War and Literature

The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War.
by Daniel Aaron.
Knopf. 401 pp. $12.50.

Daniel Aaron has written a book about the impact of the Civil War on American writers in order to demonstrate the perfectly valid thesis that the war actually had very little impact on American writers. Such an undertaking necessarily involves some complicated intellectual footwork, since to make out any kind of case one is obliged to start from the assumption that the war should have received important literary treatment, and then proceed to discuss the many writers who either could not or preferred not to deal with it at all, others who touched on it only peripherally, and still others who tried to make full-scale use of it but did so in fiction or poetry that, for the most part, can only be considered third-rate. Mr. Aaron's argument, in short, requires him to fabricate a historically dubious expectation as to the effect a major war should have on literature and then to concentrate on instances of negative performance, of the failure of various writers to measure up to the expectation.

This not only places him in continuous dialectical jeopardy, but engenders a quality of monotone and bleakness that pervades his study and finally deadens the effect of even his best perceptions. The examination of the influence on literature of any historical event is difficult enough, but the examination of the influence an event largely did not have on literature requires the genius of a Flaubert to bring off. He at least just might have succeeded in his ambition to write a book about nothing.

Another of Mr. Aaron's problems is that Edmund Wilson explored much the same material with far greater thoroughness and sensitivity in Patriotic Gore, and he did so without imposing on himself the constraints that so severely hamper Mr. Aaron. Wilson was not interested solely in the extent to which the war figured as the subject matter of imaginative literature or whether it inspired an epic novel or poem, but rather in the overall literary achievement of the wartime and immediately postwar years. He shared Mr. Aaron's view that the period was not one in which belles-lettres flourished. But instead of allowing the fact to trouble him, he proceeded to examine what the period did produce and tried to put into the perspective of the war particularly the many examples of those other literary forms—the diaries, memoirs, speeches, letters, and journalistic accounts—which might be said to have flourished.

Mr. Aaron pays his respects to Patriotic Gore and has obviously learned from it, yet he also has serious reservations about some of Wilson's judgments and finds him, on the whole, too perverse and speculative to be an altogether trustworthy guide. One feels, in fact, that it may have been partly because of these reservations that Mr. Aaron felt justified in undertaking his own study of the subject. Nevertheless, the authority of Patriotic Gore is massively present in the world of Civil War literary scholarship and, unavoidably, it has had its influence on Mr. Aaron's manner of engaging his materials. It is almost as if Mr. Aaron were writing with such an acute consciousness of what Wilson had already said, and said so well, that he chose to omit or pass lightly over certain areas of discussion rather than risk intruding on Wilson's territory. Wilson was a prodigious, perhaps an excessive, quoter and citer of cases, and he was also an extraordinary stylist. Mr. Aaron quotes scarcely at all and buries his citations in footnotes that are almost always livelier and more to the point than his text. His style, moreover, is as lackluster as his conception of his subject and the result is a book large in size but thin in substance.

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Mr. Aaron's method is to offer us a catalogue of American writers from Emerson to Faulkner, each of whom is characterized on the basis of his or her relation to the Civil War. There is a good deal of sheerly informational value in some of these studies, particularly in those of the older New England writers and of James, Adams, Twain, and Howells who, unlike Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier, seem to have had something more than a theoretical response to the issues of the war and to have felt a genuine emotional and imaginative involvement with its tragic aspects, even if the war experience itself, in which they had no personal part, figured only peripherally in their work. Mr. Aaron is also informative in his discussions of John W. De Forest, who participated in much of the fighting and wrote Miss Ravenel's Conversion, which is widely considered to be the best novel about the war to be written by a veteran, and Ambrose Bierce, who also fought and came to write with great bitterness of his experiences. Mr. Aaron is considerably less effective in his discussions of the modern writers, Faulkner and the Southern Agrarians, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, for whom the war and its aftermath, along with the myth of the chivalric ante-bellum South, constituted a heritage of romantic legendry and social corruption that became in their best work the source of a symbolism of great tragic as well as comic-ironic significance. He does not really engage the Agrarian writers at all, and his treatment of Faulkner incorporates the worst features of his synoptic approach.

Although the list of writers whom Mr. Aaron at least touches on seems, if anything, overly long, it still contains curious gaps for which he offers no explanation. One wonders, for example, why he is willing to depart from his thesis to the extent of including discussion of such a gifted diarist of the war period as Mary Boykin Chesnut, while making no mention of such other diarists as Kate Stone, Sarah Morgan, or Charlotte Forten, whose Journal contains an invaluable account of a mulatto girl's experiences as a teacher of Southern blacks during the war, and whose association in 1862 and 1863 with the Boston Abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then a colonel in the Union army, during the campaign in South Carolina is surely one of the most unusual relationships between black and white in the history of the war. Mr. Aaron does not discuss Higginson himself beyond a few brief references. Yet Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment is an important document of wartime race relations. There is also no mention of Kate Chopin, and Rebecca Harding Davis is only quoted. Yet both women were writers of some significance, and it can be argued that in her Life in the Iron Mills Mrs. Davis made a pioneering contribution to the development of the realistic novel in America, at the same time that she wrote considerable fiction directly concerned with the war. One might also ask why, if he chose to include Mrs. Chesnut, Mr. Aaron fails to consider such eminent military memoirists as Generals Grant and Sherman. Because Wilson had already done so?

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But the question that most urgently needs to be raised about The Unwritten War is why, if he is so preoccupied with the failure of the war writers to produce an epic literature, Mr. Aaron did not concentrate his attention on the possible causes of that failure or at least offer us some educated speculations about them. As it now stands, he devotes more than three hundred pages to a discussion of how these writers mostly did not react literarily, or reacted with less than complete effectiveness, to the war experience. It would seem he might have been well advised to condense these materials into an essay of forty or fifty pages and devote the bulk of the book to a close psycho-historical examination of the factors behind this singular phenomenon. Instead, he confines the expression of his vague and fragmentary thoughts on the subject to a few pages in his introduction and conclusion. The definitive study of this subject would need to take into account and explore at considerable length areas of speculation which Mr. Aaron passes over much too quickly.

It might, for example, be argued that by the time the war ended, the causes for which it had been fought as well as the realities of the actual fighting had become so thoroughly fictionalized in the public mind of both North and South that any effort to fictionalize them formally may well have seemed either redundant or sacrilegious. There is undoubtedly much truth in Thomas Beer's observation that “the ‘real’ war was unwritten because of that spiritual censorship which strictly forbids the telling of truth about any American record until the material of such an essay is scattered and gone.” Surely, no other major war in history was fought over issues so beclouded in myth and romantic sentiment or so distorted by the pretensions of high-minded self-delusion and metaphysical clap-trap. Slavery may have been the official rabble-rousing moral issue of the war. But the motives that drove the armies of both sides to such preposterous lengths of slaughter and generalized mayhem were those of sectional chauvinism and economic self-interest, which, since they were too crass to be openly acknowledged, had to be transcendentalized into grandiose quasi-religious abstractions. Wilson described the process as one in which the South pitted “a reciprocal vision . . . with equal fanaticism against the North's Armageddonlike vision, derived from its traditional theology, of the holy crusade which was to liberate the slaves and to punish their unrighteous masters. If the Northerners were acting the Will of God, the Southerners were rescuing a hallowed ideal of gallantry, aristocratic freedom, fine manners, and luxurious living from the materialism and vulgarity of the mercantile Northern society.”

Mr. Aaron writes perceptively about the tendency of both North and South to regard their war in Miltonic terms, as a sequel to the English civil wars, and to identify themselves, respectively, with the Puritan Roundheads and the royalist Cavaliers. “Just as the Puritans sapped the kingly prerogative and humbled the arrogant Cavaliers, so their descendants smashed the legatees of royalism in the Southern States”—thereby creating, one might add, that mighty legend of heroic defeat and the destruction of the last American strong-hold of civilized men, on which the South to the present day has nourished its pious self-image and, in the process, severely retarded its development toward genuine civilization. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain only half facetiously attributed the oppressive influence of this legend to the novels of Sir Walter Scott, who set “the [Southern] world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” It even seemed to Twain that “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war,” and Twain was also convinced that one of the chief reasons why Southern literature remained moribund while Northern literature flourished after the war was that the latter had thrown off “that old inflated style” derived from Scott, while the former still clung to it.

Obviously, there is rich potential material for comedy and pathos in the spectacle of a whole people forming a conception of themselves on their reading of romantic novels, and then going off to die for that conception, undoubtedly with appropriate quotations of bad prose resounding in their heads. Nothing would seem more suitable to the production of the kind of literature we have become accustomed to see produced by wars, the kind that represents the sabotage of pieties and hypocrisies, the follies of vain heroism, and that dramatizes the disparity between the professed moral objectives and the realities of war experience. Yet the writers of the Civil War wrote virtually no literature of this kind, and they did not partly because so many of them were themselves deceived by platitudes and partly because the realistic tradition in American fiction was not yet sufficiently developed to provide them with the technical means or the imaginative stimulus. Until well after the war, the conventional high style of American prose in both the North and the South had, as Twain suggested, a heavy verbosity and rhetorical floridness that made it the perfect medium of patriotic oratory and obfuscation. It was the eloquent language of the establishment con job, a sort of 19th-century Watergatese, and while it was beautifully suited to the telling of lies, one can hardly imagine how a serious writer could have used it to tell the truth. Nevertheless, there were certain writers of the period—most notably Twain himself, Howells, Bierce, and De Forest—who were writing a simple and straightforward realistic prose. Yet even De Forest, who seems to have been encouraged in his attempts at realism by the example of Stendhal, confessed that he could not bring himself to tell “the whole truth about war and battle—lest the world should infer that I was naturally a coward, and so could not know the feelings of a brave man.” It was very probably this kind of reticence deriving from both personal pride and the lack of a developed anti-heroic literary tradition that prevented the appearance of a truly effective and honest war literature.

But there were other deterrents as well. For example, Mr. Aaron speaks with tantalizing brevity of the fact that “the men of culture who fought in the war considered it unsoldierly to write” and that “the truths about the war . . . were hardly printable subjects to the predominantly feminine reading public” of the time. But he does not take adequately into account the extremely important point that the war writers lacked what De Forest described as an overview of American society, a vision that would encompass the “variety” of our regional life and transcend the “antagonism” between the different sections. American writers both before the war and for many years afterward were provincial writers, inhibited by local interests and prejudices, and they were, moreover, writers who, according to Mr. Aaron, “simply did not know the land and people they spoke to and spoke for.” Under such circumstances neither the Great American Novel nor the great American war epic could be expected to be written, and it is precisely to an exhaustive analysis and interpretation of such circumstances that Mr. Aaron's study should have been devoted.

Not until Faulkner did America produce a creative imagination complex and ironical enough to demythologize the South and the Civil War, and with the one exception of Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage, it was not until World War I that our writers became capable of producing a war literature of genuine distinction. Regrettably, the story of our greatest war remains unwritten, and in spite of the efforts of Wilson and Mr. Aaron, so too does the definitive study of the reasons why.