Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Media Bell's Bend: Acclaimed Author Courts Controversy with Nathan Bedford Forrest Novel
Posted by Jim Ridley on Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 2:19 PM
Pro-NBF: "He was a great general. The Klan wasn't really like that when he was in charge. He even had a radical agenda that called for racial reconciliation. See, the Klan was more like a fraternity then, and we all know fraternities are well-known for their policies of racial inclusion." Against NBF: "Part of his 'great generalling' was the Massacre at Ft. Pillow. Also, he founded the Klan. Seriously. The Klan, people. Is it really worth the trouble of offending upteens millions of people just to 'honor' this guy?"The idea of Forrest's life in the hands of Bell, a Nashville native whose novel of the Haitian slave uprising All Souls' Rising was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award, promises something much more provocative and enticing than an embellished historical marker. At any rate, it'll be more dignified than Forrest's most visible local monument--a statue that resembles Edgar Allan Poe getting goosed after a few too many absinthes. From the publisher's copy:
From the author of All Souls' Rising ("A serious historical novel that reads like a dream"-The Washington Post Book World)-a powerful new novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most reviled and celebrated, loathed and legendary, of Civil War generals. With the same eloquence, dramatic energy, and grasp of history that marked his acclaimed trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture, Madison Smartt Bell gives us a wholly new vantage point from which to view a complicated American icon. We see Forrest off the battlefield, in the more hidden but no less telling moments of his life: wooing the woman who would become his wife; battling an addiction to gambling; overcoming his abhorrence of the bureaucracy of the army to rise to its highest ranks. We see him taking part in the business of slave trading, but treating his own slaves humanely. We see him with his slave mistress, with whom he fathered several children, and we see him reveal his gift for inspiring courage but not change. As the novel unfolds, a vivid portrait comes into focus: a man whose fierceness was marked by fairness, a life filled with contradiction and integrity. In Bell's telling, it is also an evocation of genius and reticence.
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Nathan Bedford Forrest is hard to sum up with a tidy little post; undoubtably he was the greatest Civil War cavalry officer on either side by a long shot. Having arisen from the poor classes, enlisting in the Confederate army and having risen to the rank of general based upon his actions and merits certainly deserves utmost respect. His supposed involvement with the KKK (of which, if memory serves me correctly, NBF denied)would certainly stain his memory in modern times but when viewed from his perspective, does not appear as sinister as it would today. Fort Pillow likewise is a tragic event but one that often repeats itself in times of war, and one for which I would argue, it is very hard to pass revisionist theories. If you weren't there, given the nature of war, too hard to get to the truth of what transpired. I say, reinstall his statue at MTSU. They are still the Blue Raiders after all.
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