The Historical Novel Walter D. Edmonds

WALTER EDMONDS has an advantage over most writers of historical novels in having been born and reared, so to speak, in the history he writes about. Research among documents he has used to supplement observation and hearsay; but the Erie Canal, though fallen from grandeur, was right at his front door, and old canallers still lived to tell him about the past.

When Rome Haul was published in 1929 we all felt that here was something quite fresh, a new locality for fiction and a peculiar people as American as maple sugar and as full of provincial character as a woodchuck. The fact is, nevertheless, that new material never made a good novelist. What was true was that Mr. Edmonds brought to the handling of new material certain talents that always strike us as new wherever and however they may express themselves.

The novel is a saga of life in northern New York in the 1850’s, and the characters and scenes are many and diverse; but the canal, as an imposing symbol of the conquest of man over nature and of man as pioneer, gives a certain unity to the tale as it did to the immensely various and shifting population of the country it ran through. There is little plot, though there is some suspense. In the reader’s mind are always the questions whether the hero will leave the canal for the farm, whether Gentleman Joe the outlaw will ever be caught, and whether Dan will ever fight — and beat — Jotham Klore. But most of the time the canalboat, the Sarsey Sal, moves slowly to and fro between Albany and Rochester, with her amusing crew, passengers, and neighbors. The narrative is as lazy as their lives were as a rule, and as exciting as their lives were now and then.

Narrative of this sort is about the oldest kind there is, and yet certainly one of the best: a rhythm of moderate adventure punctuated by crises of excitement, crystallized episodes, which are really complete short stories in themselves. In this book, for example, the grand comedy of the Reverend Fortune Friendly’s enforced sermon in the haymow and the intense incident of the blizzard can be separated from the context and read for their own sakes. They are so good, in fact, as to suggest that the author is really most at ease in the concentrated narrative of the short story — an impression which is reënforced by his later work. At any rate this first novel follows a method which he has found congenial ever since. It is that of the old picaresque romance, with its heterogeneous incidents and interpolated short tales; and I doubt if a better for historical fiction has ever been discovered.

Rome Haul was written fast and smoothly and with joy, out of enthusiasm and a full mind, and it began with no serious intention. It was the remark of a beggar, who said of the canal, ‘It’s the bowels of the nation, it’s the whole shebang of life,’ which turned the author’s thoughts to wider and deeper meanings. ‘Heretofore,’ he says, ‘I had thought of the canal as a quaint and picturesque place, made up of scenes and stories. . . . All at once it became a good deal more. ... I began to see the book as a serious panorama of a real phase of life and the people who lived it.’

Fortunately this new seriousness did not make him solemn. It is, in fact, a strong sense of the dramatic that has helped Edmonds to avoid successfully some of the common faults of historical fiction in general.

Young writers often mistakenly suppose that historical fiction is somehow easier to write than the fiction of contemporary life. There really is no fundamental difference, however, between the two, for historical fiction is not a type but a manner. Whatever makes a novel good makes a historical novel good; and that is mainly a story that moves and characters that live. Research and documentation may end by being only so much excess baggage, if the author is not a storyteller first: a reflection which suggests why, for so many historical novels, the reading is like plodding kneedeep in snow.

This the great historical romancers have known instinctively. And they have known another thing which the modern realist does not always remember. They knew that although in the past people were very much the same as at present, every age has had its special spiritual atmosphere, which is the sum total of its attitudes towards the unknown, supernatural, divine, as well as towards nature and mankind in general; and that unless a historical novel somehow conveys this it is not really a historical novel at all.

Mr. Edmonds, without theatrical costuming, archaic diction, and elaborate description, has certainly caught not only the surface but the atmosphere of times past. Whether he has ever fully caught their deeper spirit is doubtful. In Erie Water (1933), he showed symptoms of having contracted the rash of documentation and one was afraid it might prove his undoing. He has recently said that ‘the book is so historically accurate that it is a wonder anyone ever read it as a novel.’ But this is too modest, for nearly every reviewer remarked on its fidelity to its period. It is a book of great charm, less exciting than Rome Haul and less highly colored, but its central theme of a young man’s buying a redemptioner girl is very appealing.

The volume of short stories, Mostly Canallers (1934), was written during a period of several years. Many deal with the same types and even with the same people as the novels, and several are very good. Two or three are, however, of a quite different sort. I must mention ‘Bewitched,’ the only story of a cow I remember ever to have read, and a strangely haunting story it is; and ‘The Death of Red Peril,’ about a racing caterpillar, a bit of rugged humor that deserves to be mentioned with the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

I have deferred consideration of The Big Barn (1930) because it is not of the same genre as the other books. It is both an extended character study and a carefully integrated novel. There is no doubt that its reception suffered because of the popularity of Rome Haul, and on rereading it I have been impressed by its many excellences. Old Ralph Wilder, a provincial titan of the Erie country, is the author’s most ambitious portrait. It is a powerful creation, but the other characters make no strong impact upon the mind. On the whole the novel gives the impression that Edmonds is working in an uncongenial medium. His imagination takes fire only in the crises of the action. The fact was that, for the first time, he was essaying the psychological portrayal of complex characters, and his strength lay in dealing with those who are simple and direct.

Perhaps these remarks indicate why the public seized upon Drums Along the Mohawk (1936) and took it immediately to its heart. Here was a more powerful narrative than he had essayed before; it told an important story superbly, despite occasional lapses; it handled its burden of documentary material lightly; and it conveyed the atmosphere of a period with success. The loose structure of the saga set the author free to exercise his special abilities, giving him liberty to multiply characters and incidents without violating the unity a plot would have demanded. There was also a seriousness of intention, which, while it may not make the novel better, certainly does not detract from its dignity. ‘To those who may feel,’ he says, ‘that here is a great to-do about a bygone life, I have one last word to say. It does not seem to me a bygone life at all. The parallel is too close to our own.’ It is a faculty for living in the past as if it were today that gives to his fiction its air of vitality.

If the novel just mentioned has the quality of epic, Chad Hanna¹ is almost pure comedy. It has hardly any purpose except to be entertaining, but this purpose it achieves delightfully. Most of the excitement and merriment are provided by a year or so in the history of Huguenine’s Great and Only International Circus, a forlorn little outfit trying desperately to sustain its own delusion of grandeur. There is also something about a runaway slave, a good deal about horses, and not a little about the canal. It is written with gusto and its best scenes and characters deepen the impression that Edmonds is one of the true humorists of our time. I might point, for evidence, to the narrative of the last hours of Oscar, the lion who, like the Cid Campeador, went on doing his duty after he was dead, and the portrait of Mrs. Huguenine, the Fat Lady. This is lusty, gusty fun and yet, like most true humor, has its shadows of pathos. I really know of no one since Mark Twain who could have created the Elias Proops and the sick Oscar of this book, the Samson Weaver and Mrs. Gurgct of Rome Haul, or Red Peril the caterpillar.

There is no reason to suppose that Edmonds’s best book is not still to be written. I can’t be critically solemn about those he has written. I would much rather thank him for many hours of rare enjoyment. However, if one must try to sum up his qualities, one may say that his work has some evident limitations. For instance, his outlook is almost exclusively masculine; his best portraits of women are those of women who might as well have been men, and he shows little delicacy of insight regarding the other sex. Against this objection, if it is one, we may set the fact that he has great delicacy of perception regarding natural beauty, animals of all sorts, and children. He has not yet exhibited the highest type of constructive imagination, and his invention is in general shortbreathed. But on the other hand few writers can excel him in straight storytelling or in the brilliancy with which he can flash a scene. His historical perspective has seldom achieved grandeur and his portrayal of the past lacks both latitude and altitude. He has, however, chosen to cultivate a restricted field intensively and he may have no ambition to extend it.

In addition to the talents I have mentioned I should name an infallible eye for significant minutiæ of nature and human nature, an instinct for the telling phrase, and the mastery of a style, springy, sinewy, and firm. The ability to tell a good story in good English is always rare at any time, and to say that he has this might be accounted sufficient praise. His talents are, in fact, so many that one hopes he will be ambitious and will continue to experiment. Chad Hanna is all very well as a breathing space, but not at all as a stopping place.