The March — E.L. Doctorow
Random House
2005
Rating:


In "The March," E.L. Doctorow introduces his titular character — for the Civil War march of General William Tecumseh Sherman's army truly is a character — like a cataclysmic meteorological phenomenon: "It was not fearsomely heaven-made, like thunder or lightning or howling wind, but something felt through [the] feet, a resonance, as if the earth was humming." The freed slaves of Georgia see Sherman's coming army as a "brown cloud" that makes it appear "as if the world has turned upside down."

Instead of delving into the mechanics of the war and turning its soldiers into heroes like Michael Shaara's "The Killer Angels," Doctorow examines what happened to the people of Georgia and the Carolinas when Sherman came through. Doctorow shows how some people, when the world is turned upside down, are able to right themselves, while others attempt to right the world.

Efforts to achieve any kind of equilibrium force the characters to change their alliances and even their identities. Doctorow plays this idea for laughs with Will Kirkland and Arly Wilcox, a Shakespearean pair of scoundrels who seem to shed their identities like skins, while always remaining snakes underneath. Will and Arly are about to be hung by their Confederate Army for treason, but they manage to escape and pose as Union soldiers, only to be captured by the Confederates during battle. The pair's escapades begin as the freewheeling adventures of two future "Deadwood" founders, as when they visit a whorehouse and Arly tells Will: "when we go inside them, plum into their beings, and they cry out in our ear and we feel there is nothing softer, warmer, or more honeyed up in God's world than what embraces our stiff tool, and we are made by God to shiver into them the issue of our loins, well, boy, don't talk to me about what you don't know." Despite their playfulness, there's an insidiousness lurking in their bellies.

Southern belle Emily Thompson has no choice but to rely on the kindness of Army surgeon Colonel Wrede Sartorious (also of Doctorow's "The Waterworks") when Sherman's men march through Georgia and her father dies. Emily is able to put aside her Southern loyalties by tending to the wounded, who bleed and need mending no matter their allegiances. She soon falls for the German-born Sartorius, and their relationship becomes intimate enough that Sartorious surgically removes her hymen before they have sex for the first time.

Sherman himself appears, but not as a Nero-ish emblem of anarchy and hellfire. The general makes his first appearance riding a horse too small for him so that his feet nearly touch the ground. Having just lost a son, Sherman turns paternal toward a light-skinned slave girl posing as a drummer boy. "Sometimes I want to cry, too," he tells her.

If Sherman is a man of metal, then he is mercury. For all his sensitivity and lamentations about the destructiveness of war — "our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war" — he can't help but find some glee in his accomplishments. "I have marched an army intact for four hundred miles," be boasts. "I have gutted Johnny Reb's railroads. I have burned cities, his forges, his armories, his machine shops, his cotton gins. I have eaten out his crops, I have consumed his livestock and appropriated ten thousand of his horses and mules. He is left ravaged and destitute, and even if not another battle is fought his forces must wither and die of attrition."

Doctorow reserves the most humanity for Pearl, a freed slave and daughter of her master. The symbolism couldn't be plainer — pearls are formed under pressure, she's named after Hester Prine's child in "The Scarlet Letter," who threatens the order and stability of society — and she's written with too much nobility when compared to her flawed, white counterparts. Yet she's as rich as a Toni Morrison character. Pearl has trouble adapting in the post-slavery South. The blacks have always scorned her for her white heritage and she had no place in the white world. After being rejected by the orphan slave child she hoped to raise because she wasn't "black enough," Pearl reluctantly chooses to pass as white and takes an accepting white fiancι. He tells her, "You will have to let the world catch up with you."

The simple beauty of "The March" is that it admits the world hasn't caught up with Pearl yet, but it isn't afraid to hope, either. Doctorow's novel may not be as innovative as his 1975 tome "Ragtime," but it has far more modest and, in a sense, bolder ambitions. This is a book of people surviving, of trying to, as Sherman says, find something of moral consequence in the ground they tread.

Posted Thursday, October 20, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/book//e.l.doctorow.the.march