The March – E. L. Doctorow, 2005 ★★½

Trudging through Georgia

The American Civil War remains a touchstone for understanding what it means to be American. Whether it’s race and regionalism, human rights and civil liberties or westward expansion and technological progress, everything that makes America American runs through the Civil War like a teeming railroad junction or the mighty Mississipp.

No wonder so many American fiction writers take a shot at writing about it.

Some writers go for epic allusions and existential ruminations. Some produce romantic potboilers. Some work the flags or showcase the inhumanity. Some strive to put you in battle. Some endeavor to explicate the history. There are even those manage to do some or all these things at once; which is why Civil War fiction is one of my favorite subgenres. There’s just a lot of there there.

For decades, the late E. L. Doctorow was one of American letters’ biggest names, specializing in historical fiction. He wrote a lot about life in and around New York City in the 19^th and 20^th century. The opportunity to read him on the subject of the Civil War was quite appealing. This novel started with much promise, and had me feeling pretty excited a third of the way in. Then the gears shifted and The March settled into something neither thrilling or a letdown. To borrow a well-used word from “The Simpsons,” it proved entirely cromulent.

In 1864, the Confederacy is on the ropes. Union Gen. William T. Sherman seeks to drive the dagger home by leading 60,000 troops deep behind enemy lines, laying waste to much of Georgia and the Carolinas. En route, his armies intersect with freed slaves, refugees, displaced plantation owners, even a war photographer; drawing some people together while laying waste to others:

After several miles the countryside looked flattened hard and scorched, as if a hot clothes iron had been taken to it. It was no longer the natural world God had made. Where houses had been were chimneys standing up from blackened mounds like gravestones.

The March presents the title entity as its own character, a kind of beast rolling through the story with a will of its own, “something iridescently blue and side-winding that looked like the floodplain of a river.” At times, it is uncontrollable even by its appointed commander.

Sherman takes his time putting in an appearance in The March; for the first few dozen pages the book introduces a slew of people far from the hurricane’s eye. The most central of them is Pearl, half-black daughter of a Georgia plantation owner and a slave, who joins the march in disguise as a Union drummer boy. She carries a divided sense of herself and her place in the world that I suspect Doctorow wanted to make into his novel’s thesis.

Emily Thompson is a Southern belle whose father, an important judge, dies early in the story, leaving her free to follow the march and make herself useful in ways she never imagined possible in her cultural isolation. She finds herself in the cool but reassuring company of a man of science, Wrede Sartorius.

Will and Arly are a pair of Southern deserters who meet while awaiting execution; Arly assures his young companion that the Lord won’t let them die so insignificantly, a faith soon justified by events. “I don’t know about you, Willie boy,” he says. “But it’s all the same to me how I am to be killed.”

A word of warning: Doctorow doesn’t use quotation marks in The March the way I just did in the example above. Dialogue flows in and out of the narrative without any break from surrounding descriptions of setting, mood, or action. It can be annoying. Certainly many Amazon.com reviewers have pointed it out negatively.

One gets a feeling of denseness in that, as well as in other ways. The March presents a broad collection of characters who sometimes come together and sometimes drift off to be replaced by someone else. It is always busy, always churning, pausing only to ruminate briefly on the chaos and destruction.

General William T. Sherman leads his troops into laying a destructive swath across the heart of the Confederacy in E. L. Doctorow's The March. Image from http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013-02-27/readers-review-march-el-doctorow.

Sometimes, this works. The opening, as indicated, is exciting and engaged me as much as I hoped. Pearl finds herself alone in a deserted Tara and attaches herself to a Union regiment who, in an early indication of the novelist’s humanist approach, adopt her. “She missed nothing with those cat-pale eyes of hers,” the Union officer muses.

Will and Arly hold down the comic-relief fort, at least for a while. They are truly like seaweed in the typhoon. At one point, they are conscripted to fight off an overwhelming Union assault; between attacks Arly makes an inspired decision to desert forward rather than to the rear. Finding dead Union soldiers, the two seek out uniforms that fit them so they can switch sides.

Throughout the book, Doctorow’s descriptive powers are in strong form. The movement of the march itself takes in a lot of scenery, such as a fast-burning town where a lone soldier, Stephen Walsh of New York, desperately, resolutely leads a prickly nun and her charges to safety. “The world was remade, everything became something else – the sky a shimmering bronze vault, billows of thick black smoke the clouds.”

Later on, Doctorow presents this vignette of a military evacuation:

And so a slow, sad procession of ambulances was seen winding its way through the streets of Fayetteville behind a military band. The band music was intended to honor the heroic sacrifice of the men in the wagons but, more practically, to mask their cries and moans.

There are also some noteworthy presentations of historical personages. Union cavalry commander Hugh Judson Kilpatrick draws particular notice, a hunchbacked, bewhiskered figure who beds down with freed slaves in full view of his bratty nephew and thus gets caught in a Southern counterattack with his pants down.

Sherman’s own arrival comes during a key turning point in the novel. It’s here where The March begins to feel less inspired. Sherman’s character is presented as thoughtful, with a bent for doing good (he adopts Pearl for a while), but he never gels as a central figure worth our time. The main conceit behind his character here is that the march we are witnessing, which bears his name, exists somewhere outside of his control.

Here’s the thing: Impotence is not a compelling character trait. Sherman ponders the meaning of his situation with little of the iron people familiar with him might expect. Given all we see here regarding the axiom “War is hell,” the man who coined the phrase seems at a loss for words.

Other characters similarly suffer from lack of purpose. One, freedman Coalhouse Walker, represents a callback to one of Doctorow’s most successful novels, Ragtime. Here we meet the man who will someday become the father of the like-named character whose resistance to white oppression dominates that book. But Coalhouse Walker Sr. lacks the same kind of spark. He talks about getting his 40 acres and carving out a life far away from white interference, swaps romantic sentiments with a refugee we realize will be his wife, and then disappears from the narrative.

Wrede Sartorius is another callback, this time from Doctorow’s less successful novel The Waterworks. He’s a villain in that novel but more nuanced here, limited by his firm scientific viewpoint but able to appreciate the humanity of others, most particularly Abraham Lincoln, who gets him assigned to look after his wife, the neurasthenic First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln:

In retrospect, Mr. Lincoln’s humility, which Wrede had descried as weakness, now seemed to have been like a favor to his guests, that they would not see the darkling plain where he dwelled.

This is the sort of simplistic, Ken-Burns-style piety to the conventional legend that The March falls prey to way too often. It infects even the more original characters Doctorow presents. Pearl, for example, transitions from a conflicted child with noblish airs, a kind of Faulkner figure of racial confusion, into a fetching, worldly young woman who takes up with Private Walsh as an example for a wounded nation seeking some kind of peaceful co-existence between black and white.

The worst letdown was the Will-and-Arly-subplot. Doctorow’s humorous bent dissolves as we see Arly settle upon a mission of vengeance that ruins him as a figure of bemused sympathy without adding anything to the story. I gather Doctorow was going for suspense here, but as we already know what the outcome of this is going to be, the point of it is lost.

Pointlessness was a recurring problem for me with this novel, especially as characters kept coming and going without ever cohering into a comprehensive story. The march itself peters out after a while. The novel does, too, after presenting blacks and whites alike as victims whose best chance for survival requires them finding common cause, and a measure of cooperation.

It’s not a bad message to go out on, but it lacks for anything in the way of revelatory power. After putting down The March, I was left with the thought that if Doctorow wanted to employ the Civil War as a setting for his fiction, he did so in a way that worked only sporadically at anything original, and left me feeling he didn’t really have a firm idea going in of what it was he needed to say.