Crane, Stephen:  The Red Badge of Courage

I’m not sure how I managed to miss reading this for so many years because it is one of the most well known American classics about the Civil War.  It was never a reading assignment for me in school for which I am now glad because I’m sure I enjoyed it more as an adult than I would have as a student.

This is an “interior” novel that emphasizes the thoughts and emotions of a young, idealistic boy who enlists in the Union army against his mother’s advice and prayers.  He goes off with ideas of the glory of battle after reading such classic accounts of war for which the ancient Greeks were renowned.  He quickly learns that the reality is nothing like the ideal of the classic wars.  Crane does a good job of giving us the ups and downs of the daily life of a foot soldier and excellent descriptions of battles.  However, the focus of the novel is Henry Fielding’s (often referred to merely as “the youth”) adolescent perceptions and reactions to the daily grind of the soldier and to his concerns about how he appears to the other soldiers.   This is a coming of age novel that takes place in the hellish conditions of armed conflict.  It deserves its classic designation but if it is assigned to students it should be read and discussed in small doses.  There is essentially no plot to keep a young person’s interest but it could make a great discussion book about dealing with the ups and downs of adolescent emotions.

While reading this book I also started reading a book of Walt Whitman’s Complete Poems.  I know he had written poems about the Civil War so I looked up some of them.  After reading this very realistic novel most of them seemed to me to be a too romanticized look at the war.  However, one of them captured well the feel of a scene described by Crane early in the book.  I know Crane never witnessed anything of the civil War; I wonder if Whitman did.

CALVALRY CROSSING A FORD

A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,

They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun-

hark to the musical clank,

Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering

stop to drink,

Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a

picture, the negligent rest on the saddles,

Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering

the ford-while,

Scarlet and blue and snowy white,

The guidon flags flutter gaily in the wind.

(Walt Whitman)

Winspear, Jacqueline:  Messenger of Truth

I’m having a dilemma and so is my public library system about how to classify the Maisie Dobbs series.  Some of the local libraries, including mine, are putting these novels in the adult fiction area while others are classifying them as adult mystery (at least there is no doubt that they are “adult”).   Although I filed the previous reviews I’ve done on this series under mysteries, I have decided that they really do belong in general fiction.  The plots are more complex than most mysteries and involve more than one plot thread; although sometimes these threads overlap, they are not neatly tied into a tidy package at the end and usually there are things to ponder when the last page is read.  The “mystery” in each novel is not a puzzle to be solved but a story to be unraveled so that one or more characters can go on with his/her life.  There is character development within each story and not only with continuing series characters. One of the chief delights of the series is how Winspear takes us back to an historical time, the period between to two World Wars of the 20^th century in England.  We get to see the effects of this period across the entire social strata from the poor struggling to survive to the “last hurrah” of the peers of the realm who have no clue what is happening in the lower levels of society.

This entry in the series concerns the death of a famous artist on the eve of the opening of his largest exhibition.  While working on how he will exhibit his largest masterpiece, which no one has ever seen nor knows what it consists of, he accidentally falls to his death from the scaffold on which he is working.   His twin sister is not satisfied with the explanation of the police about his death and goes to Maisie Dobbs to have her investigate not only the death but what happened to the missing masterpiece.  Because the artist was a “war artist” there are memories of the war revived, in addition to a portrait of a once wealthy landed family dealing with not only artistic temperament but also how to cope with straitened circumstances.  Both Maisie and her aide, Billy, also have problems with which Maisie must deal.  This is a very satisfying if somewhat sobering story.  I highly recommend this series.

To me an interesting connection between this story and The Red Badge of Courage, which I also read this month, is that both novels have a scene where a cease fire is called so that the warring armies can go out on the battlefield to remove their wounded and bury their dead.  In Winspear’s novel there is poignant description of a meeting between soldiers from opposite sides who accidentally meet face to face amid the carnage and hug each other as they shed tears for their dead comrades.   This is followed by a horrifying account of what happens to one of the soldiers when he returns behind his own army’s line.