Hallam's War by Elisabeth Payne Rosen
Fiction Hardcover
ISBN 13: 978-1-932961-49-2
6 x 9 / 464 pages / $25.95
May 2008
Summary | Praise | Speaking to Readers | Q&A | Bio | Events
Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets
Summary
Hugh and Serena Hallam have made the decision to leave everything they knew in Charleston behind them, hoping to create a stable, productive home for themselves and their three children in the near-wilderness of West Tennessee. Though now war may loom on the horizon, life at Palmyra is good, for both themselves and—they believe—their slaves.
Hugh is convinced that reasonable men of good will with a tolerant respect for their countrymen might yet prevail against the increasingly tense atmosphere that is dividing the two American cultures. Capable and practical, he is nevertheless considered by his neighbors to be an idealist, with progressive notions concerning the science of agriculture and the requirements of Southern commerce, an ambivalent attitude toward slavery, and a confidence about the way things should be done. But when events move their entire world toward destruction, Hugh’s values are put to the test, with only his surpassing love for Serena and his belief in himself to possibly sustain him.
Hallam’s War is the saga of one man’s struggle to defend his family, his neighbors and his honor, and of the moral compromises forced upon an otherwise good man caught in a maelstrom that leaves him no acceptable choices. A man of remarkable resilience, resourcefulness and contradictions, Hugh must learn to face his own conscience with as much courage as he displays at Shiloh. Ultimately, Hugh and Serena confront the reality surrounding their relationships with their neighbors and with their slaves. If neither of them is completely transformed, each takes a step toward a new understanding.
Elisabeth Payne Rosen’s near-epic debut is thoughtful, authentic and carefully researched. From Nashville and Memphis to Richmond, Charleston and Washington D.C., and across the bloody battlefields of Shiloh and Bull Run, Rosen brings vividly to life a heart-rending tale that resonates with deep personal grief shot through with moments of beauty and joy. In the end, there is hope for reconciliation among us all, even in the face of all the struggles that lie ahead.
Speaking to Readers
I grew up in a big family that laughed a lot and went to church. My mother was a great reader; my father was a Tulane football star who had played in the Rose Bowl. Vacations were spent at Panama City Beach or Greenville, Mississippi, where I pored over old family photographs and leafed through signed first editions of Faulkner (who knew? just a native son.)
Flash forward to a young wife in London, spilling her groceries in front of the Duke of York’s Barracks on the King’s Road and suddenly deciding: I want to know everything there is to know about the American Civil War. Who was I in relation to my own ancestors and what part--if any--of their lives was I responsible for? Being an Enneagram One who loved beauty but was always occupied with judging between Right and Wrong, I created my characters to explore this issue, but they lay there, inert, for a long time, resisting my judgments. Then, when I had turned my back, they rose up and began to live their rich and complex lives without me, signaling: “Assume nothing. Listen backwards, and look.”
Praise
"Rosen meticulously recreates the Civil War from a Southern point of view, and her narrator is a man of both character and contradiction . . . . Rosen does a remarkable job in terms of research and authenticity." —Booklist
"A big, sprawling Civil War epic, Rosen’s first novel contains enough romance and history to draw Miss Scarlett’s fans like flies to honey. . . . plenty of battle detail and frequent appearances by real historical figures all add up to a winner..."—LIBRARY JOURNAL
"Rosen, a deacon in the Episcopal church and a hospital chaplain, delivers an auspicious debut set during the Civil War. Serena Hallam, the beautiful daughter of a prominent Charleston family, is married to handsome Hugh Hallam, a Virginia native, West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran. The happy couple lives with their three children and a dozen slaves at Palmyra Farm in Tennessee. A progressive who is concerned for the welfare of his slaves, Hallam laments the growing sectional acrimony and insists that rational heads will prevail in the end. Regardless, when the war begins, Hallam puts aside “his conflicted loyalties” and joins the Confederate army. Appointed commander of the 8th Tennessee Infantry Regiment, he is wounded and taken prisoner at Shiloh. In his absence, Serena struggles against long odds to run Palmyra Farm and hold the family together. Rosen paints a balanced picture of antebellum life and writes convincingly about the horrors of combat. (Her description of field hospitals is especially chilling.) Civil War buffs in particular will welcome this thoughtful historical novel." —Publisher's Weekly
Bio
Elisabeth Payne Rosen was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and educated at Hollins College, Virginia. After working in New York City, she moved to London with her husband, Martin Rosen, a film and theater producer, where they stayed for thirteen years. An ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church, she lives and works as a hospital Chaplain in Marin County, California. This is her first novel.
Civil War Deacon (blog)
Q&A with the Author
1. Why did you choose to write a novel about the Civil War?
I was getting out of a red London Transport bus in front of the Duke of York’s Barracks in London, minding my business and trying to keep my groceries from spilling on the sidewalk, when out of the clear blue sky I was overcome by a single, overwhelming desire: I want to know everything there is to know about the American Civil War. It was as clear as that. Which was strange, because growing up, I’d always been puzzled by those historical markers along the sides of southern highways: who would be interested in standing at the edge of an empty meadow or an overgrown woodlot, trying to imagine some skirmish that happened so long ago?
Looking back, I think my epiphany (I joke that I was “called” to the Civil War) was a form of homesickness for America, for the South. I had been part of a big, close family and felt their absence sharply; I missed the heat, the food, the intimacy of relations between the races, troubled though they continued to be. Why this should have taken the form it did—obsession not only with the period surrounding the war, but with the actual battles, the maps and strategy—I did not and do not know. I was anti-war in general and had never even been interested in board or card games that required strategy of any kind. Anyway, intrigued by my obsession, a friend suggested that I put all that energy into a book.
2. How did you ensure your tale was authentic to time and place?
To say that I read extensively in the period is an understatement; I lived and breathed the War and everything that surrounded it. The library at the American Embassy had outgrown its quarters and been donated to the University of London, so in those pre-Google days, I would hire a babysitter for my two small children and take the tube to Russell Square with a list of all the things I wanted to know. I’d sit on the floor in the stacks and just inhale it all, copying down the few factual things I needed to remember. Then on trips back to New York or Louisiana, I’d pore over or buy secondhand copies of whatever I could get my hands on—books, letters, plantation journals, slave narratives, agricultural quarterlies. (Although I already knew a lot about growing cotton, from my summers on the farm/ plantation where my father and his six brothers grew up—the model for the “Palmyra” of the story).
The whole process was completely absorbing—at least to me. At one point, my husband had to warn that if I didn’t stop talking about it, we would never be invited anywhere; the eyes of even our most faithful friends were beginning to glaze over. So I continued on my own. I discovered that there’s no library on earth that doesn’t have a pretty decent section on the Civil War, with its own little oddities--from the Chelsea Library in London, where I found a biography of Stonewall Jackson written by a Sandhurst instructor, to Eastern Montana College in Billings, where I holed up for six weeks once while my husband was making a film there.
3. Please tell us about your encounter with the renowned Shelby Foote.
Shelby Foote had gone to high school with one of my uncles in Greenville, Mississippi. He agreed to meet with me in Memphis, and from the instant we met, over a cheeseburger (mine) at the Holiday Inn, it was if we’d known each other forever. There was no small talk; we began exchanging personal impressions of Union and Confederate figures as if they’d just left the table, or were about to arrive: Sam Grant and Bobby Lee, Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Shaking his head, he would say things like, “I’ve never cared for Phil Sheridan. I’ve simply never liked the man--and I don’t care who knows it.” I thought I’d died and gone to heaven—no more glazed eyes! He was full of original anecdotes, and narrated the entire Battle of Memphis for me from the levee above the Mississippi River.
4. How did you discover the voices of Hugh and Serena Hallam? What was hardest and what was most rewarding about writing from so many points of view?
Hugh has remained more or less the same since he first cropped up in my imagination. He’s a lot like my husband in his character and physical bravery, and like my father, too. He‘s also me, what’s inside my head: my prideful nature, my struggle to do the right thing.
Hugh Hallam is first and foremost a soldier, and being from the Vietnam generation myself, that has always fascinated me: the whole paradox of being trained for war—being good at it --yet aware, through experience, of the pure destructiveness of war, its fatal glamor to the uninitiated and the unexposed. There were many, many like him on both sides of the issue in the 1850’s, but they were ultimately swept up into the whirlwind--and for the most part, once they were in uniform and under fire, they shot and killed each other with the same degree of effectiveness (or ineffectiveness), the same determination to defend those fighting on either side of them, as the ones who’d abjured the idea of war entirely--or had been pressing for it all along.
Oddly enough, Serena took longer to emerge. I had this idea that it was somehow more admirable--more imaginative and difficult--to create a character as unlike myself as possible. Later, I gave in and let her be as flawed as I am, make her own mistakes. After that, she fully “owned” her half of the book, as I’d always intended. I think of the two of them as equal characters in every way.
Writing from many different points of view was easy for me; I didn’t even know that’s what I was doing until somebody pointed it out. I suppose it’s a writer’s cliché to say so, but all my characters without exception are a part of myself. I do not deny any of them.
5. What are your connections to the South? Do those connections remain a part of your life?
I am still deeply connected to the South. A couple of years ago, a group of friends out here in California, men and women, each chose three or four words to describe themselves, such as American, woman, lawyer, etc. My first word was “southern”. It’s not that I think it’s the most important thing about me; it’s just that it’s the ground (literally) on which the rest has been constructed. My mother, three of my four siblings, and many, many of my oldest friends still live in the South, and I remain very connected with all of them.
6. The hero of your novel is a white slaveowner who is depicted sympathetically. Do you expect any controversy from this?
This is simply one exploration—my exploration—of what it felt like to be a certain kind of white southerner in the late 1850’s, and at the same time, what it might have felt like to be a slave—or I should say, what it felt like to be these particular human beings, all of them enmeshed in a horrifying and inhuman system.
My own belief is that if and when deep racial healing ever happens in this country, it will happen first in the South.
7. As a Chaplain and a religious person, did you feel any conflicts in writing about slavery and war?
It’s very odd: after my daughter read the completed manuscript she said, “Why don’t you say anything about religion? It’s the most important thing in your life.” I’ve thought about that a lot, and I still don’t know the answer. It’s true that, aside from a couple of scenes, there’s very little that’s overtly “religious” in HALLAM’S WAR, yet everything I’ve written in it—the way I feel toward my characters, how I view the historical outcome of the war—comes from my own deepest moral convictions—which are absolutely not separate from my religious beliefs.
8. What does your work in the hospital require? Did any of your experience as a Chaplain inform your book?
I have worked for many years in a hospital for physical rehabilitation: severe head injuries, spinal cord injuries, strokes. I walk into a given hospital room and see a patient lying on a bed, usually looking terrible--at least at the beginning. They may be paralyzed, terribly disfigured, mentally confused by trauma, age or the medications swirling through their system. Who they seem to be at that moment is not who they know themselves to be; not their ordinary self, much less their best self. My part in their recovery is to see and apprehend them as they once were (i.e., listening from a place of inner spaciousness, recording images and facts in my mind); accept and love them fully as they are now; and simultaneously see them—actually see them!--as they have the capacity to become. Obviously, this is good training for a novelist--though I suspect it works the other way around, as well.
9. What's next?
There’s a subject that’s been going around in my mind for years--non-fiction. It has to do with growing up in the South just before and during the Civil Rights era, and would require sleuthing around about people and events I was too young to understand at the time. I even have a great title for it, but since I haven’t checked to see whether it’s copyrighted, I’ll keep it to myself. And yes, I do often think about what happened to Serena and Lewis and Varick and Kitty and the others, after the war was over.
Excerpt
The early morning darkness reminded Hugh Hallam of Mexico; then as now he had saddled his horse before dawn and ridden out while the others slept, to survey the territory around San Augustín before the day’s assault and get the feel of the land in his bones. He wondered why he should think of the war now, when peace lay over the fields and the heat of the day was still a long way off. Beyond the fences, the cotton lay in dark, leafy rows in the fading starlight, nothing like the stony wasteland of the pedregal fourteen years ago, before the battle that would rage all day towards Churubusco.
Behind him in the silent house, his wife, Serena, would have drowsed back into sleep by now. They had made love early, while it was still cool. He remembered her body on the bare sheets, the heat and softness of her skin. No smoke arose yet from the brick kitchen as he rode by: Markie was not yet up. He had drunk a cup of cold water from the cistern on his way out.
The moon had set by the time he closed the last gate behind him and headed out towards the orchard, past the long, low house and through the two short lines of slave cabins. He had built the first of them himself—his only shelter that first winter in Tennessee, when he'd left Serena and the children behind and come out ahead to clear the land. The others he had added as necessity dictated over the years. They were small, plain structures, but of good quality by the standards of the neighborhood; he had allowed his slaves to build their own chimneys of solid brick, purchased by himself at the mason's, and not the usual wattle and daub that managed to catch fire once or twice a year. Each cabin had a small yard where its inhabitants could keep chickens or tend a patch of greens.
Five of the cabins were silent and dark now, their narrow doors open to catch the coolness of the night air. In the sixth cabin a candle burned. French would be awake, studying the advertising circulars he had picked up yesterday in Kinlock. Hallam paused in front of his door, then resisted the impulse to intrude. It would be a long day; let him have his privacy before it began.