Gone With the Wind
Cold Mountain is
sincerely plausible. It is a solemn fake. You will not hear this from the
readers and judges who have helped make Charles Frazier's Civil War tale
probably the most popular novel about that period since Gone With the
Wind . (Since its publication in June, Cold Mountain has sold more
than a million copies; in November, it won the National Book Award.) The book
is so professionally archaeological, so competently dug, that one can mistake
its surfaces for depth. But it's like a cemetery with no bodies in it. All the
records of life are there, the facts and figures and pocket histories, pointing
up out of the ground, but what's buried there was never alive.
Most
people don't want novels to be, in the deepest sense, unreal. They want them to
obey the conventions of current realism. Thus John Berendt, author of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , has said of Cold Mountain
that it is "utterly convincing down to the last detail." And he's right. But
Cold Mountain is utterly convincing in an unreal way.
Frazier has written a stirring story of bloody simplicity
and epic power. As a storyteller, he hardly ever errs. This is a remarkably
tremorless first novel. It is the story of Inman, a Confederate soldier who is
wounded in 1864 and briefly hospitalized, and who then deserts to find his way
home. He travels raggedly from Tennessee to the mountains of North Carolina
where he had grown up. There, near Cold Mountain, waits his sweetheart, a woman
called Ada Monroe. The daughter of an upper-class Charleston, S.C., minister
who has died just before the book begins, she is struggling to make her old
farm profitable. The novel alternates Inman's story and Ada's story. She waits;
he travels.
Inman is
silent, good, and strong--one must imagine a Confederate Clint Eastwood. He is
metaphysically alone, as the conventions of adventure dictate: "He wished not
to be smirched with the mess of other people." But messes just keep on
smirching him. He goes through a shower of picaresque trials: Three men set on
him (he single-handedly beats them off); he saves a pregnant woman from death,
and another woman from a band of renegade federal soldiers; various men try to
recapture him; he is seduced by a woman whose husband, discovering the couple,
tries to shoot him. Inman's conversation, in late-20 th -century
writing-school style, is intelligently starved ("It is still a cloudy matter to
me if I did the right thing, letting you live"), and his inner life is
carefully rationed. He is a Homeric foot soldier--Frazier has said he had
Odysseus in mind--and quite unreal. The novel's unreality flows from Inman's
unreality.
Cold Mountain rolls the brougham of itself from
episode to episode, until Inman reaches home. A puff of sentimentality is
exhaled at the end of the book: Inman is reunited with Ada, only to be shot
down at the last minute. But the tragic couple was permitted a night of
passion, and a moist epilogue shows a happy little girl, the product of this
union, frolicking with her mother some years later: the happy end of a happy
ending.
Frazier
is a good writer: calm, for the most part unsentimental, often rich. But the
novel is a refined exercise. It is worth bearing in mind that Frazier was,
until recently, a professor of English, although the jacket copy omits this
fact, preferring us to believe that he and his family merely "raise horses" in
Raleigh, N.C. Cold Mountain is in fact a willed pastiche of Stephen
Crane--that is, modern prose with occasional attacks of nostalgia. "There was
not moonlight nor the prick of lantern light from some welcoming home. The town
of Cold Mountain was ahead, but they knew not how far." Or this, as Inman
battles the three thieves: "[H]e eventually smote the three down to their knees
in the dirt of the street so they looked like those of the Romish faith at
prayer."
Such prose, if not quite antiquarian's dust, is the carbon
of something once fiery. It is not a living 19 th -century prose, or a
living contemporary prose, but rather a 20 th -century reduction,
living off the alms of the 19 th century. Frazier does the opposite
of writers such as Melville or Woolf, who historicize the language by shaking
its roots. Linguistically, he is not in search of the historically rejuvenating
but the historically plausible. But most great historical fiction--George
Eliot, Stendhal, Tolstoy--is not written in "historical" prose. Crane, in
The Red Badge of Courage , wrote in 1895 about the Civil War, but it
would not have occurred to him to write in anything but the living language of
his own age (which, admittedly, was closer to the earlier period's than
Frazier's is).
To compare
Crane and Frazier is to compare a genuine, fibrous style with academic tissue.
Frazier controls all his similes so that they stay ruly. His similes--there is
at least one per page--are either trimmed for historical plausibility (like the
thieves Romishly at prayer) or, more frequently, made to involve an animal, the
idea perhaps being that in simpler times, a homely, rustic simile would have
come to mind. So we have a man's tongue "grey as the foot of a goose"; a
catfish "the size of a boar hog"; a man who gets ready to take a blow "like a
cowed dog"; a night as dark "as the inside of a cow"; an old man whose dugs
"hung down like those on a sow hog"--an entire farmyard of likenesses. Crane,
by contrast, lets his similes go everywhere: In battle, one man has a shoeful
of blood: "He hopped like a schoolboy in a game." A corpse is seen, and Crane
describes the dead man's beard moving in the wind "as if a hand were stroking
it."
In short, Frazier sacrifices aesthetic life to
historical life. The result is that while one continues to believe Cold
Mountain on the surface, one stops believing it at any deeper level. There
is a false consciousness to a late 20 th -century writer's efforts to
evoke a 19 th -century man in a language that belongs to neither. When
Inman is seduced, for instance, he places his hand on the woman's leg, high up.
Frazier writes, of the woman's genitals, that to Inman they "seemed
extraordinarily fascinating though it was but a mere slot in flesh." The reader
realizes instantly that a deserting soldier would never think like this--that
he would never use these upholstered words. The private language of a man like
that would be both simpler and more strange, more original, than Frazier's
ecclesiastical English. Instead, we have Frazier's fancy, plausible idea of how
a vagina might have been described in 1864 had this been written down .
But Inman is not writing anything down--he is being seduced, he is speaking to
himself. One sees that Cold Mountain is condemned to be a literary
approximation of an already literary idea of reality.
Henry James complained to
Sarah Orne Jewett in a letter of 1904 that the historical novel had "a fatal
cheapness." Although the novelist might be able to render well all sorts of
facts and dates and general furniture, she could never truthfully render the
"old consciousness." The great historical novels are always about contemporary
consciousness. This inability to convey the "old consciousness" was not a
matter of inaccuracy but of bad faith. It would always be the new consciousness
imagining what the old consciousness was like--forcing it to be "old." "And
even then," James added, "it's all humbug." Cold Mountain is advanced
humbug.
