Too much of nothing.(The March)(Shalimar the Clown)(Lunar Park)(The Diviners)(Indecision)(Book Review)

One of the ways in which war becomes palatable to those not in the fight is by cliche. Even Sherman's impassioned plea that all glory in war is moonshine, that war is hell, has been rubbed smooth by the retelling. It has lost its humanity and its truth. As it must. Who would go to war if, in fact, he knew the true hell that it is?

All war--indeed, all kinds of extreme experience--may acquire this sheen, but the Civil War seems particularly vulnerable. The Lost Cause and the Union both have taken on a mantle of dignity and rectitude that no economically motivated clash could ever wear. Consider the term "civil war buff." Although this doesn't stand up etymologically--the term derives from a buff-colored uniform used by New York volunteer fire fighters in the 1920s, and, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, was "originally applied to an enthusiast of fires and firefighting"--I've always thought that the suggestion of polish was fitting. There is relish in the reenactments; there is a shine, too, to the grim instruments of amputation.

In the wake of poetry will come realism, efforts to re-assert the actuality of the thing, to bring back a focus on the true costs of war. Over time hell can be polished, and then someone comes along to put the hell back in. That's what E. L. Doctorow has attempted in The March. (1) The year is 1864, and General William Tecumseh Sherman is on his way to take Savannah, to present it as a Christmas gift to Lincoln. From Savannah, he marches up through the Carolinas, burns most of Columbia to the ground, fights Joe Johnston at Bentonville. Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomatox on April 9th; Abraham Lincoln is assassinated on April 14th; Johnston surrenders to Sherman at Durham Station, North Carolina on April 26th. Most of the book retells Sherman's march and describes his famously huge, scavenging horde of an army. The tactics he used on this march are said to have revolutionized warfare.

The H. G. Wellsian character Sartorius Wrede describes Sherman's march thus:

 
   But supposing we are more a nonhuman form 
   of life. Imagine a great segmented body 
   moving in contractions and dilations at a rate 
   of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a 
   hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its 
   being and tentacled to the roads and bridges 
   over which it travels. It sends out as antennae 
   its men on horses. It consumes everything in 
   its path. It is an immense organism, this army, 
   with a small brain. That would be General 
   Sherman, whom I have never seen. 

It is a hellish vision, a swirling hallucination. It is a Heironymous Bosch vision of hell, where technology, man, and animals have merged into one monster. And just as in a Bosch hell, there are many little scenes of suffering; terrors are glimpsed everywhere you look.

In Doctorow's work, scenes shift constantly. Surely, the march is a subject well suited to such a style--made up as it was of doctors, freed slaves, and deserters from the Confederacy, newspapermen, cavalry officers, and infantry from all over the Union. Doctorow will record them all; he will push your eyes around the canvas, a glimpse here, a vignette there, now a short scene of violence, now another contemplative few paragraphs of interior monologue as one or another of his many, many characters considers life.