Surviving 'March'

DALLAS - It's a little before Christmas, late at night in the lobby of the Hotel Adolphus. Well-dressed revelers are keeping the valet parkers busy out in the cold. Just arrived from a bookstore appearance, still in his coat and gloves, E.L. Doctorow asks if there's some place quiet to get a drink. We retire to a corner in the nearly empty Bistro.

It's ridiculous to compare a book tour to William Tecumseh Sherman's famous March to the Sea - the subject of Doctorow's new Civil War novel, ``The March'' - but to authors, tours can feel like an endless military campaign.

Dallas is Doctorow's last stop, the last of several months of book signings, TV interviews, award ceremonies and talks. And with a delayed flight from San Francisco in the afternoon plus a hastily rescheduled interview, this has been a long Friday for the 74-year-old National Book Award-winner, author of Ragtime'' andBilly Bathgate.''

He's tired and is looking forward to returning to his home in Sag Harbor, an old whaling village on Long Island, N.Y.

"What I learned while I was writing the book," he says over his Grey Goose on the rocks, "is that it wasn't about just an army marching. It was a whole civilization uprooted and turned nomadic. It was a self-consuming war. We were consuming ourselves. Sherman understood that" - hence the Union general's determination to wage "total war," to destroy not just the rebel forces but also their industrial and agricultural support, their slave economy.

Sherman's strategy broke the back of the Confederacy in 1864. He separated his army from its supply lines, split it up into three independent corps.

They proceeded to cut a 60-mile-wide swath through Georgia and the Carolinas, living off the land, freeing slaves, burning homes and crops, liberating the Andersonville prison camp.

With Grant blocked by Lee in Virginia, Sherman's November capture of Atlanta boosted Abraham Lincoln's re-election.

And it began the war's bitter endgame.

Sherman's two-volume Memoirs,'' Doctorow's chief historical source, have been ranked with Ulysses S. Grant'sPersonal Memoirs'' as nonfiction masterworks of American literature.

Still, "they are defensive and self-justifying," the author says, "as all memoirs are to a degree. Sherman is somewhat vain, proud of what he accomplished. But rightly so. He was almost a basket case after (the battle of) Bull Run, but he survived to command the army. There's such vigor in his prose. He has a good eye for detail."

Doctorow's own eye has been focused almost entirely on American history - from the Old West in his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times'' (1960), to the McCarthyite Red Scare inBook of Daniel'' (1971 - not to be confused with the current NBC drama).

"It has been pointed out," he says, "one can line up all of my novels to create a 150-year history of America - not that I planned it that way, of course."

``Ragtime,'' in particular, featured two central concerns of his: race in America and the allures and failures of radical politics.

Mixing fictional characters with real-life figures (Houdini, Henry Ford, anarchist Emma Goldman), it brought the post-modern historical novel to the best-seller list in 1975, decades before the likes of Don DeLillo (Underworld''), Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon'') and Barbara Kingsolver (``The Poisonwood Bible'') made it such a current phenomenon.

The March'' takes much the same approach asRagtime,'' but instead of concentrating on a single, turn-of-the-century family in New Rochelle, N.Y., it follows dozens of people trying to hang on to Sherman's juggernaut of chaos and creation - or trying to stop it with a desperate assassination.

"Here, security doesn't come from being rooted," Doctorow says. "Paradoxically, security comes from staying on the march. Everyone has to adapt, everyone's identity changes along the way. It's a new kind of society being born.

"That's why there are so many characters. The book is not just Sherman, it's an ensemble cast. What I was doing, I realized, was writing a Russian novel."

War - but without the Peace.

In trying to convey this, The March''had me breaking rules,'' the author says. ``I was worried about that. I realized I couldn't do what you normally do, establish a single, sympathetic character and follow him, expect him to survive.''

As a result, "the book took a lot of patience to write," he says. "There was a lot of staring at the middle of the page, waiting for it to tell me what to write."

There is talk of a film adaptation of ``The March,'' but when told that he has been somewhat better served by Hollywood than most novelists, Doctorow says with a sad smile, "I beg to differ."

Whether he wrote the screenplay, didn't write it or even produced the film - "no matter what position I've taken, it hasn't mattered. What gets made gets made."

Of the four films adapted from his novels (Welcome to Hard Times,''Ragtime,'' Daniel'' andBilly Bathgate''), ``Ragtime'' remains the least disappointing (and was turned into a Broadway musical).

More typical, he says, was the 1967 Henry Fonda Western, ``Welcome to Hard Times,'' co-written and directed by Burt Kennedy.

"At the time it came out," Doctorow recalls, "I said it was the second worst film ever made." Years later, when a film called ``The Heavy'' was declared the worst film in history, Kennedy sent the novelist a note.

"It said, 'Now I'm only third.' "

The March'' has received near-universal acclaim, although Sherman remains a controversial figure. Claiming thatGone With the Wind'' remains the great novel of Sherman's March, one reviewer denounced Doctorow's account for not portraying a "colder, crueler, nihilist Sherman" - overlooking the fact that Doctorow does depict him as an angry racist, which he was. Yet Sherman was also the author of Special Field Order No. 15, the famous bequest of "40 acres and a mule" to liberated slave families.

"There's a proprietary feeling people still have about the Civil War," Doctorow says. "It still hits home."

After a recent reading in Atlanta, he recalls, a man and a woman approached him and pointedly asked whether he'd ever visited Stone Mountain.

It's the theme park that features a giant, carved-granite shrine to Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, as well as The Battle for Georgia, a 24-minute film about Sherman's March. A popular tourist attraction, Stone Mountain was the site of the second founding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. The Klan was also closely involved in its design and financing.

"'Nothing you say about General Sherman,' the man told me, 'will ever change my mind about him.' "

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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.