646
PARTISAN REVIEW
Inman miraculously survives, is helped by a passing black man, and moves
on toward the Blue Ridge, starving, afraid of houses and people until he
gets help again from a fenule hermit, an elderly, philosophical goat herder,
artist, and root doctor who asks, "Was it worth it, all that fighting for the
big man's nigger?" Inman is also helped by a young widow whose man
died on a battlefield in Virginia, and when Federal rifleman come rushing
in and grab her one hog and her chickens, he stalks and kills them, saying,
"If you'd stayed home this would not have come to pass."
It
is still in the violence-polluted wilderness country where men kill
one another in the midst of nature's purity and beauty that Inman meets
up again with Ada at last. She and Ruby have left her farm to dig a grave
for Stobrod when they hear he has been murdered by Teague. In fact, he
has only been wounded, and the women are nursing him in a hut in the
woods when Inman arrives and the lovers have a brief idyll--soon
destroyed by the same murderous gang. As in
A Farewell to Arms,
the lovers
are parted finally, by death, though it is the woman, not the man, who sur–
vives. Unlike Hemingway, however, Frazier gives an upturn to his ending.
Mter all, Inman's unborn child will survive as Henry's did not. In a final
scene at the farm, a reformed Stobrod and the two women and a little girl
are found surviving with some degree of happiness in the year 1874.
Cold Mountain
has had the unique good luck of being both a popular and
critical success. Most serious reviewers agree with Alfred Kazin's statement,
in the
New York Review
if
Books,
that it was "an astonishing first novel." Kazin
added, after this declaration,
"-if
that is what it is;' as though suggesting cau–
tion about the book's form, but did not explain his reservation. It is more a
novel than a rewritten history like
Cloudsplitter,
for all the characters in it are
offipring of the author's pure imagination; Longstreet and Lee and "befeath–
ered Stuart" are seen only for a moment, in Inman's memory, as they witness
Fredericksburg from the top of Maryes Heights and Lee makes his famous
remark, "It's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too
much." If a secondary character like the unspeakable Teague seems incredi–
ble when he bursts into the action from time to time, like the devil out of the
opening called "hell's mouth" on the medieval English stage, it can be said
that absolute villainy and a lust for violence are perfectly credible, as the more
atrocious episodes of the past and today's headlines demonstrate. Frazier's
Inman and Ada are given interiority though there is a certain flatness in
Inman; he is ready-made for a Clint Eastwood movie part-brave, intelligent,
taciturn, and unillusioned-the Hemingway hero-undone at the end only
by a spasm of pity for a boy member of the thuggish gang that is after his life.
Ada and Ruby are really more interesting, probably because the romance
cookie-cutter for female personalities is inapplicable to them. But the struc–
ture of the whole, with its intricate weaving of elements, seems both formal
