美国国家公共电台 NPR In 'Varina,' A Confederate Contemplates Her Complicity

 

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

The writer Charles Frazier used to think he'd said enough about the Civil War. He wrote an acclaimed¹ Civil War novel that became an Oscar-winning movie.

CHARLES FRAZIER: After "Cold Mountain," I never thought I wanted to write about the Civil War again. But as the past three or four years have shown, it's not done with us as a country, as a culture.

INSKEEP: We still have competing visions of America, and Charles Frazier's new novel, "Varina," offers a fictional² version of a real-life Confederate. Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederacy, and Varina Davis was his wife, the Confederate first lady. It's Varina who caught Frazier's attention. His novel depicts³ Mrs. Davis long after the war when she is a widow and moves, as Varina did in real life, to New York, to the north. She tries to remake herself as a writer, though the past keeps returning to haunt her.

FRAZIER: I was very interested in this figure who was peripheral⁴ to all of those enormous, destructive, horrible elements of American history who continued evolving in her thinking. She was never perfect, and to my mind, it's only really the greatest heroes who are able to rise totally above the values of their culture. And she certainly wasn't that. But I really liked the idea of a character struggling to move forward, to stay engaged with the world. And she at some point said, I'm not going back to Richmond, to the South, until it's feet first in a box.

INSKEEP: Well, not perfect - that's all of us, of course. Needing to improve - that's all of us.

FRAZIER: Yeah.

INSKEEP: But in this case, you have someone who was the first lady of the Confederacy, an attempt to found a nation that was based on slavery, that was based on racism⁵. Did you have any qualms⁶ as a writer about spending so much time with a Confederate icon⁷?

FRAZIER: Yeah. Well, yeah - and the thing that kept pulling me in is her continuing to examine the lead-up to the war, her complicity, that sense of the consequences of being on the wrong side of history, those kinds of things.

INSKEEP: What drives the plot of this novel is that Varina Davis is in upstate New York late in life, changing her life as you say. And she's visited by a figure from her past, a man - a younger man of mixed race who it is said that she looked after, that she cared for, during the Civil War itself. Did anything like that happen in real life?

FRAZIER: It did, yes. There's a photograph of him that would have been made in a photographer studio in Richmond. And some of her children were photographed at the same time with some of the same props⁸. And this little boy left Richmond right before the fall and traveled with her until they were captured in South Georgia.

INSKEEP: I guess we should state for non-Southerners, when you say right before the fall, you mean the fall of Richmond.

FRAZIER: Yeah. And he - there's a little bit of record of him for about a year after that, and then he disappears from history. And he would have been about 6 at the time. And I wondered what a reunion of Varina and that little boy, now a middle-aged⁹ man, would be like and what questions he might asked her about his past and her past.

INSKEEP: What were Varina Davis' views about slavery?

FRAZIER: She in later age said very clearly the right side won the war. She also would sometimes make retrograde statements like, gosh, I wish we could all go back to the time when we took care of each other. And James Blake very quickly challenges her on that.

INSKEEP: James Blake, who's this younger man that she...

FRAZIER: Yes, is that child grown up.

INSKEEP: On page 210, you have this paragraph in which your main character, Varina, is thinking about the land and how it's changed or how its meaning has changed by what's happened on it. When you read some of that?

FRAZIER: Sure. (Reading) The old land had become all overlain with new maps of failures and sins, troop movements, battles and skirmishes, places of victory and defeat and loss and despair, slave quarters, whipping posts and slave platforms, routes of attack and retreat, monumental cemeteries¹⁰ of white crosses stretching in rows to the horizon and also lonesome mountain burials with one name knife-cut into a pine board, weathered blank in 10 years and rotted into the ground in 20, the land itself defaced and haunted with countless¹¹ places where blood - all red whoever it sprang from - would keep seeping¹² up for generations to come.

INSKEEP: So I hear you speak that, and I think about a drive that I just took through a good part of the South, including your home state. And all the way up Interstate 95, you got those brown signs for historic battlefields. And three or four occasions, you've got huge flagpoles with huge Confederate flags. Is Varina Davis' description of the South the way you see the South today?

FRAZIER: It is certainly the way I see it sometimes. Dealing¹³ with the commemoration of those kinds of things - we certainly need to remember, and we need to remember the causes. And we need to remember that part of the reason the Civil War keeps rearing its head is because we never resolved the issues that arose from the ownership of human beings, the issues of race, dealing with the aftermath of slavery, all those things that we're still carrying with us.

INSKEEP: Very late in the book, not to give away the ending, but there's a line in which your main character, the younger man who remembers Varina Davis, says he remembers saying to Varina, someday you'll be forgiven for all this, yes? What's her answer?

FRAZIER: No.

INSKEEP: What's that mean?

FRAZIER: That the fundamental sin of slavery is something that she benefited from for the first half of her life and that she thinks that that may be an unforgivable sin.

INSKEEP: Is that true of just the person or is it true of the country?

FRAZIER: Well, I think there's an argument to be made for both, that it pertains¹⁴ to both.

INSKEEP: The novel is called "Varina." The author is Charles Frazier. Thanks very much.

FRAZIER: Thank you.

1 acclaimed   

adj.受人欢迎的

参考例句：

• They acclaimed him as the best writer of the year. 他们称赞他为当年的最佳作者。
• Confuscius is acclaimed as a great thinker. 孔子被赞誉为伟大的思想家。

2 fictional   

adj.小说的，虚构的

参考例句：

• The names of the shops are entirely fictional.那些商店的名字完全是虚构的。
• The two authors represent the opposite poles of fictional genius.这两位作者代表了天才小说家两个极端。

3 depicts   

描绘，描画( depict的第三人称单数 )； 描述

参考例句：

• The book vividly depicts French society of the 1930s. 这本书生动地描绘了20 世纪30 年代的法国社会。
• He depicts the sordid and vulgar sides of life exclusively. 他只描写人生肮脏和庸俗的一面。

4 peripheral   

adj.周边的，外围的

参考例句：

• We dealt with the peripheral aspects of a cost reduction program.我们谈到了降低成本计划的一些外围问题。
• The hotel provides the clerk the service and the peripheral traveling consultation.旅舍提供票务服务和周边旅游咨询。

5 racism   

n.民族主义；种族歧视(意识)

参考例句：

• He said that racism is endemic in this country.他说种族主义在该国很普遍。
• Racism causes political instability and violence.种族主义道致政治动荡和暴力事件。

6 qualms   

n.不安；内疚

参考例句：

• He felt no qualms about borrowing money from friends.他没有对于从朋友那里借钱感到不安。
• He has no qualms about lying.他撒谎毫不内疚。

7 icon   

n.偶像，崇拜的对象，画像

参考例句：

• They found an icon in the monastery.他们在修道院中发现了一个圣像。
• Click on this icon to align or justify text.点击这个图标使文本排齐。

8 props   

小道具； 支柱( prop的名词复数 )； 支持者； 道具； （橄榄球中的）支柱前锋

参考例句：

• Rescuers used props to stop the roof of the tunnel collapsing. 救援人员用支柱防止隧道顶塌陷。
• The government props up the prices of farm products to support farmers' incomes. 政府保持农产品价格不变以保障农民们的收入。

9 middle-aged   

adj.中年的

参考例句：

• I noticed two middle-aged passengers.我注意到两个中年乘客。
• The new skin balm was welcome by middle-aged women.这种新护肤香膏受到了中年妇女的欢迎。

10 cemeteries   

n.（非教堂的）墓地，公墓( cemetery的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• It's morbid to dwell on cemeteries and such like. 不厌其烦地谈论墓地以及诸如此类的事是一种病态。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease. 在其它地区里，邻近墓地的地方，时疫大概都要严重些。 来自辞典例句

11 countless   

adj.无数的，多得不计其数的

参考例句：

• In the war countless innocent people lost their lives.在这场战争中无数无辜的人丧失了性命。
• I've told you countless times.我已经告诉你无数遍了。

12 seeping   

v.（液体）渗( seep的现在分词 )；渗透；渗出；漏出

参考例句：

• Water had been slowly seeping away from the pond. 池塘里的水一直在慢慢渗漏。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Chueh-hui could feel the cold seeping into his bones. 觉慧开始觉得寒气透过衣服浸到身上来了。 来自汉英文学 - 家（1-26） - 家（1-26）

13 dealing   

n.经商方法，待人态度

参考例句：

• This store has an excellent reputation for fair dealing.该商店因买卖公道而享有极高的声誉。
• His fair dealing earned our confidence.他的诚实的行为获得我们的信任。

14 pertains   

关于( pertain的第三人称单数 )； 有关； 存在； 适用

参考例句：

• When one manages upward, none of these clear and unambiguous symbols pertains. 当一个人由下而上地管理时，这些明确无误的信号就全都不复存在了。
• Her conduct hardly pertains to a lady. 她的行为与女士身份不太相符。