The Inexpressible Conflict

EARLY IN 1861, when the Civil War was very new, Matthew Brady photographed George Armstrong Custer seated with a Confederate prisoner, Lieutenant J.B. Washington, who had been a friend and classmate of Custer at West Point. The picture, for Brady, perfectly illustrated the fratricidal aspects of the War.

There is a third person in the photo, however, who symbolizes perfectly the total insanity of the whole conflict. Seated between Washington's legs is his own slave boy, who is supposed to have followed him into battle. The black child is no more than nine or ten; he sits totally ignored by both white men--the one his owner, the other his emancipator.

Daniel Aaron thinks that the Civil War has never been properly treated in American literature because the issue of race created an emotional resistance blurring literary insight. That is the central and most provocative thought of his book, The Unwritten War.

Without the long presence of chattel slavery, Americans would not have allowed the usual animosities springing from cultural differences to boil up into murderous hatreds. Without the Negro, there would have been no Civil War, yet he figured only peripherally in the War literature. Often presented sympathetically (which ordinarily meant sentimentally and patronizingly), he remained even in the midst of his well-wishers an object of contempt or dread, or an uncomfortable reminder of abandoned obligations, or a pestiferous shadow, emblematic of guilt and retribution.

The constraints imposed by race operate similarly on both North and South alike, Aaron believes. The result is a massive literature that skirts the real issues of the War--sometimes coming tantalizingly close, but missing the mark. To prove his point Aaron catalogues the responses of several generations of American writers, starting with Emerson and going all the way to Faulkner.

The literature breaks down into categories, usually determined by age, sometimes by common experience. For example, Emerson and Whittier are grouped together as "Elder Statesmen," Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman take "a philosophical view of the whole affair," while James, Twain, Howells, and Adams are the "Malingerers." Within these categories Aaron analyzes particular responses and finds that, in spite of the collective failure to come to grips with the War, the conflict was a disturbing and compelling experience for each. Especially to men like Twain and Howells, the War marked the turning point in their own American experience--each went through a kind of intellectual shuffle trying to write about it.

AARON HAS ALWAYS been what might be described as gently suspicious of the rationalizations and idealizations of writers. He described a personal attitude toward history and literature elsewhere, in an essay called The Treachery Of Recollection.

Nevertheless, what a person was or thought or did thirty years ago is past and dead, even if that person is physically alive...feeling a deep familial piety for his defunct historical self, he indulges in ancestor worship, tidies up embarrassing disorders of his dead past, reverently conceals his own skeleton in a hidden closet...no writer enjoys total recall, every recollection is suspect.

American writers felt compelled to "tidy up" the experience of the Civil War--in some ways one could describe all writers as intellectual tidiers of otherwise messy social experiences. But they were not able to do so. Aaron constantly wants to know why; in asking the question he set himself the most rigorous historical task possible: he had to figure out what was not said as well as what was.

Nowhere in the book is the approach more persuasive than in the section describing the attempts of "Malingerers" to write about the War. Unfortunately, it seems that exactly those writers who could have handled the war perceptively somehow or other never ended up in the fighting. Not that one must participate, only that the fact of one's nonparticipation must not become obsessive.

Henry James, for one, felt guilty all his life for not following up his radically abolitionist principles with action. He allowed his extraordinary recollective powers to be more evocative than explicit. He made the South something magnificent and swashbuckling in his mind, only to discover that it was a mere shadow of its former self when he finally visited there after 50 years. The image of this pathetic South was more dramatic to him than anything else possibly could have been; he rejected Southern chauvinism and identified completely with Southern pain and defeat. In the end, Aaron sees the War as perhaps the central experience in James' life--an all the more tragic and profound experience because he could never quite grasp it. The War hovered around the edges of his consciousness, distorting his sensibility and point of view.

THE CONCLUSION of the book is that no writer on either side was able to find any satisfactory meaning in the war; no one could even make it an adequate historical metaphor. Aaron suggests that this lack of meaning comes out of the constraints of American literary conventions in the 19th century; not only did writers duck the issue of race, but also the experience of the common man in the War.

Aaron is at his best in covering this material; the book is the best of any of his work so far. He is scholarly without being abstruse; he writes directly and very well. The Unwritten War Daniel Aaron proves again that he is one of the finest contemporary critics of American history and literature.