THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410080184
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines
HENRY AND CLARA
THOMAS MALLON
Ticknor & Fields. 358 pp. $22.95
DEFEND THE VALLEY
A Shenandoah Family in the Civil War
MARGARETTA BARTON COLT
Orion Books. 441 pp. $35.
Largely because of the wildly popular PBS series ``The Civil War,'' first aired in 1990, the War between the States has inspired many new books, some of them most worthwhile and others less so. At hand are two volumes that reflect these differences.
Thomas Mallon's Henry and Clara is a work of historical fiction that treats the lives of Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris. This young, affianced couple - she the witty daughter of a U.S. senator from New York, he a major in the Federal army - were seated with President and Mrs. Lincoln in Ford's Theatre on the evening of Good Friday, 1865. Their lives were ever after blighted by John Wilkes Booth, who, after shooting Lincoln, struggled with and stabbed Rathbone before leaping to the stage and escaping.
Margaretta Barton Colt's Defend the Valley: A Shenandoah Family in the Civil War, on the other hand, is period nonfiction, a superb portrayal of Virginians caught in the tragedy of war. Of course, it is the sensational Henry and Clara that has attracted the most critical attention.
On a spring evening 18 years after Lincoln's assassination, his mind having steadily lost almost all touch with reality, Henry shot Clara to death, stabbed her and then slashed himself with his dagger. His wounds were not mortal, though, and he spent the rest of his life in an asylum, surviving until the early years of this century.
As history, the story of Henry and Clara is at once intriguing, horrifying and saddening. But in the fiction of Mallon, the story is largely labored and tedious, with the author's wooden characters lurching to life only occasionally. The dialogue is often stilted and awash in banalities.
Mallon draws Henry and Clara as a pair doomed from childhood. At that time, his widowed mother married her widowed father, and so the two grew up under the same roof as stepbrother and stepsister, a relationship much remarked upon by observers as they grew romantically involved over the years.
Henry is portrayed as a sardonic, self-absorbed know-it-all with a chronic case of ``the sulks'' - much of this, it is hinted, the result of his father's death. Aside from his affinity with the besieged, heroic souls of Lord Byron's poetry (for which Clara has a passion), it is unclear just what she sees in him. For her part, Clara is portrayed as a genteel social climber, not entirely unlike her viperish stepmother, obsessed with possessing Henry body and soul.
Clara's celebrated witticisms often consist of a series of misfired one-liners. And for a clever man, Henry's own verbal repartee is fairly shallow. At one point, shortly before Clara must leave him for a time, he hurries her along by saying, ``We can't have you missing your dreams because you've missed the train.''
While courting and alone together for a few minutes on a voyage to Europe, Clara murmurs those words every man longs to hear: ``It's a shame the Piedmont may be torn up by war just because the French and Austrian emperors can't get along.'' A minute later, the two embrace passionately, with Clara ``pulling on Henry's shoulders'' and ``biting at his whiskers.''
The war begins and drags on, and the little whisker-biter dreams lovingly of her bare-chested beau burying the gore-bespattered dead after the Battle of Sharpsburg.
By the time of their fatal confrontation, Henry has become transformed, in a sense, into Booth, having convinced himself that not only could he have stopped the assassin from shooting Lincoln, but that he actually willed Booth to act as he did. And Clara has become the image of her despised stepmother, politely contemptuous of the unwashed masses even as her husband's declining fortunes make her own life desperately shabby. An interesting thesis, these dual cases of psychological identification with one's tormenters, but Mallon poorly handles the absorbing story.
For moving writing on the Civil War era, one may turn profitably to Defend the Valley. Similar in style to Elizabeth Wallace's Glencoe Diary, Colt's volume folds in the letters, memoirs and speeches of her Confederate ancestors, the Bartons and Joneses of the Winchester, Va., area, to tell the story of ordinary men and women who soldiered and coped as best they knew how with tragedy.
The book unintentionally emphasizes two things above all others: the lost art of letter-writing; and the norms, sneered at today, that were held as common and unquestionable by Americans of the mid-19th century.
To use an accurate but cliched phrase, there is simple eloquence in these fragments, which together address the hardships of shelterless soldiers sleeping in wet fields during wintertime, their yearning thoughts of faraway homes, their grief at learning of lifelong friends killed in action, the martial courage of the famous Stonewall Brigade, the plight of slaves as they try but fail to escape their masters and the trials of women on the home front desperately trying to run family farms single-handedly.
By putting the reader inside the minds of the Bartons and Joneses, Defend the Valley shows not only what happened in the lower Shenandoah Valley during the war years, but fully what it was like to be alive in that time. MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who lives in Michigan, is the
editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell
Kirk.'' ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by CYNTHIA DUNNE
Jacket photos from WESTERN RESERVE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
and WASHINGTON & LEE UNIVERSITY
Jacket design by JULIE METZ
Jacket lithograph from the BETTMANN ARCHIVE
by CNB