"Quantrill sometimes spares. Anderson never."
James Carlos Blake (left) writes very well. There is
a ‘literary’ tone to his prose, and while he is not Cormac McCarthy, he can
perhaps be compared to, say, Charles Frazier, with a dash of Larry McMurtry
thrown in. The trouble with his books is not the writing. It’s that his central
characters are so loathsome. The Friends of Pancho Villa is a fine book (click the link for a review) but it tells
the life of the perfectly detestable Rodolfo Fierro, Villa’s private
executioner. Blake also wrote The
Pistoleer, a fictional life of the also repulsive John Wesley Hardin. If the
author’s aim is to get the reader to identify with these characters, understand
them or even sympathize with them, he makes an odd choice of dramatis personae.
Wildwood Boys (Harper Collins, 2000;
paperback Perennial, 2001) is the story of William T Anderson, Bloody Bill, the Confederate
guerrilla leader and bandit, who was certainly one of the Civil War's most savage and bitter combatants and may even have
suffered from delusional paranoia, which exacerbated an already sadistic
personality. At any rate, a nice man he was not.
As often with paperback
editions, quotations from enthusiastic reviews of the hardback pepper the
opening pages. “A superb and engrossing novel,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel calls it. “A captivating … fascinating
read,” trumpets the San Diego Union
Tribune. It has, according to the Tampa
Tribune, “more than its share of lyric beauty” (I wasn’t aware that lyric
beauty was shared out, but anyway). They may be right, these reviewers, but my
reaction is always skeptical. I’ll be the judge of that, I say.
Still, once engrossed in
the pages (and the book is engrossing) you have to admit that it is pretty
lyrical. Does he even overdo it? Take this passage:
The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing
nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit
western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a
time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled
of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their
clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing
time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter
afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split
open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy
falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a
high ivory moon.
Perhaps I am being
unkind, or expecting overmuch, but it just seems to me that the writer is
trying a bit too hard. I am reminded of Dr. Johnson’s dictum, “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet
with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
Yet there’s no denying
that much of the description is poetic and occasionally brilliantly phrased.
The narrative is linear,
with no flashbacks or trendy flitting about between the (then) past and future.
Blake does, however, occasionally slip into present tenses for a passage and
then revert to the past simple. It works, stylistically. We get the story of
William T Anderson (no one knows what the T stood for; possibly Thomas because
there were Thomases in his family) from his birth to his death. This straightforward approach is
actually quite refreshing now and then.
We read about him growing
up in Kansas (where his family removed from Missouri, Blake suggests because
Anderson père had got too fond of
horse rustling). We are told that the boy had a gift of communicating with
dogs. He understood them and ‘spoke dog’, as it were. OK. We are also given an
account of an incestuous relationship he developed with his sister Josephine, who
throughout the novel is the love of his life, even after her death in the 1863 collapse
of the house in which she was imprisoned (it is this which turns Anderson
implacably towards revenge). It doesn’t make very pretty reading, but then nor
does 99% of Anderson’s curriculum vitae. I don’t know what evidence, if any,
there is for either of these things, the canine communication or the sister-love, but that’s the privilege of a novelist
writing a life, I guess. You don’t need evidence.
Photographed in the guerrilla shirt and classic long hair
When his hero does join
the Confederate guerrillas, Blake does not shy away from the atrocities and war
crimes, though he does emphasize those of the Union militias in such a way as
to if not justify, then at least partially explain the brutal actions of
Anderson and his confrères. He has a point: bushwhackers or jayhawkers, it was
often hard to tell the difference, for both were as close to bandits as you
get, both were ruthless and brutal, and both committed massacres. The looting and
burning of Osceola in 1861 by Jim Lane’s men was remarkably similar to
Quantrill’s attack on Lawrence in 1863, though Quantrill’s assault was
considerably worse in terms of number of lives lost.
The local Missouri and Kansas population had
to engage in a deadly guessing game when blue-uniformed men arrived on their
farms and demanded to know their loyalties, for it was the habit of the Confederates
to dress in captured Union uniforms. The wrong answer could leave the farmer
hanging from a tree and his buildings in flames. To the sufferers, it often
made little difference which side their tormentors were on; the result was the
same.
Taken in Sherman, TX for his wedding
Blake does not mention
some of Anderson’s worst crimes. For example, it is generally accepted that after Confederate forces under General Joe
Shelby conquered Glasgow, Anderson traveled to the city to loot. He visited the
house of a well-known Union sympathizer, the wealthiest resident of the town,
brutally beat him, and raped his 12- or 13-year-old black servant. Anderson
indicated that he was particularly angry that the man had freed his slaves, and
trampled him with a specially trained horse. The man later died of his injuries.
Anderson killed several other Union loyalists and some of his men returned to
the wealthy resident's house to rape more of his female servants. This would be
hard to have your book’s hero do if you want to retain a modicum of sympathy
for him.
The most famous photograph. The infamous Bloody Bill.
Famous guerrillas who
rode with Quantrill and Anderson enter the pages of the book but fairly peripherally, and
they are not central characters. Cole Younger, for example, is first mentioned
on page 119 of my edition, appearing as “a beefy red-haired man”,
quite jovial but with a strong streak of ruthlessness, and he reappears from time
to time in the narrative, but only incidentally. Arch Clement is portrayed as
particularly vicious. Similarly, Frank James is introduced on p 190 and pops up
occasionally thereafter but he does not really emerge as a character. His
younger brother Jesse, who was not at Lawrence (though he is often shown there
in Western movies) and only joined the guerrillas in the spring of 1864, gets a
bit more page-space from Blake, after his first appearance as a
seventeen-year-old beardless youth on page 319.
As for Quantrill (and that
spelling is used) he comes across as educated - given to using Latin tags and quoting “Sir
Bacon”, presumably Francis of that ilk– and he is credited with insisting that
no woman be harmed at Lawrence, so he is something of a Southern gentleman. It
is true that Quantrill had been a schoolteacher for a time, also taking up a job in the lumberyards, unloading timber
from rail cars, in order to support his family, in debt after the death from TB
of Quantrill père. But he was hardly
a gentleman in the then understanding of that word.
Quantrill looks young, bemused.
In the book
Anderson and Quantrill get on well at first but gradually become estranged,
especially when Quantrill objects to Anderson’s marrying Bush Smith (who looks,
according to Blake, extraordinarily like his sister Josephine). This was
perhaps dramatically useful. It is, though, possible that in reality Anderson
always harbored a resentment of Quantrill, who claimed to have encountered a
band of renegades in July 1863 and rebuked them for robbing Confederate sympathizers.
These bandits were led by a certain Bill Reed but William Anderson and his brother
Jim were prominent members of the gang.
While wintering near Sherman,
Texas, 1863/64, Anderson and Quantrill appear to have fallen out seriously when
Quantrill expelled one of Anderson’s men for stealing, and then Quantrill’s men
killed the thief when he attempted to return. Anderson then rode to Sherman and told General Cooper that Quantrill was
responsible for the death of a Confederate officer; the general had Quantrill
arrested and taken into custody but he soon escaped. Anderson was told to
recapture him and gave chase, but he was unable to locate his former commander
and stopped at a creek. There, his men briefly engaged a group of guerrillas
loyal to Quantrill, but no one was injured in the confrontation. None of this
appears in the book, though.
Novels are not supposed
to be true biographies, though you do sense that Blake has read deeply in his
subject. This is a romance, and romances should be taken for what they are and
not criticized for not being something else. I found this book to be extremely
readable, and you will, probably, too.
Photographed dead
And a Happy Christmas to all our readers! Here's looking forward to a Western 2020.
