TEV GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): DELIA FALCONER'S THE LOST THOUGHTS OF SOLDIERS

The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers
By Delia Falconer
Soft Skull Press
151 pp
$16.00

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

Regular readers of The Elegant Variation know that good things do indeed come in small packages. Roy’s Kesey’s Nothing in the World was virtually unputdownable and our host’s obsession with enthusiasm for Sheila Heti’s Ticknor is well documented. Delia Falconer threw her hat into the ring last Spring with The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, which was released around the same time that the aforementioned novellas came out. Weighing in at a bantam-like 155 pages, Falconer’s haunting prose is every bit as evocative as another novella with a historical subject: Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

For a book so slender, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is difficult to pin down. First and foremost, it’s a rumination on history, warfare, and its slippery relationship with the truth. The narrative is fainter than one would expect for a book about the Battle of Little Bighorn, an event overloaded with received wisdom passed down through the ages, some of it accurate, some not. Perhaps the best way to approach the book is through a literal reading of its title.

Captain Frederick Benteen is an old soldier coming to terms with his past. History has not been kind to Benteen and his reputation has been slagged by armchair field generals who suggest the outcome of the Battle would have been different if Benteen had accompanied Custer into the teeth of the slaughter. When a letter arrives from a scholar eager to make his reputation by clearing Benteen’s name, the old soldier starts poking through his personal effects and journals from the Indian campaigns.

As Benteen considers what, if any, his response to the earnest young scholar should be, a host of unforgettable characters emerge from the fog of his memories: the recklessly irreverent Handsome Jack, the soulful and reflective Star-Gazer, the bawdy and slightly crazed cook, and the great man himself, Colonel Custer who emits a weird aura every time he appears on the page—call it the vanity of the doomed.

In Benteen’s recollections, the men are seldom engaged in warfare, but rather the hard licks and picks of 19th century Army life. Falconer knows that a soldier’s existence is 90% boredom and thus the men are always talking about themselves: their experience (or lack thereof) with women, their alcohol preferences, their dreams. Their thoughts are as poetic (I don’t think a soul is a good idea if given infinite space) as they are ribald (You quim quaffer! You gusset-guzzling bloomer-bolter! You old tuft-taster!).

These portraits have a startling intimacy about them and though Benteen would never admit it (nor would Falconer capitulate to a formulation so trite), he clearly loves his men. His recollections constitute a meta manuscript, a lush catalog of lost thoughts that had he foolishly followed Custer into the fray, would never have come to light.

Quiztunes for Delia Falconer

TEV: Thanks for taking the time from your travels to talk with The Elegant Variation. You just returned from Japan. Were you there for work or play?

DF: For play. I turned forty a couple of weeks ago and decided I wanted to be in Kyoto on the day, walking beneath the thousands of red torii at Fushimi-Inari. But I wouldn't be surprised if Japan works its way into my work over the next few years.

TEV: You mentioned in an interview that your interest in this footnote to the Battle of Little Bighorn was a happy accident of your research at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. How did you come to be interested in the American West?

DF: I was led to the west by a long-term obsession with the early beginnings of cinema (Muybridge, Marey, and Edison's cinematograph). When I travelled to Cody I was particularly fascinated by Edison. Some of Edison's first films were of performers in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The show (with its stage coaches under siege, stampedes of buffalo and Native American performers) was actually a "western" in almost every sense, except for the fact that cinema itself was yet to be invented. I was struck by the way this sense of nostalgic spectacle seems to have always been married to the idea of the west, even before its conquest was complete. I wanted to capture this sense of hauntedness, of a second shadow world, that seems to have always clung to it. My main character, Frederick Benteen, understands himself as part of a deeply private, shadow-world that the myth of the west has replaced; he contrasts himself to Custer, who is greedy for the spotlight.

TEV: There's this Faulknerian attention to history as a living legacy that permeates the book. As the past comes to life in the memories of your protagonist, he is acutely aware of how history has been represented and misrepresented, and how those representations continue to be perceived. Did you ever feel like the scholar who endeavors to set the record straight?

DF: "Faulknerian" - thank you! I can live with that. I've certainly been a scholar— my first incarnation was as a cultural studies academic–so perhaps that shows. But to be honest I think I have more in common with Benteen. The young scholar believes there is a "right" answer to discover; whereas Benteen, in spite of his smaller, darker self, finds that he's ultimately more interested in human behaviour, in subtext. My aim wasn't to reinstate Benteen as a hero over Custer—well perhaps it was, at the beginning—but I found myself more interested in questions about how we write history, and how we appear to other people and come to be remembered. Are we most ourselves in our heroic moments, or in our gestures, our throwaway jokes? Does history lie in the grand events, like wars, or in the "nine tenths nothing", as Benteen puts it, when we are waiting for something significant to happen? How can history be written to accommodate the weight of ordinary lives?

I've always been very impressed with something Kundera wrote in an essay on the novel: that the novelist's job—and the thing that makes the novel unique - is to create a world where judgment is suspended and characters do things that may surprise us. According to Kundera, the novel's business is not to be dogmatic, but radically skeptical. So is Benteen--there are many things he's done that are repugnant or questionable, but this quality of skepticism gives his life a certain kind of grace. Benteen becomes a kind of novelist, if you like - like his strange friend Star-Gazer. Instead of writing the revisionist history the boy wants, he finds himself searching for a form to accommodate the lives and dreams of all the men he went to war with; one that recognises that the books are made up not only of what they say but of what they are silent about. I like writing fiction because, in order for it to work, I have to try to be like Benteen and put my own quickness to judge aside; to try to find a better self to write out of.

TEV: On one hand, the literal lost thoughts of the soldiers in your book, particularly those of Star-Gazer and Handsome Jack, have the density of poetry; on the other hand, their yearnings and quotidian catalogs could fill several books. Why did you choose the form of a novella for this story?

DF: Two writers were guiding influences as I was writing The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers: W G Sebald and Junichiro Tanizaki. I'm a huge fan of Sebald's, especially the way in which he assumes our knowledge of the Holocaust in his novels and works around its edges to concentrate instead on ephemeral details of trauma and longing. In doing this he completely renews that history's capacity to shock; this is what makes his novels profoundly moving and deeply moral. This idea of renewing history to make it sting appealed to me greatly. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Tanizaki writes about Musashi's abiding sexual obsession with "woman-heads", the noseless heads of warriors slain on the battlefield and taken as trophies. There is a compelling Japanese elegance about Tanizaki's choice to focus his story on this bizarre detail; and, again, that history seems more alive and human to me because of that choice. Sebald gave me the courage to assume that readers were already familiar with the story of Little Bighorn and to concentrate instead on the human detail, the "seams and spaces in between" as Benteen himself says. And there was something about the west that seemed compatible with an almost Asian approach. The haiku-like brevity of people's speech in Wyoming, for example; and the sense of a shadow-world at its edges. I wanted to emphasise the strangeness of that history, to make it foreign, in order to take the spotlight off Custer and turn the focus onto poignant, ordinary moments.

TEV: What are you working on now?

DF: A new novel—I'm sorry, but I'm superstitious about talking about novels-in-progress, so I can't say anything about it. I realised recently that almost all my writing is in some way or other about the way technologies define our lives: whether these technologies are cinema, or photography (the subject of my first novel), or ancient aqueducts. I'm currently working on a collection of essays, called With the Things of the Earth, about our relationship to the proliferation over the last century of man-made things that now outnumber us. I'm also writing essays, features, and reviews. My current interest is in technological solutions to environmental problems: a couple of months ago I flew down to Tasmania to talk to a scientist who has come up with a new method of preventing road kill. I'm also obsessed by the TV series CSI, and am in the middle of an essay about it.

Comments

[Laird Hunt]

Excellent review and interview. I'll definitely be getting hold of this one.

[James]

I'll belatedly second Laird's comment. I picked this up on the strength of your post, Jim, and was amply rewarded. Concise, but rich--in fact, its richness may be due to its brevity. Thanks.

[Capt. Henry Bruns]

I have not read the novel but the depiction of FW Benteen in this review has no resemblance to the real man. He was outspoken to a fault and the only actions he never second-guessed were his own. FW Benteen was one of the bravest cavalry officers to graduate from the civil war and even his enemies could not deny it.

The guy described in your review sounds more self-obsessed than John Kerry.