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Whitman.
The Valley of Shadows
is his retrospective account of
what it was like in the Mid-West during the ominous fifties. Mr.
Wilson says that
Uncle Tom
and
The Valley of Shadows
contain
"certain striking features in common" and that they had both been
"forced into being" by the passionate fifties, one during and one
after. Moreover, this same hermetic aspect worked on human ma–
terials as well, forcing them upward, notably Grant, who, by this book,
is
permanently rehabilitated as an admirable man and a superior
writer, if a completely inadequate President.
One of the best chapters in the book is about Grant as a man, as
a general, and as a writer. It all winds up to a magnificent conclusion
which is both finely written and an eminently fitting conclusion for
the story of Grant. It follows a description of Grant meeting Bismarck.
For the boy from the two-room cabin, who had not wanted to go
to West Point and who had hoped that it would be abolished in order
that he might not have to finish there, who had had, he said, "a horror"
of the Mexican War in which he had been forced to serve, believing
it to be "most unjust," who had taken to drink and, discharged from
the army, had gone to clerking in his brothers' leather store, who
could not bear the sight of blood nor even face a steak not well
done, and who said he much preferred farming to fighting-this man
had found himself, in his forties, the most conspicuous figure in what
had been up to that time the most destructive war in history and
afterward at the head of the formidable state which this war had
consolidated; the equal, the sympathetic colleague, of the master of
that other great new state which had consolidated the German
principalities.
A product of this rise was Grant's
Memoirs,
which as Mark Twain
first said and, as Mr. Wilson agrees, should stand with the classic war
memoirs in Western culture.
In fact it is "literature" of this order, Grant's
Memoirs,
Mrs. Chest–
nut's diaries, Mosby's recollections, that, as presented by Mr. Wilson
anyway, are the most powerful documents to come out of the conflict.
If
we think of poetry as the most compressed and the most
"literary" of verbal expressions, this is where the literature of the Civil
War period is the most impoverished, some of Whitman excepted. The
weakest chapter in this book is that concerned with the poetry of the
War. First, Mr. Wilson is not at his best anyway in dealing with
verse, in fact, at times seems to lose interest; second, the poetry itself
that came directly out of the War, as Mr. Wilson says, makes "barren
reading;" but, third, he does try manfully, and unsuccessfully, to
make of Sidney Lanier a poet to be given serious consideration; and
