Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Beck, David A" <dabeck AT iupui.edu>]

Janet,
I'm not sure we are a "shining light to the world" anymore or have been
for a long time. Our credibility has been on a downhill slide since
Viet Nam. I'm more apt to remember Percy's analogy of the old, rusting,
roller coaster at the beginning of Love in the Ruins: "now [is]the
blessing [on the U.S.A.] or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the
chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?" (I love that passage.)

-David



Quoting janetcantor37--- via Percy-L <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>:

> How lovely to read this now. But how sad because I am beginning to
> think that this is becoming obsolete thinking these days. There is
> more race rancor in our conversation today than I can remember since
> the 60's. It shouldn't be this way. I wish it were not so. We have a
> great country. I hope we don't lose it because we are asleep at the
> switch. It is a country worth saving, a shining light to the world. I
> wonder what Percy would be saying about current attitudes?
> Janet Cantor
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Jim Forest <jhforest AT gmail.com>
> To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
> <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
> Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2014 6:04 AM
> Subject: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
>
>
>
> from the March 29, 1957 issue of Commonweal
>  
> https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/american-war
>  
> The American War
>  
> by Walker Percy
>  
> WHAT ARE THE reasons for the current revival of interest in
> the Civil War? That there is such a revival is undeniable. Books on the War
> pour off the presses every week?some of them, incidentally, of a very high
> order, such as Bruce Catton's This Hallowed Ground and Shelby Foote's Shiloh!
> What is at once noticeable about the current literature is its frankly
> non-political character and the absence of the old rancor. The race issue may
> be still very much an issue, but Northern and Southern historians
> have achieved
> a common view of the War itself. When Catton from Michigan and Foote from
> Mississippi write about the battle of Shiloh, it sounds like the same battle.
> Catton is never more eloquent than when he is appraising Lee's generalship;
> Foote is just as impressed by the fighting qualities of the Northern soldier.
> Indeed, from this distance the underdog psychology probably kindles
> the reader's
> enthusiasm more readily than do the social issues?and perhaps this is just as
> well.
>  
> The general impression outside the South seems to be that it
> is the rest of the country which has rediscovered the Civil War, that
> the South
> has never stopped looking back. This is mistaken, I believe, and is due to an
> understandable optical illusion. The truth is, at least in my
> experience, that
> the Southerner never thinks about the Civil War?until he finds himself among
> Northerners. Then, for some reason-perhaps because the Northerner insists on
> casting him in his historical role and the Southerner is perfectly willing to
> oblige, or because, lost in the great cities of the North, he feels for the
> first time the need of his heritage?he breaks out the Stars and Bars. I
> remember traveling from Alabama to summer camp in Wisconsin in the twenties.
> The train would stop in Chicago to pick up more boys. We from Alabama
> had heard
> as little about the Civil War as the Boer War and cared less, but every time
> the Illinois boys got on in Chicago the War started, a real brawl yet not
> really bad-tempered. The same sort of thing must have happened during
> the World
> War I when an Alabama division suddenly found itself in a donnybrook with the
> Fighting 69th at Plattsburg.
>  
> The truth of it is, I think, that the whole country, South
> included, is just beginning to see the Civil War whole and entire for
> the first
> time. The thing was too big and too bloody, too full of suffering and hatred,
> too closely knit into the fabric of our meaning as a people, to be
> held off and
> looked at-until now. It is like a man walking away from a mountain.
> The bigger
> it is, the farther he's got to go before he can see it. Then one day he looks
> back and there it is, this colossal thing lying across his past.
>  
> A history of the shifting attitudes toward the War would be
> enlightening. There would probably emerge a pattern common to such great
> events, a dialectic of loss-recovery: the long period of recollection, of in­
> tense partisan interest which is followed by a gradual fading of the
> Event into
> a dusty tapestry. (Lee and Grant at Appomattox taking their place beside
> Washington Crossing the Delaware.) Then under certain circumstances, there is
> the recovery. Perhaps Washington will never be recovered, having been
> ossified
> too long in grammar school tableaus. But Lincoln and Grant and McClellan and
> even the legendary Lee, who after all are closer in time to
> Washington than to
> us, have come very much alive. Why, then, their recovery, and what
> exactly has
> been recovered?
>  
> WHAT HAS been recovered, it seems clear, is not the politics
> or the sociology of the War, nor even the slavery issue, but the
> fight itself.
> The tableau I remember from school was the Reconciliation, Grant and
> Lee in the
> McLean house, Lee healing the wounds at Washington College. Little was said
> about the War, except that it was tragic; brother fighting against brother,
> etc. Undoubtedly this was the necessary if somewhat boring emphasis for the
> textbooks. Now, after ninety years of Reconciliation, we can take a
> look at the
> fight itself.
>  
> What a fight it was! The South is a very big place, yet
> there is hardly a district that didn't have its skirmish, its Federal gunboat
> sunk in a bayou?where some old-timer won't tell you, "Yes, they came
> through here." It is startling to realize that there were more casualties
> in the Civil War than in all the American forces of World War II, and
> more than
> in all other American wars put together. Of 3,000,000 men under arms,
> 2,300,000
> for the Union, 750,000 for the Con­ federacy, 618,222 died, with total
> casualties probably going well past a million. For sheer concentrated fury,
> there are few events even in modern warfare to equal that terrible
> September 17
> at Antietam Creek when over 20,000 men fell?or the May-June of '64
> when, beginning
> with the battle of the Wilderness, Grant lost on the average of 2,000
> men a day
> for 30 days, culminating in the slaughter at Cold Harbor when over 8,000 men
> fell in about ten minutes! There were murderous battles in the West which one
> never heard of, like Stone's River with over 25,000 casualties.
>  
> Yet terrible as it was, it is impossible to read of the Army
> of Northern Virginia or of the Army of the Potomac without being caught up in
> the tremendous drama. The armies were big enough so that the action
> took place
> on an epic scale, yet the War was, as much as were the Punic Wars, a personal
> encounter of the opposing leaders. Lee was very much aware of this
> grim beauty
> when the fog rose over Fredericksburg showing Burnside's entire army facing
> his, battle flags flying.  "It is
> well that war is so terrible,? he said; "else we should grow too fond of
> it." But what gave the Civil War the tragic proportions of the Iliad 
> was the  fact, apparent after Shiloh, that the American soldier,
> Union and
> Confederate, was not going to be beaten until he could literally fight no
> longer or was killed. When his leader was great, he was almost
> invincible; when
> his leader was mediocre, he was still superb. Pickett's charge is justly
> famous, but just as heartbreaking was the Union  assault on
> Longstreet's position in the sunken road at Fredericksburg.
> The difference was that where Pickett?s men had every confidence in Lee,
> Couch's men knew very well that Burnside was wrong. Yet they attacked all day
> long, and only stopped when the field was piled so high with dead that they
> could no longer run over them.
>  
> AS IN ALL tragedies, a great deal seemed to de­ pend upon
> fate. Small mischances become as important as Thetis?s oversight when she
> dipped Achilles?all but his heel?into the Styx.  A Con­federate
> courier  loses some
> battle orders;  they  are found wrapped  around  three cigars and
> brought to McClellan; the direct result is the battle
> of Antietam. One can't read of that war without playing the
> fascinating game of
> what-if.... What if Jackson had lived through Chancellorsville? What if
> McClellan had listened to Phil Kearny (instead of the Pinkerton detectives)
> during the Seven Days? What if Jeb Stuart had tended to business at
> Gettysburg?
> Lee was always just missing his Cannae and Lincoln's generals were
> always just
> short of ordinary competence?until he got Grant.
>  
> Besides the great failures, there were the great successes,
> the heroes' deeds which are always irresistible to the human spirit
> and so pass
> over immediately into the legend of the race. There was Chancellorsville when
> Lee, facing Hooker's 85,000, divided his battered army of 43,000,
> sent Jackson
> to the left, leaving him in front of Hooker with 17,000 men?and attacked and
> very nearly destroyed the Army of the Potomac. There was the Union's
> "Pap" Thomas's assault on Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga and the
> subsequent demoralization of Bragg. And there was the fateful decision at
> Spotsylvania when, after taking a fearful mauling, Grant, instead of falling
> back toward Washington as the army had been doing for the past three years,
> re­treated south, sliding around Lee's right.
>  
> Therein lies the tragedy. If Lee had been a little more or a
> little less?if he had gotten his Cannae or if he had only been just competent
> and been whipped by McClellan in '62?the results would still have
> been notable,
> but they would not have approached the terror and  piteousness of
> what actually did happen. The
> summer of 1864 has a Gotterdammerung quality. With the issue hardly in doubt
> after Gettysburg, the fighting nevertheless increased in fury with both sides
> attacking steadily, without the usual remissions between battles.
>  
> YET WITH all the horror, or perhaps because of it, there was
> always the feeling then, and even now as we read about it, that the things a
> man lived through were somehow twice as real, twice as memorable as the peace
> that followed. Peace is better than war, yet it is a sad fact that
> some of the
> heroes of the War, like Grant and Longstreet and many a lesser man, found the
> peace a long descent into mediocrity.  In
> the ordeal the man himself seemed to become more truly himself, revealing his
> character or the lack of it, than at any time before or after. If a man was
> secretly cowardly or secretly brave, stupid or shrewd, that was what he was
> shown to be. The War infallibly discovered his hidden weakness and his hidden
> strength. Hooker the braggart was reduced to impotence simply by having Lee's
> small army in front of him (and understandably, for the veterans of
> the Army of
> the Potomac used to say to replacements fresh from victories in the West:
> "Wait till you meet Bobby Lee"). Grant the ne'er-do-well matured in
> defeat and became a noble and sensitive human being by having Lee at
> his mercy.
> It is no wonder that there was the temptation, especially in the
> ruined South,
> to enshrine those four years as the four years of truth and to discount all
> other times, even the future.
>  
> Then there were the thousand and one lesser en­counters, any
> one of which, if it had happened at another time, would have its own
> literature
> and its own historians: the Confederate raiders, Farragut's capture of New
> Orleans, the battle of the ironclads, Forrest's miniature Cannae at Bryce
> Crossroads, James Andrews' stealing  the
> Confederate train, and so on. It was the last of the wars of
> individuals, when
> a single man's ingenuity and pluck not only counted for some­ thing in itself
> but could conceivably a:ffect the entire issue. Forrest himself is quite
> unbelievable. It is as if Launcelot had been reborn in Memphis. He
> carried into
> battle a cavalry saber sharpened to a razor edge and actually killed men with
> it. He actually did fool a Yankee commander into surrendering by parading a
> single cannon back and forth in the distance as they parleyed. He
> actually did
> have twenty-nine horses shot from under him.
>  
> THERE IS an ambiguity about this new interest in the Civil
> War. On the one hand it is the past recaptured, the authentic recovery of the
> long agony during which this nation came to be what it is. Yet there is also
> the temptation to yield to an historical illusion by which the past seems to
> gain in stature and authenticity as it recedes and the present to be
> discounted
> because it is the here and now. We sense the illusion in the words of the
> old-timer, "Yes, they came through here," in which it is somehow
> implied that this place has existed in a long trivial aftermath after its one
> day of glory. Perhaps the North is in for a mild case of the same romanticism
> which the South recovered from over fifty years ago.
>  
> The increased emphasis upon the fighting at the expense of
> ideology is probably good. One does well, anyway, not to apply ideology too
> closely to that war. James Truslow Adams can talk about the March of
> Democracy
> and Bruce Catton can call the Union army a truly revolutionary army
> and perhaps
> they are right. Perhaps the War was really and truly fought over
> slavery. But the
> other case can be made too. It is difficult to see the yeoman farmers who
> largely made up the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Northern
> Virginia as
> Southern Bourbons. The South had some reason to regard the fight as a
> continuation of the American Revolution. After all it was her soil which was
> being invaded and her independence which was being denied. The South
> might even
> have the better of the constitutional argument; yet what won out seems to
> transcend all the arguments. For it is that extraordinary thing, the American
> Union.
>  
> * * *
> Jim & Nancy Forest
>
> Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands 
>
> Jim's books: www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/
>
> Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com
>
> Photo albums: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/
> Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/
> On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/
> A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/
> In Communion site: www.incommunion.org
> Forest-Flier Editorial Services: http://forestflier.com/
>
> * * *
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