Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

W. R. D. King [I wrote] is one of those eminences whose strong impression on their own times has suffered a gradual erasure upon the tablets of history. Five years older than Buchanan, he was born into the planter class of Sampson County, North Carolina; he graduated from his state’s university in 1803 and won admission to the bar in 1806. He served in the state legislature and was elected to Congress in 1810, at the age of twenty-four; he was one of the young “War Hawks” who voted, in 1812, the fledgling nation into another war with Britain. Presumably [ Retrospect: unable to locate facts of military career and rank; will do further research if this section is used in your Ford issue (unlikely)], it was amid the scattered and unsatisfactory engagements of little Madison’s little war that King earned the title of “Colonel” with which Buchanan in his letters and public addresses invariably honored him. In 1816, King was appointed secretary to the legation, headed by William Pinkney, to the Kingdom of Naples and then to the Court of St. Petersburg — those chilly parqueted halls constantly reverberant, it seems, with the tread of the thick boots of American politicians. In 1818 King moved to Dallas County, in Alabama, and in 1819 was elected Senator from that state. Thus he, thanks to faithful re-election by the sufficiently pleased voters of his adopted state, for fifteen years figured near the forefront of a golden age of the Senate, when the inexorably rising tensions of a growing nation divided by the slavery issue incited an epic eloquence from such giants of oratory as Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Benton; King, like Buchanan, Silas Wright, and John Crittenden, must be counted in the second rank of these noble arguers of the nation’s complicating case, but contemporary vision did not perceive a striking difference in stature. History buries most men, and then exaggerates the height of those left standing. King was president pro tempore of the Senate from 1836 to 1841, an office made unusually important by the erratic temper and rare attendance of Van Buren’s Vice-President, Richard Mentor Johnson, a profligate Kentuckian whose hammerlock on celebrity was his slaying of the Indian chief Tecumseh (“Rumpsey, dumpsey,” went his campaign chant, “Colonel Johnson shot Tecumseh”) and whose fathering of two daughters by his mulatto mistress was so flagrant an indiscretion that even Jackson, who had pushed Johnson upon Van Buren, by 1840 admitted him to be a dead wait [ sic ] on the Democratic ticket. When, in 1850, Vice-President Fillmore became President upon Zachary Taylor’s abrupt death, King was elected to preside over the Senate.

Now, did Buchanan love King? Fellow bachelors and Senators, they lived together from 1836 to 1844, when President Tyler appointed King Ambassador to France. In 1845 Buchanan became King’s superior, as Polk’s Secretary of State. King asked in 1846 to be recalled; after his defeat as the Union candidate for Senate from Alabama, he returned to the Senate in 1848, as Buchanan was retiring to his idyllic Wheatland interim. A visitor to Wheatland in 1856 wrote in a letter published in Buchanan’s campaign biography, I was much gratified in finding in his library a likeness of the late Vice-President King, whom he loved (and who did not?). He declared that he was the purest public man that he ever knew, and that during his intimate acquaintance of thirty years he had never known him to perform a selfish act . American gays, having seized as theirs Whitman, Melville, and Henry James, among our crusty, straight-lipped Presidents must be satisfied with Buchanan, our only never-married chief executive, who in the heat of 1860 was characterized thus by a calumnious but not unpoetic pro-Douglas paper: Mr. B. has a shrill, almost female voice, and wholly beardless cheeks; and he is not by any means, in any aspect the sort of man likely to cut, or attempt to cut his throat for any Chloe or Phillis in Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, and in spite of all these drawbacks, the portly figure and courtier-like address of Mr. Buchanan form very striking features at a reception. Like Dean Swift and Alexander Pope, he rather courts the reputation of gallantry; and his half-fatherly, half-lover-like attention to such ladies as are presented, rarely fails to flatter the vanity and elicit the gratitude of the fluttering and glittering victims .

King was, history assures us, the epitome of a Southern gentleman and an exemplary — dare we say, a perfect? — Senator. In Buchanan’s eyes, it might be imagined, he loomed as a beau ideal, a masculine angel, conversant with the multitudinous ins and outs of Congressional politicking and the friendships whereby white political males maintained a network of interacting persuasions that up to the rupture of civil war extended from Maine to Texas, Michigan to Florida. The word friend occurs again and again in Buchanan’s letters; one standard source ( The Dictionary of American Biography ) says of him, His nature was adapted to friendships, and those which he made were lasting and gratifying to him . Nineteenth-century men were more easily gratified short of orgasm than men of our time. Indeed, the pleasure and relief which male companionship afforded Victorian Anglo-Saxons was in large part the decided absence of physical interaction, with its demands of tenderness, expertise, hygiene, energy, and extensive preamble and follow-up. Men were simply not educated to cope with women. Ruskin, seeing his bride nude, with her healthy pubic bush, embarked on six years of unconsummated marriage, finally confessing, after much evasive sophistry concerning his non-performance, to his virgin wife that (in the words of a letter she wrote her parents begging an annulment) he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April . This same underappreciated woman, born Effie Gray, survived to enjoy a successful marriage, producing eight children, with the painter John Millais. Yet Millais, anticipating the day in a letter to his close friend Charles Collins, likened anticipation of his impending wedding to the glimpse of the dentist [ ’ ] s instruments and, though he professed to be not in the least nervous , his bride’s diary recorded that in the honeymoon train He got very agitated and when the Railway had started the excitement had been so much for him that instead of the usual comfort I suppose that the Brides require on those occasions of leaving, I had to give him all my sympathy. He cried dreadfully . Impotence at the moment of defloration was not uncommon; Charles Kingsley warned his fiancée, You do not know how often a man is struck powerless in body and mind on his wedding night , but he looked forward bravely to the coming time when he had learnt to bear the blaze of your naked beauty . Throughout most of history men love one another, yes, but as spirits, not bodies; only our coarse materialist imaginations seek to de-Platonize the masculine romances of the previous century. Does not every detail of masculine personal decor — the black stovepipe hats and trouser legs, the constant cigars and chewing tobacco with their residues of foul breath — declare physical unapproachability? Shared housing among bachelors was common domestic economy; witness Doctor Watson and Sherlock Holmes. [ Retrospect: details needed here on incontrovertible homosexual contacts among Victorians; informed demographics on results of male sequestration in schools, jails, armies, and above all navies (CK Melville, Dana); probable sub-elite carryovers from looser and more physicalized Renaissance and eighteenth-century mores, etc.: a book in itself, and perhaps already written. Let’s hope so.]

One surviving portrait limns King as a youthful Byronic beauty, but a photograph shows a King whose swarthiness, lustreless stiff hair, and high chiselled cheekbones convey a suggestion of Indian blood unexpected in a man who, writing from Washington to Wheatland in May of 1850, deplored the expansion of territory achieved by the Mexican War and warned against any expansion into Central America on the grounds that its remote situation and degraded mongrel population would involve us in constant difficulties . Mongrelization was much on these gentlemen’s minds. The Ostend Manifesto of 1854, drafted entirely in Buchanan’s hand, urged the acquisition of Cuba by purchase or force and asserted that by not interfering we would be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames [of black insurrection and rule] to extend to our neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our Union .