Reckoning with Robert E. Lee

"The best way to honor historical figures is to bring them to life, in their contradictions," explains Roy Blount of the subject of his latest book, Robert E. Lee: A Penguin Life (see LJ 4/15/03). In the nearly 140 years since the Civil War's end, Lee has been lionized, demonized, marble-ized, and feminized by his other biographers, many of whom despaired of finding a human being under the layers of Lost Cause piety. The most famous biography of Lee, Douglass Southall Freeman's three-volume life, "put the M in monumental," says Blount. "I was going for something closer to the quick, so I dwelt upon Lee's childhood and his parents—odd ducks, both of them, who undoubtedly helped shape his mysterious personality." As for Lee's divisiveness as a symbol, Blount notes that to some the general stands for "slavery and treason," to others, "purity and honor. Strange for someone so marmoreal to be such a can of worms. But why write about anything that's not loaded?"

Blount, a popular humorist and travel writer by trade, might not seem like the first candidate to write a life of Lee, but he comes by his interest honestly. Born in 1941, the future author of Crackers, Be Sweet, What Men Don't Tell Women, and Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor made Confederate guerrilla raids regularly around his hometown of Decatur, GA—"wearing a gray cap and running around pretending to shoot Yankees"—until the age of ten. "Then I got off into baseball. But no one from the South can put off reckoning with the Civil War forever. After I gave up on being a baseball immortal and became a writer, I wrote about pretty much every Southern matter except the Civil War."

Before becoming a freelance writer in the mid-1970s, Blount put in stints at Vanderbilt and Harvard, served two years in the U.S. Army, and was a staffer at Sports Illustrated in its more literarily adventurous years, during which he wrote a now-classic account of his time on the road with the Pittsburgh Steelers, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load. Like other funny writers from the South, Blount has often been broadly compared to Twain. In fact, James Atlas, the editor of the "Penguin Lives" biography series, originally proposed Twain as a subject, but Blount demurred.

"I had recently written several things about Mark Twain, and felt I had shot my bolt, at least for the time being, with regard to him." Blount instead picked a more elusive and politically loaded Southern icon —the "Marble Man," as Lee is known. "I figured it would be a challenge; I'd learn something. It turned out I had to learn something about four different wars, the Whig Party, Puseyism, George Washington's marriage.…It took me, off and on, longer than the Civil War itself."

The details that make Blount's Lee less like a talking Southern statue are for the most part not the traits that decided battles but inhabit the arena where most of life is lived. Blount notes Lee's fondness for having his children tickle his size 4½ feet and his lifelong flirtatiousness with Virginia ladies: "There is no reason to believe that he ever had an affair, but I agree with the smart-set ladies of Richmond that it's a wonder." Out of such anecdotal muck grows a human being to replace the gray tactician of historical cliché. But Blount doesn't dodge the larger, more controversial questions about the general: While "choosing Virginia over the U.S. was not a good career move" for Lee, "by his lights it was understandably the honorable, the patriotic, the home-loyal choice. It put him on the wrong side in a horrible war." As for Lee's disappointing stance on slavery, "What I suggest is that…abolitionism was a far simpler moral stance for New England Brahmins than it was for anyone (except the enslaved) in states where slave owners, and slaves, were one's neighbors and slavery was essential to the economy—as essential as the stock market is today….Slavery was an evil, and any defense of it, however roundabout, was pathological; but ending slavery was not a matter of deciding 'Let us all be good now.' "

For all his efforts to humanize General Lee, Blount does believe the famous Lee mystique was real: "Lee's strong suit was his mystique. It was compounded of audacity, integrity, and how great he looked on (and off) a horse. The mystique spooked Lee's Union counterparts until Grant into blundering timidity, and it helped inspire his own troops—except for the many deserters—to keep fighting under conditions that were physically more miserable than slavery."

Despite the mystique, Lee was better at inspiring his subordinates, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, than at communicating directly with his troops. "When it came to specific instructions, Lee was not a great communicator. He certainly commanded badly at Gettysburg. Thereafter, his defensive tactics in the face of a much stronger enemy were highly effective, but amounted to playing out—stretching out, alas—the grisly string."

Will Lee the statue return? Unfortunately, he already has in Ted Turner's four-hour film Gods & Generals, which Blount, long an admirer of Robert Duvall's other portrayals, saw only halfway through: "Had I been ten people, urging one another on and passing around cold towels, I could not have watched it all." Blount also feels the movie squandered the chance to show the "poignance" of how the war aged Lee, who looked, before serving four years at the military helm of a doomed cause, "a lot like mid-career Cary Grant."

In the end, weighing the private and public Lee, the bad against the good, would biographer Blount assign Lee to heaven or to hell? "If, as he devoutly but rather gloomily believed, there is a heaven, he is doing there the things he allowed himself to enjoy: riding alone, flirting harmlessly, eating fried chicken, playing with children, and gossiping with belles about their beaus at balls. But it's hard to picture him happy." Among the many new projects crowding for Blount's next attention is a second novel, "which I hope will be even stranger than Robert E. Lee."