*Harbert, Mich., is a crossroads town about 60 miles east of Chicago
across the lake. To get there you have to drive through the gritty
desolation of South Chicago, through Gary, where in autumn the blast
furnaces at night make a glowering sheet lightning, through the smoke
of Michigan City and into clean air again, along Lake Michigan behind
some of the biggest sand dunes in the world. Carl Sandburg's place is
on top of a dune a mile or so from the Harbert post office. On the land
side the house is a triple decker, the top deck open and sunny. The
front porch looks over ten miles of beach through the crests of some
tall pines. Inside it is the kind of house a good workman likes to have
for his family. Sandburg bought this place eleven years ago, about the time he started
work on The War Years, the second part of his biography of Abraham
Lincoln. In the attic he put a stove, a cot, a few chairs and a lot of
book shelves. Near a corner window he put his typewriter on an old box
whose height suited him. He liked to tell people that if Grant and
those fellows could run their war from cracker boxes, a cracker box was
good enough for him. This attic and a room on the second floor called
the Lincoln Room came in time to resemble second-hand book stores. In
the first two years alone Carl Sandburg went through more than a
thousand source books and marked them for copyists, of whom he had two
at a time working downstairs in the glassed-in porch. His pretty,
white-haired wife, Paula, and three daughters helped with the files.
Gutted and exhausted books went to the barn. From April to October each year Sandburg made no engagements; he sat at
his cracker box and wrestled with a bigger job than any army commander
ever faced. Fifty years old when he started it, he could summon to his
aid a lifetime of singularly useful experience: as a shock-headed
Swedish kid in Galesburg, Ill. in the '80s listening to talk of Lincoln and the Civil War; as a
harvest hand, a migrant worker, a volunteer in the Spanish-American
War; as a young reporter in Milwaukee and Chicago getting ten years of
schooling in the hard facts of politics, business, labor; as a poet, a
big Swede trying to shape American lingo to fit his anger against bunk
artists, his vague tenderness for common people, his sense of the power
of U. S. Midland cities. When the literary history of his time comes to be written, Carl Sandburg
may well be esteemed the luckiest of his Midwestern generation. Vachel
Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters had as great if not greater native
talent; even Ben Hecht, whose desk was next to Sandburg's on the
Chicago Daily News in the early '20s, seemed a more brilliant,
sophisticated writer. Of them all, Sandburg, the immigrant's son, got
the surest roothold in authentic U. S. tradition, and got it perhaps by
the near accident of digging for the truth about Abraham Lincoln. “That
son-of-a-gun Lincoln grows on you,” he once told a reporter. Before he
finished The Prairie Years, which carried the biography to 1861, he had
meditated on the basic Lincoln material, had achieved a clear, homely,
sometimes lovely style. The greater demands of the Civil War material
in range and stamina and subtlety unquestionably deepened and
instructed him still further.
