NF NY Times reviews new book "Varina" by Charles Frazier on Confederate "First Lady"

Non-Fiction
From the review by BRENDA WINEAPPLE:

Americans are hard on their first ladies. We complain that they spend too much money or connive too much and drink too much — or not enough, in the case of Lemonade Lucy Hayes — and they run or ruin their husband’s careers. So in its strange way, history has been kind to Varina Howell Davismainly because it’s largely forgotten her. The much younger second wife of Jefferson Davis, who presided over an imaginary country called the Confederate States of America, Varina Davis has escaped the opprobrium of statues dedicated in her honor and then torn down.

But she hasn’t disappeared. An excellent scholarly biography by Joan E. Cashin was published in 2006, and she drifts through Mary Chesnut’s astringent memoirs prophesying the failure of the Confederacy. A woman to whom clever women gravitated, as Chesnut suggested more than once, Davis (who lived until 1906) in later life sought to reconcile North and South. She developed a close friendship with Julia Dent Grant and in the 1890s wrote an advice column as well as a number of articles for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. And she rises, once again, in “Varina,” Charles Frazier’s elegiac novel, told mostly from her own subdued point of view.
 
From the review:

Frazier in this, his fourth novel, lyrically resurrects the blasted but hauntingly beautiful Southern landscape just after the war, a time when Varina Davis and a brood of five children, along with a former slave and “a dwindling supply of white men,” have fled Richmond. It’s the spring of 1865, and the Federal Army is close. Hoping to elude Union soldiers and bounty hunters all the way to Florida, eventually to reach Havana and freedom, Varina has a little money from the sale of her household furnishings and a small pistol with which she can shoot herself if Union soldiers try to violate her. The pistol and instructions are gifts from her husband. Beyond that, she has a great deal of moxie as well as a reserve of “housewife morphine” that will last for a little while.
 
Frazier takes an interesting approach to the story-telling:

To narrate the travails of this Mississippi-born Confederate mistress in 2018 is far from easy, so Frazier leaps what might have been an insurmountable narrative hurdle with a widower named James Blake. A middle-aged black man, he calls on Varina Davis just a few months before her death. To cut back on her “powders and tinctures,” she is staying for the season at a sanitarium-like hotel, the Retreat, which offers a range of therapies (hydrotherapy, mechanotherapy, electrotherapy and “dramatotherapy”) in the fashionable resort town of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Blake, who lives in nearby Albany, has recently come across a book, “First Days Amongst the Contrabands” (a real book), by a Northern abolitionist teacher, that devoted an entire chapter (also real) to a boy known as Jimmie. This book, along with a wisp or two of early memories, has stirred up misgivings about his own past that Blake believes Varina might clarify. Uninterested in backward glances or interminable “tales of waste and loss,” she wants to brush him off. “The only bright spot is, the right side won,” she says, and then pointedly advises, “Don’t look back.”

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Blake is, of course, Jimmie, the skinny orphan boy Varina rescued back in 1864 when she saw a drunken woman beating him with a stick. Raising him alongside her own children in the Gray House, as she derisively christened the president’s mansion, Varina protected Jimmie until the Federals captured them in 1865. “Keeping you with me was worse for you than letting you go,” she sorrowfully recalls. Sent to Gen. Rufus Saxton, military commander of the Union-occupied Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, so he might be cared for, Blake then disappeared from her life — until now, the summer of 1906, when he arrives with his book and a slew of questions: “Did you ever own me?”
 
I'll let the Varina experts discuss what they think of this:

Beautifully rendered, too, is Frazier’s chronicle of Varina’s youth. The daughter of a profligate entrepreneur from New Jersey and a well-to-do Mississippi woman, Varina was shipped off at age 17 from her home in Natchez to a plantation called the Hurricane, ruled by the tyrannical slaveholder Joseph Davis, whose gloomy brother Jefferson she married the next year. A widower twice her age in a state of perpetual mourning for his first wife, Jefferson Davis was a “girdled tree,” Varina realized, “bark cut and peeled away past the living flesh.” During their 45-year marriage, they were together little more than half of it.
 
From the conclusion of the review:

Varina reads the Greeks, Cotton Mather and Dante as well as “The Anatomy of Melancholy” and “The House of Mirth”; she meets Oscar Wilde; and after her husband’s death she completes his memoir, as if to discharge an overdue debt. And, presumably inspired by Blake’s presence, she does stitch together the past, or so he decides, and keeps its memory green. But a didactic interlocutor — more catalyst than realized human being, more reflector than protagonist — does not and likely cannot counterbalance the empire of slavery Varina represents. Still, thanks to Frazier’s delicate ventriloquism, Varina Davis becomes a marvelously fallible character, complicated enough to stand on her compromised own.
 
From the review:

Frazier in this, his fourth novel, lyrically resurrects the blasted but hauntingly beautiful Southern landscape just after the war, a time when Varina Davis and a brood of five children, along with a former slave and “a dwindling supply of white men,” have fled Richmond. It’s the spring of 1865, and the Federal Army is close. Hoping to elude Union soldiers and bounty hunters all the way to Florida, eventually to reach Havana and freedom, Varina has a little money from the sale of her household furnishings and a small pistol with which she can shoot herself if Union soldiers try to violate her. The pistol and instructions are gifts from her husband. Beyond that, she has a great deal of moxie as well as a reserve of “housewife morphine” that will last for a little while.


So, I've read a lot of negative things about Jefferson Davis.


Was Jefferson Davis just being Jefferson Davis when he gave his wife a gun with instructions to shoot herself if Union soldiers try to "violate" her? Or would the "typical" husband in a similar situation in this time period give his wife the same instructions?
 
Boy, I don't know. We are hard on our first ladies. Ours from the war took a beating IMO- and I'm including Mary Custis Lee. There's a terrific clue here on why Varina's been ignored. We hear almost nothing about Mary and only seem to see Varina when her photograph is being photo shopped to ' prove ' she wasn't ( gasp ) a white chick. My take has always been both women, Mary Lee pre-war and Varina post war, sought genuine unity in this country. Heck, Mary's family retracted publication of her letters speaking of her love for our Union ( Martha Washington's grand daughter would sure have something to say ) and still won't budge. We never hear much of Varina's friendship with Julia or any of her regrets from the war. IMO, they've been and continued to weaponry, variety dependent on agenda.

Even browsing the most critical era articles and books containing mention of Varina, never came across a thing on an addiction @WJC . I'm just not convinced. If there'd been a good stick to use to beat her, someone would have ' spilled ' during her life time over an opioid addiction. Does this, combined with that very odd, kinda dismissive description of her childhood make her seem she came from nowhere? Varina was a Howell- names meant something when and where she grew up. She writes from that exact place, read a letter by her where she's considering Davis. She's intrigued by him. It's clear he's one of quite a few interested in a lovely, beautifully educated and much-sought belle. This ' thing ' where Davis moped for the rest of life because his wife died continues a narrative of which I'm also not convinced- the uber-romantic love story of a beautiful dead bride and the man who buried his heart with her? Just no.


Beautifully rendered, too, is Frazier’s chronicle of Varina’s youth. The daughter of a profligate entrepreneur from New Jersey and a well-to-do Mississippi woman, Varina was shipped off at age 17 from her home in Natchez to a plantation called the Hurricane, ruled by the tyrannical slaveholder Joseph Davis, whose gloomy brother Jefferson she married the next year

Yep. On the leaving it. Just weird.


I'm not saying any of this from a stupid North v. South perspective. Three women from the war have yet to emerge from a fog of critique binding them in those myths. History can come down to how it's told. Our 2 Mary's and Varina. Biggest sin any of them committed was apparently marrying men who would be famous. I may read this if @AshleyMel tells us it does Varina justice.

Sorry to be lengthy. Those three women and how they tend to be portrayed is a ' thing '. Bugs me.
 
I may read this if @AshleyMel tells us it does Varina justice.
Oh gosh! So sorry I am late getting back to this! I've been up to my elbows with a new veteran's quilt (pic to come later!). They take so much time and energy but are so very worth it!

I think we are on the same page with it comes to the women of the time, JPK. I appreciate your perspectives. Give this one a read.

I approached the book cautiously but eager. It is fiction; however, I found the story compelling and maybe even a very plausible "what if". It only took a few pages for me to loose myself in the novel. Frazier is a heck of a writer.
 
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