On Losing the War and Being Twice Blest for It

'One needs more than a ... good story of brave men and the wives ... they left behind when they went off to fight and die. One needs a theology.'

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STL, STD

One needs more than a swashbuckling good story of brave men and the wives and mothers they left behind when they went off to fight and die. One needs a theology.

Asked by news reporters why he thought there were so many fine Southern writers, the novelist Walker Percy, who, in 1962, had just won the National Book Award, answered at once, “Because we lost the War.” 

His point was not the obvious one that a defeated people will have better stories to tell than the side that won. Although it is true that while the winners get to write the history, often imposing the harshest possible outcomes on those who didn’t, the losers exact their revenge by telling the stories that we all love to read. 

Margaret Mitchell, for instance, who wrote the bestselling novel Gone With the Wind, which later inspired a smash Hollywood hit, was no Boston Bluestocking. She was steeped in the South, her native land, and in writing about it sought to valorize its past. Still, notwithstanding the bloody backdrop of Sherman’s March to the Sea, which left much of Georgia ravaged and prostrate, the story, for all its lush romance, remains lamentably low on realism. 

So, what was Percy’s point? It had to do with unearthing the real meaning of a Lost War. Or, to put it a little differently, with finding the precise interpretive lens through which a vanquished people might set about explaining to itself what had happened: the nature of the catastrophe that had just smashed their world to bits. 

For that, one needs more than a swashbuckling good story of brave men and the wives and mothers they left behind when they went off to fight and die. One needs a theology. And in the South there was one already in play, however scrubbed down as a result of four centuries of Protestant leveling. It was a kind of do-it-yourself theology, its roots square in the Bible, which gave the Southerner a point of reference, a vision even, of God himself sitting in judgment upon his people, for whose transgressions pain and expiation must follow. 

“Not every lost war would have this effect on every society,” comments Flannery O’Connor in an essay on the “The Regional Writer,” using Percy as her point of departure, “but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having a means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening it at every point, has been another history,” she added, seizing upon an Old Testament image as arresting as anything she ever wrote:

In the South we have, in however attenuated a form, a vision of Moses’ face as he pulverized our idols. 

It is this distinction, surely, that both she and Percy had in mind, which is what so sharply separates the regional writer from the emulsifying sameness of so many stories turned out elsewhere. It is the knowledge of Good and Evil, of knowing that the choices one’s characters make are fraught with Heaven and Damnation. Such a writer, says O’Conner, will occupy that most “peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem,” she concludes, “is to find that location.” 

This will not mean an inventory of Southern quaintness, in which beaten biscuits, moonshine, and magnolias are conscripted to define the special quality of regional life. Rather, it is about finding an identity that lies far below the surface, of plunging the reader deep down, right to the very bottom. “It is not made,” O’Connor reminds us, “from what passes, but from those qualities that endure, regardless of what passes, because they are related to truth,” continuing,

It lies very deep. In its entirety it is known only to God,  but of those who look for it, none gets so close as the artist. 

So, what is it about the artist whose concrete depictions permit a comparison as exalted as God himself? Isn’t that rather a tall order? Jacques Maritain didn’t think so, who tells us that “God and the literary artist have one thing in common, that while they both love their creations, they judge them without sentimentality.” 

None of that nonsense about “Have a nice day!” Because if God is love, if he wishes to promote the best good of the beloved, then it may be better if the day does not turn out to be so nice. That in order to cure the hardened heart, the persisting obduracy of those who will not bend to behave, thinking all is well despite so depraved an indifference to the welfare of others, God may have to resort to more direct means of chastisement. Like losing a war. 

Meanwhile, what we want, the God we should prefer, as C.S. Lewis points out in The Problem of Pain, “is not so much a Father in Heaven as a Grandfather in Heaven…a senile benevolence, whose fondest wish is that we might all simply enjoy ourselves.” 

We wish him to be simply kind to us, not realizing that real love cannot always countenance mere kindness, especially when kindness is understood as wanting only that nobody be allowed to suffer. Vast numbers of the innocent have been blithely exterminated on that basis. This is a far cry from Dante’s understanding of love as “a Lord of terrible aspect,” moving not only the sun and the stars, but the human heart as well. 

And what else are the stories we tell supposed to be about if not the human heart? Which means, of course, the heart in conflict with itself, to lift a phrase from another Southern writer, William Faulkner, who declaimed it in his Acceptance Speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Because we have forgotten, he said, “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice,” we must learn them all over again. 

“While the South,” writes O’Connor, providing the perfect footnote to Faulkner’s speech, “is hardly Christ-centered, it is very much Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.” 

Which is why he will so often find himself in collision with the life he has failed to live, the better version of himself he has fallen short of, the ideals he has mocked and betrayed. Leaving, of course, the usual worm in the apple, whose poison has seeped so far into the fruit as to threaten its very life. Accordingly, the stories he tells will teem with unresolved tension, with endings that may not turn out so well after all. 

“Because we lost the War.”