Varina
By Charles Frazier, Ecco/HarperCollins, 356 pages, $27.99
Americans are hard on their first ladies. We complain that they spend too much money or connive too much and drink too much — or not enough, in the case of Lemonade Lucy Hayes — and they run or ruin their husband’s careers. So in its strange way, history has been kind to Varina Howell Davis mainly because it’s largely forgotten her. The much younger second wife of Jefferson Davis, who presided over an imaginary country called the Confederate States of America, Varina Davis has escaped the opprobrium of statues dedicated in her honour and then torn down.
But she hasn’t disappeared. An excellent scholarly biography by Joan E. Cashin was published in 2006, and she drifts through Mary Chesnut’s astringent memoirs prophesying the failure of the Confederacy. A woman to whom clever women gravitated, as Chesnut suggested more than once, Davis (who lived until 1906) in later life sought to reconcile North and South. She developed a close friendship with Julia Dent Grant and in the 1890s wrote an advice column as well as a number of articles for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. And she rises, once again, in Varina, Charles Frazier’s elegiac novel, told mostly from her own subdued point of view.
Author of the wildly popular debut novel Cold Mountain, which won the National Book Award more than 20 years ago, Frazier in this, his fourth novel, lyrically resurrects the blasted but hauntingly beautiful Southern landscape just after the war, a time when Varina Davis and a brood of five children, along with a former slave and “a dwindling supply of white men,” have fled Richmond. It’s the spring of 1865, and the Federal Army is close. Hoping to elude Union soldiers and bounty hunters all the way to Florida, eventually to reach Havana and freedom, Varina has a little money from the sale of her household furnishings and a small pistol with which she can shoot herself if Union soldiers try to violate her. The pistol and instructions are gifts from her husband. Beyond that, she has a great deal of moxie as well as a reserve of “housewife morphine” that will last for a little while.
To narrate the travails of this Mississippi-born Confederate mistress in 2018 is far from easy, so Frazier leaps what might have been an insurmountable narrative hurdle with a widower named James Blake. A middle-aged black man, he calls on Varina Davis just a few months before her death. To cut back on her “powders and tinctures,” she is staying for the season at a sanitarium-like hotel, the Retreat, which offers a range of therapies (hydrotherapy, mechanotherapy, electrotherapy and “dramatotherapy”) in the fashionable resort town of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Blake, who lives in nearby Albany, has recently come across a book, First Days Amongst the Contrabands (a real book), by a Northern abolitionist teacher, that devoted an entire chapter (also real) to a boy known as Jimmie. This book, along with a wisp or two of early memories, has stirred up misgivings about his own past that Blake believes Varina might clarify. Uninterested in backward glances or interminable “tales of waste and loss,” she wants to brush him off. “The only bright spot is, the right side won,” she says, and then pointedly advises, “Don’t look back.”
Blake is, of course, Jimmie, the skinny orphan boy Varina rescued back in 1864 when she saw a drunken woman beating him with a stick. Raising him alongside her own children in the Gray House, as she derisively christened the president’s mansion, Varina protected Jimmie until the Federals captured them in 1865. “Keeping you with me was worse for you than letting you go,” she sorrowfully recalls. Sent to General Rufus Saxton, military commander of the Union-occupied Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, so he might be cared for, Blake then disappeared from her life — until now, the summer of 1906, when he arrives with his book and a slew of questions: “Did you ever own me?”
As the novel’s moral centre, James Blake presumably allows the reader to admire this complex woman or at least hope that her empathetic imagination may not be as deficient as, say, that of her husband. As the novel proceeds, Blake begins to visit her on Sunday afternoons, and she begins to reminisce, though her recollections are often filtered through the haze of the opiates she’s been swallowing since the age of 13 to blunt panic, depression and grief. In 1877, after she’d sought medical help in Karlsruhe, Germany, her doctor diagnosed her as suffering from “misplaced malaise.” Varina protested. “Even leaving the war out of it,” she asked, how could her malaise be misplaced, given the deaths of most of her six children, her difficult marriage, her experience of poverty and homelessness — not to mention something she calls “recognition of fundamental moral failure”? She evidently means slavery.
It’s a convenient euphemism and often the best she can muster. “Being on the wrong side of history carries consequences,” Varina acknowledges. “Redemption becomes an abstract idea receding before you.” But does it? When Ellen, a former slave whom Varina considered a friend, is asked how she was treated, Ellen replies, “Nice enough,” hurting Varina’s feelings. Blake explains to the first lady that owning another human means that “any sense of security ran straight through you.” Instead of confronting this, Varina sinks into portentous maxims: “to live is to rant,” “unreliable memory is all we have” or pronouncements that are part Varina and part Frazier: “Time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.”
James Blake is thus heavily tasked as the black man come to instruct as well as to learn; by profession, no surprise, he’s a teacher. But when he disappears from the narration, which he mostly does, a seemingly more relaxed Frazier lyrically unspools Varina’s history in the picaresque style of Cold Mountain. The flight of Varina and her motley caravan from Richmond is beautifully rendered; they pick their way through a terrain “scoured to bare nubs” and encounter refugees “pushing wheelbarrows heaped with quilts and cookware and canvas.” They meet the Wiggins family, white Southerners without slaves, who killed Union soldiers in search of plunder and now suffer the terrible guilt of choosing “them or us.” Then there is the senseless, seemingly inevitable violence of two proud Southern boys flinging childish insults until one pulls a gun. In minutes both lie dead.
Beautifully rendered, too, is Frazier’s chronicle of Varina’s youth. The daughter of a profligate entrepreneur from New Jersey and a well-to-do Mississippi woman, Varina was shipped off at age 17 from her home in Natchez to a plantation called the Hurricane, ruled by the tyrannical slaveholder Joseph Davis, whose gloomy brother Jefferson she married the next year. A widower twice her age in a state of perpetual mourning for his first wife, Jefferson Davis was a “girdled tree,” Varina realised, “bark cut and peeled away past the living flesh.” During their 45-year marriage, they were together little more than half of it.
Varina reads the Greeks, Cotton Mather and Dante as well as The Anatomy of Melancholy and The House of Mirth; she meets Oscar Wilde; and after her husband’s death she completes his memoir, as if to discharge an overdue debt. And, presumably inspired by Blake’s presence, she does stitch together the past, or so he decides, and keeps its memory green. But a didactic interlocutor — more catalyst than realised human being, more reflector than protagonist — does not and likely cannot counterbalance the empire of slavery Varina represents. Still, thanks to Frazier’s delicate ventriloquism, Varina Davis becomes a marvelously fallible character, complicated enough to stand on her compromised own.
–New York Times News Service
Brenda Wineapple, the author, most recently, of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, is completing a book on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
