None shall look back, p.1
None Shall Look Back, page 1
None Shall
Look Back
Southern Classics Series
M. E. Bradford, Editor
Southern Classics Series
M. E. Bradford, Series Editor
Donald Davidson
The Tennessee, Volume I
Donald Davidson
The Tennessee, Volume II
Caroline Gordon
Green Centuries
Caroline Gordon
None Shall Look Back
Caroline Gordon
Penhally
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
Georgia Scenes
Andrew Nelson Lytle
Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company
Andrew Nelson Lytle
A Wake for the Living
Thomas Nelson Page
In Ole Virginia
William Pratt, Editor
The Fugitive Poets
Elizabeth Madox Roberts
The Great Meadow
Allen Tate
Stonewall Jackson
Robert Penn Warren
Night Rider
Owen Wister
Lady Baltimore
Stark Young
So Red the Rose
None Shall
Look Back
CAROLINE GORDON
with a preface by Eileen Gregory
“Stand, stand, shall they cry; but none shall look back.”
—NAHUM, Chap. II, Verse 8.
Originally Published 1937
Copyright © 1937 by Caroline Tate
Copyright © renewed 1965 by Caroline Gordon
Published by arrangement with
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Preface to this edition © copyright 1992
by J. S. Sanders & Company
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:
92-089827
ISBN: 978-1-879941-11-3
Published in the United States by
J. S. Sanders & Company
P. O. Box 50331
Nashville, Tennessee 37205
Distributed to the trade by
National Book Network
4720-A Boston Way
Lanham, Maryland 20706
1992 printing
Manufactured in the United States of America
To Allen Tate
Preface
When Caroline Gordon in late 1934 embarked upon a novel about the Civil War—originally to be called “The Cup of Fury,” and finally entitled None Shall Look Back—the subject matter might have appeared a natural one, given her family heritage and her intellectual affiliations. However, to a writer of her seriousness it posed considerable problems, and she did not lightly take it on. When she did, she chose the most demanding of stories—the story of a soldier—depending upon no easy devices of narrative, and crafting her work with models in mind that far transcended the genre of Civil War romance.
That she should turn eventually to the materials of the Civil War might seem, in retrospect, almost inevitable. By 1934 she had already clearly revealed in her two published novels—Penhally (1931) and Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934)—an intent to mine the resources of her own family’s history. And in the context of that immediate fund of memory, the Civil War had something of a mythic stature—a “general catastrophe” in the past, as she put it in a late memoir, that, at least in part, explained why “life was a desperate affair.” Her acceptance of the matter of familial memory opened her to the need to imagine and enact again that original catastrophe.
Moreover, the need to come to terms with this store of memory was shared by a generation of Southern writers. Her husband, Allen Tate, as well as Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, and others, was publicly involved in the Agrarian movement before and after the publication in 1930 of I’ll Take My Stand, a polemical, intellectual defense of the Old South. In addition, Tate had written biographies of Stonewall Jackson (1928) and Jefferson Davis (1929); and Lytle had published a biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest (1931). Not coincidentally, this period also witnessed a new surge of fiction about the Civil War. While Gordon was writing None Shall Look Back (from December 1934 until October 1936), Lytle completed his novel set during the war, The Long Night (1936), and Tate began The Fathers (1938). These titles joined others of some seriousness emerging around the same time, novels by Evelyn Scott, DuBose Heyward, Stark Young, and William Faulkner.
Though the Civil War forms part of the story in Penhally, Gordon’s choice to address the material of the war directly was long and carefully contemplated, because she fully understood the demands it would impose upon her. To grasp her achievement in None Shall Look Back, we need to see clearly the technical problems she confronted, as well as the scope of her conception. While on a Guggenheim in Paris in 1933 Gordon wrote to a friend that she had long cherished a desire to take a soldier through the four years of the war, but that she didn’t think it could be done, at least not by a woman. Her remark suggests that she had a particular kind of narrative in mind: one that, among the hundreds of published Civil War novels, had not yet been done and might still be impossible to do; and one that she saw as particularly “masculine” in its demands on the writer.
What story did Gordon imagine, and what were the impediments she may have foreseen? First of all, the genre of Civil War novels, which continued to thrive into the first decades of the twentieth century, itself constituted a serious problem: the task of bringing romance into the confines of naturalism and historical accuracy. For Civil War novels, almost by definition, are romances, characterized by tendencies which are deadliest to the serious novelist—idealization, sentimentality, and polemicism. Ironically, the publication of None Shall Look Back was delayed because of the success of the greatest war romance of them all, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Clearly, then, Gordon’s first instinct as a writer in imagining the story of a soldier would be an insistence upon careful naturalism. But another, even larger, aspiration complicates this instinct. From the beginning she seems to have envisioned a narrative difficult to achieve, one that would be epic in spirit—a tale memorializing the deeds of a hero, set in the context of the concrete, valuable, though flawed world for which he is willing to die. “Her story,” said Katherine Anne Porter in reviewing None Shall Look Back, “is a legend in praise of heroes, of those who lost their battle, and their lives.” As Porter keenly discerns, it attempts to give homage to the ancient assertion of “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” uttered in the novel by an old classics teacher as his students leave the academy for war. This unqualified affirmation of the heroic was to some extent scandalous even in its own day, when anti-heroes were the norm and when the writer, according to Porter, was under considerable pressure to adopt a “form of opportunism . . . called ‘interpreting history correctly.’ ” Even more so does it seem scandalous today, with our still more exacting criteria of negation.
The desire to chronicle the hero is hard indeed for any novelist to fulfill. The naturalism at the roots of the novel is essentially skeptical, resistant to the easy appeal of public beliefs and of heroic gestures: irony is its dominant tone. Thus, as much as Gordon admired Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, its narrator, who continually deflates the pretensions of the main character and who views “courage”—both as a human gesture and as a public “badge”—with steady skepticism, cannot serve as a guide in her effort to render the hero. Crane’s irony must be eschewed, as well as the sentimentality of the romance.
Gordon was conscious too of the anomaly of a woman’s choosing this kind of artistic task: women do not generally write epic narratives. And, in technical terms, though the world of the home and of lovers is relatively accessible to the imagination, to write a narrative of the experience of a soldier in war requires more: an assured mastery of a “masculine” domain, the highly technical language of warcraft—strategy and maneuver, both overt and covert; disposition of forces; the technical nature, force, and impact of weapons; the pragmatic care of the army, the movement of vehicles, the feeding of men and of horses; the physical symptoms of hunger, thirst, disease, and exposure; the nature and variety of wounds, the postures of the dead, the cries of the dying, the effects of putrefaction, the disposition of bodies; and, perhaps most essentially, a language attentive to the individual characters of horses and of men as they show themselves in gesture—that is to say, a language ordered to the discrimination of spirit and courage. We should note, indeed, that the mastery of this kind of detail is not typical of male writers either: it simply requires too much work.
Thus in writing this novel, Gordon did not turn for paradigms to the romance writers that preceded her. For her narrative discipline and for the factual record she depended upon the study of historical writers—Civil War documents such as the Forrest biographies of John Wyeth and Andrew Lytle and the collection of eyewitness accounts in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War; and, as models of perspective, classical battle narratives, such as those of Plutarch and Thucydides. But beyond these disciplinary guides, she chose imaginative company with no less than Tolstoy and Homer. Indeed, the considerable technical achievement of None Shall Look Back is to make the devices of fictional naturalism serve the purposes of a classical heroic narrative. As in Homer, the bareness and simplicity of the style, the quiet, reiterative use of epithets, and the play between nearness and distance, give great dignity and poignancy to the tragic events described. The narrative stance in the novel, Ford Madox Ford said, suggested that of Athene among the armies in the Iliad, the narrator standing beside the reader with calm impartiality and clear-sighted premonition.
We must emphasize the technical matters of None Shall Look Back in part because the style is so conspicuous a part of its force, but also because craft, for Gordon, was in some mysterious way identical with, or at least inseparable from, imaginative vision. In her late memoir “Cock-Crow,” she sees the pattern of her life’s work in terms that make None Shall Look Back appear a fable of her career: “War which, now under one disguise, now another, pits a man against his arch enemy, Death, has always provided a favorable climate for the growth of the hero, as well as for the study of his ways and deeds. The novelist, like the soldier, is committed by his profession to a life-long study of wars and warriors.” The novelist and soldier are alike in commitment: and thus the author’s attention to the details of military craft as well as to the passion of the soldier’s life reflexively signifies the inexorable demands, the austerity and sacrifice, of her own art.
If None Shall Look Back renders the catastrophe of the South, we are brought to the question, as with Troy in the Iliad, of why this “city” falls. Concerning the war itself, the loss of Confederate to Union forces in the western campaigns, Gordon is quite clear. Its leaders relied excessively on an abstract knowledge of military procedure and insufficiently on specific and original strategies and inspired leaders: “The problem,” Forrest thinks when he sees that the generals at Fort Donelson plan to surrender, “was how to convey to these men a certain knowledge which he had and which they did not seem to possess,” a knowledge based on concrete and intuitive engagement with all the actualities of the moment. Gordon does not give commentary on the generals and battles, but only renders the historical account, which itself clearly conveys the imprudence and blindness that lost the Confederate army its opportunities at Fort Donelson and Chickamauga and which caused unnecessary slaughter at the battle of Franklin. Nor does she obscure these failures by vilifying the enemy or ridiculing its leaders. On the contrary, Sherman in particular, unlike Jefferson Davis or Generals Bragg and Hood, is depicted as recognizing a military genius when he sees one, and from the beginning considered Forrest one of his most formidable adversaries.
Apart from this large arena of pride and error, in the private sphere of family and desire, do we also find premonitory signs of the eventual fall of this world? We are led to this question in part because of the title of the book. An apocalyptic sense is suggested both in the original title—“The Cup of Fury,” from Jeremiah 25:15—as well as in the final title, taken, as the epigraph tells us, from Nahum 2:8: “But Ninevah is of old like a pool of water: yet they shall flee away. Stand, stand, shall they cry; but none shall look back.” In the verses alluded to, both Jeremiah and Nahum speak prophetically of the wrath of God descending upon unrighteous peoples. The verse from Nahum, in particular, describes the warriors in the last line of the city’s defense breaking in terror. The novel closes with just such a scene of panic in battle, when Forrest yells to his retreating men: “ ‘Rally, men, rally! For God’s sake, rally!’ But they would not listen.” Though the title of the novel may be read ambivalently—as referring to the kingdom of the invaders (the oppressor Ninevah) rather than to the South (Israel)—the parallel between the biblical text and the last scene clearly suggests that the defeat of the South is a kind of retribution, that it collapses out of some ultimate weakness of spirit. However, the ending just as clearly points to the heroic figure, for Rives does “stand,” and our last image of the war is of Forrest charging the line alone.
To understand the importance of the hero in the world of the novel, we must first contemplate the problem of courage—that is, the problem of facing death—which his presence brings into focus. As we attempt to discern the possible weakness within this world—or more specifically within the Allard family—the flaw is not obvious, but so deeply embedded in a stable and elegant way of life as to be almost invisible. Critics have located this flaw as part of a defense or attack of the presumed agrarian beliefs of the author, and their diagnoses seem inadequate: the polemical is as alien to this novel as is the sentimental. As the author renders it, the chief flaw does not appear to be the encroachment from within of “Yankee” entrepreneurs like Joe Bradley, or industrialists-to-be like Jim Allard. Nor is the flaw of the Allards and of the South to be found in the institution of slavery as such, which appears to be a symptom of a deeper spiritual problem, rather than the problem itself. The novel reflects a deliberate choice by the author to avoid the question of slavery as an abstract issue—for such reductive abstraction on both sides was, after all, a main cause of the war—and to confront it as a concrete and therefore complex aspect of the South, reflecting its hierarchy and economics, but also its values and its unresolved moral perplexities.
The flaw of the Allard world might best be seen in the figure of its patriarch. Fontaine Allard’s love of land and his sense of responsibility to his ancestors and descendants are presented as a kind of sacred piety; and as one who breeds horses, he is associated with the heroic pattern of the whole novel (two of the Confederate generals who escaped from Fort Donelson were on his horses). But this sense of piety and proprietorship should not be taken as an unqualified moral measure. Though he is basically a good and generous man, the narrator makes us aware that Fontaine Allard is unable to be happy where he cannot command; that he is slightly pompous, complacent in his sense of his family’s superiority, and intolerant of difference. He thinks to himself at the beginning of the novel that “Youth must always regard itself as imperishable”; but there is little sign that he does not participate in the same naivete, the same inability to appreciate the mutable and transient. Even his awareness of familial continuity in time is associated with the transient, the fragrance of flowers from the garden, which “spoke to him of pleasures past and of pleasures to come.” His identification with land, lineage, and ownership is so complete and unconscious that, like the crazy dwarfish Old Ben who haunts the stables where he used to ride as a jockey, Fontaine becomes a helpless idiot at the moment his house falls, roused from torpor only at the mention of horses.
The flaw in the fabric of the ample and contented Allards of Kentucky might be put in simple and proverbial terms: they live a life whose happiness (well-being, good fortune) is apparently never seriously examined in relation to death and mutability, and never rooted in any order beyond the natural. The South, Allen Tate suggests in I’ll Take My Stand, failed in being a feudal society without a correspondingly articulate structure of religion; its way of life to some extent was an end in itself. Something of the same insistence is made in None Shall Look Back, as it presents a world of gracious and decorous pleasures and passions, having no apparent ends beyond the moment, except its own perpetuation in the family. The implied questions throughout the novel, thus, are simple, stark, and ancient ones: in what does human happiness consist, and what are the ends by which it is measured? War and catastrophe bring us to a remembrance of these ultimate questions; and the hero points to an answer, if we are able to read it.
The novel establishes a persistent questioning all along, in pointing to ambiguous figures like Forrest who possess an incommunicable and invaluable knowledge. In this light, we must reconsider two of the Allard connection that are taken by the Fontaine Allards to be “eccentric,” but that prove, paradoxically, to be central: Edmund Rowan, who ignores the life of the farmer in order to pursue the life of sport; and Susan Allard, the wife of Thomas Allard, whose father Garrett Allard, concerned with his soul, in his old age gave up the raising of tobacco and tried to dispose of his slaves. These two figures are alike in important ways: each lives austerely, minimally sustained by an agrarian life, with no concern for possessions; each manifests an intensity or a “passion” that transcends the pursuit of ordinary pleasure—for Susan Allard, the care of the sick and needy, and for Edmund Rowan, the hunt (if, as Gordon suggests elsewhere, we take the hunt as an heroic quest, a ritual confrontation with death); and each is happy and self-sufficient, as are no other characters in the novel.
