Summer Reading: 2nd Spark of 3: an accidental cluster

samAlthough I didn’t begin the summer with a reading plan, a pattern began to emerge early.  A reference to Sam Watkins in a journal article spurred me to re-read Watkins’ Civil War memoir Company Aytch (Simon and Schuster’s Touchstone Edition the best of the 3 I’ve owned), which I had read twice before, but always in leisurely fashion.  When I elected to revisit it, I decided I’d feel its real force if I read it in a single day.  Watkins’ account, made famous by Ken Burns’ TV series on the War, reminded me that I had another veteran’s account on my bookshelves, and I decided to read it next for contrast.  For many years my favorite first-hand account of that war had been Henry Kyd Douglas’s I Rode with Stonewall, but Sam has him beat for candor and earthiness.  The Tennessee infantryman saw plenty of the war, and though he’s is given to understatement about its horrors, he occasionally matches Wilfred Owen for the visceral grimness of it all.  Besides battle (Shiloh, Dalton, Atlanta), he’s astute on buckeye whisky, snipe hunts and snowball fights, and his management of the vernacular on the page is always a pleasure to read.

Watkins’ candor can be arresting.  For instance, he reflects that he didn’t try to shoot Federal officers (“yellow sheep-killing dogs”), who rode about with swords and barked orders.  Instead, he shot at riflemen: “when we got down to close quarters, I always tried to kill those that were trying to kill me.”

Watkins was in some respects a representative man, but also an uncommon one – curious and articulate, able to trust God while seeing the absurdity of war and its practices (“The private soldier fought and starved and died for naught”).  I particularly recommend Company H for its unflinching view of the “perfect pandemonium” at The Dead Angle on the Kennesaw Line – the vomiting from exhaustion, horses bleeding from the ears, the dead stacked like cordwood, then the forest fire and the moving sacrifice of William A. Hughes, who left Watkins his beloved Enfield “Florence Fleming.”

Sam “fought and fit and gouged and bit,” recorded his opinions on particular officers (like the “muggins” Hood), and when he looks back years later, he has a civilized man’s perspective: “My flesh trembles, and creeps, and crawls when I think of it today.”  None of that wistful pseudo-philosophical “else we should grow too fond of it.”

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Robert T. Hubard’s The Civil War Memoirs of a Virginia Cavalryman, resembles I Rode with Stonewall more than Watkins’s book, partly due to the patrician overtones, amplified by the overlap in geography – the Virginia countryside as it is ravaged and crossed, claimed and abandoned.  Hubard, a blue blood of the Old Dominion, may not have been aware of the insights he offers about the internecine struggles and aspirations among men who steadily elect new officers and never cease jockeying for position.  Hubard claims, as he is passed over for promotion, not to be guilty of politicking, but his obsession with that aspect of army life is fascinating.

Hubard’s book is comprised of both letters sent during the war and recollections recorded shortly after hostilities ceased.  Consequently, the accounts of war are interlaced with the author’s concerns about the home front (Buckingham County) never far away from him.  Most particularly, this Marse Robert is preoccupied by the courting he’s missing out on, so his dashing dragoon identity is reflected in his priorities; he and Sam Watson are not from the same class.

Besides his detailed accounts of fighting from horseback, Hubard’s maps are useful, as is the photograph gallery.  One of my favorite aspects of the book (carefully edited and noted by Thomas P. Nanzig) includes the extensive accounts of mounted actions around Five Forks, complete with excoriations of Generals like Pickett who were lunching on oysters and unaware, in part due to the peculiar phenomenon of acoustic shadow, of the mayhem occurring just three miles away.

Finally, Hubard, who writes with organized grace and, occasionally, a little freshness, reveals a few nuggets of information which took me by surprise.  When I was young, I followed the debate over whether or not Lee headed for Gettysburg with the local shoe factory on his mind.  I still don’t know the answer, though his advance corps surely knew of the availability of shoes.  However, Hubard reports (and it’s easy to imagine why this might have been suppressed over the years) that men without shoes were sent to the rear because it was assumed they would not be able to keep up with the march.  Hubard’s surprising observation is that more than a few men threw their shoes away to avoid the fight.  I’ve never seen a reenactor choose that practice to emulate.

Verdict: A good book for honeydipping, but not the compelling narrative of Watson or Douglass.

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For over twenty years I’ve followed the exploits and ruminations of James Lee Burke’s Cajun detective Dave “Streak” Robicheaux, as well as his short stories and more literary novels like The Lost Get-Back Boogie.  What I like in them is Burke’s authenticating specificity, his alternation between fiercely-paced action and provocative reflection.  He’s bold with metaphor, as merciless in creating unsettling characters as Fellini, and his protagonist is the kind of stand-up guy you wish you could eat oysters with, then listen to a jazz band on the roof of a New Orleans hotel.

Three or four years ago I picked up a copy of his Civil War novel White Doves at Mourning, but something in it wasn’t really clicking after fifty pages, and I allowed life to interrupt me long enough that I lost the thread and set it back on the shelf.  Not this time.  Perhaps primed by the non-fiction I’d been reading, I took larger steps, moved less skeptically and found a sprawling account of a part of the war I little knew – the home front in Louisiana.

BurkeLike his other novels White Doves at Morning is bristling with characters, some of them rough and brutal, none of them ridiculous or soft.  The primary character, Willie Burke, is struggling to make sense of the conflict between what his culture tells him and what he observes, especially concerning the outcasts in his parish – the flinty abolitionist, the courageous slave daughter of a plantation owner, the local pirate and overseers turned soldiers, the good, the bad and the ugly all twisted about and damaged by the war.
Like most of Burke’s work, WDAM is a story of conflict and doubt, cultural questioning, considerations of race, gender, and Burke’s long-time, over-arching subject, the abuse of power.

What I loved about the book is, predictably, Burke’s style, the vivid scenes on the bayou, the nearly grotesque villains, the intricate weave of history and improvisation.  It was a quick and satisfying read, but I close the book with a few reservations.  Burke believes, as I do, that there are not only people behaving well or badly, but also evil people, and for this reason, he’s determined that the reader understand that, complicated as the moral territory is, it’s not ambiguous.  To guarantee this understanding, Burke treads lightly around the thin ice of bigoted diction.  Although his monsters are not concerned with political correctness, his narrator is.  This is a problem only because the narrative is generally presented as contemporary with the action, so I don’t like seeing terms like “people of color” and “testosterone” where they seem anachronisms or just not true to the moment.  A few clichés of character and situation arise, but the narrative moves briskly, and I just wash the problems down with the fluid action.

The truth is that I prefer Burke’s more complicated novel treating the Civil War – In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.  It’s a modern novel set in haunted and bloody territory occupied as fiercely by revenants as by the contemporary Hollywood crew, mobsters, finance finaglers and cops who can’t walk through walls.  I recommend this latter novel, but it’s hard to believe any Burke fan could leave WDAM without experiencing substantial satisfaction, because even when some of the ingredients to a Burke gumbo are less than fresh, the roux is solid, guaranteed.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.