Civil War Novel ‘Cold Mountain’ Leaves Battles In Background

Before he became a novelist, Charles Frazier was a great reader and a man of the outdoors. He had walked the Andes as well as the mountains of his native North Carolina, where he lives on a farm near Raleigh and raises show ponies.

In one sweep, his first novel, “Cold Mountain,” has won critical acclaim and astonishing popular success. The book is No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for the third week.

Considering the customary treatment and brief shelf life of most first novels, “Cold Mountain” (Atlantic Monthly Press) is a publishing phenomenon. In common with Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” and David Guterson’s “Snow Falling on Cedars,” it is a literary work of exceptional merit that is selling as many copies as thrillers and romance novels, and it has achieved its wide readership largely through word of mouth.

Encouraged by local reviews and small booksellers, people across the country are reading it and telling their friends about it. There are 500,000 copies of “Cold Mountain” in print.

Priming the pump is the 46-year-old author, who has been on a book tour.

His book is a Civil War novel with a difference. In quietly understated lyrical prose, it traces the hazardous journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman, who deserts the army and walks 300 miles across North Carolina, back to Cold Mountain to be with the woman he loves.

Traditionally, Civil War novels deal with men in war, and authors do their research on battlefields and by reading memoirs and diaries of generals. William S. McFeely, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Grant: A Biography,” suggests there is a built-in problem with many Civil War books: “Despite the disclaimers, many of them end up glorifying battle,” or, on the other hand, making war seem morally neutral.

Something similar bothers Frazier about Civil War literature. “When you grow up in the South,” he said, “you get this concept of the war as this noble, tragic thing, and when I think about my own family’s experience, it doesn’t seem so noble in any direction. To go off and fight for a cause they had not much relation to: that’s the part I see as tragic.”

Still, Civil War novels from “The Red Badge of Courage” to “The Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara continue to captivate readers. In many ways, Frazier breaks the pattern. For him, the war is in the background. “I felt those battle books had been done and in many cases done well,” he said over a lunch of crab cakes, collard greens, red rice and sweet iced tea at a Charleston restaurant. “What I was interested in was the old lost culture of the southern Appalachians.”

His goal was to write “an ‘Odyssey’ rather than an ‘Iliad,”’ a book with a Homeric breadth but a very specific American locale. “Part of what I wanted to do was to learn as much as I could about the history of that little piece of the world,” the area where he was born and where his family has lived for 200 years.

Frazier’s father, a high school principal, had been researching the family history and told his son about W.P. Inman, Charles Frazier’s great-great-uncle, a Confederate soldier who, as in the book, deserted and walked home to Cold Mountain. In a flash, Frazier realized this was a story that answered his creative needs, and it took place in his backyard. After considerable research, all he could find about the real Inman would fill only one page.

Thinking about Inman, he realized: “He was badly wounded, physically and spiritually. He was running away from what caused the wounds and he was running toward what he thought would heal those wounds. He’s somebody who has every reason to hate the world and is very prone to that feeling but is looking for a way not to.”

Having no photograph of Inman, he took as a model a portrait of his grandfather. “He’s wearing a black suit, a white shirt without a tie, but it’s buttoned up to the top, and he just looks large and dark and dangerous.”

He alternates Inman’s adventures with scenes back at Cold Mountain, where Inman’s love, Ada, homesteads with the help of a resourceful young friend, Ruby. It was a breakthrough in the writing when he created the characters of the two women. Until then, he said, the difficulty and the meanness of the journey dominated. “There wasn’t much sense of what he was going to, his desire for peace and contentment and home, the opposite of the values of war.”

Ada, who comes from Charleston, is the outsider on the land, whereas Ruby is a natural farmer. The two women were based partly on people he knew as a child, “very strong, independent women who had a level of self-possession and self-mastery that runs counter to that stereotype of women in that culture. If there was a copperhead out in the backyard, they would take the gun out of the husband’s hands because they were better shots.”

Reviewers have pointed out specific parallels to “The Odyssey,” one saying that Frazier’s wise old Goatwoman (an outspoken critic of slavery) is a variation on Circe. Actually, she is closer to the swineherd in “The Odyssey” and is also based on someone the author knew as a child, a man “who went all over the southern Appalachians in a goatcart.”

Or as his Goatwoman says: “I journeyed all over the world. As far north as Richmond. All the way south nearly to Charleston, and everywhere in between.”

Gradually, he began to find his own narrative voice, which he described as having “a kind of rhythm and music that sounds in my ear like people talked when I was a kid.”

Frazier’s primary sources include William Bartram, the celebrated 18th-century naturalist, whose “Travels” tracked through the geography, flora and fauna of the American wilderness. It was from him that the author was inspired to write poetic passages about the wonders of nature.

As might be expected, the novel was not Frazier’s first attempt at writing. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, he taught early American literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

In his 20s, he wrote “Paul Bowles-ish stories about Americans in third world countries.” He did not think they were good enough to publish, but he never lost his desire to write.

When their daughter was born, he and his wife decided to return to North Carolina, where she taught accounting and he taught literature. About six years ago she suggested that he put some serious effort into writing a novel because otherwise he would always regret it.

Eventually he decided to take a two-year break from teaching, then extended the self-imposed deadline by several years.

A great deal of the book was written in a cabin in the mountains, a vacation retreat owned by his wife’s parents. He worked on the novel for more than five years, with his wife and their daughter reading parts of it. He was fearful of showing it to anyone else.

Along the way encouragement came from Kaye Gibbons, a North Carolina novelist and friend. Gibbons sent it to her agent and in December 1995, it was submitted to Elisabeth Schmitz at Atlantic, which quickly bought the book for an estimated six figures. The paperback rights brought $300,000.

Then the novel was bought by MGM/UA for $1.25 million for a movie to be directed by Anthony Minghella.

For his next novel, he plans to write about people in “the self-contained cultures” of elegant summer resorts that flourished in the mountains of North Carolina before and after the turn of the century. On his desk at home is a stack of books on the subject.