Author David O. Stewart has just released The Burning Land, the second novel in The Overstreet Saga. I’ve had the pleasure of reading several of David’s novels, including The New Land, the first in this series and I’m delighted to have him here on the blog.
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I think it started with my father’s letters to me at camp. He could be a distant parent, fiercely cerebral and work-focused, not much interested in children between when they began to speak and when they had something to say. In the letters, I met a different man.
On paper, he was funny. He observed social peccadilloes, his own and those of others. He was mild-mannered and tolerant. He didn’t make me nervous. I liked this guy. As years passed, I realized that his letters not only were a rarely visible side of him, but also were how he wished to be, at least some of the time. On paper, he could be that person.
That’s part of the magic of a written letter, one on paper that has been planned. Letters can be drafted in a solitude that allows experimentation with different voices, with self-awareness, one that permits revelation that might be painful or feel awkward in person. It barely resembles texts fired off in the welter of daily life, or emails sent without being reread for tone, completeness, or typos.
When writers invented the novel three centuries ago, they naturally used letters between fictional protagonists to reveal character, provide backstory, and move the action along. That’s how they functioned IRL (see, I have texted; I just hate to).
Early epistolary novels included Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). More recent examples include The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C.S. Lewis and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964).
When I began researching The Burning Land, an historical novel, I again met the power of letters for story-telling. The tale, inspired by two ancestors’ rocky path through America in the 1860s, follows unfortunate lovers through mad, violent times. My early research included reading many letters between soldiers and those at home. Often literate, Civil War soldiers endured years of separation from loved ones. They lived rough, surrounded by death from vile diseases and battlefield slaughter. But they wrote wonderful letters.
A classic of the genre came from Major Sullivan Ballou in July 1861. He wrote to his wife on the eve of a battle, anticipating his death the next day. As featured in Ken Burns’ documentary of the Civil War, Ballou told her:
O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth, and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you in the garish day, and the darkest night, amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours, always, always, and, if the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air cools your throbbing temples, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Correspondents wrote infrequently. They often waited for a reply before writing again, which made the letters a conversation that ripened over weeks and months. They chose words carefully, considerately, the recipient’s spirit strong in the letter-writer’s mind. When military duties interrupted letter-writing, soldiers would pick up their pencils days later, sometimes in a different mood or having found new ways to express themselves. Often the unspoken was as potent as the spoken.
Conventions of the time are evident. Endearments, unlike Major Ballou’s, tended to be brief and awkward, yet brevity gave them weight. Soldiers devoted little space to the horrors of the battlefield, usually skimming over the subject in detached, summary terms. Wives wrote little of the suffering from having the family breadwinner off at war. Few at either end wrote of fear, except when silence fell over the other end of the conversation. Those terrifying silences brought scoldings and fervent pleas for a response.
Homely events were safe ground: crops, poor food, seasons, mutual acquaintances. Humorous moments were cherished, related with relish. So much was not said, either because it was too delicate, or too explosive, or had been forgotten in the tumble of days.
What, I realized, a powerful way to tell a story, to allow characters to say who they were and were not and at considerable length. Long speeches in novels usually seem ridiculous; other than the odd gruesome bore, people don’t talk in multi-paragraph bursts.
But letters may plausibly run on. We expect and often want them to. The letter-writer can develop her subject at the length it merits, or can step around it decorously, conspicuously changing the topic, which can signal as much as or more than words might.
And letters offer one final blessing for the novelist: during the Civil War, a shaky postal system worked slowly, allowing a natural telescoping of months of combat, or of camp life, or of home-front gloom. I used the letter format in only seven of forty chapters, but those chapters provide a change of voice and new perspectives on each principal protagonist.
Is the epistolary novel destined to be frozen in the amber of historical fiction, unfit for use in novels about our world of hyperspeed communications? Yes and no. Today, soldiers text and Facetime from war zones. Cursive handwriting is a dying skill. A letter scrawled on a piece of paper may be seen as frequently as the white rhinoceros. So, the type of correspondence sustained by Henry and Katie in The Burning Land won’t fit tales set in 2023.
But novelists are resourceful when it comes to avoiding the straitjacket of the omniscient authorial voice. Their characters use today’s communication tools. In Russell Banks’ penultimate novel, Foregone, an ill-tempered, dying man tries to explain himself in a documentary film interview but the filmmaker keeps changing the subject. Other writers tell contemporary and futurist stories through emails and blogs, texts (ugh), social media posts, news stories, PowerPoint slides, and even imagined forms of communication.
Each form of epistle carries its own power and its own limitations. I retain an acute fondness, however, for the pace, reflection, and silences of nineteenth-century letters.
David O. Stewart is the author of five novels and five historical narratives. His Civil War novel, The Burning Land, released on April 4.
The Burning Land, Book 2 of the Overstreet Saga brings the reader back to the Civil War and its aftermath, when Americans fought to determine what the nation would become—a time of excitement, opportunity, and agonizing loss, when history played havoc with the lives of ordinary people like Henry Overstreet and Katie Nash.
In 1861, Henry and Katie have found love on the rugged Maine coast. He builds boats. She wants to teach school whenever her family duties relent. Their hearts are light and the future looks bright. Then America explodes in civil war.
At first surprised by Katie’s anti-slavery feelings, then persuaded, Henry enlists in the 20th Maine Infantry, fated to become a legendary regiment in the Union Army. Staggering through a dozen brutal battles, including the desperate defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, he rises to sergeant. Katie, working on short-term teaching contracts, organizes neighbor women to make warm items for Maine’s men in uniform. Quiet letters between Henry in army camps and Katie at home strengthen their love. Finally receiving a brief furlough, he hurries home for a rushed wedding and precious hours as man and wife.
But history’s grip is fierce.
A ghastly battlefield wound ends Henry’s war. Katie nurses him through a long recuperation, but they cannot agree—should they return to Maine or join America’s mad flight westward? Ultimately transplanted to booming Chicago, little goes right for them in that overnight metropolis, which will test their strength and commitment as never before.
Many thanks, David. I’m one of those readers who loves to see letters mixed in with a story! Best wishes for The Burning Land. Earlier posts by David include The Birth of the Lincoln Deception and Growing a Fictional Family Tree.
FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY
M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel is THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, a dual timeline set in Hong Kong. Mary’s other novels, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.
