The story history couldn't tell
Franklin resident Robert Hicks has lit a fire in the publishing
world with his tale of town's Civil War heroine
By ALAN BOSTICK - Staff Writer - The Tennesean
FRANKLIN — Asked if he's penned a second Gone With the Wind, Williamson County resident Robert Hicks pauses — a rare event for this talkative man.
"I haven't read
Gone With the Wind, so I can't tell you, though I have seen the movie," Hicks says, sitting in the study of his historic cabin.
It's a provocative question, perhaps, but unavoidable. The parallels between the books, at least superficially, are more or less exact.
Like Margaret Mitchell's 1936 classic, Hicks'
The Widow of the South, to debut here in nine days as part of a mammoth national publicity campaign, also features a strong-willed heroine, the real-life Carrie McGavock. Like Scarlett O'Hara, she enters as an ordinary soul and exits an extraordinary one.
There's a frustrated love affair — there, with Ashley Wilkes, here with Zachariah Cashwell — and prematurely departing children.
By far the most obvious link, certainly, is the bloody backdrop of the failed Southern cause during the American Civil War. While Mitchell's novel deals of course with the fight for Atlanta and the reconstruction that followed, Hicks' is centered on the Battle of Franklin, a savage tide-turning encounter on Nov. 30, 1864. It was in the immediate aftermath of that five-hour struggle that the McGavock family's Carnton Plantation home was converted into a makeshift Confederate hospital, with Carrie McGavock assuming the unlikely role of head nurse.
It becomes clear, though, through conversation with Hicks, that any apparent links are due less to conscious intent than to the common experience of those Southerners who endured that phase of history — the experience, that is, of profound and irreversible change.
From behind the desk where he wrote
Widow on his desktop computer, Hicks explains that his own book is principally about one thing — transformation — and not just for his fictional characters. "I hope I have written a book that transforms people and makes people think about who they want to be," he says.
Even before the first book is sold, transformation, it seems, is in the air.
Convinced that
Widow represents a potential sensation, the book's publisher, Warner Books, has rethought its standard approach to a debut novel. The announced print run of 250,000 copies is an exceptionally high number for a first effort — a more common figure for such a book would be 25,000. Hicks, an entirely unknown writer of fiction, was also sent on a 20-city pre-publication tour; soon, he'll embark on a signing odyssey of more than 30 cities.
And then — perhaps not so surprising to those who know him — there's the mid-life transformation of Hicks himself, an impossibly energetic 54-year-old born and raised in South Florida but a Franklin area resident for more than three decades.
This shaven-headed, bespectacled man best known to many hereabouts as a music publisher, artist manager, art collector and plugged-in man-about-town is about to become an historical novelist read coast to coast. And presumably even read abroad, thanks to publishing rights already sold in the United Kingdom, France and Italy.
How big can it go? No movie deal yet, but Hollywood's said to be intrigued. Hicks already has been contacted by celebrities he's too cautious yet to name. But if Charles Frazier's
Cold Mountain, a less accessible, more self-consciously literary novel, can be made into a film, then the very readable, romance-tinged
Widow would seem a cinch. It also seems certain that Franklin will soon welcome tourists from all over — hooked fiction readers anxious to inspect the meticulously restored rooms of Carnton and stroll through the adjacent cemetery prepared after the war for about 1,500 Southern dead.
Within a couple of years, Hicks calculates that attendance at Carnton could jump from the current annual total of nearly 40,000 to as high as 300,000. That will largely be due, he believes, not only to his book, but also to the achievements of Franklin's Charge, which he co-chairs. This initiative is close to taking hold of what remains of the eastern flank of the Franklin battlefield — essentially the area immediately adjacent to the current Carnton property — and further rescuing historic terrain from the threat of modern development.
Ultimately, widespread exposure for this city and its remarkable history is what means most to Hicks. Touring Carnton in his company, one senses that, more than anything, he's a committed preservationist, and one who's been intimately tied since 1987 to Carnton's rising fortunes. After all, the original idea for
Widow, dating back nearly a decade, was to spread the word about Franklin's history, the people who lived it and Carnton's unique role.
As it turned out, that Hicks would sit down and write a book himself was the last thing on his mind.
That's not to say that fiction writing wasn't a dream from his earliest years in South Florida, where his parents, now deceased, had a water purification company. Quite the contrary.
"When I was a kid and would be sick, my dad wouldn't leave me with the TV remote control," Hicks recalled. "He would leave me with a couple of copies of the encyclopedia or
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. My parents revered words and reading.
"We were never told that children should be seen and not heard, but we were always told, 'Don't say anything unless it's a good story. Make it worthy of us listening to it.' "
Hicks still remembers the day, in seventh grade, when he sat down in the family library and jotted down titles of the novels he planned to write one day.
"Writing books was always thought to be a noble profession in our family. That said, the reality of life takes hold, and I chickened out."
Rather than write, Hicks finished school, settled in the Franklin area and began his successful career in country and rock music. He developed a close knowledge of so-called "outsider art" — usually understood as those colorful, quirky, tense paintings and sculpture by self-taught Southern artists — and has lectured widely as an authority. He has collected everything from fossilized shells and baseball cards to books and 18th-century Tennessee maps, and his isolated, late 18th-century log cabin, Labor in Vain, qualifies as a mini-museum. He co-curated the Art of Tennessee exhibition that opened in 2003 at Frist Center for the Visual Arts and included some of his own items. He's a partner in the B.B. King's Blues Clubs in Nashville, Memphis and Los Angeles.
That's hardly an exhaustive list of Hicks' activities, plans and dreams. He's one of those people who seems to know everyone, has something informed to say about almost anything, and seldom if ever turns things off.
Ask him for the one constant in his world, and he'll say creative give and take.
"I always wanted to be creative and be around creative people," he said.
But writing? No thanks.
"It's scary. It's tough. It's a hard route to go to come in night after night and try to figure it out."
So when it occurred to Hicks, sitting nine years ago in his PolyGram office on Music Row, that Carnton in particular and historic Franklin in general could use a visibility boost, he first thought of a movie.
But soon he concluded that a book did indeed make more sense. He literally spent years trying to convince someone else to take on the project. One friend actually wrote a version of the story, but it gradually became clear over time that Hicks himself would have to follow through on his own idea.
Who, after all, knew the subject any better?
From the start of the writing, Hicks had no doubt that McGavock and her sparsely-documented experience must be the book's focus. Even if accessible only in outline, the material was simply too incomparable to pass up.
"One of the largest private military cemeteries in America is in the backyard of her house," Hicks said. "When she dies (1905) there are multiple national obituaries telling us about the impact she had on a generation."
Still, Hicks realized that "everything I know about Carrie McGavock could be put in a pamphlet." Though it's said she wrote hundreds of letters, not one has surfaced at Carnton. She left no journal, though she did leave a remarkable "book of the dead" or "cemetery book," in which she carefully noted, as much as possible, the name, home state and regiment of the men buried there. The leather-bound book is now displayed inside a glass case in the Carnton house.
So Hicks had little choice but to flesh out her story as fiction.
"I have no idea what her motivations were. I can guess at them, and that's why it became fiction."
Aside from referring to key studies of the battle itself, such as
Five Tragic Hours by James Lee McDonough and Thomas L. Connelly and Wiley Sword's
The Confederacy's Last Hurrah, Hicks turned to classic Russian fiction. He reread Leo Tolstoy's
War and Peace and Boris Pasternak's
Dr. Zhivago.
"They are about the circumstances of the people in these epic moments in history. These people are being tossed and turned about. Since I wasn't studying journalism and I wasn't studying writing, all I knew to do was go to Russian novels. I basically wanted to write a Russian novel."
He began writing in earnest 2˝ years ago. With just over 100 pages of text, top literary agent Jeff Kleinman sold the book proposal quickly to Warner, where Amy Einhorn became Hicks' editor.
"He has written an epic novel," said Einhorn, vice president and executive editor at the New York publisher. "For me, it was the love story that hooked me in. For others, it was the whole Civil War aspect. It's incredibly well-written, very accessible and unbelievably poignant and moving. It appeals to women and men, young and old."
But will this fictional treatment appeal to serious historians, especially those, like Thomas Cartwright, who've spent much of their lives examining every facet of the Battle of Franklin?
Cartwright, director of Franklin's historic Carter House, hasn't read the as-yet unavailable book. But he understands its potential appeal.
"Not everyone is an historian, and not everyone wants the details of troop movements, etc.," Cartwright said. "Many individuals love that type of fiction."
The historian thinks it unlikely that
Widow readers would confuse fact with fiction, resulting in a falsified image of the actual battle. "Surely they would know when they're reading that it's a fictional account. That should be self-explanatory," he said.
"I think a positive of this book — if it's as good as everyone says — is that it will help another generation to remember the Battle of Franklin."
Not unlike what Scarlett, Rhett and Tara did for Atlanta.
• Here's an excerpt from Robert Hicks' The Widow of the South. Near the end of the book, this passage is in the voice of Carrie McGavock. It describes the creation of a military cemetery at Carnton, expanding the McGavock's family cemetery, after the end of the war. The day I began retrieving the dead was impossibly, incongruously beautiful. It was a day that might have been held over from before the war, from my childhood back in Terrebonne when the sky was deep blue and cloudless and the wind carried the scent of the woods and fields. It was innocent…Professor Stiles had warned me away. He told me the sight of the recently uncovered men would be too much for some of his men to take, let alone a woman. I told him that I was meant to be there and that if I fainted, then I was intended to faint. But I would not shy from the remains of these men or pretend that what I was doing wasn't itself a horrible solution to a more horrible proposition. I would not pretend that their movement from abandonment to discovery to final rest was an unremarkable journey. They would be exposed, the professor told me, and the stench would billow up, and some of them would be reduced to bones, and others would have mummified faces like leather. There would be hair and clothing everywhere. Their teeth would be bared and snarling. He did not think I should see such things. I said I thought I must see such things, that such things were the wages of war and it was only our own weakness as sinners, including my own, that required these last near 1,500 men to make the sacrifice that left them alone under a couple feet of Tennessee topsoil.
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