CIVIL WAR GORE
Current, Richard N.
Civil War Gore Patriotic Gore: studies in the literature of the american civil war, by Edmund Wilson. Oxford. 816 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by Richard N. Current Edmund Wilson has read "a certain...
...In dealing with Lincoln, he relies on William H. Herndon as against the "romantics," though historians have proved Herndon to have been as romantic a falsifier as ever took Lincoln for his subject...
...In this film he was particularly impressed by the sight of a sea slug "gobbling up smaller organisms through a large orifice at one end of its body...
...As the foregoing illustrations suggest, Wilson not merely departs from his stated thesis...
...This fascination will infect any reader who has, to begin with, the slightest interest in American literature or history...
...No matter whom or what he is talking about, Wilson is always interesting, even exciting...
...Instead of treating Abraham Lincoln as the oaf that Edgar Lee Masters once portrayed, Wilson respects the great man's abilities, though he is by no means a Lincoln lover, even when he says (in one of his many quotable asides) that "the crudest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg...
...During the war the participants on both sides reacted to the demands of the hour with no such unanimity as that of a school of fish but, instead, with policies so incompatible as those of Jefferson Davis, who sought to make the most of Confederate authority, and Alexander H. Stephens, who stood stubbornly and fanatically on his principles of states rights...
...He quotes so extensively from the writings that his book has some of the qualities of an anthology...
...But not always reliable...
...From the moment he gets into his subject itself, however, Wilson seems to forget his thesis and to lose himself in fascination for the people he writes about...
...The one-time editor of Vanity Fair and the author of Memoirs of Hecate County is sophisticated enough in some fields, yet rather naive at times in this one...
...These views on war he presents in his introduction to a series of essays on the lives and writings of some thirty men and women who took part in, or felt the impact of, the Civil War...
...Wilson is rather naive also in a more fundamental sense, in his assumption that all uses of power are equally pointless...
...To list all his erroneous or questionable statements would be tedious...
...From the introduction, the reader expects to find a debunking spirit in the discussions of Civil War literature that follow...
...When two sea slugs meet, he learned, the larger "ingurgitates" the smaller, even though the size difference be slight...
...he quite effectively disproves it...
...Yet it is essentially a work of collective biography and literary criticism, and the mark of his personality appears on every page, in his choice of selections as well as his comments...
...In discussing Tourgee, he overlooks certain passages and fails to see the irony in others...
...Human beings, after all, do not ingurgitate one another so mechanically...
...Men use "morality" and "reason" to justify what they do, though in wartime they actually lose their senses and their morals...
...He shows that, before the war, men and women on both sides impelled themselves and their fellows to conflict not just for the love of power but for a variety of considerations—considerations as different as those of, say, George Fitz-hugh, the pro-slavery propagandist, and Robert E. Lee, the critic of slavery...
...They do not merely prate about but are driven by their passions and ideals...
...This is the real moral that, in spite of himself, Wilson eloquently points in Patriotic Gore...
...But the slug really has no significance for the political behavior of men...
...A few examples of his historical naivete will have to suffice...
...consider his ways and be wise...
...These are essential, not incidental, are motives, not mere rationalizations...
...Reviewed by Richard N. Current Edmund Wilson has read "a certain amount of history," he says, and he has seen a Walt Disney movie of life in the ocean depths...
...hence he does not quite get the point of Tour-gee's 1879 best-seller, A Fool's Errand...
...Instead of caricaturing Harriet Beecher Stowe and ridiculing Uncle Tom's Cabin, Wilson gives a compassionate account of the experiences that compelled her to write, and he praises her book as one that, for all its faults, remains powerful...
...My Maryland!—"Avenge the patriotic gore/ That flecked the streets of Baltimore...
...Such a reader will feel, when he reaches the last of the approximately 800 pages, that the book, though long, is not nearly long enough...
...Now," Wilson goes on, "the wars fought by human beings are stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of the sea slug...
...His avowed moral might be put something like this: Go to the slug, thou antic...
...In expounding and admiring Stephens' constitutional views, he seems quite unaware that these were far from being original with Stephens but were mostly warmed-over leavings from John C. Calhoun...
...Instead of emphasizing George Washington Cable's somewhat prudish traits, Wilson practically idolizes Cable as a lonely and dedicated Southerner working for Negro rights after the war...
...Instead of dismissing Ulysses S. Grant as a butcher, Wilson admires him as a natural gentleman and a clear thinker and writer, the author of "hard and pellucid" memoirs...
...People then behave with the unanimity of (Wilson likes those metaphors of marine life) "a school of fish...
...In after years the combat veterans were as far apart, in their life purposes as affected by their war experiences, as Albion W. Tourgee, the idealistic but eventually disillusioned carpetbagger, and Ambrose Bierce, the sardonic journalist preoccupied with death, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Olympian jurist...
...The title, incidentally, comes from the Confederate war song, Maryland...
Vol. 26 • October 1962 • No. 10
