Woe to Live On

Woe to Live On - By Daniel Woodrell




FOREWORD

First off, let me say that most American novelists would not have attempted to write this book. They wouldn’t have the courage to tell a story where racial epithets are common and, even worse, a major character is a black man who fights for the Confederacy. It would not matter that the offensive language was true to the time period and place or that the black soldier was based on a member of Quantrill’s Raiders, a man who can be seen in a 1904 reunion photograph. These are parts of history a good many people would prefer remain unacknowledged, and those people will resent an author for bringing such matters to light.

Readers wishing for a romanticized lament for “the lost cause” will be equally resentful. Woodrell’s Confederates are not men of honor who observe the gentlemanly rules of warfare. These soldiers plunder, kill unarmed civilians, and torture their captives. Their mode of warfare is ambush or trickery, even dressing in Union blue to surprise the enemy. The nobility of Southern womanhood is seen in light of a couple rutting on a dirt floor. The only cause the men fight for is vengeance. Their loyalty is to each other, but within the ranks there is hatred and killing. The puritanical, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, prefer a world without ambiguity or paradox. Woodrell, like all the best artists, is an outlier. His quest in Woe to Live On is to render the world as it was, not as we wish it to have been.

“War means fighting, and fighting means killing,” Bedford Forrest said. Jake Roedel, the novel’s narrator, learns the truth of Forrest’s comment all too well. Jake knows that in such times even “mercy has treachery in it.” Which brings us to the central question raised in Woe to Live On: Is it possible for a man to retain his humanity in an inhuman time, and if not, at least to regain that humanity after a war ends? As Jake puts it, “Our struggle had carried us into a new territory of the soul, where we found new versions of our selves.” Woe to Live On provides an answer that is neither nihilistic nor sentimental—and is sometimes contradicted in the novel itself—but nevertheless is one that I find satisfying and true to the complexity of the human heart.

There is so much more to praise about this novel—its perfect pacing, the memorable characters, the seamless meshing of history and imagination, but what I admire most in Woe to Live On is the language. There is not a moment when the words feel outside the time and place. Words such as scotched and codded abound. The similes are colorful but they fit the characters’ rural backgrounds: “That was clear as cow patties on a snowbank”; “You done did the milkin’, might as well lap the cream.” The syntax and formality in Jake’s telling is true to letters written by Civil War soldiers: “I believed I could not be hit, so absent had I decided myself to be” and “… wondering how many of our dinner companions would share our meals no more.”

The horror of war is vividly rendered. This is not a book for the fainthearted. Men kill and are killed, and the reader is spared few details. A scene where a wife’s love letter is read aloud to a dying Union soldier is particularly harrowing. But amid the carnage there are moments of lyrical wonder and beauty. One of my favorites is when Jake, hiding out in a barn, observes “the shafts of light spearing down through cracks and illuminating all the grainy debris in the air.” It is a moment that brings to mind another soldier, Tolstoy’s Prince Andre, who, fallen on the battlefield, sees the sky as though for the first time. Beauty and wonder yet abide in the novel’s world. And a belief that, even in the worst of times, we are capable of moments of grace and forgiveness, “that aloneness would not be our fate.”

Daniel Woodrell is one of America’s best writers, and Woe to Live On is one of his finest achievements. The reissue of this novel is cause for celebration.


—Ron Rash