Concerning Sterling Price and the nature of the novel.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



I have recently finished reading two books about one-time Missouri Governor and Confederate Major-General Sterling Price.  These two were Robert E Shalhope's 1971 biography Sterling Price:  Portrait of a Southerner, and Thomas C Reynolds' unfinished 1867 manuscript titled General Sterling Price and the Confederacy, edited and annotated by Robert G Schultz and published in 2009.  I purchased Schultz' book at the Missouri History Museum on the cold, rainy morning of 28 March 2010, and the Shalhope book sometime later on Ebay.

Price figures prominently in the Missouri Civil War saga, and in a few decades preceding, and a synchronism entangles his life and times with those of one of the characters of Memphis Blues Again, Old Tom, as well as his distant descendant, Max Bainbridge; as such, coming to terms with Price is relevant to the novel's conception and construction.   Although Price fought for the rebels and Old Tom for the Federals, I'd long hoped to learn to admire Price.  However, the more I've read and learned about him, and the deeper I've read between the lines, the more I've come to despise Price.  I see lingering bits of him in the present, peering out gluttonously from behind the pig-eyes of the privileged occupying positions of power, they whose only allegiance is to advancing their own status at the expense of all the subordinates and underlings who are depending on them for a certain minimum degree of wisdom and guidance.  But on closer inspection in the present, as in the 1860s, we discover occasionally that presumed philanthropic impulse is sometimes simply absent.  Sterling Price was all about Sterling Price and no one else.  When he was lucky his fortunes, and those of the state of Missouri, rose; when his luck ran out he fell, heedless of, and disavowing any responsibility for, the ruination that littered his wake.  Confederate Missouri fell, too.  Whether that was lucky for the state is for others to decide, although I certainly have my own opinion.

As I've been working on the second draft of Memphis Blues Again I've come to appreciate a need to include a number of chapters set in the 1860s that will be directly intercut alongside the contemporary main thread of the story.  Among other things, these chapters will provide timely perspectives of Price's marches, as well as of the Ewing brothers on the Kansas-Missouri border, and later outside besieged Vicksburg.  Having now read these two Price books, I've reconsidered the portrait of him I'm going to paint in those particular chapters.

But also I confess that my conception of the basic structure of the novel is shifting, too.  It's occurred to me in the last couple of days, although the dissatisfaction has been growing incrementally for some time, that the novel as written is not sufficiently outrageous.  What I mean is that there is a massive impulse at work in this novel to try to get deep into the engines of history, and specifically to give a comprehensive accounting of why America is, in the present, the country that she is.  Trying to squeeze all of this into the conventional forms of the novel is a tight and constraining fit.  Anyway I've never been too good at being conventional, and increasingly I've been asking myself:  Why should I restrict my own grand vision in this novel to conform to and appease the stodgy, somnolent expectations of others?  I've been thinking lately about Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and Thomas Pynchon and especially about James Joyce.  And I remember most clearly that the idea of the novel is, after all, a rather recent human invention.  Human beings are under no obligation to shape their creativity in such a way as to accommodate the formats of the past.

In other words, increasingly I am of the opinion that in Memphis Blues Again I should not only tell the story I have to tell, but I should also have a go at reinventing this object known as the novel.  Exactly what this means I don't clearly know, yet, except that it involves nonchronological time; time as an extended solid, perhaps, so that past and present are all One Thing; all One single story; inseparable; fused.  That, it seems to me, is essential to breathing life into Memphis Blues Again.