An Interview with Pat Carr, Author of Death of a Confederate Colonel

Most authors who use the Civil War in fiction write novels. Why did you choose to write short stories?
While I am writing a novel set in the Civil War, I see short fiction and longer narratives as having completely different functions. For me, novels must contain a vast core event—those encompassing actions of life and death, love and betrayal in War and Peace, Crime and Punishment or the social novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Trollope, or the picaresque adventures in Tom Jones. Short stories focus on intimate personal triumphs and defeats, those moments of awareness Joyce called ‘epiphanies,’ after which nothing in the lives of the characters will ever be the same. I think both are equally important, and I wanted to capture the moments with this particular book.

What is your attraction to history?
I grew up in a Wyoming oil camp in the middle of nowhere, and in that desolate landscape there seemed to be no present and very little future, but there was a past in the arrowheads I used to find in the hills. My love for history probably began then, and I was an undergraduate history major at Rice. I think we can get a better grasp of where we’re going by looking at where we’ve been, and since I’m convinced that human emotions and motives stay the same through the ages, I feel we can understand ourselves if we understand history.

Why not write history then rather than historical fiction?
Fiction has the advantage or making a reader care about the participants in an event, which isn’t necessarily the case with the facts of history.

Since you’re writing fiction, do you just make up what happened?
Absolutely not. Americans learn too much of their history from novels and films, and writers owe it to their readers to get the facts right. Fiction has to have a basis in truth—and historical fiction has the added obligation of being grounded in what actually happened.

How much research do you do in order to get it right?
Exhaustive research. I read everything I can find on the particular event I’m using—things like contemporary recipes and advertisements from dry-goods stores. With the Civil War, the sources can fill a library, but I try to look at all of it—even if I don’t use half of it. For example, I had a case of gangrene in one of my stories, so I went to a three-hour seminar on gangrene given for nursing students, I persuaded the staff at the Wound Center to let me hang out with them when they got a patient with gangrene from diabetes, I haunted medical museums as far away as Alexandria, Virginia, to study Civil War medical instruments, and I read up on the treatments for gangrene used between 1800 and 2000 (A bromide solution could actually cure gangrene). But then the story itself didn’t jell, and I haven’t used any of that information yet. So now I’m trying to work a character with gangrene into the novel I’m writing.

Is the Civil War your main historical interest?
I’ve probably been interested in the Civil War era longer than in any other historical period because the war itself was such a tragedy and because it inspired so many works and so many great authors. I find the war in Arkansas particularly tragic in view of the battlefields right next door and the fact that the combatants and the collateral damaged civilians were all in the family. But I’m also continually fascinated by the artifacts of both North and South American pre-history, an interest undoubtedly stemming from those arrowheads in my childhood.

Your stories are mostly set on the home front rather than on the battlefield. Is there a reason for that?
In the Civil War, the home front often was the battlefield, of course, but actually I don’t write about anything I haven’t experienced. I do know life on the periphery of war, and since I’ve encountered birth and death, have seen my share of blood, have listened to my father-in-law tell about the horror of the day the Americans were ordered from the trench ‘over the top’ in 1918, and I’ve watched the stress of returning soldiers, whose trauma caused our next-door neighbor to hang himself a couple of months after he was invalided out after Anzio, and caused one of my students to blow off his head not long after he got back from Saigon. Given the eight or nine wars America has been involved in since 1898, too many people in the twentieth century have been in battle, and I don’t believe in usurping or devaluing their experience by guessing what they went through. That’s the surest way to end up with a cliché or a stereotype. I’ve also always paid attention to Chekhov’s caution that a lie in fiction is a hundred times more boring than it is in real life. If there’s anything I don’t want a reader to be, it’s bored.

Is there anything in particular you want your readers to take away from your stories?
Yes. I want them to recognize the complexity of ordinary people—not just the Southern belles about to lose a Tara-like plantation—but the ordinary men and women who end up witnessing and fighting the wars. I want readers to understand motives, which are the same for all of us, and to care about the people I present on the page. The Yank and the Reb were essentially the same, and I want readers to see that. Ultimately I want everyone to empathize with everyone else, no matter which side of the war they were on or which war they’re coming back from.

When did you start writing?
Actually before I knew how to write. I must have been about three or four, and I couldn’t recognize the letters of the alphabet, so I squiggled lines across pages folded into books and then ‘read’ the stories to anyone willing to listen.

One last question, what are you currently working on?
The Civil War novel I mentioned, which will be set in Little Rock in 1864 after the war had gone bad for everyone. And since TCU Press, which published my novel about Pancho Villa, Border Ransom, has requested a sequel, I’m also researching and working on that one.