Long before Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, the worst disaster to befall the South came not from nature, but man himself. Or to be exact: One man and his army.
On Nov. 12, 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman marched out of Atlanta toward the sea, leading more than 60,000 Union troops, prisoners of war, stolen livestock and a trail of newly freed slaves.
“The march was actually Sherman’s idea,” says novelist E.L. Doctorow over coffee on a recent afternoon. “But he didn’t invent the idea of total war – that is, living off the land and pillaging. That was actually done on a small scale in Mississippi by Grant. But Sherman made it epic in size.”
The author whom Anne Tyler has called “a human time machine” doesn’t simply grab this information off the top of his head. He knows it because he has just published “The March,” an epic novel about Sherman’s lethal stroll to the sea. (Random House, $25.95).
Weighing in at nearly 400 pages, the novel features dozens of characters and puts us in the thick of battle. Bullets whiz by and the stench of dead bodies permeates the air.
The book seems poised to be Doctorow’s most lauded novel yet – this for an author who has already won a National Book Award, a PEN/Faulkner Prize and two National Book Critics Circle Awards).
Part of the praise derives from the book’s innovative structure.
“The March” unfolds, inhabits and narrates all at once – from a multitude of perspectives. A conventional novel might follow a fixed group of characters through this journey. Here characters are introduced and then dropped or summarily killed off – sometimes even offstage. There is no time to grieve, as forward movement must be maintained at all costs.
A few characters survive the chaos. A Union surgeon named Col. Sartorius carves his way through a river of bodies and winds up as surgeon general of the United States. Emily Thompson, the daughter of a prominent Southern judge, hitches her wagon to his train, ensuring her safety, but not her happiness. A mixed-race slave girl named Pearl is swept up by a Union general, later takes on the identity of a drummer boy and travels for a while with Sherman himself, an avowed racist.
Doctorow says this revolving cast was a conscious strategy. He wanted to portray the chaos of the march – but also the strange bargain it presented: Survival meant allying oneself with destruction.
“It wasn’t only the troops but the freed slaves attached themselves to the columns,” says the 74-year- old novelist. “There were dispossessed whites. So you had this odd kind of strange thing where people’s security wasn’t rooted to the land, it was rooted to the march – to movement.”
If movement is the book’s main character, its right-hand man is Sherman himself, who emerges as an authentic fictional character, a melancholic whose sanity was preserved by a white-knuckled grip on his idea of The Union. Doctorow must occasionally put him into service as a thinking and breathing politician, but he still rings true. When Secretary of War Stanton visits the general in Georgia and tells him to be more sympathetic to blacks, Doctorow has Sherman explode during a private reverie.
“I have marched an army intact for four hundred miles. I have gutted Johnny Reb’s railroads. I have burned his 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 … And that is not enough for the Secretary of War. I must abase myself to the slaves. Damn this Stanton – I am sworn to destroy the treasonous insurrection and preserve the Union. That is all. And that is everything.”
Doctorow did not write the book to empathize with Sherman, but he found the man fascinating.
“He’s a wonderful writer,” Doctorow says. “He wrote his memoirs, he wrote letters. When you read him you see a complex mind at work: somewhat defensive, somewhat guilty, a principled man in terms of his view of the Confederate rebellion as treason against the United States, and not necessarily sympathetic of the idea of the Emancipation Proclamation. He was not an abolitionist; he was, in fact, something of a racist.”
Sherman is not the first historical figure to enter Doctorow’s fiction. At times it seems as if Doctorow is writing a mythical history of the United States.
“Depending on the time, I’ve always gravitated toward the place where the time was being most vividly expressed. So the national identity flashed into being,” he says. “In 1865, the hot spot was in Georgia, in the Carolinas, so that’s where I was.”
Doctorow doesn’t think of himself as writing historical novels per se. Every novel “is about the past,” as he puts it. “After a while, the time something was written falls away and you just have a novel.”
What Doctorow is too modest to say, but what his audience is starting to sense, is that in rare cases, you don’t just produce a novel, you conjure a masterpiece.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
