I’d like to quote from Chapter 7 of ‘The Black Flower’ by Bahr reminds me very much of Faulkner:

“So the women could not forgive. Their passion remained intact, carefully guarded and nurtured by the bitter knowledge of all they had lost, of all that had been stolen from them. For generations they vilified the Yankee race so that the thief would have a face, a name, a mysterious country into which he had withdrawn and from which he might venture again. They banded together into a militant freemasonry of remembering, and from that citadel held out against any suggestion that what they had suffered and lost might have been in vain. They created the Lost Cause, and consecrated that proud fiction with the blood of real men. To the Lost Cause they dedicated their own blood, their own lives, and to it they offered books, monographs, songs, acres and acres of bad poetry….

“But their greatest, their supreme and most poignant accomplishment, was the Confederate Soldier. Out of the smoke they plucked him, and set him atop a stone pedestal in the courthouse yard where he stood free at last of hunger and fear and raggedness and madness and violence; where he would never desert nor write home for a substitute, never run, never complain of short rations, never question the sacred Cause of which he was protector, and for which he had marched forth to willing sacrifice. But his musket was always at rest, and not for nothing was he always young, his eyes always soft as he looked backward over the long years. For he was really no soldier at all, but an image created by women, and he was born not of war but of sorrow and of fierce desire.”

Chris

Howard Bahr continued Faulkner’s excellence of writings on the war in his wonderful novels, ‘The Black Flower’, ‘Year of Jubilo’ and ‘The Judas Field’. They are full of wonderful passages just like Faulkner’s famous one quoted in the post.

Chris