Frazier enables ‘Varina’ to rise again
Charles Frazier’s lively new novel Varina (Ecco, 353 pp., ★★★☆) arrives at an improbable if interesting moment. Frazier resurrects and reimagines an obscure historical figure — the wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis — at a time when statues of Confederate “heroes” are being toppled one by one, with Jeff Davis’ among them.
So ably does Frazier bring indomitable Varina Howell Davis to life that I couldn’t help but imagine her reaction if she’d been around to see her husband’s bronze likeness ignominiously hauled away. She’d consider it justice, probably. After all, this is a Southern woman who after the Civil War moved to New York to write for newspapers and declared that “the right side won.”
Frazier’s novel is the latest to star a worthy female figure rescued from history’s dustbin. And Frazier is a superb prose stylist who elevates the historical fiction genre; his 1997 debut, Cold Mountain, the tale of a Confederate deserter trying to get home to the woman he loves, won the National Book Award.
Sometimes Frazier’s considerable literary talents get in his way. His writing can be breathtaking, but Varina’s fragmented narrative hopscotches all over the place. Which is a shame, because this picaresque novel’s most memorable scenes rival Gone With the Wind (and Cold Mountain) for sheer jaw-dropping Dixie drama.
As Varina begins, it’s 1906 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the elderly Varina (called “V” here) has a visitor, a black man named James Blake, a schoolteacher. James believes he was once “Jimmie Limber,” the little (real-life) boy rescued and briefly raised by Varina, after she saw him being beaten in the street. The last time they were together it was 1865 and V and Jimmie and her brood of children were on the run after the Confederacy fell.
So V begins filling in the blanks for James, telling the story of her life, and it’s irresistible. V has a Scarlett O’Hara ferocity she tempers with occasional opiates. She’s a smart, well-read 17year-old Mississippi girl when she’s shipped off to meet older widower Jeff Davis, a military man headed for Congress. Their marriage gets off to an appropriately gloomy start: Jeff takes his new bride to visit his late wife’s grave on their honeymoon!
Jefferson Davis slips in and out of Varina, an almost ghostly presence. (He and his wife had six children, but often lived apart.) He is much more a defender of the Confederacy, and believes slavery more benign and justified than Northern child-fueled factories.
Slavery flows like a deep current through Varina. Frazier, a North Carolina native, tackles the topic in shades of gray, not simple black and white. (Varina has darkish skin, and in Richmond they gossip that she may be mulatto or a “squaw,” which she is not. And the grown, dignified James wonders if Jefferson let V keep him only because he was so light-skinned.)
“V has never made any claim of personal high ground. She grew up where and when she did. From earliest memory, owning other people was a given. But she began feeling the strangeness of it about nine or ten — not the wrongness or the sin of it, but the strangeness only.”
In 2018, such paragraphs, however subtle, can land uneasily. Varina the character is a fictional triumph, and the real Mrs. Davis did save Jimmie; Varina the book is more problematic. The Civil War continues to haunt.
Their marriage gets off to an appropriately gloomy start: Jeff takes his new bride to visit his late wife’s grave on their honeymoon!