Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

The First Book I Ever Bought

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It was the summer before I turned seven. A favorite activity for all of us kids in the neighborhood was to ride our bikes up to the TG&Y dime store in the local shopping center and usually just drool over all the toys in the children’s section. The distance between our block and the dime store was about a mile-and-a-half; we’d ride back streets to get there, avoiding the more direct, and busy, nearby U.S. Highway 61.

The shopping center included the TG&Y, a Beall’s department store, a Western Auto, a Mackenzie’s Bakery, and the anchor, the A&P grocery store. A few years later, a Katz & Bestoff (K&B) drug store was added on the western end.

As young as I was, I was reading beyond my years. I liked the dime store’s toys and games as much as anyone, but I also would wander over to where the children’s books were displayed in something like a magazine rack, with staggered rows so you could see all the titles. The books were for all ages, from toddler to young teen.

One Saturday, I rode by myself to TG&Y. I placed my 16-inch red bicycle on the pavement in front, secured by a kickstand. (This was a long time ago, when you didn’t think to have a bicycle lock. Why would you need one?) I made my way to the book display. I’d had my eye on one, and I had just enough money to buy it, including tax. It was all of 59 cents.

It was my first book purchase.

Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion was originally published by Julie Campbell Tatham (1908-1999) in 1948. Officially, it was a “girl detective novel,” so you didn’t exactly want to be with your friends when you bought it. It followed a long line of teen detective stories that had become wildly popular in the 1920s and 1930s – The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew being among the most well known.

I came to that book, a mystery with two 13-year-old girl detectives, because of television. Through various TV shows, both after-school programs (like the Mickey Mouse Club’s Hardy Boys segment) and primetime TV series, I discovered I liked mysteries. So why not read one? And this one had an added bonus – an old mansion that was probably haunted.

I brought the book to the checkout counter, made my purchase, the salesgirl bagged it, and I was on my way home. I was soon visiting the town of Sleepyside-on-Hudson in New York State, where the Belden family with its four children lived. Brian and Martin were older teens; Trixie was 13; and little brother Bobby was 5 or 6, and often the bane of Trixie’s young life.

Julie Campbell Tatham

It was a fully recognizable family, not unlike Ozzie & Harriet. Kids got into minor trouble, but it was easily resolved. Nobody was dysfunctional. Heroes and villains were easily identifiable, and they were never the same person. I don’t think Trixie’s mother ever vacuumed wearing a nice frock and pearls, like June Cleaver did on Leave It to Beaver, but her character is not unlike Beaver’s mother and Harriet Nelson.

A new family, the Wheelers, had just moved into the nearby large estate next to the Belden’s farm (Mr. Belden also worked at an office job). Also close by is the Frayne mansion, decaying ever since old Mr. Frayne’s wife had died. Mr. Frayne himself has just been taken to the hospital after being found by Trixie’s father at the foot of the long driveway.

I reread the story that I first read some 65 years ago. I wanted to see how much I remembered, how much I didn’t, and if I would like it as much as that kid did back in the late 1950s. I recalled three things: Bobby getting bitten by a copperhead; a fire where the only thing that’s saved (by Trixie, of course) is a mattress; and Mr. Frayne’s 15-year-old nephew Jim, who comes to Sleepyside to get away from a mean and brutal stepfather.

My memory was intact, including the overall arc of the story. Trixie and her new friend Honey Wheeler are a textbook example of opposites attracting. I thought I’d read more about Trixie’s two older brothers, but they’re both away at camp and don’t figure into the story. I remembered that Jim had red hair.

What I didn’t remember was that, while the story ends on a high note, it also ends with a couple of hanging threads, like what happens to Jim? If I want to find out, I have to read the next book in the series, The Red Trailer Mystery. Nice marketing ploy, that.

The author, Julie Campbell Tatham, wrote the first six books in the series. The next 33 were written by a variety of writers, typically using the pen name “Kathryn Kenny.” The books are still in print. Because I read an original edition published by Whitman Publishing in 1958, I don’t know if the more contemporary editions have been “modernized” or not. Some of that has happened with The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Campbell Tatham also wrote the Ginny Gordon series at the same time she was writing the Trixie Belden books.

I found my copy of Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion via a used bookstore online. It is exactly the same edition I bought when I was a kid, the one I carried home on my bike from TG&Y. I’m that almost-seven-year-old kid again, buying and enjoying the first book he ever bought for himself.

Top photograph by Eleanor Brooke via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Finding Hope in a Cemetery

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I walked into a John Constable landscape and found hope – in a cemetery.

A bit tired of seeing tourist sights on a recent vacation, my wife and I took a Saturday to explore Hampstead in north London. We’d been here in 2015 for a guided walk about the poet John Keats. Walk, perhaps, isn’t the right word. It was more of a brisk run up and down the hills of Hampstead.

One place I wanted to see during this visit was where our Keats Walk had started – St. John-at-Hampstead Church, also known as the “Keats Church,” even though it was the family of his love interest, Fannie Brawn, who were members. Keats himself never attended. The church does have, however, a bust of the poet.

Unfortunately, the church was closed and locked for the day. A few people were walking by; a couple sat talking on a bench. Instead of leaving, we wandered around the churchyard and its cemetery. The original cemetery is adjacent to the church; a larger and newer extension is across the street. 

To continue reading please see my post at Cultivating Oaks.

“God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers” by James McIvor

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In 1861, the first year of the Civil War, soldiers on both sides still felt some sense of momentum. Overly optimistic, many believed the war would over by Christmas. As the war stretched into 1862, the initial optimism was giving way to something else – a sense of failure and despair. And that sense affected both sides. 

The South was beginning to feel the bite of the Union blockade of Southern ports. The North was watching a series of what seemed like only Confederate victories on the battlefield. Soldiers were becoming demoralized. It didn’t help the Union’s cause that so many senior officers were “political generals” and appeared sorely lacking in experience and common sense. The sense of failure and isolation was especially acute around Christmas, when soldiers would have ordinarily been home with their families.

Using books, articles, letters (both published and unpublished), archival papers, and diaries, author James McIvor has written God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers: A True Civil War Christmas Story. He’s provided a snapshot of what the Christmas season was like during the four years of the Civil War. His focus is the soldiers, what they thought, what they experienced, and often why they wanted to be anyplace other than where they were. The book was first published in 2006. 

Sometimes the Christmas season and holiday coincided with battles, and soldiers found themselves marching to battle when they would have preferred to be at home, or at worst sitting around a campfire and enjoying a good meal. More often, Christmas was quiet, leaving too much time to think and reflect, and miss fallen colleagues and the family at home.

He points out that the Civil War changed perceptions of the holiday. The suffering on both sides had been great, and the feelings about Christmas that had been growing for decades before the war became something much stronger with the end of the way. “The Civil War, in fact,” McIvor writes, “made Christmas a truly American holiday in a way it had never entirely been before.”

McIvor is a longtime Civil War enthusiast and freelance writer. He lives in Virginia. 

God, Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers is a poignant narrative, but it avoids sentimentalism. Soldiers who served before and after the Civil War would likely find some of their own story here.

Top illustration: Christmas Eve 1863 by Thomas Nast, the German-born Civil War cartoonist who is credited with creating the image of Santa Claus.

“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott

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I was in 9th grade, at the time part of the middle school where I grew up. Our English teacher assigned our all-boy class two papers about authors – one English and one American. We were required to read one work by each author for our papers. She had a list of 35 English writers and 35 Americans, one for each person in our class. Our choices, however, were determined alphabetically, which meant whoever was last would get the two no one else wanted. Which meant me.

No one wanted to read a play by William Shakespeare, which meant he would be my English author. And the last American author on the list (remember this was an all-boys class) was Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888).

When my name was called, general laughter erupted. The teacher, with her soft Alabama accent in a roomful of New Orleans boys, was irate. She loved Alcott, she said, and she loved Little Women. And if any of us ever wanted to understand girls, we should read the Alcott novel. I knew what I had better read for my report.

Louisa May Alcott originally published Little Women as two books, Part 1 in 1868 and Part 2 in 1869. The story is based on the lives of Alcott’s sisters, family, and friends. A first read of Part 1 by her publisher found it boring, until he had his two daughters read it. Then he had more girls in the target audience read it. The 2,000-copy first edition sold out almost immediately.

The book has been as popular in Britain as it has in the United States, even though the setting is Civil War Massachusetts (Part 1) and Massachusetts and Europe for Part 2. G.K. Chesterton, when he read it, said it had anticipated the Realism School in literature by about 30 years.

To read it today, you also realize how it anticipated the television mini-series. It’s episodic chapters are almost ideally suited for the small screen (see the 2017 mini-series version developed by Heidi Thomas, she of Call the Midwife). The well-loved work has been adapted countless times for stage, movies, and television. It’s even been adapted as a musical and for anime.

And Little Women is well-loved with good reason. It captures of the lives of the four March sisters living between childhood and adulthood (thus the title, “little women”). The family is living through the Civil War period, with their father serving as a chaplain with the Union army. Each chapter centers on a particular sister – Meg the wise one, Jo the headstrong one with a burning passion to write, Amy the pretty and artistic one, and Beth, the youngest, most frail, and kindest of the girls. In their father’s absence, their mother Marmee presides over the family. 

For all four girls, and the next-door neighbor Theodore (“Laurie”), the story is something of a coming-of-age novel. While the story is set during the Civil War, the war itself rarely intrudes, until in Part 1 Mr. March is taken ill with pneumonia and Mrs. March travels to Washington, D.C. to care for him. Part 2 occurs after the war is over.

Louisa May Alcott

It’s a well-written, engaging story. As you read, you come to like these sisters, and you keep reading o find out what will happen to them and their mother. I have to admit, having seen the 1994 movie version, I can only identify Susan Sarandon as Mrs. March, although Emily Watson did a fine job in the 2017 BBC television series. Those two adaptations stick very closely to the original novels. 

I read the work thinking there would be more about the Civil War than I had remembered from my first reading back in high school. There’s not. The war is a distant and unrelated event in the story. Even Mrs. March rushing to her husband’s bedside is never detailed. 

But it’s still a good story. Alcott wrote well, with passion and with humor. Some of the predicaments that Jo and Amy in particular get into are close to hilarious.

For my ninth-grade papers, I read Julius Caesar and Little Women. My lack of choice ended up standing me in good stead with the teacher, who gave the class a Southern evil eye, daring anyone to laugh, when I read my paper (as we were required to do). I saw a few grins, which quickly disappeared when she turned her attention upon the miscreant. No one laughed.

Top illustration: A drawing of the March house. 

Related:

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott. 

A Year of Reading (and Writing) the Civil War

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My story connected to the Civil War has passed the 70,000-word mark, and the ending is in sight. I’m not sure when it was that I realized I was writing about something I had only the most surface understanding of, but I did. The only solution was to start reading and researching.

Many blogs and web sites have been helpful, but two especially so. Emerging Civil War, edited by Chris Mackowksi, is written by historians, National Park guides, and other who know their stuff. Most have published books. Civil War Books & Authors, penned by Andrew Wagonhoffer, posts notices of new books and full-length book reviews focused solely on the Civil War, its causes, and its aftermath. Both sites have been at this work for years, ECW for more than a decade and CWBA since 2005.

What was also a treat was discovering and visiting the Missouri Civil War Museum, located adjacent to the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery here in St. Louis.

Missouri Civil War Museum

My reading and research this year has been less about military strategy, tactics, and battles, and more about what both civilians and soldiers experienced. For several decades after the war, officer and soldier memoirs were popular, and several publishers have made them available in digital format. The same is true for civilians, although there seem to be more memoirs by women and mothers on the Southern side than the Northern, likely reflecting the direct experience these women had.

I did pay attention to certain battles. For my story, the battles of Shiloh, Gettysburg, The Wilderness, Franklin, and Petersburg / Appomattox were the key ones, as was the whole surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. The surrender, in fact, was the scene where the manuscript originally started, even if its now in another place. 

What’s also changed is that I’m reading other fictional accounts of the war – novels, stories, and poetry. Many people turned to fiction and poetry to make sense of what happened in the years between 1861 and 1865. As a friend once said, “Fiction can be truer that history.”

What follows is a list of the books I read in 2023. Given where my own fiction manuscript is, I expect to be reading far fewer in 2024. Then again, maybe not; the Civil War is a difficult subject to walk away from.

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorda.

Irish-American Civil War Songs by Catherine Bateson.

Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances Clark and Rebecca Jo Plant.

An Atlas and a Map of the Civil War

Contemners and Serpents: The James Wilson Family Civil War Correspondence, edited by Theodore Fuller and Thomas Knight.

Four Years with Morgan and Forrest by Col. Thomas Berry.

Grant vs. Lee, edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch.

If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania, Vol. 1, by Scott Mingus & Eric Wittenberg.

Reading John Greenleaf Whittier, the “Abolitionist Poet”, edited by Brenda Wineapple.

A Season of Slaughter: The Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, May 8-21,1864 – Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White. 

Bear in the Wilderness by Donald Waldemer. 

“No One Want to Be the Last to Die”: The Battle of Appomattox, April 8-9, 1865 by Chris Calkins. 

The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg and Tullahoma, edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch. 

Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War by Derek Maxfield. 

My Dearest Julia: The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife.

The Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl by Eliza Frances Andrews. 

Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer by G. Mosely Sorrell. 

The Civil War: The First Year by Those Who Lived It – Library of America.

President Lincoln Assassinated! The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, Trial, and Mourning by Harold Holzer.

Bloody Promenade: Recollections on a Civil War Battle by Stephen Cushman. 

Belle Boyd: Cleopatra of the Secession.

If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania, Vol. 2 by Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenberg.

The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It – Library of America. 

Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers by Rufus Dawes.

The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It – Library of America. 

The True Story of Andersonville Prison by James Madison Page.

The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It – Library of America. 

From Western Virginia with Jackson to Spotsylvania with Lee by Peter Luebke. 

The Story of Camp Douglas by David Keller.

Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox by J. Tracy Power. 

Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War by Stephen Cushman. 

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott.

Shiloh, A Novel by Shelby Foote.

John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary.

John Brown’s Body by Stephen Vincent Benet. 

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

The Battle of Franklin by A.S. Peterson.

The Stolen Train by Robert Ashley. 

I also wrote four blog posts that discussed a little of my own great-grandmother’s experience in Union-occupied New Orleans and some of the struggles I had with the research. 

A Little of the Story of Wilhelmina Ostermann

When Research for Your Historical Novel Changes Your Understanding

My Enchantment with (and Addiction to?) the Civil War.

Research Can Teach You a Hard If Useful Lesson.

Top photograph, courtesy Wikimedia Commons: The Wilderness site, sometime after the battle. The dense scrub wasn’t conducive to fighting, but the dry weather made it conducive to being ignited by sparks from artillery fire.

“The Stolen Train” by Robert Ashley

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It didn’t change the course of world history, or even the Civil War. It didn’t even end in success. But the Andrews Raid, sometimes called the Great Locomotive Chase, was certainly notable in its daring and how it almost succeeded.

In 1862, with the blessing of Union military commanders, recruited 20 soldiers. Their mission: capture a Confederate locomotive called The General not far from Atlanta and take it all the way to safety behind Union lines in Tennessee. Along the way, they would tear up track, burn bridges, and do whatever they could to disrupt the Western & Atlantic Railroad Line from Atlanta to Chattanooga. That line was a key supply line for Confederate armies in Tennessee.

It almost worked. Chased by Confederate soldiers upon a train pulled by The Texas locomotive, the raiders made it to within 20 miles of Chattanooga when they had to abandon the locomotive and scatter. Some were caught and imprisoned. Eventually, the survivors were the first to receive the newly created Medal of Honor. 

In 1953, author and historian Robert Ashley published The Stolen Train, a fictional account of the raid. Most of the characters were based on real persons, including the raid’s leader, James Andrews, and the train engineers Andrews had recruited. The primary fictional character was a young, 15-year-old soldier named Johnnie Adams, who has two jobs, lookout atop the train and scrambling up telegraph poles to cut wires.

That a 15-year-old boy is the main character explains who the audience is – squarely aimed at boys in the 10-13 age bracket. I was 10 when I first read it, and even though I thought of myself as a loyal Southerner, I was thrilled by the story. And it is a thrilling story.

Lest you think a 15-year-old would have been too young to enlist, read Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances Clark and Rebecca Jo Plant. They estimate that up to 10 percent of both the Union and Confederate armies were comprised of boys aged 15 and younger. Ashley’s book for boys is more factual than it might appear.

James Andrews, who led the raid

A considerable number of my classmates read The Stolen Train; it was offered by Scholastic Book Service and widely distributed across the country. Rereading it more than half a century later, it’s still a thrilling and riveting read. Despite its ultimate failure, the Andrews Raid made Southern military and railroad authorities look foolish at best and incompetent at worst. But in their defense, who would have expected a raid to begin deep with the Confederacy itself?

The paperback copy I have is from a fifth printing in 1971, with a cover price of 75 cents. I believe my copy in 1961 cost 50 cents. An Amazon Kindle edition was published in 2020 and lists for $1.99, while hardcover and paperback editions were published in 2012 and a mass market paperback edition in 1997.

It’s a good story, and especially for boys. It’s good to see that it’s available.

Top photograph: The General, on display a few hundred yards from where it was stolen in 1862, at the Southern Museum of the Civil War & Locomotive History, Kennesaw, Georgia.