Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 24, 1994 TAG: 9402030027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CROSS KEYS LENGTH: Long
His first published book, ``Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground,'' was a finalist in the non-fiction category of the National Book Awards. His next, ``Preservation,'' is due to be published in May or June.
His is working on a series of short stories and preparing for a four-city publicity tour on behalf of Ballantine books, which will issue ``Battlefield'' in paperback.
Once the most private of men, Svenson, 49, mourns his lack of a private life. Callers want him to speak to groups about the Civil War, often for free. Letters arrive steadily ``from people who the book touched in a very personal way.''
Last summer, visitors stopped by from all over the country to walk on, and talk about, the 40 acres of the Civil War battlefield where he lives and raises hay.
``I felt in my bones that there was a story here,'' he says.
Svenson's story is of the one-day, ``whistle-stop'' battle of June 8, 1862. In it, Maj. Gen. Richard S. Ewell and his division of Confederate forces take on a Union contingent nearly twice as large, commanded by Maj. Gen. John C. Fremont. The engagement had long been but a footnote to the next day's battle at Port Republic, four miles away. There, Gen. Stonewall Jackson wound up his highly successful Valley Campaign.
Svenson describes the prelude to that finale, and in the process discovers an unlikely hero - 68-year-old Brig. Gen. Isaac R. Trimble, whose battlefield tactics put the Federals on the run.
If ``Battlefield'' were only a story of the Civil War, it might not have proved so popular. Svenson made it into an unusual blend of detailed history and personal journey. In the process, he narrowed the war's overwhelming, often confusing nature and created a true microcosm. By mastering the events of a single day, he brought into focus the entire war.
He also mixed in descriptions of his modern-day adventures on the site. He describes, often whimsically, his construction of a pond, his house and two studios. He tells about the old farm equipment he bought and restored. He winningly describes his obsession with the baler, which he dismantled, re-assembled and restored to showroom condition, paint job and all. His neighbors got a laugh out of that.
The episode underscores the author's quiet intensity, which makes him the most fascinating of the book's many characters.
Svenson used to regard himself as ``a painter who writes.'' Now it's the other way around. He still creates big, bold abstract works and sells them through a Washington gallery, but finds, ironically that the better his paintings become, they more difficult it becomes to find buyers for them.
That's all right. With ``Battlefield's'' success, ``I can write anything down and someone is going to look at it,'' he says. ``It took me 30 years to get into that position.''
Svenson grew up in Rhode Island and New Jersey and majored in political science at Tufts University. The son of a college professor, he considered a diplomatic career. After graduation, he joined the Navy and spent his tour not in Vietnam but in Norfolk, mostly, working as a ship's storekeeper.
On board, he was the only enlisted man with a college degree, he says. His shipmates liked rock 'n' roll and drinking beer, and he found that he did, too. He left the Navy with self-employment high on his priority list. He earned a master's of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina and set out as a painter - and an electrician, carpenter, college teacher, traveling musician and songwriter, among other things.
He spent 10 years trying to crack Nashville with his country compositions. He sold some but never had a hit.
Married and with two children, he spent many years in suburbia. After a divorce, he married Becky Humphrey, an art professor and papermaker at James Madison University in Harrisonburg. When a huge turkey barn went up near their home in Rockingham County, they sought a private place where they could create. That's how they found the battlefield.
When Svenson paced his new property, deciding where to build his house, he picked up ``its living pulse.'' When he hammered and nailed his cedar home into place, he received ``intimations.'' The dead were speaking to him, and he was listening. ``I began to do a little historical sleuthing,'' he says.
He offered to write a series of columns for the local paper, mixing the present and the past. He wanted to call it ``Battlefield Beat.'' But the paper turned it down. The rejection steered him into something larger and finer.
Svenson traveled to Richmond, New York and elsewhere in search of materials about the Battle of Cross Keys. His hard-won findings give density to his work. Every sentence means something. And when the facts begin to run together in the mind, he breaks the spell with an observation, amusing or compelling, from modern times.
``Locked out of housebuilding by snow and ice,'' he writes, ``I passed the time reading about the Civil War. From the beginning, I felt like an observer from another planet ... I seemed to be incapable of sorting out facts, figures, and dates to the point where the big picture came through with any degree of clarity. All my life I have been envious of people who retained like a sponge soaked up water. I could only relate my meager gleanings to an intuitive perspective: imagining life as it was then and contrasting it with life as I lived it now. The differences flabbergasted me.''
He dug deep and came up with, among other things, a brief history of the minie ball, dispatches from President Abraham Lincoln to the feckless Fremont and the diary of Rebel soldier Joseph Chenoweth, who wrote it while awaiting the fighting on horseback. Svenson calls it ``a glimpse through a window onto a frightened individual's soul.''
He invested three years in the research and the writing. His 40 letters of inquiry to publishers brought 40 rejections, leavened with some letters of explanation and encouragement.
``It made me realize I had something,'' he says, ``if I could get it.''
Tall, balding, sporting a gray beard, he roams the living area of his tin-roofed, cedar house, and says his fan mail and telephone calls are almost evenly divided - half from people gripped by the Civil War material, half from people riveted by his reflections.
His second book is more of a personal odyssey, examining what in life is worth keeping - the intangibles, not the tangibles.
If it's anything like the first, it will be deeply felt. ``Battlefield'' is a book so finely wrought that, like the Bible, it calls for repeated readings.
``I realized as I was doing it,'' Svenson says, happily, ``it was coming out good.''
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB