Doctorow’s War

I was inclined to speculate further along these lines when I found that E.L. Doctorow, no slouch in the jeremiad department, had chosen as the setting for his new novel the earth-scorching trajectory of William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous march from Atlanta to the sea. The March as metaphor, even as allegory? It would be hard to beat, and I rolled up my sleeves to be reminded about What is Wrong with Something, probably America.

And immediate chagrin over my own smugness was quickly salved by the absorbing pleasure of reading this complex, splendid story. The March is not a pamphlet, or a treatise, or even a war novel. It is a very fine, even a great, novel about the nature of important things–war, human nature, freedom, imagination–and a riveting story as well.

In a series of parallel narratives, Doctorow follows the experiences of a wide cast of characters–dispossessed planters, newly freed slaves, a number of officers on Sherman’s staff, the general himself–caught up in the march and its periphery. As he has done elsewhere (Ragtime, for example), Doctorow introduces to one another people who would otherwise be unlikely to meet, and here places them in the context of historical events that could hardly be surpassed as dramatic narrative. The suspense, and the suspension of daily life, as southerners, black and white, wait for the Federal army to arrive; the “foraging” and burning; battles and skirmishes; and above all, the momentum of the march itself, form an irresistible movement that sweeps the reader along with the participants.

The threads of the story are inextricably intertwined; none of the characters is dispensable. But the tale of Will Kirkland and Arly Wilcox, two very young Confederate privates tossed about in the chaos, weaves the strands into a whole. Will and Arly meet when they’re both under sentence of death, thrown into the Confederate hoosegow in Milledgeville for desertion and sleeping on guard duty. Reprieved to rejoin the Confederate defense against the approaching Federals, they join in the fighting around a covered bridge and, in the confusion of battle, slip over to the other side in hopes of escaping the war altogether. Swapping their uniforms with dead Yankee soldiers’–Will tries to remember “what the word was for the next thing down from a deserter”–they find themselves back in Milledgeville with the occupying forces, caught up in the tide that will toss them between the sides like flotsam.

Arly is philosophical. He considers that, as God has saved them from execution, He must surely have a plan in mind, and Arly is determined to use his own “good sense and artful cunning” to figure it out. With his eagle eye for the main chance, Arly is able to maneuver himself and the bemused Will through a series of protean changes: from Rebs to Yanks and back again a couple of times, till they land on their feet as ambulance attendants with a Federal field hospital.

The hospital’s surgeon, Wrede Sartorius, is drawn in sharp contrast to the unlettered and hapless boys. He’s another sort of philosopher entirely. Without exactly making him into a symbol, Doctorow is generous with allusions that indicate Sartorius’s nature and disposition. “Wrede” is an old Dutch or Low German word that means “fierce” or “cruel,” and “Sartorius” is a Latinized way of being called “Tailor”–as he is in his skillful and impersonal cutting and sewing. (The echo of Faulkner appears to be accidental, though Carlyle would bear some looking into.)

Sartorius prides himself on his rejection of the constraints of his German upbringing, and of the “military mind.” He’s a brilliant surgeon who gets away with his disregard of army hierarchy by his effectiveness; a prophetic diagnostician who assures his companion Emily Thompson that someday “we will have found botanical molds to reverse infection. We will replace lost blood. We will photograph through the body to the bones. And so on.” (He even diagnoses Lincoln’s Marfans syndrome, though not in so many words, when he encounters the president much later.)

Emily, “Judge Thompson’s daughter from over at Milledgeville,” has joined the march after her home is overrun and her father dies. At first, she sees Sartorius as “transcendent . . . like some god trying to staunch the flow of human disaster.” She is fascinated and seduced by him, figuratively and literally, as he explains the nature of the march. It is a “nonhuman form of life,” he says, a “great segmented body . . . self-healing” that replaces dead “cells” (soldiers) with living ones. But when she talks with him about what’s happened to a woman demented by the war, she sees further into him:

But when Emily hears the demented woman play Chopin, she asks, “‘What is this I hear if not a soul given as music?’ And immediately she ran off to gather her belongings.” She has accurately seen that Wrede is “a magus bent on tampering with the created universe.” (See Doctorow’s The Waterworks for the harrowing finale of Sartorius’s career as magus.)

Wrede Sartorius is not an uncomplicated magus, all the same, as we see in his horrifying and poignant attachment to the wounded Albion Simms, “physically unimpaired but for an iron spike in his skull.” Wrede is fascinated by the scientific phenomenon at first–the loss of memory but the sound reflexes and ability to see and hear. So he has a cage built to transport the unfortunate man in order to test his idea that the brain will “recede like an outgoing tide.”

“Albion Simms would deteriorate under study.” “The plethora of casualties” allow Sartorius to consider the war a “practicum.” Yet this appallingly mechanistic point of view (though he never abandons it) is tempered by occasional awareness. Sartorius, for whom science is all, still is haunted by a sense of tragedy. He wonders on a rainy morning if there is a similarity between himself and Albion, “as if something had been severed as well in the Sartorian brain that impelled him now to seek knowledge with no regard for the consequences.” He is unable to reck his own rede.

Meanwhile. (This is the sort of story that invites one to recommence with “meanwhile.”) Meanwhile, Will and Arly, finding themselves left behind after a respite in captured Savannah, attempt to rejoin the march. When Will is wounded trying to steal a horse, Arly takes him along in an ambulance wagon for verisimilitude. Arly contemplates their partnership.

And there is, but it is a mighty burden, revealed to Arly by his companion’s death. With the fortuitous inheritance of a photographer’s wagon, he sets off to find General Sherman himself and to carry out the “mighty purpose” that has been made known to him.

The March is an interestingly literate novel; both in style and substance, Doctorow locates it firmly in the Western tradition. There is active allusion and reference. Dr. Marcus Aurelius Thompson and his slave Sophie on the train to a siding in nowhere: “Am I the Pharaoh?” he asks of her. “Because if I’m the Pharaoh I’m convinced. I don’t need no frogs, nor no locusts, I’m letting you go.” Tents in an army encampment are like Cadmus’ “crop of teeth sprung up from the earth.” A fleeing matron appears at a relative’s home “standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom,” an erinye. And Arly echoes the psalms and the atavistic image of journey when he tries to encourage Will at one point:

Doctorow calls also upon the ancient and persuasive trope of sympathetic nature to paint a world at war. Dust rises around an approaching army as “an upward streaming brown cloud . . . as if the world were turned upside down.” Scenes of limbing trees for firewood are juxtaposed with scenes of limbing men. In particular, images of rivers, swamps, and fog, literally accurate, stand in as well as metaphor for the uncertainty of battle. General Sherman sees a skirmish as if “the smoke were the diaphanous dance veil of the war goddess.” It’s marvelously evocative and a sobering reminder that cliché (“the fog of war”) may well have its origin in the literal.

It’s through the portrait, at times almost endearing, of Sherman, that one begins to get at what’s seriously problematic with Doctorow. It’s not at all problematic in the novel, but it casts a curious light on those outside jeremiads. Doctorow’s Sherman rings true, drawing on the great fund of what we do know about him to explore his paradoxical character.

“Sherman affected the sloppy uniform, and shared the hardships, of the enlisted man.” More than once, “Uncle Billy” goes unrecognized in his “old beaten up cap, and a cigar stub in his mouth,” and when Columbia is unintentionally burned, he joins the fire brigades himself for a time.

But the officers on his staff have seen him in despair after the death of his son Will, and various strategic reverses. The observant Colonel Morrison believes Sherman is proud and cynical, concealing a feeling of “superiority to all,” and careless of the deaths of his troops. Sherman wrestles with these contradictions himself, fearing death mostly as “a profound humiliation.” Yet he contemplates, at times, the deaths of individual soldiers, and writes a moving letter to the Confederate General Hardee when his son, another Will, is killed in an engagement with Sherman’s troops. (There are four dead Willies mourned in The March: Sherman’s son, Hardee’s, and Lincoln’s, and the Kirkland’s boy from North Carolina, and we’re intended to notice them all.)

Sherman is mightily impatient with governing the towns he captures, or dealing with the freedmen who follow his train and civilian cavillers in Washington. He is splendidly disdainful of the southerners who have brought war upon themselves, and yet think that its consequences might be controlled. And humming “The Ride of the Valkyries,” he is brought low by what he calls God’s envy, when he reads in a newspaper of the death of another son. (This is a vivid scene but regrettably unlikely, since Die Walküre was not performed till 1870.)

The understanding shown in this nuanced portrait, and the completely imagined world realized in The March, disconnect violently from Doctorow’s public rhetoric. In a vituperative opinion piece on “The Unfeeling President,” published in 2004, he scorns George W. Bush up one side and down the other: “The president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it.” He charges Bush with feeling nothing, regretting nothing, mourning nothing, when he sends young soldiers off to war. Leaving policy debate essentially aside, he presumes to see into Bush’s soul, and neither charity nor, failing it, prudence moves him to consider the possibility that feeling is not always publicly parsed.

Doctorow allows Sherman to contemplate the general’s paradoxical situation: “[P]erhaps we call a private a private, for whatever he is to himself it is private to him and of no use to the General. And so a generalship diminishes the imagination of the General.” The commander in chief is a general as well. It has to be in the nature of war that generals consider armies as men en masse. It is, indeed, also the case that they are bound in morality and justice, in their prayers and in their counsel, to consider the individual human casualties of the wars they prosecute.

But Doctorow doesn’t require Sherman to ponder these things in public, or even demand a cri de coeur of the Christ-like Lincoln, who appears near the end of The March. The comprehensive imagination that has allowed him to make a nearly perfect war poem of this novel is not even briefly brought to bear on reality. And this has a curious result. The poem, the work of making, in its completeness is more reasonable and true than his diatribe on this present war. Perhaps it’s the case that the irony of this, unrecognized, feeds the violence of Doctorow’s anger with George Bush.

For the thoughtful reader, especially if he’s concerned with the perilous state of mind that encourages roiling emotion to color policy preference, The March lays out profound, true pictures of genuine complexity. Perhaps Doctorow would profit by rereading his own book.

Priscilla M. Jensen writes from McLean, Virginia.