“Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All”, by Allan Gurganus

 

718 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0394545370

My mother bought Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus way back in the early 90s but never got ‘round to reading it, which is about when I came along and “borrowed” it. So, what to make of it? The premise is that it is the oral reminisces of one 99-year-old Lucy Marsden (that’s the Widow) as she speaks to an unnamed visitor to her nursing home, circa 1980 or so, about her life and times, most of which were spent with her husband, “Colonel” William Marsden, who was 50-years-old when she married him in 1900 at the ripe of age of…15. And there is the first issue I had with this book: while she explains that, after having made a fool of herself at her first cotillion which led her to become Persona non grata in proper society – and, evidently, the perfect match for a 50-year-old bachelor – I had a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of parents allowing their child to be wed to a man old enough to be her grandfather. Different culture, different rules, I know, but…lordamighty.

This “Oral History” structure of the book allows for certain privileges on the author’s part, like letting Lucy ramble on and on about one topic or another in little self-contained vignettes, which more often than not are out of chronological order; in this way it sounds very much like an old person rummaging through their memories and picking up whatever thought they find before moving onto the next (anyone who has ever spoken to an elderly person for an extended period knows what I’m talking about). This literary devise often works well…until it doesn’t, for all too often one feels that the book is too well-structured to be a true oral history, as Gurganus has a handle on balancing the descriptiveness of the story while moving the plot along, something I suspect a woman closing in on a century of life wouldn’t be able to accomplish in her fly-by-wire ruminations on her long life. But Gurganus the author must keep the story turning, so this supposed memoir has a proper, professional structure to it after all.

But, for all that, this is an uneven book. The first 200-pages, give or take, are good, cleverly written and formally structured; again, beyond what would be believable as an old woman’s spoken recollection. So much so that it is painfully obvious that these words, supposedly spoken ex tempore by an almost-100-year-old woman, were in fact carefully crafted over long hours by a professional writer (so much for suspension of disbelief). But after that the tale quickly goes south (heh), and Widow dissolves into a series of brief vignettes in which Lucy – and thus, the reader – find themselves lost in a string of disconnected tales, some of which were quite engaging while others were tedious as hell, if not pointless. Perhaps this was Gurganus’ way of correcting his overly-written book and making it seem more like the memories of an old woman pouring forth? I doubt it; any editor worth their salt would have detected this and made him correct this obvious change in tone and focus.

So while I really, really wanted to like Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, there were just too many literary inconsistencies for my liking for me to really enjoy it. All well and good for a book club, maybe, where discussions can be started and controversies sparked (hmmmmm…), but for a one-on-one read I would find better things to do.