Books: Rebel Romance

MISS RAVENEL’S CONVERSION—J. W. De Forest—Harper ($2.50).

The story of this novel is unsparing enough now to disturb most modern readers. Seventy-two years ago it was so shocking it blew its gifted author into literary oblivion. One of the best war stories in U. S. fiction, the first and one of the best realistic portraits of a young American girl, the slyest commentary on the difference in romantic Southern and Northern ways of doing the same thing, it was also one of the greatest failures in U. S. publishing. The book went out of print; the blonde and charming Miss Ravenel was forgotten, along with her dashing but dishonest Colonel Carter; their creator, John William De Forest of New Haven, who died in 1906, became a footnote in college textbooks, someone greatly admired only by William Dean Howells.

Last week Author De Forest’s masterpiece was republished. Originally purchased for serialization in Harper’s Monthly (Oct. 27, 1866) for $1,250, it was found too strong for the magazine, was brought out as a novel, fell flat despite Howells’ enthusiastic review. Twenty-one years later De Forest rewrote it, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Harper to bring it out again. At last, prodded by renewed interest in the Civil War, the changed attitudes toward candor in fiction, the publishers have belatedly acknowledged that De Forest and Howells were right, that their predecessors and public opinion had been wrong.

The Story. Miss Lillie Ravenel was a rebel. At 19 she was tall, slender, graceful, blushed easily and had a way of looking at a young man with her blue eyes so lively and intent that each thought she was especially interested in himself. And, says De Forest, this “was frequently not altogether a mistake.” Miss Ravenel was born in New Orleans, loved it, admired it, complained that she was lonely as a mouse in a trap in the New Boston House in New England, whither her father carried her when Louisiana seceded. New Englanders, she said, were right poky, and all the beaux so immature and awkward she thought the Yankees must execute their men at 21. When one of these milksops announced the first defeat at Bull Run with tears in his eyes—”Our men are running, throwing away their guns and everything”—Miss Ravenel gave a shriek of joy, and then, being polite, ran upstairs to dance alone in her room.

Dr. Ravenel was a goodhearted, long-winded, affable Unionist who predicted that the Southerners would fight like jackasses and heroes. Southerners, said he, were an honor to the fortitude, but an insult to the intelligence, of the human race. Why, sir, they would become an example in history of much that was great and of everything that was wrongheaded. Father and daughter argued without listening to each other. He said that once when he got hit on the head, after returning to New Orleans, he knew instantly he was in the South, like the shipwrecked sailor who knew he was in a Christian land as soon as he saw the gallows. Miss Ravenel would be embarrassed by such remarks in company: “Papa,” she would say, “what a countrified habit you have of telling stories.” “Don’t criticise, my dear,” the doctor would reply, “I am a high toned gentleman and always knock people on the head who criticise me.”

Two men broke up this amiable relationship: New England-born Edward Colburne, and Virginia-born Lieutenant-Colonel Carter, a dark-haired, hard-drinking, segar-smoking veteran of many wars and love affairs, a widower of nearly 40 who had stayed with the Union despite mysterious intrigues with Southern filibusters before the war. Intelligent, discerning, timid, young Colburne let the Colonel walk off with Lillie. She was almost annoyed about it. Colburne, she thought, was “very pleasant, lively and good; but—and here she ceased to reason—she felt that he was not magnetic.” The Colonel certainly was. When all four turned up in New Orleans after the Yankees captured the city, Colonel Carter found his playful love affair with Lillie growing serious, married her despite his need for money, the political favoritism that blocked his promotion, her father’s fear of him, her sophisticated New Orleans aunt’s frank advances toward him. As sardonic a figure as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, but far more plausible, Colonel Carter became a drinker without believing he drank, sold government supplies without believing he was dishonest, and—before Lillie’s baby was born—drifted into a love affair with Lillie’s young aunt without losing his belief that he was an honorable Virginia gentleman. Meanwhile, he was a hero—whipping his troops into superb order, disciplining them ruthlessly, winning their admiration, leading them into carnage at Port Hudson and damning the cowardly political generals who got sick on the eve of battles. But when Lillie discovered his deception, the only good impulse in his “emphatic and volcanic nature” disappeared. Plodding Captain Colburne saved the family in a raid, avoided in embarrassment the wiles of Lillie’s aunt, finally won Lillie—in about the sense that the North won the South.

The Author. Born in Humphreysville (now Seymour), Conn, in 1826, John William De Forest dropped out of school at 13 after his father’s death, wrote an authoritative history of Connecticut Indians at 25, spent two years in the Near East and Europe (where he translated Hawthorne into Italian) before he was 30, wrote two travel books and two reasonably successful novels. In 1856 he married Harriet Silliman Shepard and for the next few years divided his time between New Haven and Charleston, S. C. When Sumter was fired on he escaped from Charleston on the last ship going north, recruited a Connecticut company, captained it, served under Weitzel and Banks in Louisiana, under Sheridan in Virginia, was a major when the war ended. He was in charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau at Greenville, S. C., when Miss Ravenel’s Conversion was published. His service ended in 1868 and he spent the rest of his life in New Haven turning out bitter novels satirizing the Gilded Age.

Significance. Strangest fact about Miss Ravenel’s Conversion is that it has been forgotten for so long. Battle scenes like the storming of Port Hudson are superior to those of Stephen Crane; the humor, bewilderment and passion of Miss Lillie make Hawthorne’s and Cooper’s damsels seem moral abstractions. Although, in its 466 pages, the book sometimes seems labored, and antiquated asides slow down its fast story, De Forest’s wit picks it up, springs out in the plain talk of soldiers, his comments on the appallingly dull conversations of people in love, on the mores of the Puritan North and the Cavalier South. Says Yale’s Professor Gordon S. Haight, who believes that De Forest’s characters are unsurpassed in U. S. fiction: “It was an unfortunate moment to launch a realistic story of the war. At that time the bereaved were looking for comfort in such works as Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar; and those who still wished to read about battles wanted them tidied up for the drawing room.” But another factor is at work in re-establishing the value of such books as De Forest’s. More important than the change in taste is the current re-examination of U. S. literature represented in works like Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England. That re-examination is burying many an unread bigwig, demonstrating that many a forgotten novelist has more to say to moderns. First discovery that is likely to prove popular, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion should speed the search.