Scenes of intimacy.(The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage)(Book review)

The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, by Daniel Mark Epstein (Ballantine, 576 pp., $28)

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IN this new book, Daniel Mark Epstein has composed an elegant and insightful study of a well-known couple. The author of several volumes of prose and poetry, among them an outstanding book on Lincoln and Whitman, Epstein uses his poetic gifts to evoke those tender places in the Lincoln marriage that other, less imaginative historians have failed to see. In a characteristic passage he describes how, on a summer night in the Lincoln house in Springfield, the future president

 
   extinguished the lamp and came upstairs. 
   He took off his clothing and lay down 
   beside her. He was always a great comfort. 
   They made love under the eaves in 
   the soft fragrant air of June, and soon she 
   was pregnant again. 

Epstein's purpose, in passages like these, is to remind us that, before they became historic figures, the Lincolns were human beings, complicated, passionate, sympathetic. The stereotypes that have hardened around them fail to do justice to the people they really were. Epstein wrote The Lincolns, he says, partly in order to explode the common belief that "Mary was crazy, and Abraham was a saint."

In this he has succeeded brilliantly. At the same time, he has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Lincoln's relation to the Romantic Revolution of the 19th century, and in particular he has deepened our understanding of Lincoln's Romantic predicament through a fresh and provocative interpretation of the Syphilis Question.

The notion that Lincoln thought he had syphilis is not new. His law partner, William Herndon, said that the future president told him that "about the year 1835-36" he "went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease." Epstein bolsters Herndon's claim by drawing on recent scholarship that shows that the "blue mass" pills Lincoln took (ostensibly for constipation) contained mercury and were often used to treat maladies caused by "excess of venery."