Zack
Sergeant Major
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2017
- Location
- Los Angeles, California
I was reading EL Doctorow's novel THE MARCH and there were two striking passages in it about Sherman's asthma:
Page 114-115: In Savannah: "In his apartments upstairs he sat in his bath and smoked his cigar and read of his greatness. Letters of adulation were coming in by the bundle. He called for Moses Brown to add to the hot water, for that was the only thing that could calm him now, national recognition working in him as a nervous excitement. Also, the steam eased his breathing - his asthma was acting up. Not only the rain but the sea wind was having its effect. Sherman came from Ohio. Even to be near the sea unsettled him, and whenever he had to be on it all he could think of was the perversity of God in composing something that only heaved and wallowed and slopped about."
And Page 241 - "The good weather was a relief to Sherman, who couldn't have been happier to be out of South Carolina, a swampland, to his thinking, with its spreading rivers and miserable, seditious souls. All that moldy wetness had aggravated his asthma. His chest breathed music - for days at a time he was like a walking harmonium. But when it was really bad, drawing breath was an act of will. The terror of his life was not having enough air. It was why he hated water, it was why he couldn't sleep at night in a closed-up room as well as he could in the outdoors under a vast black sky, with the stars assuring him that there was enough volume of space and air for him to breathe."
I know Sherman did have asthma and ultimately died of it, but the comments about a dislike for the sea and its severity during the war - any truth to those? Or is this just poetic license on the part of the author (this is a novel after all).
Page 114-115: In Savannah: "In his apartments upstairs he sat in his bath and smoked his cigar and read of his greatness. Letters of adulation were coming in by the bundle. He called for Moses Brown to add to the hot water, for that was the only thing that could calm him now, national recognition working in him as a nervous excitement. Also, the steam eased his breathing - his asthma was acting up. Not only the rain but the sea wind was having its effect. Sherman came from Ohio. Even to be near the sea unsettled him, and whenever he had to be on it all he could think of was the perversity of God in composing something that only heaved and wallowed and slopped about."
And Page 241 - "The good weather was a relief to Sherman, who couldn't have been happier to be out of South Carolina, a swampland, to his thinking, with its spreading rivers and miserable, seditious souls. All that moldy wetness had aggravated his asthma. His chest breathed music - for days at a time he was like a walking harmonium. But when it was really bad, drawing breath was an act of will. The terror of his life was not having enough air. It was why he hated water, it was why he couldn't sleep at night in a closed-up room as well as he could in the outdoors under a vast black sky, with the stars assuring him that there was enough volume of space and air for him to breathe."
I know Sherman did have asthma and ultimately died of it, but the comments about a dislike for the sea and its severity during the war - any truth to those? Or is this just poetic license on the part of the author (this is a novel after all).
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