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Lorna sent back to be punished by her owner, and Lidie arrested for "nig–
ger-stealing." But-not to worry-she is released through the intercession
of the still-infatuated slave-owner who sadly sends her back to Quincy. It
is really enough-as Smiley must have realized. Lidie's "all-true travels and
adventures" are finished. There'll soon be a war, but we don't hear what
Lidie does during it. When it is over, she and her cousin Frank, who served
in the Union Army, agree, however, that "after
K.T.,
nothing, not Bull
Run nor Gettysburg, certainly not the raid at Harpers Ferry that some
thought started it all, not the emancipation nor the burning of Atlanta, not
the killing of the President, nothing ever surprised either of us again ."
One can say that these two recent novels about the last years before the
Civil War are about the tragic intersection of violence and ideology.
Charles Frazier's National Book Award winner is a Civil War novel about
the exhaustion of ideology when violence has so surcharged human expe–
rience that nothing matters but the painful recovery of the ability simply
to feel again.
Cold Mountain
can be compared to
A Farewell to Arms
because
personal love is set against a background of war. The resemblance is really
not very close, the stories are qui te different and the wars that are in part
the subject of the two novels are very different, the Civil War having been
fought for causes-the slavery issue, the contest between the principle of
national union and sectional loyalty-which bitterly divided Americans,
while World War I was without ideological claims.
But Frazier's Inman really is like Hemingway's Frederick Henry in
having decided to "make a separate peace" when he simply leaves the hos–
pital, his battle wounds hardly healed. The war is almost but not quite
over; he may be sent back to the front, but, instead, he sets out for his home
in the Carolina mountains. Whatever political passions had once moved
him, we hear nothing of them from the moment he climbs out the open
window of his ward. A boyhood Cherokee friend has told him of cases,
according to his tribal lore, when "a man's spirit could be torn apart and
cease and yet his body keep on living." He thinks himself a case in point,
"for his spirit, it seemed, had been about burned out of him but he was yet
walking." His object is a village and a Blue Ridge peak called Cold
Mountain. The beautiful, remote mountain, an old Cherokee woman had
told him, was also a sacred place where one might find the entrance to a
country whose dwellers "are not filled with fear" and "do not endlessly
contend with one another." In the town he hopes to find again, after four
years, a woman, Ada, with whom he had been in love, but he is not sure
what self he might bring to her, for he feels himself to be only a "hut of
bones." "He had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned
by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world
from which everything he counted important had been banished or had
