THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407130404
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
PETER SVENSON, abstract artist and aspiring author, was fairly accustomed to rejection. His paintings, always persistent but never popular, earned him little money and less fame. His writings acquired for him 30 years of rejection slips.
At midlife, having exhausted the remunerative possibilities of songwriting and folk guitar supported by sometime labor as electrician, college instructor and furniture salesman; having in the process lost spouse, house and custody of the children; having witnessed firsthand the departure of emotional and financial stability in earnest pursuit of creative ambition, Svenson came, belatedly, to a sobering conclusion:
It was next to impossible to make both art and a living.
``Recognition and its attendant rewards,'' he conceded, ``seemed to recede like my hairline, and there was nothing in my power to reverse the process.''
But things happened.
Svenson married again, this time to an old friend from graduate school who happened to be an art professor. They moved to 40 acres of hay field and pasture land in the farming community of Cross Keys, Va. That ground had been the site of a small but fierce one-day Civil War engagement June 8, 1862.
Ignored skirmish, ignored artist.
He wrote a book about it.
Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground (Faber & Faber, 246 pp., $21.95; Ballantine paper, $11) came out a year ago. The book saw consequence in struggle - his and history's. Battlefield was nominated as a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Awards.
It didn't win. Neither, in the long run, did Isaac R. Trimble, the outnumbered 60-year-old Confederate brigadier general who repulsed an attack by Union commander Maj. Gen. John C. Fremont. But, for a moment at least, past and present, the last were certifably among the first.
Svenson, now 50, goes over the ground again in Preservation (Faber & Faber, 190 pp., $21.95), demonstrating that rich soil carefully turned can yield more than one strong crop.
``The best way to preserve a battleground that was farmed in the 1860s,'' he maintains, ``is to keep farming it.''
The sequel volume, as before, is one part autobiography, one part history and one part hymn to the stubborn vigor of a 1967 Oliver 550 tractor with a 42-horsepower gas engine that ``looks like a bulldog and drives like a Mack truck.'' Svenson rhapsodizes about heavy equipment the way Shakespeare does about music. Both find poetry in unlikely places:
``I have made a study of tractor seats and their comparative comfort, and while I have found one or two equals to the Oliver throne (with simpler suspensions, such as a single automotive-type shock absorber and coil spring), I haven't found anything that exceeds its cushioning effect. The Oliver Corporation must have patented the system. When I climb onto the tractor and position myself squarely in the seat - thus depressing it about halfway - my posterior floats as if on a cloud.''
That's the key to Svenson's artistry, finding marvels in minutiae. Whether he is recounting the proper process for seeding a field (shovel-whack the copperheads), pursuing a bad debt (in person) or paying respects to the hallowed dead (don't pave the site path), he insists upon the importance of tiny details.
Svenson's photographic memory extends to the freshman English class at Tufts that did not teach him this lesson decades back. Mr. Finkter, the instructor, squeaked Svenson out of there with a C-minus. The ordeal still rankles after all these years:
``If I indulged in a descriptive flight of fantasy, it was red-lined for unreadability. If I wrote a sentence without a verb, it was struck down as incomplete. If I used a word that sent a classmate to the dictionary, I was guilty of obfuscation.''
Now Svenson's scribblings earn him national attention, suggesting that what we tend to preserve is not necessarily the earth-shaking or even the correct but, very simply, the interesting. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by ADRIAN MORGAN
Jacket photograph by PHOTONICA
by CNB