Mind Picker: Booth

The Booth family is gratified by the depth and breadth of national mourning for Junius Brutus Booth. Every American paper reports Booth’s death and most include long eulogies. But one response is memorable for its brevity. Rufus Choate, a storied trial lawyer turned Whig congressman, a man famous for his soaring and sustained bouts of oratory, says simply, “There are no more actors.”

In an Author’s Note at the end of Booth, Karen Joy Fowler explains that “during one of our American spates of horrific mass shootings”, she began to wonder about the families of shooters — what it must be like to love someone who becomes universally despised — and then she began thinking of the Booth family, and started working on a novel about the family of John Wilkes Booth; pointedly not focussing on John himself as he was a man who had sought notoriety and was not deserving of Fowler’s attention. Then when Trump was elected president, Fowler recognised that “Lincoln’s warnings concerning the tyrant and the mob” were still true in the modern day, and she realised that the story she was writing about the radicalisation of the man who would become Lincoln’s assassin could be seen as a warning for the present: it is still true that a house divided against itself cannot stand and growing partisanship imperils the Union. So, on the one hand, Booth is stuffed full of interesting historical information about the Booth family (I had no idea how famous the Booth father and older brother, Edwin [the nineteenth century’s “greatest Hamlet”], were), and on the other, Fowler never lets us forget that she’s drawing a line between the past and the present; the parallels are obvious and underlined. As a work of historical fiction, this was well done (with the caveat that, as a longish book, too much detail can feel tedious to me), and as a work of political commentary, an essay expanding on the Author’s Note would have sufficed for me. This felt a bit of a slog; just okay to my taste.

They were wrapped together in a single blanket, John’s little body hot against Mother’s breasts. She was looking down into his flushed and fretful face, when on sudden impulse she’d said a prayer asking to know what his fate would be. Instantly a flame rose from the ashes and, shaping itself into an arm, stretched toward the baby as if to knight him. In that flame, Mother said, she could read the word Country, followed by Johnny’s name. And then the arm fell back and faded away. This strange, unfirelike behavior taking place on their own little hearth has the whole family excited. It may be an ambiguous fate, but it’s clearly a glorious one, a narrative of such power that Asia will write a poem about it one day, forgetting how angry she once was not to have been given a glorious fate of her own. She was less upset by her own lack of a destiny than by the fact that nobody had ever even bothered to ask the fire if she had one.

Junius Brutus Booth — celebrated Shakespearean actor of the London stage — wooed the beautiful Mary Ann Holmes, and in 1821, moved her to the United States, eventually settling her in a “secret cabin” in the woods northeast of Baltimore. Over the course of twenty years, Mary Ann will give birth to ten children, six of whom will survive to adulthood, and as Junius (equal parts genius, madman, and hopeless alcoholic) spends around nine months of every year touring with acting troupes, Mary Ann (and the enslaved people the family “leases”), work the farm and raise the children and try to stay above the poverty line. The family will move into Baltimore and back to the countryside again; eldest son June will leave to make a name for himself on the stage; Edwin will be taken out of school to travel with his father; the two youngest boys — John and Joe — will be sent to a boarding school; and the two daughters — Rosalie and Asia — will be left to take care of Mother, their brothers, and watch for marriage prospects. Throughout all the years, John Wilkes will be the pet; the scamp, the matinee idol, his mother’s and sisters’ favourite who can do no wrong.

Fowler tells this story from three perspectives: From Edwin’s (the most celebrated actor in the family, his biography is well documented); from Asia’s (she wrote several [some would say apologetic] memoirs of herself and her more famous family members); and Rosalie’s (of whom very little is known, so Fowler was free to have Rosalie’s sections fill in the historical bits from the newspapers and the typical family life of the time). This rotating POV gave a satisfying backdrop for John Wilkes’ formative years, while never presuming to imagine what the future assassin was thinking or feeling. And by giving us the whole Booth story (ending not long after the assassination), Fowler is able to pinpoint a few transformative moments: John was present at “the battle of Christiana” — in which free Blacks repelled a Marshal’s attempts to capture escaped slaves — which some historians point to as the beginning of the beginning of the Civil War; he joined the Richmond Grays militia unit to march on Charles Town to ensure John Brown’s hanging (the battle flag of the Grays reads “Sic semper tyrannis”); he was visiting Edwin’s house in New York City when the anti-draft riots happened (and apparently delighted in watching the city burn). Fowler makes clear that all of the Booth family thought of themselves as pro-Union Northerners, except for John Wilkes, and other than apparently suffering the mental illness and alcohol abuse that seems to run through the Booth family (Edwin says of his brother, “He has all of Father’s madness without the genius”), and some slightly different experiences at school (and particularly coddled at home), there’s no real explanation for how one of the Booths could become a murderer. But again: this isn’t really meant to be John Wilkes’ story; this is the story of America and how slippery the slope is towards considering your countryman your enemy once the drums start beating.

What’s it like to love the most hated man in the country? Loving John is something the world simply will not have. Not loving John is something Rosalie and Asia simply cannot do.

As I’m not an American, I had only a general knowledge of John Wilkes Booth and what Fowler writes about his background and upbringing (and particularly the stories of the more famous and celebrated acting Booths) was interesting and informative to me. And since the symbols of the United States aren’t emotionally affecting to me, it did take this whole, long novel and Fowler’s Author’s Note at the end for me to really understand what it meant for the Confederate Flag to have been “carried through the halls of the Capitol for the very first time” during the insurrection of January 6th, 2021: the events of that day were, naturally, shocking to witness as a non-American, but their meaning wasn’t really clear to me until now. It still felt like a bit of a slog — this is not at the top of my own Booker picks — but it wasn’t entirely a waste of time.