Review
“Lush and lively, taut and tense. . . . The ‘stuff’ of which historical fiction is made. . . . According to historian Shelby Foote, the Civil War produced two authentic geniuses: Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest. . . . Forrest has found his novelist in Madison Smartt Bell. Born and raised in Nashville, Bell knows the sights, smells, sins and syntax of the Civil War South.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Anyone interested in looking at human inter-dependencies and disparities of the times should read the somber but telling pages of Devil’s Dream.”
—Jackson Free Press
“Sparkling with jeweled descriptive moments, this volume absorbs Forrest and those around him into the crossroads of a violent, dangerous moment where history seems to compress, the dead awaken, and conflicts slip into a time zone that defies chronology.”
—Baltimore City Paper
“[In Devil’s Dream] you’ll find one of the most compelling figures of American military history and a damn colorful creation to boot.”
—Miami Sun Post
“Many of Bell’s dreamlike images have the effect of ripples across water from a skipped stone—quick and close in the beginning, they slow, then disappear back into the smooth-as-glass water.”
—Nashville Scene
“From this retrospective view, hardscrabble Forrest emerges as a cog in a larger machine, a creature of a world he didn’t make, though complicit, to be sure, in its moral failures. North and South, ‘they’re in it right up to the neck with the rest of us,’ Forrest insists, speaking of slavery. ‘Make yore own self free,’ he tells his black son. But Madison Smartt Bell knows that such advice makes little sense to anyone wearing leg irons, that slavery didn’t end without unthinkabl...
About the Author
MADISON SMARTT BELL is the author of fourteen previous works of fiction, including Soldier’s Joy and Anything Goes. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up collection bullets on the same fields where many of Forrest's battles were fought. He now lives in Baltimore.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Robert Goolrick "Devil's Dream," Madison Smartt Bell's new novel, is a sort of biopic of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general who was considered by his peers to be brutal, brilliant, profane, savage and virtually unstoppable in his ferocity. He is sometimes referred to as "the Wizard of the Saddle," and, at least in this work, he is one hell of a feisty redneck. He is also pompous, taciturn, burdened with a Tennessee twang that would make Minnie Pearl blush and, in the end, not very interesting. The novel is told in fits and starts, jumping backward and forward in time. In the years before the Civil War, Forrest enjoys some prosperity as a slave trader and some domestic comfort in the company of his highborn, oddly matched wife, Mary Ann Montgomery, whom he met while pulling her carriage out of the mud. The years following the war are filled with one failure after another and, ultimately, destitution. These sudden jumps in time are disconcerting and seemingly without point so that we are left not always knowing exactly where we are. In fact, if you know little about the Civil War, the book is a wilderness, and if you know a lot, you may be astonished at the nitpicking quality of Bell's scholarship, amazed at his warehouse of trivia, but I doubt you will be much moved or enlightened. As portrayed here, Forrest is relentlessly one-note and irritating. Even hillbilly coarseness loses its frisson after repeated usage. One unnamed character says he is "a man having no pretension to gentility -- a negro trader, a gambler . . . Forrest may be & no doubt is, the best Cav. officer in the West, but I object to a tyrannical, hotheaded vulgarian's commanding me." Note the use of the ampersand. It is an indication of Bell's pretentious 19th-century style, which is a combination of cornpone and ever more complicated forms of swearing. When Forrest isn't talking dirty, he spouts pompous and not very original aphorisms about the nature of conflict: "War ain't got no goddamn rules," he says at one point. And soon after, "They say the world turns itself like a grindstone. Over and over. Don't never stop. Ye may whet yoreself agin it. Or let it grind ye down." I don't think Nathan Bedford Forrest, or anybody else for that matter, ever actually said those words. The novel also has as one of its main characters a dead Haitian named Henri, who moves among the living as one of them, even though he presumably died at the ferocious battle of Chickamauga. His undead voodoo status gives him the ability to know the future. But his prescience serves no real purpose, either to the other characters or to the story. Henri claims to be the son of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture, about whom Bell published a biography in 2007. Henri seems to be free of the redneck twang, speaking both English and French with a simplicity and an eloquence that are denied every other character except Forrest's wife and his son by a black slave, who speaks as though he had attended Choate and Harvard. I just wish that in the heat of battle, about which Bell writes with passion but an absolute lack of variety, I hadn't had to keep running to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up "widdershins," "osnaburg" and "barracoon," words that stop us dead in our tracks and make us feel like we're playing Scrabble with Yosemite Sam. It is also hard to imagine writing about Forrest -- whose relationships with blacks ran from the horribly brutal to the intensely sexual, even loving -- without mentioning his postwar involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, but Bell manages to do it. "Devil's Dream," which takes its name from an old fiddler's jig, is like a 300-page transcript of a loudmouth swearing while he shoots some guy in the face. It purports to be a portrait of a man who once played an important part in the most awful episode that has ever gripped this country. As Bell tells us, by war's end one in every 10 able-bodied Union men was dead, one in every four in the South. Such a towering player in that cataclysmic tragedy as Forrest deserves better. William Tecumseh Sherman said, "War is hell." Madison Smartt Bell's new novel is no fun, either. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
July 1861
He passed the night in a canebrake a little way south of the Ohio River, still in earshot of the river’s sluggish flow. Amid the cane he found a raised flat shelf of limestone, harder than sleeping on the ground would have been, but apt to give him some relief from ticks and chiggers or so he hoped. Before he lay down he splashed a little water on the four directions at the edges of the oblong stone—not too much water, for there was a moon, and he didn’t want to leave the cover of the cane to fill his canteen from the water’s edge.
When he stretched out, the walls of his empty stomach shrunk together, contracting like wet leather as it dried and cracked. Shadows of the slender cane leaves danced over the moonscape of the stone, and the pocks in the surface griped his back and shoulders, or his hip and elbow if he tried to settle on his side, so that he thought he would not sleep, most likely. He heard the crying of a screech owl and watched a bat wing flick across the curved edge of the moon—his eyes as hard and parched as the moon itself—but then the ancestors were sitting round him in a circle, one plucking slowly on a gut spun and strung across a gourd and another clicking time with two hollow bones against each other. The faces of the Old Ones were hidden from him in shadow, but what came toward him was the face of a white man, hard-favored with his dark eyes bored deep, dark caverns carved away under his high cheekbones and just above the bristly black of the beard that hid his mouth. This white man had the air of a slave-catcher, he thought, and he didn’t like the penetration of his look, and yet when the big pale hand spread across his forehead it was a gentle, almost a healing touch.
So he woke up shivering, with no coverlet, only his loose-yoked linsey shirt and nankeen britches. Surprised at his movement, a copperhead poured itself over the edge of the stone and slipped away, rustling the bed of dry cane leaves. The reddish brown braid of it was out of sight before he thought to draw his knife. A bright burst of saliva stung the inside of his mouth. That snake had been big around as his arm . . .
He poured water, pissed off the edge of the rock, took a sip from the canteen, and with the long knife back in the twist of cloth that served him as a belt he stepped down and moved toward the edge of the canebrake, watching closely for the copperhead or his brothers and setting his bare feet down carefully to avoid cane stobs buried in the leaves. He’d had a better kit when he left Louisiana—a pack with a spare shirt and pants and a little money rolled up in it, a hat and socks and a pair of stout shoes. All gone somehow along the way. He’d stowed away on a steamboat headed up the Mississippi River, then made the trip across to Louisville, hanging between two boxcars in the dark. In Louisville things had gone against him and he had come away in a great hurry, following the bends of the river but none too closely—maybe as far as Brandenburg, he thought.
At the edge of the woods he found a cluster of new white mushrooms and ate them raw. There were shoots of poke sallet too, which ought to be boiled to drain their poison. They might have been small and new enough to be safe, but he wouldn’t risk it. Yesterday he had happened into blackberry brambles and found a few, still reddish, underripe and sour on his tongue and afterward in his stomach. He was still considering the poke weed when a plump rustle in the leaves behind him made him turn, and there was a young blue jay, downed from his nest—a windfall the Old Ones must have laid before him. With one movement he’d wrung off its head and was catching the first warm jet of blood in the back of his throat. That alone was enough to strengthen him. He still had flint and steel in his pocket but he was wary of smoke from a cook fire, however small. He carried the bird back to the limestone shelf to pluck it, and then ate it raw, all but the viscera and the feet, chewing the little bones and the skull of it most thoroughly.
Encouraged, he walked westward, till he struck a deer trail which he then began to follow. The trail meandered roughly along the same course as the river, now and then coming in sight of it, through a gap in the trees. There were vast clearings with corn just beginning to tassel, south of his way, in the direction of Brandenburg. In the end he might gain the Mississippi again, but that would be days, on his bare feet. And there were soldiers beginning to move in these parts, both the gray and the blue. When war became general he could make his own way, but this circling suspicion was hard for him to navigate.
He began to know that he was being watched, by nothing human though, he thought. He stopped moving, hand on the grip of his knife, and looked, barely breathing, only his eyeballs moving. A doe, a big one, between the river and the trail. Melting brown eyes turned on him through a cluster of black oak and maple leaves and the pale slender leaves of the cane. When he dropped his hip to free the knife she was up and away, the white tail flashing.
He didn’t run after her. No man can run down a deer. A panther maybe, or a wolf, or two wolves working in concert. He might have brought her down with a pistol but his pistol was lost in Louisville along with his boots. He cut a six-foot length of stout green cane and split one end of it and set the grip of his knife in the notch. With this rough blade-chucker in his right hand he went the way the doe had gone, following sign. She had not run far, and sometimes he could hear her light hooves crunching dry leaves of the ground cover. He heard the silence when she stopped and twice he made out the line of her shoulder and her head turned back, long ears revolving as she looked at him, but he never had a clear throw, with the undergrowth—not until she broke across the open road. Then he lunged forward, using every ounce of his breath and his heartbeat to whittle a few yards off of her lead as he whipped the green cane forward. The knife released as he’d meant for it to and buried its blade behind her left shoulder.
The doe ran on, smoothly at first, but then there came a hitch, one leg stuttering in her gait. When she slowed and turned back to nuzzle the hilt of the knife her forward leg gave way and she fell down.
He caught his breath. Horsemen were coming up the road from the direction of Brandenburg, clop-clop-clop at a steady trot on the corduroy. He had time to disappear in the brush but still they might well ride him down and he would have lost his knife too, and his kill—he would not be driven off his kill as easily as that. Huffing and covering his heart with his palm, he walked to the fallen doe and crouched, looking in her liquid eyes as the light went out of them. He drew the knife free and when the blood came he thanked her for letting her life pour into his. He pulled her head back then and turned it to bring the big vein up thick beneath the wedge of white fur, and cut it carefully so she could bleed dry into the ditch beside the road.
The horsemen had reined up by then. Five riders in long linen dusters, one black among them, leading a pack mule behind his horse. The one who seemed to be their captain had a short carbine in a scabbard by his right knee and a saber and two pistols in his belt. He wore a hat with a broad brim curled up on one side in the style of a cavalry officer, and he was the same gaunt-faced, hollow-eyed rail-thin specter from the dream he’d had on the limestone shelf the night before. A slave-catcher maybe, he’d thought when he woke alone on the stone, and he recalled the copperhead that had poured itself away from him at his first movement, and he reminded himself he was no slave.
“I be go to Hell,” the captain said, his voice harsh as a crow’s. “In all my days I never seen sech a trick as that. Son, kin I git ye to tell me yore name?”
“Henri.” I’m not your son, he thought, and I’m not anybody’s slave.
“Onn wi?” The white captain squinted and screwed up his mouth. “You shore don’t talk like folks around this way.”
The other white men laughed; the black who held the mule was silent, studying the split logs of the roadway.
“Ain’t no kind of name for a natural man. Ornery. I cain’t hardly wrap my lips around it.”
“Henry,” Henri said.
“Well then, Henry, would ye pass me up that air cane ye got so I kin git a look?”
The captain prised open the notch in the cane with his calloused thumb. He opened his duster and plucked a foot-long Bowie knife from inside his waistband and let it into the grip of the green shaft, then, turning his horse a little away from the other, tried the flex of the thrower and grinned.
“I be go to Hell and burn!” he said. “Ye got some enterprise about ye, Henry. I’m bound to grant ye that.” He loosened his knife and tucked it away, then handed the cane back down to Henri. The horse he was riding was white and with the curly brim of his hat and his confident seat this captain reminded Henri of pictures of Saint Jacques Majeur he had seen a long time ago before he ever came into this country.
“Henry,” the captain said, taking a deeper bite of the name. “Kin ye ride a mule?”
Henri looked at the mule and the black man holding it. “I can,” he said.
“Then you best gut that doe and load her up and ride along with us a ways. We’re gitten up a company to fight for the Confederacy. Do you know what that is?”
“I know Kentucky isn’t in it and I know you’re in Kentucky.”
The captain laughed. “Ye’re a right knowledgeable feller. We’re bound for Louisville—ye best ride along.”
By then Henri h...
