Bugles Blow No More
by [Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50]
IF Mr. Dowdey had given us a little more of the Virginian domestic background before the War between the States, his novel might be fairly described as a miniature War and Peace. It is all war without any peace at all. The merit of the book is, as I shall show,’adequate, but the upheaval of the war remains at the end a little obscure. We are never shown just what it is that has been overturned: Mrs. Wade, the spoiled ’aristocrat,’ seems to represent the old order, yet in failing to give her more depth, and in limiting her sensibility to fear for the loss of her material possessions, Mr. Dowdey has refused to write a serious work of fiction, and has given us instead a spectacle of Richmond in the grip of war.
A great deal of historical research has gone into the making of the texture of this novel. There is no one, I am convinced, who knows quite as much as Mr. Dowdey knows about the ‘social history’ of Richmond from 1861 to 1865. He has worked out in detail the relation between the public event and the private emotion: the structure of his book is a relentless parallel drawn between the two realms of experience, and I am sure that no other Southern novelist has a better grasp of this difficulty.
But Mr. Dowdey in the long run is swamped by his historical knowledge. The individual scenes are often most effective —the exciting Secession Night, the first gunboat battle at Drewry’s Bluff, the reception of the news of victory at First Manassas in the government offices, the Bread Riot, and, best of all, the burning of Richmond followed by the moral collapse of the surrender. But there is no climax: Mr. Dowdey is dominated by public events and their mere chronology, and the book is largely a series of minor crises that fail to develop. If Mr. Dowdey had concentrated his attention upon one main event as the focus of the domestic action, he might have achieved greater clarity and drama in the domestic plot, which here tends to be frittered away in its public counterpart of war.
The characters, with two exceptions, seem to me never to come to life: Virginius Kirby, the aging lawyer who becomes a war clerk, is Mr. Dowdey’s mouthpiece for critical commentary upon the progress of events, but he is a real character, and his suicide (modeled upon the example of Edmund Ruffin) is intensely dramatic in its implications; likewise, Brose Kirby, his nephew and the ‘hero’ of the novel, comes to life toward the end, and his dazed return to Richmond after the surrender, when he can only remember that he has touched Lee’s stirrup, is so good that one regrets that it is not better.
Mr. Dowdey is not a realist, or, if he is, the realism is Sir Walter Scott’s—a close attention to historical detail. The ’love story’ is the conventional high-born lady and the fascinating commoner who are raised by events greater than themselves to a dignity that, neither knew before. Mr. Dowdey brings to the war no new interpretation. He feels, with a great many Virginians, that it was all a horrid nuisance foisted upon Virginia by incomprehensible persons from South Carolina and Mississippi, whom he dislikes almost as intensely as the Yankees whom he unhesitatingly calls ‘foreigners.’ If a Virginian cannot be a Southerner, it is well for him to be, like Mr. Dowdey, a Virginian.
ALLEN TATE