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Battlefield (Magill Book Reviews)

Part history, part meditation, BATTLEFIELD describes the interaction of an artist with agriculture and history. Peter Svenson, a painter, and his family purchase a tract of land in the Shenendoah Valley of Virginia in order to secure a refuge from twentieth century commerce and “progress.” Their ideal homesite, however, sits upon forty acres of land over which 125 years before armies raged. For Svenson finds his property to be the actual site of a Civil War battle—Cross Keys. This skirmish, which occurred in June of 1862, marked the penultimate action of Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, though Jackson himself and fully half of his army were not engaged. The Confederate Valley campaign succeeded in distracting Union attention and subtracting Union forces from the primary military struggle that summer—General McClelland’s Peninsula Campaign, the Union assault on Richmond. As such Jackson’s Valley maneuvers were, from the Southern point of view, a strategic success, and Cross Keys a tactical triumph.

Svenson’s book is not quite so winning. It attempts to tie together the historic events with Svenson’s struggles to make his homestead a working farm and peripherally to understand his place in the grand scheme of time. But the narrative lacks drama; Svenson succeeds in all he does—renovating an ancient bank barn, forming a pond, constructing his house, acquiring and refurbishing machinery. One never fears for his ultimate success. Yet it is never clear what his victory means or whom he vanquishes. The last several “farm” chapters deal with harvesting, baling, and storing hay, and while this activity may be of interest to a few readers, they must be very few. What one misses is the kind of musings Thoreau allows himself in WALDEN. Svenson never gets far enough afield, never leaves the realm of his farm and its history.

Nor will the attention of Civil War buffs be riveted for long. Svenson tells and retells the story of Cross Keys, varying his focus in an interesting way. But the fact remains that this was no Antietam or Shiloh or Gettysburg; any reader who has studied those cataclysms will find Cross Keys tepid.

BATTLEFIELD is most interesting in those parts where 1862 and 1986 collide—the Svensons initially occupy a house, for example, in which a pane of window glass pierced by a minie ball has been preserved. Then the meaning or lack of meaning of history for moderns can be called to question, but coincidence, of itself, is not enough. One wants reflection in this kind of meditative essay, not a how-to manual on the operation of a baler. Svenson shows himself to be historically sensitive and mechanically self-reliant; what he never demonstrates is that these two attributes are in any way related or complementary—a deficiency the narrative paucity of BATTLEFIELD cannot, unfortunately, overcome.