War footing

“THE Amalgamation Polka” takes its title from a 19th century lithograph showing hoop-skirted ladies and Beau Brummell-like gentlemen cavorting at a jolly social gathering. What’s unusual is that the crowd is split equally between white and black. And then there’s the suggestive caption, reporting the words of one Rev. E.S. Best of Milford, Mass.: “This blending of the two races (Caucasian and African) by amalgamation is just what is needed for the perfection of both.”

The illustration is the kind of oddball curio you might run into if you happen to be enrolled in an American studies course on any number of campuses, where the interdisciplinary impulse takes in topics as varied as the writings of Crevecoeur, the bygone, politically incorrect pleasures of minstrelsy and the finer points of textile-mill production. Similarly, in this surreal, over-the-top satire that channels so much of 19th century America, Stephen Wright takes an omnivorous approach to the period that brought you Bible-thumping abolitionists, fire-breathing secessionists, the Underground Railroad and a bitterly unamalgamated America reunited only after the deaths of 600,000 soldiers, North and South.

Wright, whose “Meditations in Green” is one of the finest novels on the Vietnam experience, works well in sanguinary settings, laying bare the dark absurdities that power the machinery of war. In “The Amalgamation Polka,” he takes as his hero and soldier one Liberty Fish, an upstate New Yorker born in 1844 to textile scion Thatcher Fish and Roxana Maury. Roxana is the high-minded and headstrong daughter of Asa Maury, the lord of Redemption Hall, a sprawling South Carolina cotton plantation; she’s a budding abolitionist who, on holiday at Saratoga Springs, spots Thatcher in a hotel lobby and promptly defects from the “slavocracy,” never to return to Charleston and her blowhard father’s incessant grandstanding: “Can’t have civilization without slavery. Read your history. That’s a fact.”

Liberty, then, is a living amalgam of North and South, mill and plantation, Yankee peddler and Southern cavalier. Wright gives us his coming of age in episodic spurts: There’s Liberty’s friendship with a freed slave named Euclid (the Fish household is a stop on the Underground Railroad); a bizarre canal journey to Rochester with his father, possibly to hear Frederick Douglass; and an eye-opening trip to New York City in the custody of his wild Uncle Potter, a firebrand who once traveled to Kansas to gun down “pukes” -- pro-slavery vigilantes then terrorizing Northern settlers on the frontier. In the city, the impressionable young Liberty -- otherwise an earnest transcendentalist who feels that “every clod of earth flicked into the air by a mule’s hoof, was, in actuality, a disclosure of feeling” -- discovers he has a taste for some less Emersonian sensations: burlesque and laughing gas.

This veering, desultory setup -- with detours involving canal-side dentistry, a tonic hawker by the name of Colonel Foggbottom (“not my original moniker, but what’s in a name?”) and a baffling interlude with some bearded ladies -- is all leading up to Fort Sumter, and it’s here that Wright’s tale snaps into place. The underage Liberty -- high on abolitionist fervor -- joins the Union cause, imagining, down Carolina way, “a pop-eyed, sunken-cheeked Grandpa Asa yanking the lanyard on the inaugural cannon.” But reality soon intrudes. At a battle resembling Antietam, Liberty is derided as an “amalgamator” by one of his less enthusiastically abolitionist Yankee cohorts. He’s also forced to confront “the phenomenon veterans joked about, the nettlesome sound of bumblebees buzzing incessantly about one’s head. He also noticed in every direction small geysers of dirt were spraying into the air as if the bubbling ground itself were being cooked over a slow, mammoth fire.” Wright is a poet of combat, particularly of the limbs-torn-off, brains-splattered-in-the-face variety. You trust him when he writes of these Union men losing themselves -- their very selfhood -- in battle, as they become amalgamated into a deadly force: “They seemed now to be no longer men but transformed by the forge of battle into mechanical parts, identical cogs whirring inside some infernal engine.”

The effect here is of Wright’s harnessing the supersaturated prose of the period -- the stuff that Edmund Wilson once derisively called “coagulated” -- to a modern, post-Vietnam sensibility accustomed to flying body parts. Throughout the book, there are shades of Hawthorne, Irving and Melville, little tonal shifts from chapter to chapter, each one of which unfolds as a distinct unit, the way, say, “The Scarlet Letter” progresses as a series of obsessively crafted set pieces rather than a symphonic whole. In these battle scenes, we feel as if we’ve stumbled across the infernal manuscripts of a long-lost literary talent, as if the scary ellipses of “The Red Badge of Courage” were being filled in by a chronicler as ravenous for bodily data -- in this case, Minie balls thunking into men, frothing chest wounds -- as Whitman.

There are more recent antecedents for what Wright is up to. “Gob’s Grief,” by Chris Adrian, and “Wilderness Run,” by Maria Hummel, both spring to mind as distillations of the Civil War era that tapped into its feverish mood for dreamlike effects. Perhaps more to the point is Charles Frazier’s bestselling “Cold Mountain,” which told of a Confederate deserter’s Odyssean journey home.

For his part, Liberty Fish, wending his way with Sherman’s army through Georgia and scavenging for hogs, molasses and brandy, decides to ditch the grand blue ranks in order to seek out Redemption Hall and satisfy his nagging curiosity about the “soul-stealer” side of the family tree.

It’s at Redemption Hall that Liberty encounters firsthand the strange fruits of slavery, far beyond his abolitionist imaginings. The Old South has become a virtual bedlam and his Grandpa Asa transformed into a Colt-wielding crackpot brimming over with outre theories about race and pursuing a regimen of forced breeding: “We of the present generation,” Asa crows, “shall be the first in recorded time to witness the grand metamorphosis, the final defeat of pigmentation.” The amalgamation polka, in other words, is best accomplished when it resembles the horizontal bop. But only when Massah dictates the terms, and only when the resulting issue tends toward the color of cotton.

In Asa, Wright has created a cantankerous madman as farcical as he is odious; as virulent as he is, in some very disturbing ways, visionary: His call for amalgamation is more radical than anything the abolitionists ever came up with. And yet we all know, after the horrors of the 20th century, the gruesome folly that is eugenics and deracination. Asa -- that heartless slaver -- is also able to see with almost Marxist clarity the impending onslaught of the Industrial Age: Those “identical cogs” of the Union war machine will soon go on to become fodder for the steel mills and coalmines. As such, Liberty’s grandfather is a fresh embodiment of the old debate over wage slavery versus chattel slavery (“lucre or the lash” as one of Wright’s characters puts it), which viewed Yankee capitalism as little more than a form of indenture for whites. It’s a favored anti-emancipation canard of the plantation owner and unreconstructed Confederate, some of whom still prowl Internet blogs and the more reactionary recesses of academia.

As one bereft Georgia farm woman tells Liberty while she surveys the war’s damage in this fantastical, indelible and unapologetically indulgent novel: “[T]his horrible, evil war, it’s never going to end.... Even after it’s over it will continue to go on without the flags and the trumpets and the armies, do you understand?” *