try, or he tried but found none, or he tried and found some but ignored them, the irony of Vidal's characterization of "the eye of faith" should be obvious to any fair-minded person.
Posted by: Chuck | January 12, 2005 4:50 PM
Given all the fuss about some 19th century men sleeping together in one bed, it is worth reflecting that Henry James slept in the same bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Neither, so far as we now know, called the other ‘honey.’
Posted by: Don | January 13, 2005 3:15 PM
I read Vidal's piece. I thought he was too eager to be convinced.
Interesting food for thought, but I don't expect we'll ever see any definite proof one way or the other.
Posted by: jerseycityjoan | January 17, 2005 11:28 PM