Allan Gurganus - Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL

Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and Colonel William Marsden was fifty. If he was a veteran of the War for Southern Independence, Lucy became a veteran of the veteran with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucys story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrators daily battles in the Homecomplete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72663-7

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artistsrefugees from the middle classhurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preachers son whose good-looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina Alabama Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each others work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this trio grows up fast, somehow founding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70203-7

THE PRACTICAL HEART

In his fictional town of Falls, North Carolinaa watchful zone of stifling moresAllan Gurganuss fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, and betrayal. Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted great-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and eighteenth-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truthssometimes bruising, ofttimes warmingfrom human hearts as immense as they are local.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72763-4

WHITE PEOPLE

In these eleven stories, Allan Gurganus gives heartbreaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires and triumphs of a grand cast of Americans. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, senior citizens startled by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70427-7

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
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ALLAN GURGANUS

Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. His honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

D IED ON ME finally. He had to.

Died doing his bad bugle imitation, calling for the maps, died bellowing orders at everybody, horses included, Not over there, dunderdick, rations go here. Stayed bossy to the last. He would look down in bed, hed command the sheets to roll back. They didnt.

My poor husband, Captain Marsden, he perished one Election Day. Children were setting off firecrackers on our vacant lot. Cap believed it was Antietam flaring up on him again like a game knee. So he went happy, yelling March! to his men (all dead) and to me (not dead yet, thank you very much). Its about what I expected I reckon.

Hed been famous for years around here. The longer he lived the more he got on the local news, then the national noticed, black and white and in color. They brought cameras South and all these lights walked right into our home and his bedroom. Folks put TV makeup on him. He thought it was poison-ivy medicine. He hit the girl doing it.

I had to prime the Captain, make him tell his usuals. By then it was like getting your parrot going for company, you would say a key word and hed chew it over, then youd see it snag way in, and out whole favorites would crankbattle by battlelike rolls on some old player piano.

Strangers kept filing through our house, kept not wiping their feet, come to see the final vet of the War Betwixt States propped up. All them boys in blue were cold in Yankee earth. Captain had tricked the winning side by holding on the last, too proud to quit, maybe too cranky. Oh he was a sightgray uniform bunched over his pajamas, beard wild as a hedge and white to match his cataracts grown big as ice cubes. Above the bed hed hung a tintype of his missing buddy, he kept a rusty musket within easy reach. From a nail, one child-sized bugle dangled on its blood-red cord. Plus he had a dried twig off this tree where something bad happened.

A neighbor child brought Captain a fistful of dogtooth violets. I thanked her, set them in a bedside water glass. All day my old man kept squinting violets way, smiling, swallowingacting strange. Finally he waves me over, makes a scared face, nods towards blue flowers, whispers, Lucy, baby spies!

ESPECIALLY after that big Civil War moving picture come out in 39, folks couldnt get enough. I had strangers pumping me for aspirins and change of a dollar, and I offered everything. No spring chicken myself. A bookseller brought in every history of the war for Cap to sign, like hed written it: The War. And you never knew which name my man would autograph next. One minute he was General P. G. T. Beauregard, next minute hed be Captain Butler. And the bookdealer sold every last signature as real.Honey, I had Yankees asking me for coffee, tea, and where was the bathroom. Got so I tacked up paper arrows in our hallway. Wrote out Oldest surviving, etc., like pointing tourists to Mount Rushmore. Wrote Toiletsmens and womensplease use same oneso youd best lock the door, and gents, please do keep seat up when not needed, thank you. Only fair. Signed, Mrs. Marsdenwife of oldest surviving, etc.

One day I hear muttering on our third floor. I find a Northern newsgirl setting right on the bed alongside our blind son. Wrong room. I hold open the bedroom door, Our boys a bit shy of strangers. She could probably tell. He had his head poked clear under the blankets. Says she in a voice like Brasso, But we investigative types like to cover all the bases, madam. Her skirt was shorter than most decent panties used to be. I just bet you do, thought I, but, leading her back downstairs, I didnt like to say nothing at the time.

Captain Marsden was thirteen when the Confederacy called. You think he knew enough to stay home safe in civvies? No way. The only male mammals still at large in Falls, North Carolina, were either livestock or babies or our geezers left over from the 18 and 12 one, men still mighty big on John Paul Jones. My husband and his pal felt right overlooked. Were ready, says the boys. Thirteen, and didnt even have to lie about their age. They had trigger fingers and some eyesight, didnt they? Was enough.

So Marsden trooped off with his best friend, a boy way prettier. The pal was Willies age but older-seeming. Name of Ned Smythe. You could look him up. Both of them hailed from here, from Falls. Pressed into service in 62 when General Lee was already running out of living bodies to put the gray on and get shot at.Those boys left town holding hands like girls that age would.