Freedom crusade

THE swath that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army cut as it burned its way through Georgia was pivotal in the Union’s victory in the Civil War.

Also pivotal: It helped forge the South’s armature of anger and injury, one that over the generations would nurture a political and economic resurgence that some have called the South’s own delayed victory.

It was, in short, a very serious bit of history and, like all serious history witnessed close up, a chaos of the exhilarating and the terrible.

E.L. Doctorow’s novels deal, for the most part, with historical moments that are sometimes national, and sometimes local to New York. He transforms them with a freedom and incandescence that have no more to do with the general run of historical fiction than do “War and Peace” and “The Charterhouse of Parma.”

Doctorow is intensely serious and brainy, and this can weigh us down. At his very best -- I think of “Ragtime,” although I admire “Billy Bathgate” almost as much -- he exercises seriousness with decided gaiety.

He does it again in “The March,” a serious novel that is at the same time entrancing fun: a panoramic vision of war filtered through its disorders; often brutal and, at times, oddly human. After a couple of constricting Doctorow efforts in recent years, “The March” is jangly, loose-jointed and an almost unqualified triumph; it is closer in spirit to “Ragtime” -- even in its near-musical vignette form -- than to the author’s other novels.

Doctorow follows dozens of characters through all or parts of Sherman’s march to the sea. Among the most arresting: a freed slave girl, an uprooted plantation family, a pair of Confederate soldiers who keep switching uniforms and sides, a brilliant Union Army surgeon, a genteel Southern woman who attaches herself as the surgeon’s assistant, the gifted black helper of a Mathew Brady-like war photographer and the memorably layered Sherman himself. Engendered by a masterful fictional imagination, each character plays out vivid scenes of drama, irony or comedy. Sherman, although historically based, is created with a lifelike freedom and a sense of purpose belonging to art rather than reality; as with Tolstoy’s somnolently instinctual Marshal Kutuzov. (Regarding history, the only apparent slip this reviewer -- no expert -- was able to catch is having Sherman’s soldiers sing “Lorena.” It was a Confederate song.)

A bravura gallop sets “The March” going. Old Letitia Pettibone thunders up at dawn, valuables spilling from her carriage, to the plantation of John Jameson, her niece’s husband. “Her face [is] drawn in anguish, her hair a straggled mess, this woman of such fine grooming, this dowager who practically ruled the season in Atlanta standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom, which indeed she would prove to be.”

“Flee!” is her message, but her outrage eclipses it. The world’s decent order has been turned upside down. Sherman had been a guest at her house in Atlanta: “He has lived among us. He burns where he has ridden to lunch, he fires the city in whose clubs he once gave toasts.”

Splashily theatrical, of course -- Doctorow’s zest for enjoyment rarely flags -- but what a way to convey a culture’s collapse. And its coldness. Jameson, his valuables already shipped to Savannah, destroys his crops and livestock and drives off with his family. Part of it, that is: He has no more than a brief glance for the teenage girl he’s fathered with a house slave.

Yet that girl, Pearl, grows into one of the two forces in “The March.” Sherman, driving his awful war machine with utter conviction yet ultimate doubt (“War is hell”), is a creation of shivering complexity. Pearl is utter ingenious directness -- the miracle of freedom is indeed her pearl, formed amid the war’s awfulness and doubt. “Teach me to be free,” she prays as the slaves await the Union troops. Bit by bit, she will learn.

Pearl joins the march, thanks to a young lieutenant who hoists her up on his saddle. An idealist trying to reconcile the mission of bringing freedom to the slaves with the pillaging that will destroy their livelihood, he is struck by the diminutive girl’s dignity and sense of purpose. Those qualities are reflected from eyes that “gleamed out at him from the darkness, as if they had drunk up what light there was, invisible to him but imperially available to her.” He fits her up as a drummer boy. She catches the eye of Sherman, grieving for his dead young son, and works as a nurse for Wrede Sartorius, the Union surgeon. Then -- as the army turns north for a swamp struggle through South Carolina against Confederate Gen. Joe Johnston’s redoubtable maneuvering retreat -- she figures in a variety of adventures that mark her progress from freedom as a gift to freedom as a life to be won.

In one of the book’s most rending scenes, she discovers her arrogant former master dying in a hospital.

“Come Pap, open your eyes and look on the daughter of your flesh and blood,” she tells him. “I know you hear me. And if you worryin about me I can promise no man will ever treat me like you did my mama, nosir. So you needn’t worry ‘bout your Pearl.... She will take your name to glory.”

Though Pearl and Sherman are the main characters, Doctorow’s witty epic advances, army-like, on a number of splendidly embattled fronts. Arly, the picaresque serial turncoat, is a comic survivor until, near the end, a flash of Confederate passion prompts him to a hopeless act of rebellion. Forced to dig his grave before being shot, he neatly rounds off its edges. “This gonna be my new home I want it nice,” he says.

Calvin, the black assistant on the “Josiah Culp U.S. Photographer” wagon, has learned the art of capturing war’s inhumanity through focusing on its humanity. When Culp is killed, Calvin takes over. His story is painful, yet beautifully told. As are many others -- notably that of the surgeon, Sartorius (he figures in another Doctorow novel, “The Waterworks” ). He is a medical superman -- surgeons flock to watch his experimental operations: angelically benevolent and elusively, angelically cold.

Ultimately, the march itself becomes the central character: an image of journey and transformation that puts individuals to a collective test that most truly reveals who they are. Sartorius, at his chilly remove, reflects:

“Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as its antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path.

“It is an immense organism, this army” -- and here he adds, with a wryness that serves in Doctorow-like fashion to intensify a rhetorical flight by grounding it -- “with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.”

No small brain, in fact, but a mind divided by many things: by ambition, an exhilarated genius for command, a ruthlessness torn by scruple and a hawklike vision compromised by seeing many, if not all, sides of war. Finally, by a stoic’s sense of time and change that the greatest generals all seem to possess. (He has no doubt he is one of them.)

At the end, we see him signing a “peace of the brave” with the tenacious Joe Johnston, and reflecting: “There was this about the end of a war, that once the cheering was over, you were of two minds. Yes, your cause was just.... But victory was a shadowed, ambiguous thing. I will go on wondering about my actions. Whereas General Johnston and his colleagues of the unjust cause, now embittered and awash in defeat, will have sublimed to a righteously aggrieved state that would empower them for a century.” *

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E.L. Doctorow describes his fascination with the South and what led him to write a novel about Sherman’s march. E4