Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

Thomas Keneally: American Scoundrel

Thomas Keneally likes to write about rogues with hearts of gold, bounders who do well by their fellow citizens in times of great crisis. Keneally’sBooker-Prize-winningnovel, Schindler’sArk,whichbecame thebasisofthefilmSchindler’sList,madethisclear.Hisrollicking,captivating new book, American Scoundrel, focuses on Daniel Sickles, the indefatigable son of corrupt Tammany Hall, who was notorious when young, and whose fame only grew greater as he lived to a very ripe old age (ninety-four). But, as bright as that fame was, it cooled more rapidlythananycontemporarywouldhaveguessed .NowKeneallybrings Sickles back to life, in every colorful and scandalous detail. Keneally takes the less traveled road to great events. Schindler was his oblique path to World War II and the Holocaust, and Sickles’s amazing life leads to the Civil War and reconstruction, up past the dawn of the twentieth century. Unlikethelastmajorattempttopopularizehim,W.A.Swanberg’s 1956 biography, Sickles the Incredible, which deals with Sickles’s first wife Teresa sparingly, Keneally takes pains to give her, if not equal time, equal status in the narrative. For it was her affair with Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, that made Sickles a thoroughly infamous figure of his time. He shot Thomas Keneally: American Scoundrel 267 268 and killed Key a few blocks from the White House in what was called, in the nineteenth century, “broad daylight,” leading to a scandalous trial, the O.J. courtroom drama of its day. Indeed, Keneally’s version of Sickles life gains its remarkable clarity and bite because it is filtered through a very contemporary lens. Its treatment of Teresa and the social mores of the country as it heads, inexorably , toward civil war is made vibrant and modern with Keneally’s own sympathy and understanding, tempered, in a provocative way, by his Australian roots. Here is a very American story, written with a dash of distance and skepticism, by a prolific novelist who wields his outsider’s perspective effectively. American academic historians usually do not make fun of Abe Lincoln, and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, as well as other iconic American figures. Keneally’s irreverence is both refreshing and enlightening . We learn why no one ever quotes Lincoln’s first inaugural address, only his second, and why South Carolina still clings to the confederate battle flag. Though Sickles’s role in the battle of Gettysburg is how he has hung on to his place in history (then, as now, war was the vehicle of rehabilitation, which let Sickles be treated seriously once again, after being dismissed by a large part of the public as a troublesome lightweight ), and is featured in the book’s jacket illustration, it is over two hundred pages until we get there. The book’s early chapters detail Sickles’s sexual history and peccadilloes, though much more gracefully than, say, the Starr Report chronicles Bill Clinton’s. Keneally tells us that, as a teenager, “Dan had been considered by his parents, George Garret Sickles and Susan Marsh Sickles, to be sufficiently unsettled and in need of special tutoring that they arranged for him to live in the scholarly house of the Da Ponte family on Spring 269 Street, New York.” As Keneally reveals: “It was a household like few others in that hard-handed, mercantile city.” The household’s head, Da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart, oversaw a domestic enterprise that outdid any opera known to exist. Sickles met his future wife, Teresa, as an infant there, and married her when she turned fifteen. Throughout,Keneally’snovelisticimpulsesareincharge.Notthat he, evidently, invents anything, but his interests lie in the realm of experience and sensation, of facts set in the context of the messiness of daily life, the material a novelist’s imagination usually brings to the page. Hecapturesthetexturesof NewYorkCityanditsmale-drenched, close-knit, friendship-oiled politics of the period deftly, and shows howSickles’sprodigiousgiftsandlife-forceboundpeopletohim,both friends and foes. Luckily, some of Sickles’s friends became presidents of the United States and when Sickles murdered Barton Key, one eyewitness fled to the White House to confer with President Buchanan about what he should do. Buchanan told the young man: “He should leave Washington straightaway, and return home on indefinite leave. Hence an American President, often referred to as the Chief Magistrate of the Republic, urged a witness–for all he knew the only witness to the murder–to flee from his legal responsibility.” By that point, midway through the book, one is well...