The Diaries of the Civil War

The Library of Congress is displaying some of them.

From a story on CBS News...

Letters and diaries from those who lived through the Civil War offer a new glimpse at the arguments that split the nation 150 years ago and some of the festering debates that survive today.

The Library of Congress, which holds the largest collection of Civil War documents, pulled 200 items from its holdings to reveal both private and public thoughts from dozens of famous and ordinary citizens who lived in the North and the South. Many are being shown for the first time.

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, for one, was grappling with divided federal and state allegiances. He believed his greater allegiance was to his native Virginia, as he wrote to a friend about resigning his U.S. Army commission.

"Sympathizing with you in the troubles that are pressing so heavily upon our beloved country & entirely agreeing with you in your notions of allegiance, I have been unable to make up my mind to raise my hand against my native state, my relatives, my children & my home," he wrote in 1861. "I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army."

A Poetry-Fueled War

During the Civil War, poetry didn’t just respond to events; it shaped them.

From an interview on Poetry Foundation...

You write that the Civil War was a “poetry-fueled war.” What do you mean by that?
Poetry in mid-19th-century America was ubiquitous in a way that it just isn’t now. It was everywhere in newspapers and magazines, children were learning it in school…. Americans were encountering poetry on a weekly basis, if not a daily basis, in the Civil War era, and that’s a profound difference from contemporary poetry and its place in our culture.
There are so many accounts in newspapers of soldiers dying with a poem in their pockets, poems written on a scrap of paper folded up inside a book; so many accounts of songs or poems being sung or read to political leaders at particular moments. For example, after Lincoln announced the second call for a draft ... James Sloan Gibbons wrote this song poem called “Three Hundred Thousand More,” which he supposedly sang to Lincoln in his office one day. So there’s a kind of immediacy of impact, that poetry is actually, I suggest, shaping events, not just responding or reflecting on them.

How did these poems reach the general public? They must have traveled somewhat quickly since they’re responding to political events.
The technological development of the railroad and then also the increasingly affordable technologies of printing and reproduction had the result of dramatically increasing the speed with which poetry could move around. ... Harper’s [Weekly] featured poetry pretty regularly. It’s the equivalent of readers seeing poetry in a magazine like Newsweek or Time, or maybe even People magazine. ... Then also it’s a shorter genre, it can be more quickly written; it can be written in response to immediate events….

Dulce Et Decorum Est

10 Great War Books Written by Women

The list, care of Flavorwire.

21 World War I Recruitment Posters from Around the World

Enjoy!

Top 10 Books about War

The list, care of Hazlitt.

Unbroken

Authors Who Went to War

A list, and gallery, care of AbeBooks.

Steinbeck in Vietnam

The last piece of published writing from one of America's greatest writers was a series of letters he sent back from the front lines of war at the age of 64.

John Steinbeck's reports shocked readers and family so much that they've never been reprinted — until now.

Reading the Civil War

The American Spectator discusses our love of reading about our great war.

From the piece...

Americans seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for everything ever written on the bloodiest episode of our history in which more than 600,000 Americans died on both sides of the conflict over Union, states rights, and slavery. The latter part of the previous sentence has, itself, generated its own body of literature on the true meaning of the conflict. Many experts argued that the meaning or mission of the conflict changed over time as the blood flowed and the stakes rose astronomically. Others maintain that states rights were either a cover for the real issue, slave-holders' rights, or so intertwined with it that they were essentially the same thing.

Where's the Great Novel about the War on Terror?

That's the question the Atlantic recently posed.

From the article...

The American war writing tradition is a proud one, and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror—at least in the non-fiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11. These works run the gamut from personal testimonies of combat (Colby Buzzell's My War and Kayla Williams's Love My Rifle More than You), to attempted explanations as to how and why these wars unfolded the way they did (Donald Rumsfeld's Known and Unknown), to embedded press accounts by correspondents with infantrymen half their age (Sebastian Junger's War) or exiled Iraqi prostitutes (Deborah Amos's Eclipse of the Sunnis.) There has been such a proliferation of non-fiction war writing over the last ten years that it's nearly impossible to talk to anyone in the publishing industry without hearing phrases like "war fatigue" and "market saturation."

Fiction has proven an entirely different animal. Almost a decade after the first bombs were dropped in Afghanistan, even the most avid bookworm would be hard-pressed to identify a war novel that could be considered definitive of this new generation's battles. The explanations for this vary from the esoteric—wars need to end first before fiction writers can fully capture their impact—to the pragmatic: People don't read fiction anymore.

In an email discussion about this issue, Eric Cummings, a literary critic who writes at the military blog On Violence, argued that a memoir-centric publishing industry has played the most instrumental role in stunting the growth of GWOT fiction. However, he continued, "The first draft of war literature tends to be memoirs anyway—it happened during both World Wars ... I'm sure [Iraq and Afghanistan novels] will come. And they will probably be better than the memoirs."

There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, took over a decade to pen. And those books seem almost rushed compared to a pair of Vietnam novels that were published in the last year, Karl Marlantes's Mattherhorn and Ken Babbs's Who Shot the Water Buffalo?, both of which took the authors over 40 years to write, rewrite, and publish.

On the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War

The Concord Monitor offers up a list of the 10 best Civil War books ever written.

The Civil War, 150 Years On

The Daily Beast looks at the battalion of new books on the anniversary of America's Civil War.

From the piece...

Beginning in November 1860, with Abraham Lincoln’s election, the initial volume in this series re-creates—through diaries, speeches, letters, poems, and newspaper accounts—the thoughts and actions of star players and everyday citizens on both sides of the conflict. Some of this material, such as Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address or the diaries of George Templeton Strong and Mary Boykin Chesnut, is familiar. Much, however, is fresh, and all the entries become more striking by being placed in the context of time unfolding. Many would be striking no matter what the context.

Riding across the Bull Run battlefield in the wake of the fighting, Confederate soldier Charles Minor Blackford writes, “I noticed an old doll baby with only one leg lying by the side of a Federal soldier just as it dropped from his pocket when he fell writhing in the agony of death. It was obviously a memento of some little loved one at home which he had brought so far with him and had worn close to his heart on this day of danger and death. It was strange to see that emblem of childhood, that token of a father’s love lying there amidst the dead and dying … I dismounted, picked it up and stuffed it back into the poor fellow’s cold bosom that it might rest with him in the bloody grave which was to be forever unknown to those who loved and mourned him in his distant home.”

That, astonishingly, is a typical entry in this splendid literary tapestry.

The First World War's Great Novelist

His name was David Jones.

From a piece in the Guardian...


According to Sebastian Faulks, there are no major British novels of the first world war. He says as much in the first episode of his four-part series, Faulks on Fiction, which begins tomorrow night. In his introduction to a 2004 edition of Birdsong, his own contribution to first world war literature, Faulks notes that most novels about the war "were disappointing". What should be strange about this, but is in fact depressingly predictable, is that nowhere does he mention David Jones's In Parenthesis, probably the best book about the war in English.

Composed of free verse and prose, In Parenthesis is at once a poem, a novel, and a singular combination of both. It is a classic, both of war literature and of modernism. You wouldn't think the British Isles had produced enough significant modernist works to ignore one of the best, yet Jones's work remains woefully neglected. Not that it has lacked advocacy. TS Eliot thought it "a work of genius", and that its dense layers of meaning would be pored over in the same way as Pound's Cantos or Joyce's later work, "when [it] is widely enough known". Given that Eliot made this assertion in 1961, nearly 25 years after In Parenthesis was first published, its remaining a minority interest was already likely.

In Parenthesis covers the period December 1915 to July 1916, during which time the half-English, half-Welsh Jones, having enlisted in 1914, was on his first spell of active service in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. We follow a Private John Ball from his passage across the Channel, through the ritual, routine and discomfort of trench life, to his wounding during a poorly organised attack on Mametz Wood (near which Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantryman begins) at the Battle of the Somme.

The Top 12 Civil War Books Ever Written

The list, care of Salon.

Trench Literature

Of course there are books about World War I, but what books were read by World War I soldiers in the trenches? AbeBooks takes note of these ones.

From the piece...

Reading material was in heavy demand from the men living in cramped conditions in a war that was static for long periods of time.

Perhaps the safest answer is anything they could get their hands on. Most soldiers travelled light to the front and then craved books and magazines once they were embroiled in the stalemate. They would read anything that could take their thoughts off the mud, the rats, the shelling, the smell, the snipers and the prospect of going over the top and charging machine gun emplacements. Nat Gould

Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and John Buchan were popular as were the horse racing novels of Nat Gould – the Dick Francis of his day, who penned more than 130 books, many of which were published as affordable yellowbacks. Captain R.W. Campbell’s Private Spud Tamson novel would also have offered light relief.

One of the most popular magazines in the British trenches was The War Illustrated – one of many magazines created at the outbreak of war. Targeted at working class men, the magazine was heavily illustrated and often carried stories about German atrocities – both true and fabricated.

The Bowmen

AbeBooks has an interesting story about Arthur Machen's tale, The Bowman.

From the piece...

Of all the memorable tales to emerge from World War I, the most remarkable one is untrue. The Angels of Mons is a legend that evolved from one writer’s skillful ability to weave ghostly stories. This particularly tale gripped a nation badly in need of hope. For some, fiction became reality.

In September 1914, two months after the outbreak of the Great War, Welsh journalist and author Arthur Machen published a short story called The Bowmen in the London Evening News. It describes how phantom archers from the Battle of Agincourt had come to the rescue of British soldiers fighting against the Germans in the Battle of Mons a month earlier.

The story was not labeled as fiction and the author soon became to receive enquiries from readers asking for verification of these ghostly archers, who had apparently been summoned by Saint George, the patron saint of England.

It appears Machen had no desire to create a hoax, but that the British public, just starting to grasp the full horrors of World War One’s mechanized warfare and its heavy death toll, was ready to believe that a ghostly miracle had occurred in France.

Hans Keilson and Other Rediscovered Novelists

The Daily Beast discusses the literary success of Irene Nemirovsky and Hans Fallada, two rediscovered novelists who wrote about World War Two and resistance to Germany. Add Hans Keilson to that list.

From the piece...

It's important, then, to keep one's eyes on both sides of the literary-and-commercial divide when another alleged discovery comes along, particularly in an age hungry for the lurid sheen of memoir-style truth. But, as a critic and reader, it's thrilling when that writer deserves the hype. In this case, Hans Keilson, a German physician who fled to the Netherlands before World War II and later joined the Dutch resistance, helping to spirit downed pilots and Jews out of the country, is such an example. Farrar, Straus and Giroux has just published two Keilson novels, The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key, that the author began writing while underground. Adversary was originally published in the U.S. in 1962, when it was praised by TIME magazine, making Keilson something like a re-discovery for American readers.

This is the first English publication of Comedy in a Minor Key, a slim and poignantly titled novel. Based on the author's time in hiding and dedicated to the Dutch couple that sheltered him, Comedy tells the story of Wim and Marie, a married couple in their mid-twenties, who take in Nico, a fortyish Jew fleeing Germany.