Last month Your Humble Narrator's
university had the privilege of hosting Sarah Vowell, NPR essayist
and voice of Violet Incredible. Ms. Vowell gave a talk on her new
book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which I am reading in
an audiobooks edition because it's hard to beat Patton Oswald as the
voice of Thomas Jefferson.* Before her public appearance, Vowell was
kind enough to meet with a dozen history students and faculty and
talk about her work, specifically her research techniques (site
visits, lots of reading, lots of notecards) and the themes, like
family and memory and democratic debate, with which she regularly
engages. In response to a question from YHN, Vowell attributed the
shortage of women in the history bestseller lists to publishers'
marketing of histories to “Republican dads” and focus on
“serious,” male topics. She found this amusing, because “there
is nothing funnier than a self-important man.” Probably so.
Perhaps the most memorable moment of
Vowell's visit (for me, anyway) came at the reception before her
talk, when one of my colleagues' sons asked her advice for a school
paper on James Buchanan. Vowell had nothing specific to offer about
Buchanan, but did share a general suggestion: try to find something
about your subject, even if s/he is an obscure politician or
president, that makes him/her appealing to you. Recalling her
research for Assassination Vacation, Vowell described plowing
through James Garfield's dreary memoirs, choc-a-block with mundane
details of a legislator's life, and seeing that he only “came
alive” when he wrote about the novels he read for pleasure.
Thinking of the future president sneaking off to the Library of
Congress to read Jane Austen made him appealing to Ms. Vowell, and I
daresay to all of us who heard her account. Since Garfield's
presidency was cut short by an assassin's bullet, and he spent much
of it dying on a sick bed while doctors futilely tried to save him,
one can't know much about the twentieth president except by studying
his pre-presidential life. It is affecting to think of him reading
novels in secret, or “writ[ing] Greek with one hand while writing
Latin with the other,”** and to imagine Garfield doing so from the
White House, if only he had avoided his encounter with Charles
Guiteau.
* Although Fred Armison, as the voice
of Lafayette's teen-aged wife, comes close.
** From Joe Queenan's Imperial Caddy
(1992), 117.
