On Richard Adams’s Traveller

Wednesday was the 160th anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Yesterday was the anniversary of Lee’s General Order No. 9, his farewell to his army. To commemorate these events, one of the Civil War history Instagram accounts that I follow shared Soldier’s Tribute, a painting of Lee’s farewell to his troops by the incomparable Don Troiani. 

The painting shows Lee, mounted, surrounded by his exhausted men who reach out to him, as they so often did, for succor. Lee turns to his right to shake the hands of his soldiers; in his left he loosely holds Traveller’s reins. If Lee is still, already statuesque, Traveller, his head pulled slightly back, shows subtle movement, either slowly edging through the gathering crowd or coming finally to rest in the face of it. If Lee is calm and resigned, Traveller’s eyes show, if not anxiety, puzzlement.

Seeing Traveller in that painting, especially with the subtle motion and emotion with which Troiani always packs his work, brought Richard Adams’s novel Traveller to mind again. It’s an unusual book, even for the author of Watership Down, and in it Adams does something remarkable.

The novel is narrated by Traveller, in the first person, in thick phonetically-rendered dialect. It can be hard to understand at first, and the danger of such narration is that it will come across as silly. But you get used to it, and the “accent” of Traveller’s speech is never used to mock him. Traveller has a distinctive voice, and Adams, an Englishman, captures the tone and style of Southern yarn-spinning with remarkable accuracy.

That’s one area in which such a book could have misstopped but didn’t. There’s also a running gag of sorts in that Traveller, a simple animal unquestioningly loyal to his master, always interprets every event in the most optimistic way possible. At first it’s ha-ha funny and we chuckle in amused sympathy, but gradually, as the novel nears its end, this use of irony creates a profound sense of pathos. Traveller ends the novel thinking he and Lee won, that Lee is leaving Appomattox not downcast and defeated but relieved at having forced “the blue men” into submission, and instead of a punchline it’s powerfully moving.

I don't know of any other novel quite like it. Dramatic irony is so often used for reasons other than pity.

It also achieves its most powerful effects if you know the Civil War and the Eastern Theatre and its colorful cast of characters—well-known generals like Jackson, Longstreet, Hill (AP and DH), and Stuart as well as more obscure figures like Prussian cavalryman Heros von Borcke—and even their horses well. Jackson’s horse Little Sorrel, in particular, a pensive horse full of dark forebodings, is an especially powerful presence. I have to wonder what someone ignorant of all that would make of it. The animal characters are so well-drawn and memorable and their skewed understandings of the human world so well conveyed that I imagine even someone with only passing knowledge of the Civil War would get it, but I can’t be sure.

Regardless, Traveller is criminally underappreciated. Its concept sounds like a cute gimmick and I’m sure a lot of people have written it off as kitsch or a mere curiosity as a result. But as I’ve written here before, it’s artfully done, a marvelous, inventive angle on a familiar story. And the goal of retelling a familiar story, as I often tell me students when approaching a subject they might actually already know about, should be to make it strange again. Check it out.

You can view Soldier’s Tribute with some extensive explanatory notes at Don Troiani’s Facebook page here. The dust jacket art of my first-edition hardback of Traveller is Summer, one of four memorial murals by Charles Hoffbauer at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond. And if you’re ever in Lexington, VA, visit Traveller’s grave right outside the crypt of Lee Chapel, where his master is entombed.

Wiley Junction

Near the house where I grew up stood a long, low, thin strip of stores we collectively called “Wiley Junction.” This included a Gulf station—later BP—the old one-room Wiley Post Office, and one shop where you could buy NASCAR trading cards, rent a movie, or lie in a tanning bed. But the store attached to the gas station was always Wiley Junction’s main draw.

The “junction” proper was the awkward joining of Old Highway 441, a two-lane road built to parallel the long-defunct Tallulah Falls Railroad, and New 441, a two-lane highway built in the 1970s with a more aggressive approach to the terrain—cutting through hills and banks and leveling off hollows to drive straighter through our county. In Wiley (unincorporated) Old and New 441 curved toward each other, like dancers bumping rears, and offered a natural location for a connector road. We drove through Wiley Junction literally every day. And most days we stopped at Wiley Junction—the store.

The Wiley Junction store was typical of the now-endangered local country stores throughout the South. Long and narrow, one entered through a glass door in the middle with the cash register at your right elbow, visible through the bunker-like gap between the lottery ticket stands on the counter and the overhanging racks of cigarettes. There was no bulletproof glass but there was a “need a penny, take one” dish. I wondered why I couldn’t take one every time—an informal education in courtesy.

To the left were three narrow aisles of goods: Slim Jims, pork rinds, chocolate bars, Big League Chew, and Lance crackers foremost, with bait, tackle, Styrofoam coolers, and basic hardware necessities hooked to a pegboard wall in back. The aisles led to the coolers, which had a smaller selection than today’s mega gas station chains but were always amply stocked. I bought many, many Cokes and Mello Yellos there, especially during those mid-90s summers when you could win prizes directly from the bottlecap. I never got that Coca-Cola Mustang but it was a great day when I won a second, free 20 oz bottle.

That was one half of Wiley Junction. Turning from the coolers and walking back to the register, you entered a bottleneck between the checkout counter and the short-order kitchen—which is the part of Wiley Junction I miss most.

You can identify this kind of country store not just by its thin, low-slung appearance, but by the smell. Wiley Junction had that smell. Clean, but not sterile. Lived-in. A faint hint of the concrete floor under the brown tile. A suggestion, somehow apparent to your nose, that the place was built by hand. But the kitchen added to that scent and elevated it. Wiley Junction smelled always, richly and warmly, of its signature offering: biscuits.

Even a short trip into the store to pick up one item left you smelling like biscuits the rest of the day. That happened to my sister one morning when she went into the store for perhaps two minutes, and I tormented her for years by calling her “Biscuit.” The thing is, the smell was wonderful. It was a greasy smell, sure, but with a sharp sweetness to it that I struggle to describe. The smell had texture—smooth and floury and warm.

Wiley Junction’s breakfast kept the place hopping in the mornings. Local tradesmen, construction workers, highway crews, state troopers with the odd local businessman thrown in during the week; local families, fishermen, hunters, and vacationers who had gotten wise to a good thing on the weekends. Sometimes it was hard to find parking.

From the narrow space between the kitchen and the cash register one could pass into an open dining area that somehow felt larger than the rest of that skinny building. There were particle board booths with one-piece benches contoured to the country rump and a bay window opening toward New 441. It was good to eat there. You would almost certainly see someone you knew. Often, for me, that was my granddad.

I’ve written about him a lot here. He was a plumber-electrician and frequently picked up biscuits at Wiley Junction on his way to construction sites all over Rabun County. On special occasions, when we had a church car wash or when the whole extended family was setting forth on a fishing trip to Tugalo, he’d pick up a big white sack of biscuits for everyone. But on weekdays, running into him during the few minutes when he’d be sitting in one those booths, eating his biscuit, was a treat—no matter that we saw him almost every day anyway. Something about Wiley Junction and the biscuits made it special.

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of his death, aged just 65, in 1998. A few years later the Georgia DOT bought up Wiley Junction and bulldozed it to widen the New Highway. It’s a four-lane now with a grass median and is safer for the traffic it has to handle between Atlanta and Western North Carolina, little of which stops in Wiley any more. But when I visit home I can’t pass that weedy, angular patch of land without thinking about what was lost.

My granddad has now enjoyed just over a quarter century of the life everlasting, and so I can hope to see him again. Wiley Junction, a happy blip in a fallen world, is not coming back in any form. But if seeing my granddad again proves to be anything like it was to see him in real life, that first moment of recognition and reunion will bear with it, before it fades away forever in light of unimaginably better things, the lingering scent of breakfast in a country store.

Mendenhall on Weaver’s South

Western North Carolina native Richard M Weaver (1910-63)

Final exams are graded, final grades are posted, and graduation is tomorrow. After a mad semester—the last few weeks especially, since just before Thanksgiving—I feel like I’m coming up for air. As I tread water and take a few deep breaths, let me recommend a good essay that points toward a body of good essays.

Last weekend Allen Mendenhall, a professor at Troy University, published a piece at Law & Liberty on Richard Weaver and his vision of the South. Weaver was an Asheville native who spent much of his childhood in Kentucky and studied at the University of Kentucky, Vanderbilt, and LSU and taught at Auburn and Texas A&M before winding up at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death at the age of 53. Weaver brought a peripatetic experience of many different parts of the South, the fruits of deep study of its thought, history, and literature, and a sharp rhetorical and analytical mind—further honed by exile, a feature of many great Southern writers’ lives—to his understanding of the South.

In his essay, Mendenhall unpacks Weaver’s views on the South’s literary character; its modes of religious practice (which Weaver is careful to distinguish from belief); the underpinnings and strengths (and weaknesses) of its social order; the roles of honor, hierarchy, and chivalry; the lives of important Southern figures; and the very nature of civilization itself. The South’s distinctiveness, to Weaver, stems from its distinct socio-religious origins but has been maintained through a posture of defense that is both instinctive and deliberate. Mendenhall:

The South’s literary character, as Weaver understood it, emerged not through imitation but resistance—a cultural flowering born of siege. The region discovered its voice not by absorbing Northern influences but by defining itself against them.

Poe would agree.

The result, in several areas, was the organic emergence, whenever a seeming social, political, philosophical, religious, or economic binary imposed a choice, of a practical, non-ideological tertium quid in the South. To give just one example: rather than capitalism or socialism—the one “fixated on utopian ideas of progress . . . industrial disruption and endless innovation” and the other marked by the “hubris of central planning and . . . an impossible (and ultimately destructive) egalitarian ideal”—from the South rose agrarianism: rooted, constrained, in continuity with received wisdom.

“Weaver’s essays,” Mendenhall notes in conclusion,

thus present the South as a repository of valuable political and cultural wisdom, offering a critique of centralization and mass democracy that remains relevant. His work suggests that the South’s traditional skepticism toward consolidated power and its emphasis on local autonomy might be a valuable counterweight to modern tendencies toward centralization and standardization. The present erosion of Southern identity might surprise Weaver, as Southerners are less vocal about the homogenizing pressures that jeopardize regional traditions and local character.

With that “erosion,” something I’ve watched in my own lifetime but that has been going on for more than a century, comes “a decline in standards and priorities,” one that

is particularly poignant because it represents the final curtain for an entire way of life and being, one in which honor, grace, gentlemanliness, reputation, knowledge, and refinement were harmonized in pursuit of something greater than oneself.

Mendenhall begins and ends the essay by wondering where our present-day Richard Weavers are—not to mention “our T. S. Eliot, our Flannery O’Connor, our Walker Percy, our Tom Wolfe, or an American Evelyn Waugh, even a Houellebecq?” A good question, especially for any Southerner who wants the South to be more than the shallow and easily commercialized “‘redneck’ signifiers” that Mendenhall points out.

The essay links to the 1987 anthology The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver. The book includes fourteen essays written between 1943 and Weaver’s untimely death in 1963. It’s outstanding. Since this essay went up last Friday I’ve been rereading a few of the pieces collected there in whatever snatches of free time I can. A few favorites:

• “The Older Religiousness in the South,” an incisive look at Christianity in the South and how it fundamentally differs from the rationalistic, socially utilitarian evolution of Puritanism in the north. If you’ve wondered what Flannery O’Connor meant in calling the South not Christian but “Christ-haunted,” this should go some distance toward providing an answer.

• “The South and the Revolution of Nihilism,” in which Weaver asks why, despite the South’s obsessively documented problems with race, Southerners vehemently opposed the movements of Mussolini and Hitler.

• “Lee the Philosopher,” perhaps my favorite of all Weaver’s essays, concerning as it does the character and worldview of my lifelong hero. I’ve blogged about it here before.

• Relatedly, “Southern Chivalry and Total War,” about the mismatch between the honorbound South and coldbloodedly pragmatic Union but written as a reflection on World War II in 1944. Weaver: “[C]ivilization is in essence a struggle for self-control.” And later: “Those who throw aside the traditions of civilized self-restraint are travelling a road at the end of which lies nihilism. . . . For the consequence of putting war upon a total basis, or of accepting it upon that basis in retaliation, is the divorce of war from ethical significance.”

Though I highly recommend this essay collection, I’m afraid it’s out of print. I recommend picking it up wherever you can find it. I have a battered old copy saved from the closing of a seminary library.

In addition to writing about Weaver’s examination of Lee as philosopher of warfare, I’ve written here about Weaver’s view of the toughness required to be heroic and his thoughts on what Chesterton called “the inside of history.” Weaver also provided one of the epigraphs for Griswoldville, a quotation I used again here in relation to another defeated army worth remembering.

After all, defeat is not judgment, and it can prove a powerful teacher. As Mendenhall puts it in his essay, the South’s “experience with tragedy” resulted in a “metaphysical instinct” contrary to the materialistic, success-oriented worldview of the rest of the country. This instinct is reflected in the South’s letters:

Southern literature refuses to flinch from tragedy. In an age prone to deny life’s darker aspects, these writers insisted on confronting them. Their vision, derived from “observation, history, traditional beliefs older than any ‘ism,’” offers what Weaver considers a fortification against dehumanizing ideologies.

And if there’s anything we need more than a new Richard Weaver, it’s that fortification.

Robert E Lee, 150 years later

A visibly exhausted Robert E Lee poses for Matthew Brady with one of his sons and a member of his staff just after the end of the Civil War

This has been a big week for my historical passions. Yesterday was the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and Monday was the sesquicentennial of the death of Robert E Lee, who died October 12, 1870 in his home on the campus of Washington College in Lexington, in the mountains of his native Virginia. He was 63.

I originally had a much longer post on the topic prepared for Monday, the anniversary proper, but it proved much, much too long and self-indulgent. So, with apologies to the General for my tardiness, let me recommend the handful of items I had originally intended to share and let them speak for themselves.

Three good essays and a bonus

This month historian Allen Guelzo, author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President among many other books, published “The Mystery of Robert E Lee” in National Review. Guelzo’s article attempts to get at the real man beneath the oceans of criticism and vitriol directed toward the strawman version of Lee that was the object of one of this year’s Two Minutes Hates. I don’t agree with all of Guelzo’s conclusions, but it’s a more measured and scholarly primer on some key aspects of Lee’s life, personality, and historical context than has become the norm.

To travel backward in time a bit—to July, as the fury of the early summer’s iconoclasm peaked—Helen Andrews published a really gutsy and thought-provoking piece in The American Conservative entitled “A Lesson from Robert E Lee.” This essay includes a strikingly drawn comparison of the characters of Lee and one of his contemporaries, a creature of pure politics and pragmatism, and goes on to suggest that the accusations flung at Lee say more about we moderns than him. It’s excellent.

As a bonus, you can read the text of the exchange Dwight Eisenhower had regarding the portrait of Lee he kept in the Oval Office—an exchange which Andrews quotes above—here. You can also watch a fun short clip of Ike talking about Lee at a 1957 Washington press conference here.

(And what’s this? A president deeply informed by history, with respect for tradition and the virtues that founded the Republic, and able to communicate civilly and coherently with those who question him? A vision of a lost world.)

For the last of the three essays I want to recommend, let me leap even further back in time to an old favorite, a classic essay I have briefly written about it here before—Richard Weaver’s 1948 essay “Lee the Philosopher.” Weaver takes Lee’s handful of almost gnomic dicta from during the war and mines them for what they can reveal about Lee’s worldview. An apropos sample:

I would not represent Lee as a prophet, but as a man who stood close enough to the eternal verities to utter prophecy sometimes when he spoke. He was brought up in the old school, which places responsibility upon the individual, and not upon some abstract social agency. Sentimental humanitarianism manifestly does not speak to language of duty, but of indulgence. The notion that obligations are tyrannies, and that wants, not deserts, should be the measure of what one gets has by now shown its destructive power. We have tended to ignore the inexorable truth that rights must be earned. Fully interpreted, Lee’s “duty” is the means whereby freedom preserves itself by acknowledging responsibility. Man, then, perfects himself by discipline, and at the heart of discipline lies self-denial. When the young mother brought an infant for Lee to bless, and was told, “teach him he must deny himself,” she was receiving perhaps the deepest insight of his life.

This essay is anthologized in the out-of-print collection The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver but you can read it at the link provided above (caveat lector: that version has a number of typos resulting, it seems, from a scan with faulty text recognition software). You can also find a longish excerpt here.

For a deeper dive

Finally, I want to recommend a slightly different way to learn about Lee if you are interested in a detailed account. There have been a number of good biographies of Lee, among them that of Douglas Southall Freeman (often dismissed as hagiography now but a monumental four-volume feat of scholarship and more measured than Freeman gets credit for), a more recent one by Emory Thomas, and an interesting study of Lee’s life in light of his religious views by R David Cox. I’d recommend both of those, but perhaps my favorite is that published a few years ago by historian William C Davis. Davis is a prolific author of history and biography and a careful and thorough scholar, and his dual biography Crucible of Command pairs Lee with the man who became his opposite number in the final year of the war, Ulysses S Grant.

For some reason we have had a glut of worshipful Grant biographies in the last few years, but this dual biography excels them all. By presenting these two strikingly different men together, Davis compellingly contrasts their virtues, their flaws, and the careers that led them to opposite sides of the bloodiest war in American history. Well-researched and written and scrupulously evenhanded, allowing the reader to get to know both men on their own terms, Crucible of Command is the kind of measured, thoughtful, and thorough account we need more of today.