My Generation (15 page)

J
ust as I started to set down these few words my attention was caught by an advertisement for a book of essays which claimed to challenge, among other things,
The Confessions of Nat Turner
and its “condescending and degrading opinions about Negroes.” It was not the modifiers—
condescending and degrading
—that bothered me so much as the key word:
opinions
. I had an old hurtful twinge of resentment, and my first impulse was to say here something mean-spirited and elaborately defensive about this familiar response to my work. I am sure there is some wisdom in my not doing so, for this award is one which by its very essence tends to make any bitterness I might still harbor quite unimportant.

It seems to me that in honoring my work this award underscores some certainties about the nature of literature. One of these is that a novel worthy of the name is not, nor ever has been, valuable because of its opinions; a novel is speculative, composed of paradoxes and riddles; at its best it is magnificently unopinionated. As Chekhov said, fiction does not provide answers but asks questions—even, I might add, as it struggles to make sense out of the fearful ambiguities of time and history. This award therefore implies an understanding that a novel can possess a significance apart from its subject matter and that the story of a nineteenth-century black slave may try to say at least as much about longing, loneliness, personal betrayal, madness, and the quest for God as it does about Negroes or the institution of slavery. It
implies the understanding that fiction, which almost by definition is a kind of dream, often tells truths that are very difficult to bear, yet—again as in dreams—is able to liberate the mind through the catharsis of fantasy, enigma, and terror.

By recognizing
Nat Turner
this award really honors all of those of my contemporaries who have steadfastly refused to write propaganda or indulge in mythmaking but have been impelled to search instead for those insights which, however raggedly and imperfectly, attempt to demonstrate the variety, the quirkiness, the fragility, the courage, the good humor, desperation, corruption, and mortality of all men. And finally it ratifies my own conviction that a writer jeopardizes his very freedom by insisting that he be bound or defined by his race, or by almost anything else. For one of the enduring marvels of art is its ability to soar through any barrier, to explore any territory of experience, and I say that only by venturing from time to time into strange territory shall artists, of whatever commitment, risk discovering and illuminating the human spirit that we all share.

[Acceptance speech for the 1970 Howells Medal. Published in the
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters
, 2nd series, no. 21, 1971.]

S
outhern women of all classes, probably more than women anywhere else, have for generations been valued for their physical beauty to the exclusion of any other quality. The ethos of the plantation, with its stress on male dominance, allowed, generally speaking, very little room for the development of women's intellectual capacities, except in a closeted way and then only with vast condescension on the part of the men. Generation after generation of this form of acculturation produced droves of famously beautiful women, but also—in combination with a diminished emphasis on education—a kind of endemic regional dumbness too well known and too persistently remarked upon to be dismissed.

That there are many exceptions to this state of things, especially nowadays, is another sign of the South's splendid resurgence as it joins the twentieth century; beauty and brains are not necessarily antipathetic in the same person. But until recent years the trials of a bright but plain woman in the South were more difficult than those of her sisters elsewhere who, though certainly fettered in many ways too, suffered less from the stigma of possessing actual intelligence. Difficult, perhaps, but in some ways more interesting. For even as recently as the 1940s, when I was growing up in the South, one could perceive the difference between the often stunning coed beauties who, like their counterparts in the past, fluttered effortlessly into poses of decorative blossoms, and those who were less favored physically but who
were far more attractive because of their wit and charm. They created their own seductiveness.

Mary Boykin Chesnut was doubtless one of these: a not really good-looking woman (self-admittedly) whose very lack of beauty helped prevent her from becoming the stereotype of a plantation mistress—frail, dependent, vacuous—and whose compensating drive toward self-expression led her to writing one of the great chronicles of the Civil War. The likeness of Mary Chesnut that regards us from the dust jacket of the new edition of her book is rather plain—the nose too long, the jaw too broad, the eyes too large and dominating—but very winning nonetheless. The picture suggests intelligence and the whisper of mischief—clearly a woman one would have liked to know. That one does get to know her is the result both of her honesty and of the meticulous way in which she records her impressions of daily life in the South between the winter of 1861 and the summer of 1865.

Yet this is not really a “personal” narrative, and despite her candor and the piercing, almost ruthless way in which she dissects her own emotions, Mary Chesnut's journal has its greatest value for the modern reader in the extraordinary panorama it presents of a culture being rent asunder. Not for its autobiography, not for its “fortuitous self-revelations,” says Professor C. Vann Woodward in his introduction to
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
, will the Chesnut chronicle be remembered, but “for the vivid picture she left of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle, its moment of high drama in world history.”

Mrs. Chesnut was blissfully fortunate in having been near the center of the political affairs of the Confederacy throughout the Civil War. Born and reared in South Carolina and married to an ardent secessionist—a onetime United States senator who, after Fort Sumter, became an aide to Jefferson Davis—Mrs. Chesnut traveled forth from her native state to the early capital in Montgomery and thence to Richmond, where she abundantly records her impressions of the great and the near-great. A well-educated woman, fluent in French and an avowed Francophile, she seems in certain rudimentary ways a Southern Madame de Staël. Although by no means a philosophical or literary innovator like de Staël, she had nonetheless the same kind of intellectual energy and, like de Staël, possessed both a ferocious interest in powerful people and the magnetism to attract such people. Thus her observations of such figures as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Wade Hampton,
and General Joseph Johnston are as fascinating in their intimacy as they are invaluable.

Here is a sketch of Jefferson Davis in June 1861:

In Mrs. Davis's drawing room last night, the president took a seat beside me on the sofa where I sat. He talked for nearly an hour. He laughed at our faith in our own powers. We are like the British. We think every Southerner equal to three Yankees at least. We will have to be equivalent to a dozen now….There was a sad refrain running through it all. For one thing, either way, he thinks it will be a long war. That floored me at once. It has been too long for me already. Then said: before the end came, we would have many a bitter experience. He said only fools doubted the courage of the Yankees or their willingness to fight when they saw fit. And now we have stung their pride—we have roused them till they will fight like devils.

And an insight into the domestic life of Robert E. (“Cousin Robert”) Lee:

General Lee told us what a good son Custis was. Last night their house was so crowded Custis gave up his own bed to General Lee and slept upon the floor. Otherwise General Lee would have had to sleep in Mrs. Lee's room. She is a martyr to rheumatism and rolls about in a chair. She can't walk.

Constance Cary says, if it would please God to take poor Cousin Mary Lee—she suffers so—wouldn't these Richmond women
campaign
for Cousin Robert? In the meantime Cousin Robert holds all admiring females at arm's length.

A glimpse of Lee and Davis on the same day:

Sunday Mars Kit walked to church with me. Coming out, General Lee was slowly making his way down the aisle, bowing royally right and left. I pointed this out to Christopher Hampton. When General Lee happened to look our way, he bowed low, giving me a charming smile of recognition. I was ashamed of being so pleased. I blushed like a schoolgirl.

We went to the White House. They gave us tea. The president said
he had been on the way to our house, coming with all the Davis family to see me. But the children became so troublesome they turned back.

Just then little Joe rushed in and insisted on saying his prayer at his father's knee….He was in his nightclothes.

But if Chesnut's journals were merely high-level gossip restricted to a circle of the celebrated men and women of the period, the book would have very limited appeal. The work is really an epic in which the accumulation of quotidian detail—the weather, parties, receptions, rumors, duels, love affairs, murders, promotions and demotions, intrigues, illnesses, celebrations—provides a sense of the rhythms of ordinary life during those chaotic four years in a way that no other book has done. We often tend to think of the Civil War in terms of its battles, all of which have been chronicled in such detail—in history and in fiction—that the savagery, say, of Chickamauga or the desperate anxiety of the ordinary soldier represented in
The Red Badge of Courage
becomes emblematic of the entire conflict. The romanticism of
Gone with the Wind
prevents that novel from furnishing us with a reliable picture of life away from the arenas of combat.

What gives Mrs. Chesnut's account such stunning verisimilitude is the way in which the war, despite its distance from the diarist and her friends in places like Richmond and Columbia, impinges on every facet of daily existence; scarcely a page of this extremely long journal does not have its allusion to the progress of the various campaigns, to the slow attrition being suffered by the Confederacy, to the hospital horrors, to privations, to lost battles and battles won, and—incessantly—to the dead, the mutilated, and men who have come home to die. Yet despite the appalling grimness of those years there is little of the morbid or despairing in Mary Chesnut's description of events. Underlying even the darkest passages is a cheerfulness of spirit, almost a buoyancy, that in effect aerates the narrative and provides much of its charm and readability.

The following passages, only a few pages apart, provide a characteristic juxtaposition of the somber and the lighthearted:

Yesterday we went to the capitol grounds to see our returned prisoners….We walked slowly up and down until Jeff Davis was called upon to speak to the prisoners. Then I stood almost touching the bayonets, where he left me. Poor fellows! They cheered with all their might—and
I wept for sympathy, enthusiasm, and all that moved me deeply. Oh! these men were so forlorn, so dried up, shrunken, such a strange look in some of their eyes. Others so restless and wild looking—others again, placidly vacant, as if they had been dead to this world for years. A poor woman was too much for me. She was hunting her son. He had been expected back with this batch of prisoners. She said he was taken prisoner at Gettysburg. She kept going in and out among them, with a basket of provisions she had brought for him to eat. It was too pitiful. She was utterly unconscious of the crowd. The anxious dread—expectation—hurry and hope which led her on showed in her face…

*   *   *

The church windows were closed that it might be a candlelight wedding. A woman in the gallery had a cataleptic fit, and they were forced to open a window. Mixed daylight and gas was ghastly and greatly marred the effect below. The poor woman made a bleating noise like a goat. Buckets of water were handed over the heads of the people, as if it was a fire to be put out, and they dashed water over her as fast as the buckets came in reach. We watched the poor woman from below in agony, fearing she might die before our eyes. But no—far from it. The water cure answered. She came to herself, shook her dress, straightened up her wet feathers, and put her bonnet on quite composedly. Then watched the wedding with unabashed interest—and I watched her….For one thing, the poor woman could not have been gotten out of that jam, that crowd, unless, like the buckets of water, she had been handed out over the heads of the public.

Readability is perhaps an imprecise word to explain the fascination that this book exerts once one has become captured by its force and sweep, but it is there in a powerful way, and is quite simply a factor of the inherent literary nature of the work. Mrs. Chesnut clearly had the gifts of a novelist (she had written a couple of undistinguished though not unpromising works of fiction), and the novelistic talent is everywhere evident—in her dialogue, sharp observations, the felicitous use of language, the deft modulations in tone which are the novelist's stock in trade. In an essay on Mrs. Chesnut published in
Patriotic Gore
in 1962, Edmund Wilson remarked on her literary qualities: “The very rhythm of her opening pages at once puts us under the
spell of a writer who is not merely jotting down her days but establishing, as a novelist does, an atmosphere, an emotional tone.”

Wilson had been profoundly impressed by the journal, which he had read in an abridged form unfortunately entitled
A Diary from Dixie
. (Mrs. Chesnut herself disliked the word “Dixie,” but the book was named by its editors, who brought out the work in 1905, nineteen years after her death.) He had also read and, with some reservations, admired a more recent and more extensive version of the diary put together by the novelist Ben Ames Williams. In the first version the editors had suppressed such matters as the gross injustice of slavery (thereby obscuring an extremely important aspect of Mrs. Chesnut, who was a vigorous opponent of the slave system), and Wilson's admiration for the Williams edition was due both to this enlargement of perspective and to the fact that it read like a good novel—something that appealed to the literary side of Wilson's critical sensibilities.

What Wilson could not have known was that considerably more of the novelistic imagination went into the making of Mrs. Chesnut's diary than one might think. For although she did keep an extensive journal during several of the Civil War years, it was not until 1881—sixteen years after the war ended—that she sat down and began completely to rework her chronicle, fleshing out her story through a complex series of expansions and elaborations, adding new episodes and new material, condensing here, omitting there, shifting dates, telescoping entries, until the new version was no longer the actual record of the wartime days but what might be termed a reconstruction through memory. The liberties she took in this reworking of her own material were plainly great, but the final product was not the creation of one who has distorted or falsified history but of one who, through the prism of memory and in the calm of reflection, has perhaps cast a brighter and more revealing light upon past events than might have been shed in an actual journal, with its frequent myopia.

Confessing that he began the editing of this new, complete edition with a spirit of skepticism, Professor Woodward writes that “a growing respect for the author and the integrity of her work began to replace the original misgivings. Given the kind of liberties she took…Mary Chesnut can be said to have shown an unusual sense of responsibility toward the history she records and a reassuring faithfulness to perceptions of her experience of the period as revealed in her original journal.”

Having read with considerable admiration Capote's
In Cold Blood
and
Mailer's
The Executioner's Song
—and having been able to compare the two versions of Mrs. Chesnut's chronicle—I would say that Mrs. Chesnut played far less fast and loose with the facts and with “truth” than either of these writers, whose works we value precisely because of their fluid, interpretative nature, their refusal to be hamstrung by adhering to a mechanical account of events. (It may be that the most interesting aspect of the controversy that surrounds these books is not the blur they create between fact and fiction but the no-man's-land of terminology; as powerfully impressed as I was by
The Executioner's Song
, some stubborn intuition still tells me it is not a novel.)

In any case, we should not fault Mrs. Chesnut for her inconsistencies; she herself did not attempt to hide the fact that much of her final version was reworked and rewritten. Partly because of this, Professor Woodward has removed the word “diary” from the title, so that
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
really ends up being not a literal record but a history book
sui generis
, a new mixture of memoir and journalism to which only the most rigorously literal-minded reader could object on the grounds that it does not hew to the minutiae of chronology and fact.