Title: God Has a Long Face
Author: Robert Wilder
Date: 1940
Publisher: Putnam
ISBN: none
Length: 461 pages
Quote: “‘We’re needin’men of substance heah now, General,’ the landlord insisted.”
Wallis Burgoyne was, technically, a deserter. Hearing that the Civil War had ended while he was in Florida, he never went back to the Ohio regiment, but “became, with a fine disregard for accuracy, General Basil Wallis Burgoyne ‘of the Northern Virginia Army.’” In other words he was a liar—a big fat liar, Wilder seldom fails to emphasize, a con artist, a real jerk, the sort of man who was usually cast as the enemy in Southern novels of the period, always trying to cheat nicer people out of their older money, likely to ruin their property by trying to “develop” it. He’s also a racist, sexist boor who may not physically molest his daughter-in-law but seldom speaks to her without making it clear that he feels entitled to do that if he felt like it. So what you won’t like about this novel is that, for better or for worse, it’s about him, with divagations into how and why he outlived most of his heirs.
All Wilder says about why he wrote such a long book about such an unlovable character is a dedication: “To, for, and because of Sally.” Who and what Sally was may never be known, which would probably have been the way she wanted it...but Burgoyne’s character develops, over 461 pages, to the point where he’s able at least to acknowledge his natural heir. Only when his White sons and grandson are gone can he address his surviving daughter as “Daughter.”
Wilder’s way of writing about women, Black people, and the working class was less obnoxious than Burgoyne’s way of talking to and about them, in 1940. That does not make it pleasant to read. He could be forgiven for using contemporary phrases but he never thinks beyond the stereotypes they express. He’s more polite about the Black woman (“negress”), the biracial daughter (“her bright-girl”), or the fellow Burgoyne offers the job (“Cracker boy’), than Burgoyne is but he doesn’t know or care anything about them. They’re props, like the horses, the boats, the dishes, the wagons, and the labor gangs Burgoyne uses. Burgoyne’s horses don’t have names: other people are supposed to have trained them to obey the commands Burgoyne’s learned to give them, or he’ll know the reason why. Burgoyne travels by horse more than he does by boat or automobile, but his attitudes toward all three means of transportation are identical. And his attitude toward human beings is pretty much the same. Minor characters in fiction don’t really need to be characterized. It’s easier to become interested in a fictional plot if you’re not burdened with the minor characters’ names and histories, but the focus on Burgoyne in this novel makes the flatness of all characters except his favored son and grandson read as if Wilder agrees with him about this being a pushy, trashy White man’s world.
Not to be missed, and seldom overlooked by Wilder, is the way Burgoyne adopts hateful attitudes and stereotypes so fully that he sends his sons out to buy up property to keep out “Yankees.” The boys are so much intimidated by their father that we never get a scene in which Burgoyne might have been asked to explain how his use of “Yankees” does not include himself as a deserter from the Federal Army in the Civil War...This really happened. Florida, the southernmost of the contiguous States, has never been fully accepted as Southern in the sense that Georgia is. Wilder shows us why.
I didn’t enjoy this book. I don’t expect the person who handed it down to me did either. Most people who are willing to read a 461-page novel don’t like that type of person and probably won’t enjoy reading about him now that they’ve been warned that he’s still alive at the end. Wallis Burgoyne may be fictionalized or fiction, but his type was occupying the Oval Office when I wrote this review. They are the bitter yellow lumps of baking soda of the Earth.
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