BOOKS

The Despot's Heel

By MARCUS CUNL1FFE

FOR a good few years Edmund Wilson has been occupying himself with the literature of the American Civil War. He has been joined in this pursuit by a horde of American centen- nialists. But the work of most of them has little in common with his own fat, rich volume,*

Which contains some of the best writing he has ever done—writing of a range and percep- tion comparable to the memorable pages of Axel's Castle, The Wound and the Bow, and To the Finland Station. His book is superior to the typical product of the Civil War buff, historian or literary scholar because he knows more than they do, especially about the 1.istory and litera- ture of other countries; because as usual he has studied what interested him and shaped his robust, idiosyncratic chapters accordingly, with results that would seem chaotic in a lesser author; and because the topic is ideally suited to his critical method. He has also, It should be said, and as he generously acknowledges, bene- fited from certain excellent recent American studies of the period such as Arlin Turner's biography of George Washington Cable and William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee.

Mr. Wilson has not confined himself to the )ears 1861-1865, when the war was being fought, or to 'literature' as belles lettres. What he does is to describe 'some thirty men and women who lived through the Civil War, either playing some Special role in connection with it or experiencing Its impact in some interesting way, and who have left their personal records of some angle or

aspect of it.' Such documents, he says, quoting abundantly from them,

dramatise the war as the poet or the writer of fiction has never been able to do. The drama has already been staged by characters who have written their own parts; and the peculiar fascination of this literature which leads one to go on and on reading it is rather like that Of Browning's The Ring and the Book, in which the same story is told from the points of view of nine different persons.

So his prime materials are the diaries of intelli- gent Southern women like Mary Chesnut and Morgan; the Northern• correspondence and Publications of Harriet Beecher Stowe and her family; the dialogues of the Adams family, and (If Henry James and his brother William; the Military reminiscences of the Confederate raider John S. Mosby, and of the Union leaders Grant d Sherman; the immense apologia of the Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens, 4nd the papers of Abraham Lincoln; the romantic yearnings of the Southern poet Sidney Lanier and the tough-minded ruminations of the hostonian, Justice Holmes, three times wounded a young officer—with as shattering an effect, _()ne would have (wrongly) guessed, as that upon Lrnest Hemingway in a later war.

* PATRIOTIC GORE. Studies in the Literature of the fkitierican Civil War, By Edmund Wilson. (Andrd betitsch, 55s.)

This is not to say that Edmund Wilson ignores questions of literature. He speculates brilliantly on the changes in American prose style, from the rotundities of the pre-war years to the semi- colloquial economies achieved by Grant, Twain and others. With equal brilliance he analyses the femininisation of the novel, as instanced in Cable and in John W. De Forest; though it is arguable that this development was already under way in the 1850s or earlier.

But here as elsewhere his concern is with the interplay of American mind and American society, and in particular with the nuances of all those warring lives : the endless arguments, North and South, about the Negro, a problem they could not settle and could not leave alone, a theme at once bedevilling and ennobling; the real condition of the Southern poor-white, as recorded by the Northern journalist F. L. Olmsted, by the brutal 'humorist' Sut Lovingood and by the resentful pamphleteer H. R. Helper; the half-real, half-imagined gentilities of the planter South, as depicted by the women diarists and as concocted by post-war sentimentalists like Thomas Nelson Page; the Calvinist spirit, no stranger to the South but more of an impelling force in the North, and summoned up to aid the Northern war-effort—witness the words of Julia Ward Howe's 'Battle Hymn of the Republic.' All these preoccupations and these figures react upon one another. We encounter them again and again in different contexts, while the antagonisms grow, while the Union gunboats parade the Mississippi, while Sherman's bum- mers cut loose through Georgia and the Carolinas; while war yields to armistice, occu- pation, Freedmen's Bureau and Ku Klux Klan. The result is a book of extraordinary fullness and variety. The only other American chronicle which resembles it is the five-volume series by Van Wyck Brooks, Makers and Finders. Yet here we must note a fundamental dissimilarity. At least in his early volumes, Mr. Brooks feels affectionate about his subject. So in part does Mr. Wilson; he is fascinated by his discoveries and communicates that fascination. But he has never liked wars—he believes that the United States should have stayed out of the First World War and he does not like the trend of American life or American policy. Indeed he has come to believe that from the beginning of its indepen- dence as a nation the United States has acted with a mindless belligerence essentially identical to that of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the other nation-states. Patriotic Gore is intro- duced with this metaphor :

In a recent Walt Disney film showing life at the bottom of the sea, a primitive organism called a sea slug is seen gobbling up smaller organisms through a large orifice at one end of its body; Confronted with another sea slug of an only slightly lesser size, it ingurgitates that, too. Now, the wars fought by human be,ings are stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of the sea slug. The same instincts, for Mr. Wilson, governed the behaviour of the Union toward the South. The Civil War was therefore horrible and disastrous. It was not fought, except incidentally, to end slavery, but blindly and almost deter- ministically, to coerce the South—by an indus- trial nation seeking to swallow up a smaller and more vulnerable economy. The outcome of the war showed the folly of this attempt. The last semblances of an older, 'Roman' America disappeared in corruption and industrialism; and things have got steadily worse ever since.

The title of his book is, then, to be seen as partly ironical, and in part perhaps as a tribute to the bullied South. It comes from the Confederate song, 'Maryland! My Maryland l'— a sort of counterpart to the Union's 'Battle Hymn,' each with its old and stirring tune:

The despot's heel is on thy shore, Maryland!

His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore, And be the battle-queen of yore, Maryland! My Maryland!

Two objections could be offered. One is that the thesis is not true. I do not agree with all of Mr. Wilson's larger theories, and I think that now and then they lead him to under-emphasise the respects in which slavery poisoned Southern life, as well as the degree to which Southern attachment to the Union persisted. Were there two slugs, or only one? Still, his argument has a healthy astringence, and I applaud his comment that a day of mourning might be a more appro- priate way of commemorating the centenary than some of its present absurdly jolly stunts.

The second objection is that the zoological metaphor, and certain economic-determinist interpretations, involve a scale of generalisation which would tend to make the movements of mere individuals too minuscule to engage our attention. But then, we ought not to hold the author to one image in his introduction. In practice, the characters whom he analyses are anything but animalcules. They are alive and complex. Far from condescending, he relives their perplexities on their level.

In this sense Edmund Wilson is very much an American; the pessimism of his thesis is a measure of his passionate attachment to that old Roman-American republic which he discerns somewhere behind the smoke from artillery and burning homes. His awareness of the antique tradition and his attempt to define it lend the book an extra dimension. They account for one of his finest chapters, which could be regarded as a key to the whole volume. This chapter deals with Alexander Stephens, the frail little man from Georgia who regretted secession and then, elected to high office in the Confederacy, with a magnificent, suicidal logic opposed the centralis- ing pressures of his own government. Arrested and imprisoned at the end of the war, Stephens busied himself with Cicero, the Greek New Testament, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold. On release he wrote the huge Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, and put on its title-page the epigraph, 'Times change and men often change with them, but principles never!' He also included the words of 'Mary- land! My Maryland !' in an appendix.

Mr. Wilson characteri es Stephens as the last traditionalist of the eighteenth-century South. He represents stubbornness, integrity, intellect; he is even contrasted– ,.1.1111,rgly, but one sees what the author means s‘ ith Lincoln, the latter as a man 'who responds to popular stresses, who hunts as one of a pack.' Mr. Wilson rescues for us a pure Southern case of considerable power, and suggests to us the paradox that only Stephens, in defeat and isolation, an opponent both of Lincoln's Union and Davis's Con- federacy, was properly entitled to state the rase.