Civil War Tale Quietly Blooms

Once there were two men, living in bordering states. One was a horse farmer, the other an assistant professor who used to be a railroad worker.

The men were strangers, yet their imaginations seemed to run on parallel tracks. In the early 1990s, each began to write a story that had been tugging at him for some time. The stories were Civil War stories, more or less, set in their home states, North Carolina and Tennessee.

The two men finished their books and found publishers. The novels appeared, one right after the other, in the spring of this year. Both writers received glowing reviews, both were nominated for the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction.

It is here that their paths diverged.

For one of the books is Charles Frazier’s much-celebrated “Cold Mountain,” the literary equivalent of a winning lottery ticket--bestseller, soon to be a major motion picture, National Book Award nominee, more than 770,000 copies in print.

But this is the story of the other book, “The Black Flower” by Howard Bahr, and the small Baltimore-based press, Nautical & Aviation Publishing Co. of America, that made it possible.

Bushrod Carter was barely 26, but his greasy hair and mustache were already shot with gray. The grime of the long campaign from Atlanta was etched in the lines of his face and in the cracked knuckles of his hands; crammed under his fingernails was a paste of black powder, bacon grease and the soil of three Confederate states. Though he was a veteran of all the campaigns of the Army of Tennessee since Shiloh, the fortunes of war had left him still a private of the line, carrying a musket in the ranks of the regiment he had joined more than three years before. True, he had been a corporal once on the march up into Kentucky, but he had lost his stripes (symbolically, for he hadn’t sewn any on) in the confusion over a pitcher of buttermilk stolen from the officers’ mess. It was just as well with him, for he really possessed no military ambition. In fact, he was sure he no longer possessed ambition of any kind.

Howard Bahr has always felt as if he were born at the wrong time. The first 10 years of his life--his happiest by far--were spent with his maternal grandparents in Mississippi, and his life with them had the slower, gentler rhythms of a much earlier time. He always thought he might be more at home in the 19th century.

Then his mother remarried, and the Bahr family began moving around, wherever his stepfather’s job took them. Bahr doesn’t elaborate much, but these were not happy years. He joined the Navy at age 17, as soon as he finished high school. When he left in 1968, he was a third-class gunner’s mate.

“I was 21, almost 22, and I went to work on the Illinois Central Railroad in Gulfport, Miss.,” he says. He has a thick Southern accent, but you couldn’t call it a drawl. Bahr’s voice is rapid and quick, his words falling over each other. “I always wanted to be a railroad man. Loved railroads all my life. That was my great ambition.”

But even as he advanced from yard clerk to brake man, he was writing. Short stories, essays, nonfiction pieces, a column for the Illinois Central magazine. In 1972, he even sold one of his columns to the Saturday Evening Post for $100.

“Oh, that was a big day,” he says.

At age 27, he decided to enroll at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and started work on his doctorate.

He had come to the study of literature by way of his fondness for the work of William Faulkner, another native son of Mississippi and an inescapable influence. Eventually, Faulkner even made it possible for Bahr to make a living: From 1976 to 1993, Bahr worked as a curator in Faulkner’s restored home in Oxford, the fabled Rowan Oak.

He wrote on the premises when he found time, but as he told the Oxford-American, a journal on the arts, in its just-published Faulkner centennial edition: “My writing was never better for having been done at Rowan Oak; neither was the creative process any more difficult or aggravating than it would have been anyway. The grace of God has much to do with creative success, I think--but not place. Not even Rowan Oak.”

He began “The Black Flower” about a year before he left Rowan Oak, for a tenure-track position at decidedly unpretentious Motlow State Community College near Lynchburg, Tenn. In 1995, the book finally finished, he sent it out to mainstream publishers such as St. Martin’s and Algonquin. They sent it back, so white and unblemished that he wondered whether anyone had read so much as a single line of the book that opens with:

Bushrod Carter dreamed of snow, of big, round flakes drifting like sycamore leaves from heaven. The snow settled over trees and fences, over artillery and the rumps of horses, over the men moving in column up the narrow road. A snowflake, light and dry as a lace doily, lit on the crown of Bushrod’s hat; when he made to brush it away, he found it was not snow at all but a hoe cake dripping with molasses. All the snowflakes were turning into hoe cakes the minute they hit the ground. The road and field were covered in them, but nobody else seemed to notice. The boys went on marching as if nothing had happened.

In the spring of 1996, the manuscript that began with these words sat in a cardboard box on a floor in a Mount Vernon townhouse, waiting patiently. It was just one in a pile of other manuscripts and proposals, sent in by other writers who had seen the Literary Marketplace listing for Nautical & Aviation Publishing: Military history and fiction, unagented manuscripts accepted.

Publisher Jan Snouck-Hurgronje--former naval officer, the son of a Dutch naval officer--got his start in military publishing at the Naval Institute, best known for a little first novel by a Maryland insurance salesman, “The Hunt for Red October.”

Snouck-Hurgronje started his own press, Nautical & Aviation Publishing Co. of America, in Annapolis, Md., in 1979. He moved it to Baltimore in 1985, then into the airy Mount Vernon townhouse in 1991. Military history is Nautical & Aviation’s bread and butter--”We’re the finest in our field,” the usually self-effacing Snouck-Hurgronje says fiercely--but fiction and fiction reprints have always had a place among the list of 10 titles published every year.

The staff is small, only four full-time employees, and everyone holds several jobs. Snouck-Hurgronje juggles publishing and editing; Jane Lears, the marketing manager, does a little bit of everything. It falls to Rebecca Irish--production manager, book designer and illustrator--to open the mail.

When Irish finally worked her way down to Bahr’s manuscript, she was so struck by its poetic language that she forwarded it immediately to Snouck-Hurgronje, with a Post-it advising him to read it immediately.

“This is the kind of book you see once in a lifetime,” Snouck-Hurgronje says now. “ ‘The Black Flower’ is as good or better as the really well-known books in the field. ‘Killer Angels’ [Jeff Shaara’s 1974 novel about Gettysburg] doesn’t have nearly the power as a novel that ‘The Black Flower’ has.”

Snouck-Hurgronje was so taken with the manuscript that he asked for only one change--he suggested the title be changed from ‘Some of the Boys’ to ‘The Black Flower.’ Bahr, however, wanted a chance to go through his novel one more time, polishing each line and fiddling with a few scenes.

“It changed my whole life,” Bahr says of his manuscript’s acquisition. “Suddenly I was no longer a novelty, and I was a novelist. I love all those people at Nautical & Aviation, and I cannot imagine having a better relationship with a publisher. Mr. Jan showed me my royalty records; they’re handwritten with a fountain pen.” Just the kind of touch a 19th century man would admire.

Being with a small press means a rare kind of hands-on attention. When Bahr flew into Baltimore, Snouck-Hurgronje wrote the check for his rental car. Lears--Miss Jane to Bahr--went over his itinerary almost mile by mile. Irish, the book’s discoverer, lavished attention on its design.

But a small press also has to juggle its finances constantly--selling a book’s subsidiary rights in order to make money to market the book. The paperback rights, sold to Henry Holt, provided a nice infusion of cash. When the Book-of-the-Month Club chose “The Black Flower” as an alternate, its confirmation letter was used to secure another line of credit from the bank.

The juggling act paid off--a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, a History Book Club selection, three printings to date, with a total of 12,000 books in print and virtually no returns. Bookstore power Barnes & Noble placed a large order and set up readings for Bahr in various stores. A friend sent the book to Vice President Al Gore.

Now Nautical & Aviation is publishing Bahr’s “Home for Christmas,” a children’s story set just after the Civil War. But Snouck-Hurgronje doesn’t have any legal rights to Bahr’s work in progress, a story about federal troops on gunboats along the Mississippi. Nor does he want that kind of option. Snouck-Hurgronje is one publisher who hopes another publisher will steal his author from him, by paying more than he could ever afford.

“Someone like Howard needs to get known, and he will eventually,” he says adamantly. “Howard is very, very self-controlled. He knows that he’s good, yet he knows there are terrific marketing barriers here.”

Such as the fact that he has chosen to write about one of the least-known battles of the Civil War.

“The Black Flower” is about the Battle of Franklin in November 1864, after the fall of Atlanta. As a onetime reenactor, Bahr knew intimately the terrain of Franklin, outside Nashville.

Yet alongside such evocative names as Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh and Vicksburg, the Battle of Franklin barely registers. In Ken Burns’ “Civil War”--a PBS series Bahr has never seen, as he doesn’t own a television set--it rates a few sentences and a single image.

Shelby Foote is one of the historians who has speculated on the motives of Gen. John Bell Hood, who sent his troops into a battle as bloody as the famed Pickett’s Charge. Was he merely a bad tactician, or was he intent on punishing his own men?

“Of the 12 generals lost to the army here today, six were dead or dying, one was captured, and three of the remaining five were out of the war for good,” Foote wrote in “The Civil War: Red River to Appomattox.”

“Down in the ranks, moreover, this dreadful ratio was approximated; 6,252 Confederate veterans were casualties, including 1,750 killed in action. Hood had wrecked his army, top to bottom, and the army knew it; or soon would.”

But “The Black Flower” is about the ordinary soldiers, not the officers.

“I have little interest in the problems of generals,” Bahr says.

It started as a short story. Then the characters decided to keep going. One can see why Bahr would be in thrall to his memorable cast: Bushrod Carter, who sees the enemy as the Strangers; his friends, Jack and Virgil C.; the two conscripts, Nebo and Simon; and Anna, the green-eyed young woman who finds herself at the center of a battle Foote described as a holocaust.

Many of the names come from Bahr’s friends and associates. Anna was inspired by a student of Bahr’s, who died in a car accident at age 31. She looked just like Anna, although she didn’t have a scar on her cheek.

“I added the scar. I don’t know why,” Bahr says, his voice even softer than usual. “In the first draft, I had a tendency to romanticize her; a friend said the focus went soft. I had to work to make her more real. I hope I succeeded.”

According to the handful of critics who have reviewed the book, Bahr has succeeded across the board:

“A poignant, haunting and important novel”--Nashville Tennessean.

“A remarkable fiction debut”--St. Petersburg Times.

“A riveting novel of the Civil War”--Publisher’s Weekly.

But even some of the reviewers can’t help noting the unfortunate timing that, after what one calls a long drought of Civil War fiction, has thrust two deserving novels into the public eye almost simultaneously.

It is a Saturday night in New York City, and Bahr is at the end of the two-day, three-bookstore tour planned so carefully by Miss Jane. About 15 people have gathered in the corner of this Barnes & Noble super-store on the Upper West Side to listen to him read and talk about “The Black Flower.”

“I wanted to write a book that was authentic, free of the Civil War cliches,” Bahr tells them. “No rosy-cheeked drummer boy.”

The men and women gathered at the event listen intently to the passage about Confederate women and their grim determination to remember their dead. They laugh at his jokes, ask provocative questions. A man with a soft North Carolina drawl confides that it is nice to hear another Southern accent in these Northern climes.

And, inevitably, someone asks about “Cold Mountain.” Bahr has a reply ready: “I haven’t read it, because I fear I might like it.”

The talk ends, everyone applauds--and leaves. Not a single one buys a book. Bahr professes not to mind.

Oh, he was puzzled by the lack of sales, he says a few days later by phone from his Tennessee home, but not bothered. He has done what he set out to do--written a book and gotten it published. Now he has moved on to his next book, while Frazier is telling interviewers he hasn’t had time to go back to writing.

“It is the books that are important, not the man so much,” Bahr says. “I wanted to make something fine and something pretty and something literary, I guess you could say. I wanted to make something. I had to do that. There was no way I could not do that. At the same time, I really wanted to have it published. I wanted people to know the story. I look with suspicion at people who say, ‘I just write for myself.’ ”

So he has 12,000 readers, and Frazier has almost 100 times that many. Bahr will not let the math distract him from the literature, from what he has accomplished. Making something fine, something pretty, something literary.

A few weeks back, Bahr saw Frazier at the Southern Book Festival in Nashville. He didn’t introduce himself, as Frazier stood in the hallway talking to Mississippi novelist Larry Brown, but he couldn’t help noticing the other writer. Their books, their fates, are so entwined, for better or worse, probably for better. After all, someone who has read “Cold Mountain” might go back to a bookstore looking for another Civil War novel and might buy a copy of “The Black Flower.”

No, Bahr wouldn’t change a thing. Some folks win the big jackpot, others get the Pick 4. He’s still a winner.

“I will say this much,” he says at last, coming as close as he ever will to answering the question he is asked over and over. “I would not trade books with Mr. Frazier for anything.”