A President Rewrites History
Steven G. Kellman | January 16, 2004 | Books & the Culture
A President Rewrites History
BY STEVEN G. KELLMAN
The Hornet's Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary
War
By Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster
480 pages, $27
immy Carter began his publishing
career in 1975 with a book called Why Not the Best? An exhortation to
excellence, it was a campaign pitch that helped put Carter, a Naval Academy
graduate with expertise in nuclear energy, into the White House in 1976. The
title poses an excellent question, one that American voters have tended to answer
by choosing affable mediocrity over wonks who seem too clever or accomplished.
In 1980, when Carter lost out to Ronald Reagan in his bid for reelection, he
began a career as the best former president since John Quincy Adams. As an international
troubleshooter and advocate for health care and human ri ghts, mediating conflicts
in Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, and Liberia and monitoring elections in Panama,
Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and East Timor, Carter earned
the Nobel Prize for Peace he received in 2002.
At age 79, he has now become the best novelist to hold the
Nobel Prize for Peace since Elie Wiesel, who won it in 1986. The dust jacket
of The Hornet’s Nest hails Carter’s debut novel as “The
first work of fiction by a President of the United States.” (The most recent
State of the Union address probably does not qualify simply because it was not
written entirely by George W. Bush.) Carter evidently not only wrote the entirety
of The Hornet’s Nest, he also designed its cover, a painting of
a frontiersman aiming his rifle through the woods at a group of British redcoats.
“I’ll never lie to you,” Carter promised
voters. But if, in Picasso’s formula, art is the lie that tells the truth,
a reader might wish that, in writing this historical novel, the 39th President
of the United States had felt freer to invent. A didactic document worthy of
the earnest man who, even after election to high office, taught Sunday school
in Plains, Georgia, The Hornet’s Nest is an attempt to overcome
ignorance about the role of the South in the American Revolution.
“Most Americans know very little about major events
of the war in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas,” explains Carter at
the outset of the book, “and I wanted to present as accurate an account
as possible of the complex and crucial interrelationships among colonists, British
officials, and the Indian tribes during the twenty years that led to the war’s
successful end in 1783.” Add Savannah—where a British victory over
the rebels and their French allies left 1,200 killed or seriously wounded, the
costliest battle of the war—to Concord, Valley Forge, and Saratoga as stations
of the War of Independence. Vietnam is not the only place where American soldiers
perished in rice paddies. The Hornet’s Nest begins in Philadelphia
in 1763, with the meeting of Ethan Pratt, the son of a shoemaker, and Espey
Nischmann, the daughter of a Moravian minister. After marrying, the couple moves
to North Carolina and then to Georgia. Hundreds of characters flit in and out
of Carter’s episodic epic, but Ethan, returning to his scorched homestead
after the truce, fills the final frame. A reluctant warrior who shares with
his Quaker neighbors an aversion to violence, Pratt is a barometer of Southern
fortunes. When his best friend, Kindred Morris, is killed in cold blood by a
British officer, Pratt joins the rebel cause. When his young son, Henry, is
murdered by Tory marauders, he vows vengeance against their leader, though he
recognizes that atrocities are commonplace, committed by both sides in the bloody
struggle.
In fact, The Hornet’s Nest is generated through
polygonal geometry; it recounts a many-sided war that pits crown against colony,
regulars against guerrillas, Indians against whites, slaves against masters,
neighbors against neighbors, in shifting permutations. Personal rivalries as
much as military strategies and political ideals determine the outcome of battles.
Alliances are undermined by quarreling and even duelling leaders. As much as
the Civil War, the southern flank of the American Revolution was a vicious fratricidal
conflict, in which non-combatants were prodded into combat and combatants adopted
only provisional allegiances.
Though written by a former president of the United States,
The Hornet’s Nest is not a chauvinistic tribute to American independence,
a literary celebration of the Fourth of July, a date that goes unmentioned in
the book. If anything, its deepest sympathies seem to lie with London, which
offered freedom to slaves who joined its forces and support for the Creeks and
Cherokees against settlers who were poaching on their tribal lands. Many of
the rebels are portrayed as reckless, uncouth opportunists, and the most fascinating
character, Thomas Brown, leads a guerrilla band supporting Britain. Brown begins
the story as the very prototype of an effete English aristocrat who arrives
in North America with a deed to land he does not know how to cultivate and a
lieutenant’s commission acquired by money not merit. However, in the novel’s
most vivid incident, Brown, exposed as a Tory spy, is tarred and feathered and
almost killed. Intent on avenging himself against his tormentors, he makes it
his business to learn the military craft, and he is soon organizing and leading
a ragtag group of backwoodsmen and Indians that proves to be the most potent
fighting force in Georgia.
For most of the war, Georgia was so thoroughly Tory that,
as Carter notes, the Continental Congress in practice represented only 12 states.
The hotheads who tossed tea into Boston Harbor taxed the patience of most South
Carolinians, and Florida, recently acquired from Spain, remained a safe base
for the British command. In many battles below Virginia, most of those fighting
on the side of the crown were colonials loyal to London. Wistful longings for
the Lost Cause have persisted long after Appomattox, but are they not only nostalgia
for old times in the land of cotton but also buried memory of a time when the
South was proudly monarchist?
The Hornet’s Nest derives its title from a small
enclave of swamps, creeks, and hills in northern Georgia in which embattled
republicans take refuge and from which they launch guerrilla forays against
pro-British forces. “I’m talkin’ about like bein’ inside
our own hornet’s nest so anybody that messes with us will live—or
die—to regret it,” explains Elijah Clarke, the rugged leader of an
unconventional militia that is to George Washington’s American army what
Brown’s scrappy volunteers are to the redcoats.
Carter signals that Clarke, a cunning frontiersman, is illiterate
and uneducated by dropping the gs in his gerunds. But every other character
sounds the same. That includes Newota, a 17-year-old Creek who speaks fluent
King’s English after just a few months of hanging out with Kindred Morris.
The Hornet’s Nest is a minefield of linguistic anachronisms. Clarke
employs the barbarous term “irregardless” long before its first recorded
appearance, in the early 20th century, and poor pioneers who encroach on Indian
territory in northern Georgia are referred to as “white trash,” a
phrase first noted in the 1830s. It does not take long residence below the Mason-Dixon
Line before Espey Pratt, a newcomer from Philadelphia, is sprinkling her speech
with “y’all.” Newota, the noblest of noble savages, delivers
lengthy disquisitions on indigenous customs as if he were a comparative anthropologist,
not an Indian adolescent with limited experience even in Georgia.
Carter himself furnishes extensive information about shoemaking,
carpentry, and farming in the 18th century. As if debriefed in the Oval Office,
a character named Reuben Starling comments on commerce between settlers and
the tribes when someone poses a leading question: “Mr. Starling, tell us
how you came to be a trader, and something about how you do it.” Awkward
exposition hobbles the novel, and when, about two-thirds through, the narrative
finally gains momentum, pivotal episodes, like the story of an abused slave
named Quash Dolly who helps deliver Savannah to the British in return for her
freedom, seem sporadic insertions lacking full drama.
In his vivid personal memoir, An Hour Before Daylight (2001), Carter
evoked a barefoot rural childhood whose greatest pleasure was in plowing furrows
straight. Trying to set the historical record straight about his native Georgia
and some of his own ancestors, Carter’s first novel is a product of assiduous
research if uninspired narrative skills. Experience with Habitat for Humanity
allows him to provide a detailed account of how to build a cabin in the Southern
wilderness, as he builds his story line by line, methodically. As a presidential
candidate, Carter got into trouble for confessing that he had lusted in his
heart, and, except for a graphic scene of rape, his novel has trouble portraying
relations between men and women. The president who brokered the Camp David Accords
between Israel and Egypt and became a roving peacemaker after leaving the White
House is evident in his novel’s sympathy for a community of Quakers who
remain largely aloof from war. The Hornet’s Nest is a curiosity
of presidential history, the 18th book by a novice historical novelist possessed
of zestful curiosity. It is hard to imagine the incumbent president, who has
admitted that he does not read even newspapers, writing—much less reading—this
volume, which despite its flaws, is a studious reminder not to take the South
for granted.
Steven G. Kellman teaches comparative literature at the University of Texas
at San Antonio. His most recent book, as editor, is Switching Languages:
Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (University of Nebraska Press).
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