Lindependence
Before he memorialized the Alamo, fifth-generation Texan Michael Lind made his name as a political writer by turning against the very conservatives who nurtured him.
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The attack persisted in Lind’s first two books, The Next American Nation (The Free Press, 1995) and Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (The Free Press, 1996). Both detail what Lind perceives as the growing plight of American politics, embodied in far-right conservatives like Buchanan and televangelist Pat Robertson. Up From Conservatism opens with the proclamation that “American conservatism is dead” and concludes just as direly: “A future in which the alternatives are symbolized by Newt Gingrich and Patrick Buchanan is grim to imagine—but, alas, not all that difficult to imagine. It is too late to rescue American conservatism from the radical right. But it is not too late to rescue America from conservatism.” On the pages in between, Lind laments how influential the Christian Coalition has become in the Republican party and repeatedly knocks Gingrich (a “fraud”) and Buchanan (“anti-Semitic”), as well as Robertson (“the single most important purveyor of crackpot conspiracy theories in the history of American politics”), former Secretary of Education William Bennett (a “would-be cultural commissar”), and Senator Phil Gramm (“sneering, pseudo-folksy”); even Buckley gets an earful. “The leaders and intellectuals of the American right,” Lind writes, embrace “a vision of the United States as a low-wage, low-tax, low-investment industrial society like the New South of 1875—1965, a kind of early 20th-century Mississippi or Alabama recreated on a continental scale.” Lind also chides the American “overclass”—those “who have advanced degrees and can afford maids”—for turning its back on Main Street’s social concerns.
Not surprisingly, Lind’s political writing has rubbed a number of folks the wrong way. Even though Up From Conservatism was listed among the New York Times’ “notable books” of 1996 ( Times critic Frank Rich told me, “I admire Michael Lind’s writing a great deal and think he has been a major force in exposing the influence and intent of the far right within the Republican party”), reviews of the book castigated Lind for his “overstatement, exaggeration and pontification” and for “producing a rant that is pompous, ponderous, pretentious, and preposterous.” The venom continued to flow in conspicuously mean-spirited reviews of Powertown. Published only two months after Up From Conservatism, the novel unfolds like a 264-page social map of Washington, D.C., and boasts an enormous, at times unwieldy cast of loosely linked characters covering the full spectrum of political power, from lobbyists to Third World domestics. Not unlike its New York cousin Bonfire of the Vanities, Powertown is ambitious in its scope and daring in its street-life intimacy (and for me an enjoyable and informative read), but one critic said it “is so deficient in nearly every aspect of style and construction that one must urge its author to stop already with his presto-change-o acts and stick to something, be it ideology or literary genre.” Another denounced Powertown unread: “[According] to those who have seen the galleys, [the novel] exhibits an ineptitude for fiction that would embarrass Newt Gingrich.” The same reviewer described The Alamo, apparently without having seen a page of it, as “excrescence.”
“The right-wingers are going after me,” Lind said as I pointed to several of the harsher reviews on the conference table. With a wave of his hand Lind dismissed the pile of negative reviews as ad hominem attacks and concluded, “If you’re a renegade, you’re worse than an infidel.”
It will be interesting to see what kind of response The Alamo generates. It took twelve years to complete—Lind got the idea for the book on a visit to San Antonio during a 1983 Christmas break from Yale—and includes a 33-page appendix on the epic style and a 28-page glossary. For my convenience, Lind provided a 2-page explanation of his use of literary allusions in The Alamo: “Travis’s speech to his officers is modelled on the remarks of Sarpedon to Glaucus in Book 12 of The Iliad. Santa Anna’s speech to his troops at the Rio Grande is modelled on that of Goffredo in Book 20 of Jerusalem Liberated (which Tasso modelled on the speech of Caesar to his legions in Book 7 of Lucan’s Pharsalia),” and so on.
The epic itself consists of twelve books made up of hundreds of seven-line rhyme royal stanzas, meaning they have an ababbcc rhyme scheme and each line is written in loose iambic pentameter. The reader will need to keep a dictionary handy—by the end of the first fourteen-page book, I had looked up almost twenty words, beauties like “lorgnette” (eyeglasses with a handle) and “enfilade” (gunfire directed along a line of troops). But The Alamo proves to be almost juvenile fun when read out loud. Try reciting the following while chewing gum: “All told, two dozen animals would graze / and prance and groom each other in the gaze / of their contumelious suzerain, /a skewbald stallion with a mottled mane.”
Though Lind takes some poetic license—he gives Travis a Colt even though the pistol wasn’t mass-produced until 1837, for instance—he emphasized that essentially all of his book is historically accurate. “The Alamo wasn’t a melodramatic battle between good and evil,” he said. “In real life Travis and Houston were members of the War Party, a faction of Texas settlers who were set on independence from Mexico. Travis is the book’s central character. The movies have always concentrated on Bowie and Crockett, but Travis was really much more of an important figure—and more interesting too. He was an intellectual as well as a revolutionary.”
In The Alamo Lind also humanizes Santa Anna and demonstrates that, despite the way the Mexican general is often vilified in Texas history classes, he was actually an excellent commander. “In his twenties he had saved Mexico from invasion by Spain,” Lind explained. “The old-fashioned Texas history is that every Texan went down with twenty Mexican soldiers, when in fact Santa Anna lost only five or six hundred. He also adopted orphans of both sides in battles that he fought and actually raised a number of Anglo-American kids.”
The final four books of The Alamo bring to life the ninety minutes of the horrendously violent battle. “In the Hollywood versions, everyone sits around playing the harmonica during the siege, and then the battle lasts about five minutes,” Lind said. “I did not want to write a pro-war, militaristic poem. If you do it the Hollywood way, you can be accused of jingoism because you gloss over the killing. This was one of the most grizzly eras of warfare. You didn’t just fall over and die—you were bayoneted. This is the advantage of the epic form. People have commented for millennia that Homer shows these guys getting their guts dragged out. As a poet, I had always been uneasy with blank verse as a form for The Alamo. Why not use stanzas? It’s much more difficult to write it that way, but I think it’s really much more of an achievement.”
Will there be an audience for a book-length poem about a 161-year-old Texas battle? Clearly The Alamo’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, thinks so. And the success of Vikram Seth’s 1986 verse novel, The Golden Gate, has probably made booksellers a little less poem-shy. “Maybe I’m wrong,” Lind said, “but I think there’s a huge audience for this—people who read historical fiction, people who like James Michener.”
I smiled as a look of childlike hopefulness filled Lind’s bright blue eyes. Will folks remember The Alamo a generation from now? Maybe, maybe not. But the odds are pretty fair that they will remember Michael Lind.
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