A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last I’ve finished Bruce Catton’s Never Call Retreat! This is the final book in his Centennial History of the Civil War, and of course covers the end of the war. I hadn’t realized just how little territory the South had left by the end of 1864: at that point they’ve got Virginia and the Carolinas and some outlying bits of Texas and Florida, but basically the rest of the Confederacy is under Federal control. There’s no possible way they could win! And yet they keep going for three more months!

This seems to happen a lot in war history. Long wars really do end like a game of Risk: the winning side becomes clear long before the actual end, but the war nonetheless grinds on and on till the loser is totally defeated.

Also at long last (this was a week for finishing books I’ve been working on for ages), I finished Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Crowns! This is the final book that Hull and Whitlock wrote together, their only collaboration not part of the Far-Distant Oxus trilogy, and, alas, not quite up to par with their other books. It’s a fantasy novel, but a fantasy constructed in a frame story: four cousins are going about their daily lives in London, then meet up at the yearly Christmas party, where they either have a magical adventure or perhaps just imagine a magical adventure in a land where they’re all kings and queens… I’ve read books that use this sort of ambiguity to good effect, but here it contributes to the general feeling that the book is underbaked.

I’ve been meaning to read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for quite some time, and this week I finally got around to it! And I quite enjoyed it, although I must admit that I lost faith in the book when I realized that some of the quotes (many of the chapters are compilations for quotes describing, say, a White House soiree, or Abe Lincoln’s face, or what have you) are completely made up. They have citations and everything! And some of them are certainly ascribed to real people who really wrote about Lincoln (Elizabeth Keckley, William Herndon), and presumably those quotes are in fact quotes, but it bugs me that I don’t know for sure. The book would have really benefited from a history note.

Finally, I continued my Newbery journey with Walter and Marion Havighurst’s Song of the Pines: A Story of Norwegian Lumbering in Wisconsin, which is not only about Norwegian lumbering but Norwegian immigration in the mid-19th century more generally. Immigrant stories seem to have been quite popular in the 1950s (also pioneer stories), and this one also leans hard on the theme of What It Means to Be an American.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on The Warmth of Other Suns. I’ve finished the first section, detailing life in the Jim Crow South; now the book has moved on to the migration, which met with enormous opposition in many southern communities, as the white landowners were determined not to lose their captive labor force.

Wilkerson draws a parallel between the South and the Soviet Union, which pleased me, as I extrapolated such a parallel from Sally Belfrage’s Freedom Summer, then wondered if it’s just that I have the Soviet Union on the brain… but if Wilkerson sees it too, presumably there’s something to it. It is curious that white Southerners tended to be the most vociferously anti-Soviet people in America while also living in the most Soviet system.

As a lighter counterpoint, I’ve begun Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm. Jones wrote this not long after the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and I’m really curious if the earlier book inspired this one - did she just keep thinking, “What if there really were tours of Fantasyland? How would that affect the lives of the Fantasyland inhabitants?”

What I Plan to Read Next

John Davis Billings’ Hardtack and Coffee, highly recommended by Bruce Catton as one of the liveliest memoirs of everyday life in the army during the Civil War.

What I’ve Finished Reading

Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, which I really liked while I was reading it: for years I have yearned for a book about an uptight career woman who finds someone who loves her in all her uptight glory, and this book really delivers on that front. But after waiting a few days to write the review, I find I’ve forgotten the names of all the characters except the lead’s sister Libby? Puzzling.

I suppose that I often have this experience with, for instance, Mary Stewart books too, and there is something to be said for reading books that you enjoy even if they are not books that stick in your mind forever and ever.

I really liked this quote: “Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.”

I also finished Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters,” a fun and fascinating read that profiles a number of female reporters from the 1880s and 1890s: Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Jordan (of Tales of the City Room fame), Ida B. Wells. (I don’t think Wells is technically a stunt reporter but sometimes one must stretch one’s ostensible topic to include interesting people.) Todd suggests that Nellie Bly and her colleagues were the origin of the “girl reporter” character type - a direct line to characters like Lois Lane.

Naturally I just had to follow up by reading Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House, which is about Bly’s undercover investigation of the conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City. An interesting (deeply depressing) source about conditions in American asylums in the 1880s, as well as general attitudes toward mental illness and the medical understanding (or lack thereof). Bly notes that once she got to the asylum she dropped her “mad” act as once, but none of the doctors or nurses ever even entertained the idea that she might be sane.

And I’ve continued my John McPhee journey with The Crofter and the Laird, his most famous and easily accessible book - so easily accessible, in fact, that I found it on my parents’ bookshelves! This is a fascinating look at life on the island of Colonsay in the Hebrides in the late 1960s, with lots of interesting tidbits about the history and folklore of the island.

What I’m Reading Now

Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword. In 1861, the U.S. Navy conquered two forts and a whole bunch of harbors in North Carolina - so much more than they expected to conquer that they were quite at a loss to follow it up by marching on Savannah, even though the Confederates had almost no forces to oppose such a march.

One thing I’ve learned from reading these military histories is that “unexpectedly huge victory” can be almost as disorienting as “catastrophic defeat.” Have a contingency plan just in case you succeed beyond your wildest dreams!

I’ve also begun T. H. White’s The Goshawk. The library only has this on audiobook so I approached it with trepidation, but actually the reader (Simon Vance) seems wonderfully in tune with the rhythms of White’s prose.

What I Plan to Read Next

In Sensational, Todd mentions that former girl stunt reporter Caroline Lockhart later (in 1912) wrote a book called Lady Doc, which involves lesbians and abortion and happens to be on Gutenberg so of course I HAVE to read it.

What I’m Just Finished Reading

As a traveling companion for The Once and Future King skygiants kindly sent Fay Grissom’s Portrait in Jigsaw, a gothic novel from 1975 which is simply A Lot. After the death of our heroine Alisdair’s mother, Alisdair’s grim father had Alisdair raised in seclusion on a remote Scottish estate. But when Alisdair emerges for her debut on her twenty-first birthday, she discovers that her mother Mai is not dead! And in fact is an internationally famous modernist novelist! Whose brilliant novels won a Nobel prize! And also she’s a Thai princess!!!

I kept expecting this last thing to turn into a trainwreck, and there’s definitely a classic 1970s “is this an attempt to critique racism or just plain racism?” moment (which is a huge and intensely convoluted spoiler), but for the most part Mai is a riff on Bohemian Writer of Modernist Novels tropes and generally the best part of the book.

I also read Mary Stewart’s Airs above the Ground, an enchanting book about Austria, and particularly about Lipizzaner horses. (The titular “airs above the ground” refer to certain maneuvers that the horses do: rearing like cavalry statues, jumping in the air and seeming to float, etc.) As is customary with a Mary Stewart book I now desperately want to visit Austria and see the Lipizzaners and try the sachertorte.

As is less customary, we start the book with the heroine already married! She and her husband start the book at odds but swiftly join forces and realize that they have each married someone even cooler than they initially realized.

It was perhaps unfair to Rebecca Serle’s One Italian Summer to read it so close to a Mary Stewart book, because while Serle’s book is a perfectly serviceable novel/travel book, it doesn’t quite achieve the “I want to pack my bags and go there NOW” that Stewart’s books manage so effortlessly. (Or rather, it looks effortless. I’m sure Stewart worked at it quite hard, actually.)

Serle’s book is packed with delicious food descriptions, AND it has a Petite Maman style plot where our heroine Katy meets her own mother from the past, so I expected to love it. But somehow the book as a whole ended up feeling like something less than the sum of its parts for me.

AND FINALLY, after leaving it to languish for a month, I finished Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox. The secret seems to lie in NOT reading the book in small pieces, as it is hard to pick back up when I know that we’re going right back to, say, wounded men burning to death in the Wilderness, but to read it in big gulps.

Contemplating whether to have Russell's cavalry unit ride with Sheridan, as opposed to taking part in Sherman's March to the Sea. Sheridan seems to have been one of the few Union officers the men hero-worshipped (the literally turned around a battle by appearing at a propitious moment) and I feel like that would be an interesting phenomena to explain to college boys in the 1960s - in particular, I think it might be good for Russell to have one epic mancrush that is genuinely platonic. However, perhaps this is overegging the pudding...

What I’m Reading Now

rachelmanija kindly linked W. E. Johns page on Faded Page, which has a somewhat random selection of Biggles (read: none of the books that I’ve seen described as particularly slashy), BUT ALSO has the first four books of the Worrals series, about a plucky W.A.A.F. girl pilot Worrals and her stalwart sidekick Frecks. Worrals has been CAPTURED and Frecks is attempting a RESCUE!

What I Plan to Read Next

The next three Worrals books!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Coolidge’s A Guernsey Lily; or, How the Feud Was Healed. The subtitle suggests a feud-forward story, but in fact it is 90% about the Wreford family traveling to the Channel Isles (for Mama’s health, you know!) with a little wisp of a feud that shows up about halfway through, about which Coolidge cares so little that she can’t even be bothered to marry the eldest daughter of one feuding family to the eldest son of the other.

Honestly Coolidge is 100% correct: I am down to read a travelog to the Channel Isles at any time. Bring on the ever-blooming flowers and the tidal cave alive with anemones! Also delighted by the fact that on Guernsey, the Wrefords rent their home from Mrs. Kempton (wife of a sailor constantly away on long voyages to South America) and her friend Elizabeth, who met in service, bought the house together for the purpose of renting it out, and as far as I can tell live there together as the landladies.

I also finished E. Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, which I must confess I bought mainly because it includes his article “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” more or less unaltered. Sometimes you just want to read about early- to mid-nineteenth century youths sleeping in their BFF’s arms after a long intense chat about their feelings, you know?

(It’s always kind of weird reading straight men’s writings about this because you can kind of feel them vibrating with longing that never actually makes it on the page because there is no way to say “if only my BFF and I could snuggle and talk about our feelings” that will not sound gay to a modern audience.)

And I finished James Herriot’s All Things Bright and Beautiful, a lovely and soothing read as all James Herriot books are. I especially enjoy the dog and cat stories, possibly because I am familiar with dogs and cats but have never had the opportunity to become personally acquainted with a cow.

What I’m Reading Now

Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox. Our boys in blue are marching into the Wilderness and the pages are thick with the promise of the horrible slaughter to come!

What I Plan to Read Next

In the afterword to The Friendly Young Ladies, Mary Renault scorned Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as an excessively glum picture of lesbian life and recommended Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women instead, and after some resistance (is it really WISE to read a book recommended in The Friendly Young Ladies) I have succumbed and ordered Extraordinary Women through interlibrary loan.

(I really ought to read The Well of Loneliness at some point but everything I read about it suggests that it is indeed lugubrious, and ugh.)

I’ve been meaning to read Bruce Catton’s Mr. Lincoln’s Army almost since I started work on Sleeping Beauty, as I figured it would kill two birds with one stone: it would be Civil War research for Russell’s life, and it would give insight into mid-twentieth-century America, as Catton was one of the most famous Civil War researcher at the time and probably the author Andrew would most likely read when trying to gain insight into Russell.

It’s also a cracking good read. Catton portrays historical figures in lively strokes, so you feel like you know them, which I realize is a quality that can be misleading - but I nonetheless prefer it to reading a history book and going, “Which interchangeable general is leading this charge, again?”

He’s also got a wonderful eye for the human touch in any situation. For instance, after three Union soldiers find Lee’s complete order of battle wrapped around three cigars, he notes, “It is irritating, in a mild sort of way, that none of the accounts of his affair mention what finally happened to the cigars.”

I also found his battle descriptions clear - well, clear is maybe not the right word, because part of his point is that it’s actually very hard for anyone to tell what is going on during a battle (especially a Civil War battle, when the gunpowder created an oily dark smoke that made it almost impossible to see what was happening). But he’s very good at explaining what the generals meant to achieve, where that plan went wrong (my favorite is the guys who range up and down a creek looking for a ford… when the whole creek is so shallow that you can cross it wherever you like), and what they actually ended up achieving instead.

A couple of passages struck me as particularly useful for my fell purposes. Here’s this one, which perfectly illustrates the different views of war popular in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: “Men would sing [“When This Cruel War Is Over”] and cry. More than any other possession of the army, it expressed the deep inner feeling of the boys who had gone to war so blithely in an age when no one would speak the truth about the reality of war: war is tragedy, it is better to live than to die, young men who go down to dusty death in battle have been horribly tricked.”

So you have Russell politely trying to spare Andrew’s innocence by only describing the fun, non-battle parts of war, like mock-battle snowball fights and stealing Rebel chickens for chicken stew, and meanwhile Andrew is already at “It was probably too awful for him to talk about, like my uncle who fought on Iwo Jima.”

The other is Catton’s discussion of the transition from smoothbore to rifled muskets, which happened swiftly over the first year of the Civil War, and began to march of advances in gun technology that ended in the slaughter on the battlefields of World War I.

“It was these ineffective old smoothbores on which all established combat tactics and theories were based. That is why the virtues of the bayonet figured so largely in the talk of professional soldiers of that era. Up until then the foot soldier was actually a spear carrier in disguise, the bayonet was the decisive weapon, and an infantry charge was just the old Macedonian phalanx in modern dress - a compact mass of men projecting steel points ahead of them, striving to get to close quarters where they could either impale their opponents or force them to run away… But with the rifled musket it just didn’t work that way anymore. The compact mass could be torn to shreds before it got in close.”

I’ve been chewing over the question of why World War I was the war that killed the whole dulce et decorum est ideal, when, after all, wars have always been bloody and lice-ridden and generally gross, and it strikes me that this passage suggests one possible explanation: dulce et decorum est survived as long as the kind of classical infantry tactics (that Macedonian phalanx) that originally spawned it survived, and died when those tactics met their definitive end in the machine gun.

(Why World War I rather than the Civil War? Civil War technology could mow down a bayonet charge… if the defenders were well-trained, and armed with functional rifled muskets, and had plenty of ammunition. If any of those conditions were not met, and they often were not, bayonet charges still worked. You needed a whole company of well-trained men firing at the top speed of two shots a minute to approximate the later effect of a machine gun.)

It’s also super interesting to consider the differences between Catton’s take on the war and the trends in more recent historiography. Catton only glances at questions of race and slavery (although he may become more interested in the next book, when the Army of the Potomac begins recruiting Black soldiers), but he’s VERY interested in the question of the relationship between a democratic government and its army in a time of total war - a topical question when the book was published in 1951, just after World War I, early in the Korean War, when it was feared the Cold War might turn hot.