Tragic Life

THE HIDDEN LINCOLN--Edited by Emanuel Hertz--Viking ($5).

William Herndon's life of Lincoln is one of the great neglected books of U. S. literature. It belongs with the best biographies by virtue of its accuracy, its almost unique tone that manages to combine veneration for a great man with shrewd understanding of a human being. But in addition to these qualities, Herndon's Lincoln is a document as essentially American as Whitman's poems, not only in its grasp of the tough frontier world in which Lincoln grew, but in its belief in U. S. democracy, its recognition of democracy's weaknesses, its sturdy faith in the common people.

But like Leaves of Grass, Herndon's Life of Lincoln has had a bitter literary history. Herndon, who had been Lincoln's law partner in Springfield for 22 years, began collecting his biographical material immediately after Lincoln's assassination. As monumental books on Lincoln appeared--Lamon & Black's outspoken Life, the ten-volume study of Nicolay & John Hay--Herndon read them eagerly but shook his head because the figures they presented were not the Lincoln he knew.

Lincoln was a man, Herndon wrote again & again, a great man, a noble man, but also a human being, ambitious, shrewd, successful, passionate, with a man's share of disappointments, of humiliations, of unhappy love affairs, and with more than most men's share of melancholy. He was a foolish father, a browbeaten husband, at once sentimental and hard; a secretive man with his human share of stupidities and perplexities, his career marked, like all men's, with its broken friendships and its grotesque blunders. The Lincoln Herndon knew was a thoughtful, dry man whose wife's temper was a scandal to the town; a law partner who brought his mean children to the office where they tore up the papers and urinated or the floor uncorrected; a practical politician who set out coldly to destroy Douglas when he saw Douglas as his rival for leadership of the West; a great talker who would start to work but waste his time telling stories and then walk home silently to a scolding wife. But he was also a local politician for whom great things had always been predicted, who was honest, picturesque, wise, extraordinary in his generosity and in his devotion to his tasks. This was the Lincoln Herndon knew, and the man he could not find in any book.

Herndon himself was well-read, a student of Darwin and Feuerbach, an admirer of Whitman, a man of the world in his understanding of men. He could turn out gnarled sentences as strong as Whitman's: "The great, keen, shrewd, boring, patient, philosophic, critical and remorselessly searching world will find out all things, and bring them to light," he wrote. "I know Lincoln better than I know myself. He was so good and so odd a man, how in the hell could I help study him!"

But Herndon was also a provincial lawyer, cranky and crude, unable to develop his ideas systematically. Consequently when he came to write his own biography in 1888, he leaned on a young collaborator named Jesse Weik to put it into publishable shape. The book contained enough of Herndon's insight and first-hand knowledge to make it a masterly record, but Weik picked and chose over Herndon's materials as he saw fit; the publishers revised the manuscript, and 70-year-old Herndon got only $300 for his share of the work and for his collection of Lincoln documents that afterwards sold for more than $300,000. Slandered as an atheist, a drunkard, a scandalmonger, a drug addict, Herndon died in 1891, his great monument to his hero disfigured, unpopular, neglected to this day.

His papers, in Weik's possession, were locked up. When the late Senator Beveridge wrote his life of Lincoln, he drew on them, paid a glowing tribute to Herndon, but advised Weik to refuse permission to other biographers. Weik took his advice so literally that for 30 years students could not get access to the 8,000 pages of material. Now in the Huntington Library in California, it has been drawn on by Emanuel Hertz, author of Abraham Lincoln--A New Portrait, in editing The Hidden Lincoln. A belated testimonial to Herndon's integrity, The Hidden Lincoln is a big book, dense and badly edited, repetitious, with few explanatory notes. Although it makes fascinating reading for people who know Herndon's Lincoln, it is likely to be alternately boring and shocking to others: boring in its painstaking inquiry into trivial matters of fact; shocking because of its candor in discussing Lincoln's doubtful paternity, his relations with his wife, his scrapes with women before his marriage

As for Lincoln's paternity, Kerndon said that Lincoln's mother was "a superior woman in mind. ... As to morals that is another question," came finally to believe that Abraham was at least legally the heir of indolent Thomas Lincoln and the uninhibited Nancy Hanks. The evidence on Lincoln's unhappy marriage ranges from an incident in which Mrs. Lincoln hit Abraham on the nose with a piece of wood because he was slow in building a fire, to a probing analysis of her aristocratic pretensions, her belief in slavery and her knowledge that Lincoln, marrying her after Ann Rutledge's death, did not love her.

Told for the first time in The Hidden Lincoln is the story of how Robert Lincoln in 1897 was found in his home in Manchester, Vt. burning his father's papers and letters. A friend tried to dissuade him, could not, hurriedly called Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, who after "a most earnest discussion of the whole subject" persuaded Robert Lincoln to deposit the remainder in the Library of Congress. There they remain, not to be opened until 1947.

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