If this were a judicial matter (but when is criticism not?) I should have to recuse myself. The author is one of my closest friends, and I was involved in the creation and publication of this book almost from the beginning more than four years ago. I read and commented on the chapters as they were written, and at the far end of the long gestation process was among those who corrected the galley-proofs. I am quoted on the back cover, and thanked in the Afterword. Familiarity often breeds, if not contempt, a steady decrease in enthusiasm, but with each perusal of Nor the Battle to the Strong I have been more impressed with Charles Price’s singular achievement. In these lax days we throw out superlatives with abandon worthy of Congress flinging wide the pork -- no sausage biscuit is worth eating if it is not “famous” -- but this really is a masterpiece, a work that rises suddenly to tower above its contemporaries, just as it far surpasses Price’s previous award-winning novels.
For most of the centuries in which it has been written, history was assumed to be primarily a record of the mighty doings of the great, a chronicle of kings and battles. In the 20th century history began to tilt the balance towards the common man, or at least to make the attempt. Nor the Battle to the Strong looks at the Revolution in the South through both ends of the telescope, from two vastly different points of view, that of the general commanding American forces in the South, and that of a neophyte private, James Johnson, a Scots immigrant and absconded indentured servant who lived through the bloody events depicted in this novel to become one of the author’s maternal ancestors.
The amount of information available to Price in recreating these very different men was as sharply-contrasted as their careers. James Johnson lived until 1850, so his federal pension application was on file, providing an outline of his service in the final two years of the war. None of his correspondence survived, but Nathanael Greene’s does in astonishing quantity. The immense task of editing and publishing it, in 13 hefty volumes, took more than 30 years and was completed only in 2005. Price drew extensively on this rich source in shaping his portrait of Greene. One of the novel’s many felicities is the way the novelist weaves the words of Greene’s letters into his narrative. At the close of Part 10 the general is sitting up late in his marquee, writing what is perhaps his most famous letter, to his friend Col. Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut, endlessly quoted because it is supremely quotable, humorously acknowledging that “there are few Generals that has run oftener, or more lustily than I have done, But I have taken care not to run too farr; and commonly have run as fast forward as backward, to convince our Enemy that we were like a Crab, that could run either way.”
So immersed did Price become in Greene’s distinctive prose idiom that the last letter quoted in the book, that to his beloved wife Caty written just after the great battle at Eutaw Springs, is actually his work, not Greene’s -- and only the editors of the Greene papers could tell the difference. The contradictory nature of the crab well describes Greene’s mind as here portrayed, a brooding forest of paradoxes. For this reader the most moving part of a novel with many affecting scenes is the quiet struggle within the general as he approaches what he knows will be his last battle, his last chance to free South Carolina from British rule for good. Greene edits out all other elements of his nature, reserving only the one that can bring him the victory he has desperately craved for so long. The reader of Swift and Sterne given to philosophical musings must go. At the end of Part 22, “In Which General Greene Must Harden His Heart,” he realizes, “Now he must be, completely, the commander of men.”
In James Johnson Price finds, among much else, an ideal vehicle for presenting the reader with details of military life in the Revolution. He volunteers in complete ignorance of all involved, and as he learns the very complicated ropes, we learn along with him. Price’s command of the arcana of weaponry, transport and camp life is as magisterial as that of any historian. From his début he has been celebrated for his evocation of sensory effects, and sights, smells and sounds are brought vividly to life. We receive overwhelming evidence of just how smelly a business war was in the 18th century. In the chapter introducing him to us, General Greene is already getting a loathsome whiff of the inadequate sanitary arrangements at the Siege of Ninety-Six: “War-making was a noisome business, never more so than in summer in the Southern parts of America; and high smell was one of its many features from which his naturally delicate soul recoiled. He turned to Pendleton. ‘More vaults must be dug, farther out from camp.’” If only the enterprising Dr. Franklin had got round to inventing air-freshener, the course of the war might have been very different.
Speaking as one who is trying to write one, I find of all aspects involved in crafting a convincing novel creation of character is most important, and most mysterious. Anyone can create or crib a plot -- although very few can seamlessly intertwine two distinct strands, as Price does here. Many can describe, if few can evoke. Any storyteller can to some extent narrate action. But only true novelists can create characters who breathe -- and cough and tipple and retch -- on the page. This is as crowded as a Dickens novel with memorable characters, a high proportion of them likeable. Starting with only a name in a pension application, Price has crafted in James’ first officer a truly great comic character whose war is one long lost weekend:
The amount of information available to Price in recreating these very different men was as sharply-contrasted as their careers. James Johnson lived until 1850, so his federal pension application was on file, providing an outline of his service in the final two years of the war. None of his correspondence survived, but Nathanael Greene’s does in astonishing quantity. The immense task of editing and publishing it, in 13 hefty volumes, took more than 30 years and was completed only in 2005. Price drew extensively on this rich source in shaping his portrait of Greene. One of the novel’s many felicities is the way the novelist weaves the words of Greene’s letters into his narrative. At the close of Part 10 the general is sitting up late in his marquee, writing what is perhaps his most famous letter, to his friend Col. Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut, endlessly quoted because it is supremely quotable, humorously acknowledging that “there are few Generals that has run oftener, or more lustily than I have done, But I have taken care not to run too farr; and commonly have run as fast forward as backward, to convince our Enemy that we were like a Crab, that could run either way.”
So immersed did Price become in Greene’s distinctive prose idiom that the last letter quoted in the book, that to his beloved wife Caty written just after the great battle at Eutaw Springs, is actually his work, not Greene’s -- and only the editors of the Greene papers could tell the difference. The contradictory nature of the crab well describes Greene’s mind as here portrayed, a brooding forest of paradoxes. For this reader the most moving part of a novel with many affecting scenes is the quiet struggle within the general as he approaches what he knows will be his last battle, his last chance to free South Carolina from British rule for good. Greene edits out all other elements of his nature, reserving only the one that can bring him the victory he has desperately craved for so long. The reader of Swift and Sterne given to philosophical musings must go. At the end of Part 22, “In Which General Greene Must Harden His Heart,” he realizes, “Now he must be, completely, the commander of men.”
In James Johnson Price finds, among much else, an ideal vehicle for presenting the reader with details of military life in the Revolution. He volunteers in complete ignorance of all involved, and as he learns the very complicated ropes, we learn along with him. Price’s command of the arcana of weaponry, transport and camp life is as magisterial as that of any historian. From his début he has been celebrated for his evocation of sensory effects, and sights, smells and sounds are brought vividly to life. We receive overwhelming evidence of just how smelly a business war was in the 18th century. In the chapter introducing him to us, General Greene is already getting a loathsome whiff of the inadequate sanitary arrangements at the Siege of Ninety-Six: “War-making was a noisome business, never more so than in summer in the Southern parts of America; and high smell was one of its many features from which his naturally delicate soul recoiled. He turned to Pendleton. ‘More vaults must be dug, farther out from camp.’” If only the enterprising Dr. Franklin had got round to inventing air-freshener, the course of the war might have been very different.
Speaking as one who is trying to write one, I find of all aspects involved in crafting a convincing novel creation of character is most important, and most mysterious. Anyone can create or crib a plot -- although very few can seamlessly intertwine two distinct strands, as Price does here. Many can describe, if few can evoke. Any storyteller can to some extent narrate action. But only true novelists can create characters who breathe -- and cough and tipple and retch -- on the page. This is as crowded as a Dickens novel with memorable characters, a high proportion of them likeable. Starting with only a name in a pension application, Price has crafted in James’ first officer a truly great comic character whose war is one long lost weekend:
“Captain Harris, as might have been expected, was more sympathetic. Of course he was also completely corned. ‘Were not the distinctions of rank and station so inflexible, my children, I should bid you join me in a cup of the creature,’ he greeted them, brandishing a silver chalice as they came into his tent and doffed their hats in salute.”In Part 10, at his camp of repose in the High Hills of Santee, as he recruits his exhausted troops in preparation for the decisive battle for control of the whole South below Virginia, Greene is acutely aware that he is, as he ponders and plans and writes endless letters, becoming history. He discusses Thomas Sumter, who had given him greater difficulty than any other of his subordinate commanders, with Col. Otho Williams of Maryland:
“Sumter can afford his grudging and rebellious temperament, his chafing under orders; I must be forever moderate, reasonable, full of sober decision.”In the final chapter we see that the real battle begins when the physical one is finished, the fight to prevail in the interpretation of what happened. To this end, the desperately weary Greene composes dispatches and letters to promote his slant on events. Back when he was discussing the Gamecock with Williams, Greene prophesied that in history “his portrait will be done in high color; mine but dimly.” For two centuries Nathanael Greene remained a shadowy figure; only in the past generation have we come to realize that he, not Washington, actually won the war, ensuring that the lower colonies would not remain part of the British empire. Now Charles Price has given us a portrait “done in high color,” fully worthy of this towering hero.
“It’s why you’re great,” Williams observed, “and he’s small and petty. History will say so.”
“Will it indeed? I often wonder what history will say of us -- of me.”
“It’ll depend on who writes the history, won’t it?”
“It always has.”
Nor the Battle to the Strong should enhance admiration for our ancestors who fought this terrible war from which all of our values as a people, all of our pretensions to greatness among nations ultimately derive. In my latest re-reading of this inexhaustible work, I experienced an epiphany while reading the long final paragraph of Part 22, in which Greene completes the self-editing that will make him the commander his battle needs. I realized I was reading not just a good book, not even a masterpiece, but a classic of our literature, as I am convinced this new novel will become. Yet it was written not by Hawthorne or Melville but by Charles Price from Burnsville, with whom I exchange e-mails about the day’s writing and the creeping of decrepitude, with whom I clink pints -- alas, too seldom. This novel does tower above the shrubs of mere scribblers like King’s Mountain rising abruptly and with complete authority from the rolling hills of the upper Piedmont -- and it too is the site of a great American victory.
