FREEDOM
William Safire
Garden city: Doubleday, 1987
1,125 pp., $24.95
How would you feel if you wrote a book everyone called important, even great, but no one really understood? You'd feel like William Safire, who has written a masterpiece that reviewers praise for all the wrong reasons - or criticize for no interesting reason at all.
Safire delivers a stunning account of the decision making process in Washington, and he describes the operation of the American political process in an odd mixture of fiction and factual history, an account of how, lurching this side to that, stumbling, falling, oftentimes nearly failing altogether, Abraham Lincoln reached that fateful first day of January 1863 on which he freed (some) slaves (over whom he had no power anyhow).
Safire did not promise a work of mere history, and he did not pretend to write mere fiction. True, he engages with historical fact, proven by the now famous "underbook" of several hundred pages of discussion of sources, moot points, controverted issues, and his reasoning and judgment on them. And equally true, he makes up people and incidents, even bedding this one down with that one. These serve the purpose for which they are invented, as much as history, in suggesting that things really happened in one way rather than some other.
Safire wanted to inquire into how the American political process reaches decisions. He could not do it wholly through history, which yields no ideal type through which such a theory can be set forth. He also could not do it wholly trough fiction, which, happening wholly in his own head, serves no useful purpose in political discourse. He gained his goal by taking from history-writing his theme and problem and borrowing from fiction his mode of narrative discourse.
Fraud or masterpiece?
So, the book is either a masterpiece or an utter fraud, but it cannot fall in between. It can be judged a fraud because the history is fanciful and fiction wooden. Or it can be judged a masterpiece because the author's own genius, which is a political genius, finds its métier and attains its full and complete realization only in this odd, and I think, scarcely precedented work. And I think it's a masterpiece.
Why? First, because it is better than the recent fiction on the subject, which really is fiction. Take for the lead example the counterpart Civil War novel of Gore Vidal. I read that book before this one came out and decided I never wanted to read another Civil War novel again. I found Vidal's Lincoln trivial and disconnected, meretriciously promising portentous insight but managing to say nothing terribly important about lots of momentous events. His invented characters all had pimples on their faces, speaking of pedophilia.
Then Safire came along, and out of admiration of his political writing, I figured, what can I lose? And after promising myself to stop after 50 of the more than 1,000 pages if I was not hooked, I never could let
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