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Long Remember
Long Remember is the first realistic novel about the Civil War. Originally published in the 1930s, and out of print sincer the 50s, this book received rave reviews from the NY Times Book Review, and was a main selection of the Literary Guild. It is the account of the Battle of Gettysburg, as viewed by a pacifist who comes to accept the nasty necessity of combat, and lives an intense and skewed romance along the way.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
19 people are currently reading
227 people want to read
About the author
MacKinlay Kantor
227 books65 followersBenjamin McKinlay Kantor, was an American journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He wrote more than 30 novels, several set during the American Civil War, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his 1955 novel
Andersonville
Kantor was born in Webster City, Iowa, in 1904. His mother, a journalist, encouraged Kantor to develop his writing style. Kantor started writing seriously as a teen-ager when he worked as a reporter with his mother at the local newspaper in Webster City.
Kantor's first novel was published when he was 24.
During World War II, Kantor reported from London as a war correspondent for a Los Angeles newspaper. After flying on several bombing missions, he asked for and received training to operate the bomber's turret machine guns (this was illegal, as he was not in service).
Nevertheless he was decorated with the Medal of Freedom by Gen. Carl Spaatz, then the U.S. Army Air Corp commander. He also saw combat during the Korean War as a correspondent.
In addition to journalism and novels, Kantor wrote the screenplay for Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is the Female) (1950), a noted film noir. It was based on his short story by the same name, published February 3, 1940 in a "slick" magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. In 1992, it was revealed that he had allowed his name to be used on a screenplay written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who had been blacklisted as a result of his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) hearings. Kantor passed his payment on to Trumbo to help him survive.
Several of his novels were adapted for films. He established his own publishing house, and published several of his works in the 1930s and 1940s.
Kantor died of a heart attack in 1977, at the age of 73, at his home in Sarasota, Florida.
Kantor was born in Webster City, Iowa, in 1904. His mother, a journalist, encouraged Kantor to develop his writing style. Kantor started writing seriously as a teen-ager when he worked as a reporter with his mother at the local newspaper in Webster City.
Kantor's first novel was published when he was 24.
During World War II, Kantor reported from London as a war correspondent for a Los Angeles newspaper. After flying on several bombing missions, he asked for and received training to operate the bomber's turret machine guns (this was illegal, as he was not in service).
Nevertheless he was decorated with the Medal of Freedom by Gen. Carl Spaatz, then the U.S. Army Air Corp commander. He also saw combat during the Korean War as a correspondent.
In addition to journalism and novels, Kantor wrote the screenplay for Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is the Female) (1950), a noted film noir. It was based on his short story by the same name, published February 3, 1940 in a "slick" magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. In 1992, it was revealed that he had allowed his name to be used on a screenplay written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who had been blacklisted as a result of his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) hearings. Kantor passed his payment on to Trumbo to help him survive.
Several of his novels were adapted for films. He established his own publishing house, and published several of his works in the 1930s and 1940s.
Kantor died of a heart attack in 1977, at the age of 73, at his home in Sarasota, Florida.
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July 6, 2021
Long Remember has been long forgotten. MacKinlay Kantor's 1934 novel, which chronicles the Civil War's Pennsylvania Campaign and Battle of Gettysburg from the perspective of civilians unlucky enough to be in Gettysburg on those three crucial days of July 1-3, 1863, caused quite a splash in its time; it was a Literary Guild main selection, and no less an authority than the Southern novelist and critic Allen Tate praised its battlefield realism.
Yet while Kantor's later Civil War novel Andersonville (1955) won the Pulitzer Prize, was praised by historian Bruce Catton as "the best Civil War novel I have ever read, without any question," and has remained continuously in print, Long Remember was out of print for decades, and only reappeared in print in 2000. How was it that Long Remember came back onto literary radar screens around the turn of the millennium, and how and why did it disappear from sight in the first place?
As to the reasons for the reappearance of Long Remember, I have my suspicions. When I first purchased this 2000 reprinting of Long Remember, I placed right next to it, on the desk of my Central Pennsylvania office, a 1996 Ballantine Books trade edition of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (1974). Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novelistic treatment of the Gettysburg campaign and battle, unlike Kantor's, has remained popular ever since its publication; it inspired Ronald Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg, and can be said to have had virtually a controlling influence on the way in which much of the reading public views the battle.
What struck me, looking at the two books together, was how much they look alike. They are the same size, and both have similar cover illustrations: for Shaara, a portion of Paul Philippoteaux's Cyclorama painting that shows Pickett's Charge from the Union perspective; for Kantor, a painting by popular Civil War artist Don Troiani, also depicting a portion of Pickett's Charge, also from what could be the point of view of an ordinary Union soldier. (Virtually all Civil War enthusiasts will recognize, within about one second of glancing at the cover, that the cover painting shows Confederate General Lewis Armistead with his hat stuck to the tip of his sword.) If the publishers hoped that the ongoing enthusiasm for The Killer Angels meant that Long Remember could find a readership among some members of that same audience, such a hope would be perfectly understandable.
But take The Killer Angels off the table, and leave Long Remember there by itself, and you will find that what you have is a pretty good Civil War novel. The author of a Civil War historical novel must make one of two choices: either take the characters to the war, or bring the war to the characters. Shaara in The Killer Angels made the former choice, introducing us to his fictive Chamberlain, Lee, Longstreet, et al., while the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia were already on the way to Gettysburg. Kantor in Long Remember makes the latter choice, introducing us to ordinary people of Gettysburg and letting the war come to them.
Kantor, an award-winning journalist and popular author of his time, often turned to war for his subject matter; his blank-verse novel Glory for Me (1945) was adapted into William Wyler’s Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), about World War II veterans adjusting to post-war life back home in the U.S.A. For Long Remember, Kantor’s main character is Dan Bale, a man who has seen war and wants no more of it.
Having left his hometown of Gettysburg and gone west to Minnesota, Bale managed to be on hand when the Dakota War of 1862 broke out there, and came back a bitter sort of philosophical pacifist. As far as he is concerned, the Union and Confederate armies can grind one another into bloody paste if they like; he wants no part of it. American readers of 1934, seeing the rise of warlike totalitarian regimes less than two decades after the end of the First World War or "war to end all wars," might well have identified with Bale's expressed belief that all war is futile, and with his intent to stay out of this war. Seventy years before the isolationism of the time between the world wars, Bale is a sort of proto-isolationist.
But as his home is on the Chambersburg Pike, just northwest of "The Diamond" (the town square that marks the heart of Gettysburg), he soon finds that his home falls within rebel lines. Kantor thus gets an opportunity to dramatize a good part of the action of July 1, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, showing us events along McPherson Ridge and around the Lutheran Theological Seminary. As Bale's home becomes a Confederate field hospital, we also get to see the physical mayhem that that war inflicted, in a time when innovations in weapons technology had far outstripped advances in medical science.
There are romantic complications as well. Bale has enjoyed an interlude of illicit passion with Irene Fanning, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Irene thinks at one point, “[H]ow wicked I am, how completely fallen from some stupid estate”, but reflects at the same time that “I suppose…this is something I’ve been waiting for, all my life” (p. 101). Irene’s husband, a cold and embittered man (there are a lot of bitter people in this book), is a Union officer in a Pennsylvania regiment somewhere on the other side of the battle lines. Irene, guilt-stricken by what she and Bale have done, insists that Bale find Irene's husband and tell him that the affair never happened (even though it did).
To say that Bale does not like the mission that Irene has set for him would be an understatement:
Dan declared, “You want me to go over there and lie to him, and I will do it,” and there was hate in his voice. Not hate for her; she was to be pitied, she could not help herself. “But if he’s killed, will you agree to marry me?”
“You should know what I will do. But this way…he mustn’t die believing me – thinking that I did –” (p. 301)
Yet Bale accepts Irene's charge, and (in a series of events that seems to defy the laws of fictional probability) takes a pair of blue uniform trousers off a dead Union soldier, makes his way through the provost marshals and skirmish lines of two warring armies, and finds himself on Cemetery Ridge just in time for Pickett's Charge on July 3rd. One senses here the anxiety of novelist Kantor to make sure that his readers finish the book feeling that they've gotten a good look at their fair share of Gettysburg landmarks.
The other indispensable Gettysburg landmark, of course, is Little Round Top; and Kantor gets us there, too, in a post-battle sequence that has him exploring that part of the battlefield in search of a friend who joined the Pennsylvania militia just before the battle and is missing and feared dead. In short, this book suffers from a tension between the author's wish to provide a realistic, Red Badge of Courage-style view of the Civil War as seen through ordinary people's eyes on the one hand, and his sense of the need to give the viewer a panoramic view of the Gettysburg engagement in its entirety on the other. That contradiction is never fully resolved.
Yet Long Remember does have its virtues. I appreciated Kantor's determination to provide a realistic, unglamorous view of war, and his focus on the trauma that war inflicts, both physically and psychologically. In the time before the battle begins, Bale encounters a Union officer from Illinois – a Major Glenn from Illinois, who disapproves of Bale’s pacifist ways. Bale meets the officer’s son, whose “eyes were hazel as his father’s, but opaque and chilly; they were the eyes of a killer, ruthless with all the hatred of nineteen” (pp. 199-200). Bale’s conversation with Major Glenn ends on this note:
“You’re fortunate to have your son with you in the same regiment,” Bale said.
Glenn swung his hand against his hat rim. “I did have three,” he said. He cantered down the graveled path, past the dead horse, and rode away up the slope without looking back. (pp. 200-01)
The World War I veterans who read this novel twenty years after participating in that dreadful conflict no doubt appreciated Kantor's uncompromising depiction of the physical mayhem that war inflicts:
Bale said, “It’s a man,” and he found him under some vines. He was a Union soldier. The black blood crusted all over one side of him and he looked as if he were dead, but he wasn’t. Dan picked him up, and one swollen arm failed to hang limp even by its own weight. Bale moved the arm – the man screamed from the bottom of hell…. (p. 301)
The man's wounds are also maggot-infested; and when Bale takes the wounded man to a Confederate field hospital, the rebel surgeon there jocularly remarks, "Ha, when they've got the worms you can't wager much. There's one like that inside, only worse -- trochanters and neck of the left femur shattered, ball lodged near the acetabulum, and maggots by the wagon-load..." (p. 301). The American Civil War was that kind of war, I suppose. So was the First World War that was on novelist Kantor's mind as he wrote. So, I would imagine, is every war.
Long Remember takes its title from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In dedicating Gettysburg’s National Cemetery, four months after the battle, President Lincoln said that no speech he might give could compare with the valor and sacrifice of the slain Union soldiers who had been laid to rest at the cemetery: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” A century and a half later, both the speech and the soldiers it honored are of course well-remembered.
As for the less-well-remembered Long Remember -- it is a good novel, though it does not rise to the level of The Killer Angels. But if you are a Civil War enthusiast who is always looking for something new to read about Gettysburg, then it should work well for you. You might also want to read it in conjunction with nonfiction treatments of the ordeal of Gettysburg’s civilians during and after the battle – books like William G. Williams's Days of Darkness: The Gettysburg Civilians, or George Sheldon's When the Smoke Cleared at Gettysburg.
Yet while Kantor's later Civil War novel Andersonville (1955) won the Pulitzer Prize, was praised by historian Bruce Catton as "the best Civil War novel I have ever read, without any question," and has remained continuously in print, Long Remember was out of print for decades, and only reappeared in print in 2000. How was it that Long Remember came back onto literary radar screens around the turn of the millennium, and how and why did it disappear from sight in the first place?
As to the reasons for the reappearance of Long Remember, I have my suspicions. When I first purchased this 2000 reprinting of Long Remember, I placed right next to it, on the desk of my Central Pennsylvania office, a 1996 Ballantine Books trade edition of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (1974). Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novelistic treatment of the Gettysburg campaign and battle, unlike Kantor's, has remained popular ever since its publication; it inspired Ronald Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg, and can be said to have had virtually a controlling influence on the way in which much of the reading public views the battle.
What struck me, looking at the two books together, was how much they look alike. They are the same size, and both have similar cover illustrations: for Shaara, a portion of Paul Philippoteaux's Cyclorama painting that shows Pickett's Charge from the Union perspective; for Kantor, a painting by popular Civil War artist Don Troiani, also depicting a portion of Pickett's Charge, also from what could be the point of view of an ordinary Union soldier. (Virtually all Civil War enthusiasts will recognize, within about one second of glancing at the cover, that the cover painting shows Confederate General Lewis Armistead with his hat stuck to the tip of his sword.) If the publishers hoped that the ongoing enthusiasm for The Killer Angels meant that Long Remember could find a readership among some members of that same audience, such a hope would be perfectly understandable.
But take The Killer Angels off the table, and leave Long Remember there by itself, and you will find that what you have is a pretty good Civil War novel. The author of a Civil War historical novel must make one of two choices: either take the characters to the war, or bring the war to the characters. Shaara in The Killer Angels made the former choice, introducing us to his fictive Chamberlain, Lee, Longstreet, et al., while the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia were already on the way to Gettysburg. Kantor in Long Remember makes the latter choice, introducing us to ordinary people of Gettysburg and letting the war come to them.
Kantor, an award-winning journalist and popular author of his time, often turned to war for his subject matter; his blank-verse novel Glory for Me (1945) was adapted into William Wyler’s Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), about World War II veterans adjusting to post-war life back home in the U.S.A. For Long Remember, Kantor’s main character is Dan Bale, a man who has seen war and wants no more of it.
Having left his hometown of Gettysburg and gone west to Minnesota, Bale managed to be on hand when the Dakota War of 1862 broke out there, and came back a bitter sort of philosophical pacifist. As far as he is concerned, the Union and Confederate armies can grind one another into bloody paste if they like; he wants no part of it. American readers of 1934, seeing the rise of warlike totalitarian regimes less than two decades after the end of the First World War or "war to end all wars," might well have identified with Bale's expressed belief that all war is futile, and with his intent to stay out of this war. Seventy years before the isolationism of the time between the world wars, Bale is a sort of proto-isolationist.
But as his home is on the Chambersburg Pike, just northwest of "The Diamond" (the town square that marks the heart of Gettysburg), he soon finds that his home falls within rebel lines. Kantor thus gets an opportunity to dramatize a good part of the action of July 1, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, showing us events along McPherson Ridge and around the Lutheran Theological Seminary. As Bale's home becomes a Confederate field hospital, we also get to see the physical mayhem that that war inflicted, in a time when innovations in weapons technology had far outstripped advances in medical science.
There are romantic complications as well. Bale has enjoyed an interlude of illicit passion with Irene Fanning, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Irene thinks at one point, “[H]ow wicked I am, how completely fallen from some stupid estate”, but reflects at the same time that “I suppose…this is something I’ve been waiting for, all my life” (p. 101). Irene’s husband, a cold and embittered man (there are a lot of bitter people in this book), is a Union officer in a Pennsylvania regiment somewhere on the other side of the battle lines. Irene, guilt-stricken by what she and Bale have done, insists that Bale find Irene's husband and tell him that the affair never happened (even though it did).
To say that Bale does not like the mission that Irene has set for him would be an understatement:
Dan declared, “You want me to go over there and lie to him, and I will do it,” and there was hate in his voice. Not hate for her; she was to be pitied, she could not help herself. “But if he’s killed, will you agree to marry me?”
“You should know what I will do. But this way…he mustn’t die believing me – thinking that I did –” (p. 301)
Yet Bale accepts Irene's charge, and (in a series of events that seems to defy the laws of fictional probability) takes a pair of blue uniform trousers off a dead Union soldier, makes his way through the provost marshals and skirmish lines of two warring armies, and finds himself on Cemetery Ridge just in time for Pickett's Charge on July 3rd. One senses here the anxiety of novelist Kantor to make sure that his readers finish the book feeling that they've gotten a good look at their fair share of Gettysburg landmarks.
The other indispensable Gettysburg landmark, of course, is Little Round Top; and Kantor gets us there, too, in a post-battle sequence that has him exploring that part of the battlefield in search of a friend who joined the Pennsylvania militia just before the battle and is missing and feared dead. In short, this book suffers from a tension between the author's wish to provide a realistic, Red Badge of Courage-style view of the Civil War as seen through ordinary people's eyes on the one hand, and his sense of the need to give the viewer a panoramic view of the Gettysburg engagement in its entirety on the other. That contradiction is never fully resolved.
Yet Long Remember does have its virtues. I appreciated Kantor's determination to provide a realistic, unglamorous view of war, and his focus on the trauma that war inflicts, both physically and psychologically. In the time before the battle begins, Bale encounters a Union officer from Illinois – a Major Glenn from Illinois, who disapproves of Bale’s pacifist ways. Bale meets the officer’s son, whose “eyes were hazel as his father’s, but opaque and chilly; they were the eyes of a killer, ruthless with all the hatred of nineteen” (pp. 199-200). Bale’s conversation with Major Glenn ends on this note:
“You’re fortunate to have your son with you in the same regiment,” Bale said.
Glenn swung his hand against his hat rim. “I did have three,” he said. He cantered down the graveled path, past the dead horse, and rode away up the slope without looking back. (pp. 200-01)
The World War I veterans who read this novel twenty years after participating in that dreadful conflict no doubt appreciated Kantor's uncompromising depiction of the physical mayhem that war inflicts:
Bale said, “It’s a man,” and he found him under some vines. He was a Union soldier. The black blood crusted all over one side of him and he looked as if he were dead, but he wasn’t. Dan picked him up, and one swollen arm failed to hang limp even by its own weight. Bale moved the arm – the man screamed from the bottom of hell…. (p. 301)
The man's wounds are also maggot-infested; and when Bale takes the wounded man to a Confederate field hospital, the rebel surgeon there jocularly remarks, "Ha, when they've got the worms you can't wager much. There's one like that inside, only worse -- trochanters and neck of the left femur shattered, ball lodged near the acetabulum, and maggots by the wagon-load..." (p. 301). The American Civil War was that kind of war, I suppose. So was the First World War that was on novelist Kantor's mind as he wrote. So, I would imagine, is every war.
Long Remember takes its title from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In dedicating Gettysburg’s National Cemetery, four months after the battle, President Lincoln said that no speech he might give could compare with the valor and sacrifice of the slain Union soldiers who had been laid to rest at the cemetery: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” A century and a half later, both the speech and the soldiers it honored are of course well-remembered.
As for the less-well-remembered Long Remember -- it is a good novel, though it does not rise to the level of The Killer Angels. But if you are a Civil War enthusiast who is always looking for something new to read about Gettysburg, then it should work well for you. You might also want to read it in conjunction with nonfiction treatments of the ordeal of Gettysburg’s civilians during and after the battle – books like William G. Williams's Days of Darkness: The Gettysburg Civilians, or George Sheldon's When the Smoke Cleared at Gettysburg.
February 15, 2010
An unpleasant but realistic picture of Gettysburg and war in general. No particular character was wonderful, all had flaws. An extremely well written and thought provoking book.
May 17, 2022
I was not able to finish this book, not because I found it hard to read or was bored to tears. I was none of these things. I was dealing with a family member's health issues and could not concentrate. What I did read was interesting and well paced with interesting dialogue. This is a book I will comeback to when I am able to listen more atttentively.
April 19, 2013
Long Remember has been long forgotten. MacKinlay Kantor's 1934 novel, which chronicles the Civil War's Pennsylvania Campaign and Battle of Gettysburg from the perspective of Gettysburg civilians unlucky enough to be in Gettysburg on those three crucial days of July 1-3, 1863, caused quite a splash in its time; it was a Literary Guild main selection, and no less an authority than Allen Tate praised its battlefield realism. Yet while Kantor's later Civil War novel Andersonville (1955) won the Pulitzer Prize, was praised by historian Bruce Catton as "the best Civil War novel I have ever read, without any question," and has remained continuously in print, Long Remember was out of print for decades, and only reappeared in print in 2000. How was it that Long Remember came back onto literary radar screens around the turn of the millennium, and how and why did it disappear from sight in the first place?
As to the reasons for the reappearance of Long Remember, I have my suspicions. Before me on my desk, in my Central Pennsylvania office, is this 2000 reprinting of "Long Remember," and right next to it a 1996 Ballantine Books trade edition of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (1974). Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novelistic treatment of the Gettysburg campaign and battle, unlike Kantor's, has remained popular ever since its publication; it inspired Ronald Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg, and can be said to have had virtually a controlling influence on the way in which much of the reading public views the battle. What strikes me, looking at the two books together, is how much they look alike. They are the same size, and both have similar cover illustrations: for Shaara, a portion of Paul Philippoteaux's Cyclorama painting that shows Pickett's Charge from the Union perspective; for Kantor, a painting by popular Civil War artist Don Troiani, also depicting a portion of Pickett's Charge, also from what could be the point of view of an ordinary Union soldier. (Virtually all Civil War enthusiasts will recognize, within about one second of glancing at the cover, that the cover painting shows Confederate General Lewis Armistead with his hat stuck to the tip of his sword.) If the publishers hoped that the ongoing enthusiasm for The Killer Angels meant that Long Remember could take hold among some members of that same audience, such a hope would be perfectly understandable.
But take The Killer Angels off the table, and leave Long Remember there by itself, and you will find that what you have is a pretty good Civil War novel. The author of a Civil War historical novel must make one of two choices: either take the characters to the war, or bring the war to the characters. Shaara in The Killer Angels made the former choice, introducing us to his fictive Chamberlain, Lee, Longstreet, et al., while the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia were already on the way to Gettysburg. Kantor in Long Remember makes the latter choice, introducing us to ordinary people of Gettysburg and letting the war come to them.
Kantor's main character is Dan Bale, a man who has seen war and wants no more of it. Having left his Gettysburg hometown and gone west to Minnesota, Bale managed to be on hand when the Dakota War of 1862 broke out there, and came back a bitter sort of philosophical pacifist. As far as he is concerned, the Union and Confederate armies can grind one another into bloody paste if they like; he wants no part of it. American readers of 1934, seeing the rise of warlike totalitarian regimes less than two decades after the end of the First World War or "war to end all wars," might well have identified with Bale's expressed belief that all war is futile, and his intent to stay out of this war. Seventy years before the isolationism of the time between the world wars, Bale is a sort of proto-isolationist.
But as his home is on the Chambersburg Pike, just northwest of "The Diamond" (the town square that marks the heart of Gettysburg), he soon finds that his home falls within rebel lines. Kantor thus gets an opportunity to dramatize a good part of the action of July 1, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, showing us events along McPherson Ridge and around the Lutheran Theological Seminary. As Bale's home becomes a Confederate field hospital, we also get to see the physical mayhem that that war inflicted, in a time when innovations in weapons technology had far outstripped advances in medical science.
There are romantic complications as well. Bale has enjoyed an interlude of illicit passion with Irene Fanning, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a cold and embittered man (there are a lot of bitter people in this book) who is a Union officer in a Pennsylvania regiment somewhere on the other side of the battle lines. Irene, guilt-stricken by what she and Bale have done, insists that Bale find Irene's husband and tell him that the affair never happened (even though it did). Irene seems like a nice young lady and everything, but doesn't she know there's a war on? Yet Bale accepts Irene's charge, and (in a series of events that seems to defy the laws of fictional probability) takes a pair of blue uniform trousers off a dead Union soldier, makes his way through the provost marshals and skirmish lines of two warring armies, and finds himself on Cemetery Ridge just in time for Pickett's Charge on July 3rd! Isn't that just too neat? One senses here the anxiety of novelist Kantor to make sure that his readers finish the book feeling that they've gotten a good look at their fair share of Gettysburg landmarks.
The other indispensable Gettysburg landmark, of course, is Little Round Top; and Kantor gets us there, too, in a post-battle sequence that has him exploring that part of the battlefield in search of a friend who joined the Pennsylvania militia just before the battle and is missing and feared dead. In short, this book suffers from a tension between the author's wish to provide a realistic, Red Badge of Courage-style view of the Civil War as seen through ordinary people's eyes on the one hand, and his sense of the need to give the viewer a panoramic view of the Gettysburg engagement in its entirety on the other. That contradiction is never fully resolved.
Yet Long Remember does have its virtues. I appreciated Kantor's determination to provide a realistic, unglamorous view of war. The World War I veterans who read this novel twenty years after participating in that dreadful conflict no doubt appreciated Kantor's uncompromising depiction of bodies maimed beyond recognition, streams running red with blood, wounds filled with maggots. His delineation of how Bale gradually, and reluctantly, abandons his pacifist stance is also nicely handled. Long Remember is no Killer Angels, but if you are a Civil War enthusiast who is always looking for something new to read about Gettysburg, then it should work well for you. You might also want to read it in conjunction with nonfiction treatments of the same sort of subject matter, like William G. Williams's Days of Darkness: The Gettysburg Civilians or George Sheldon's When the Smoke Cleared at Gettysburg.
As to the reasons for the reappearance of Long Remember, I have my suspicions. Before me on my desk, in my Central Pennsylvania office, is this 2000 reprinting of "Long Remember," and right next to it a 1996 Ballantine Books trade edition of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (1974). Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novelistic treatment of the Gettysburg campaign and battle, unlike Kantor's, has remained popular ever since its publication; it inspired Ronald Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg, and can be said to have had virtually a controlling influence on the way in which much of the reading public views the battle. What strikes me, looking at the two books together, is how much they look alike. They are the same size, and both have similar cover illustrations: for Shaara, a portion of Paul Philippoteaux's Cyclorama painting that shows Pickett's Charge from the Union perspective; for Kantor, a painting by popular Civil War artist Don Troiani, also depicting a portion of Pickett's Charge, also from what could be the point of view of an ordinary Union soldier. (Virtually all Civil War enthusiasts will recognize, within about one second of glancing at the cover, that the cover painting shows Confederate General Lewis Armistead with his hat stuck to the tip of his sword.) If the publishers hoped that the ongoing enthusiasm for The Killer Angels meant that Long Remember could take hold among some members of that same audience, such a hope would be perfectly understandable.
But take The Killer Angels off the table, and leave Long Remember there by itself, and you will find that what you have is a pretty good Civil War novel. The author of a Civil War historical novel must make one of two choices: either take the characters to the war, or bring the war to the characters. Shaara in The Killer Angels made the former choice, introducing us to his fictive Chamberlain, Lee, Longstreet, et al., while the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia were already on the way to Gettysburg. Kantor in Long Remember makes the latter choice, introducing us to ordinary people of Gettysburg and letting the war come to them.
Kantor's main character is Dan Bale, a man who has seen war and wants no more of it. Having left his Gettysburg hometown and gone west to Minnesota, Bale managed to be on hand when the Dakota War of 1862 broke out there, and came back a bitter sort of philosophical pacifist. As far as he is concerned, the Union and Confederate armies can grind one another into bloody paste if they like; he wants no part of it. American readers of 1934, seeing the rise of warlike totalitarian regimes less than two decades after the end of the First World War or "war to end all wars," might well have identified with Bale's expressed belief that all war is futile, and his intent to stay out of this war. Seventy years before the isolationism of the time between the world wars, Bale is a sort of proto-isolationist.
But as his home is on the Chambersburg Pike, just northwest of "The Diamond" (the town square that marks the heart of Gettysburg), he soon finds that his home falls within rebel lines. Kantor thus gets an opportunity to dramatize a good part of the action of July 1, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, showing us events along McPherson Ridge and around the Lutheran Theological Seminary. As Bale's home becomes a Confederate field hospital, we also get to see the physical mayhem that that war inflicted, in a time when innovations in weapons technology had far outstripped advances in medical science.
There are romantic complications as well. Bale has enjoyed an interlude of illicit passion with Irene Fanning, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a cold and embittered man (there are a lot of bitter people in this book) who is a Union officer in a Pennsylvania regiment somewhere on the other side of the battle lines. Irene, guilt-stricken by what she and Bale have done, insists that Bale find Irene's husband and tell him that the affair never happened (even though it did). Irene seems like a nice young lady and everything, but doesn't she know there's a war on? Yet Bale accepts Irene's charge, and (in a series of events that seems to defy the laws of fictional probability) takes a pair of blue uniform trousers off a dead Union soldier, makes his way through the provost marshals and skirmish lines of two warring armies, and finds himself on Cemetery Ridge just in time for Pickett's Charge on July 3rd! Isn't that just too neat? One senses here the anxiety of novelist Kantor to make sure that his readers finish the book feeling that they've gotten a good look at their fair share of Gettysburg landmarks.
The other indispensable Gettysburg landmark, of course, is Little Round Top; and Kantor gets us there, too, in a post-battle sequence that has him exploring that part of the battlefield in search of a friend who joined the Pennsylvania militia just before the battle and is missing and feared dead. In short, this book suffers from a tension between the author's wish to provide a realistic, Red Badge of Courage-style view of the Civil War as seen through ordinary people's eyes on the one hand, and his sense of the need to give the viewer a panoramic view of the Gettysburg engagement in its entirety on the other. That contradiction is never fully resolved.
Yet Long Remember does have its virtues. I appreciated Kantor's determination to provide a realistic, unglamorous view of war. The World War I veterans who read this novel twenty years after participating in that dreadful conflict no doubt appreciated Kantor's uncompromising depiction of bodies maimed beyond recognition, streams running red with blood, wounds filled with maggots. His delineation of how Bale gradually, and reluctantly, abandons his pacifist stance is also nicely handled. Long Remember is no Killer Angels, but if you are a Civil War enthusiast who is always looking for something new to read about Gettysburg, then it should work well for you. You might also want to read it in conjunction with nonfiction treatments of the same sort of subject matter, like William G. Williams's Days of Darkness: The Gettysburg Civilians or George Sheldon's When the Smoke Cleared at Gettysburg.
April 21, 2014
This is a great book, but I didn't love it like Andersonville. The reasons I didn't love it have nothing to do with any flaws in the book. MacKinlay Kantor did such a great job of the love relationship between Dan and Irene at the beginning of the book that I wanted more of them (and less of other characters) and I also wanted more of their relationship development (and so I couldn't quite get into the drama of the battle at Gettysburg). But that is, of course, not really a flaw in the book. The fact that a love relationship was interrupted is one of the many small ways in which a war is a terrible thing. And MacKinlay Kantor really does an excellent job of portraying the terribleness of war. The unbelievable horror and suffering, both physical and psychological — of those who are not directly participating as well as the soldiers themselves. How it destroys everyone and everything in its path. How it ruins the lives of those it does not kill.
A fantastic book.
A fantastic book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 30, 2014
Recently having read both Ralph Peters two recently published civil war novels Cain at Gettysburg and Hell or Richmond, I had a fairly good understanding of how the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg progressed from the perspective of the participants. This helped immensely when reading Long Remember because the viewpoint changed from that of the officers and soldiers to the impact on the citizens of the community of Gettysburg. I also believe it is important to understand that MacKinlay Kantor wrote Long Remember in 1936, a distinctly different time much closer to the civil war and, as he indicated, he had as sources "living men whose remembrances were available". If you have an interest in the Civil War, then this book is well worth reading.
August 20, 2018
A book difficult to read. Written in 1934 when some Civil War vets may still have been around, it speaks to the horror of war from the eye of a hardened pacifist who had seen war in the prarie in Minnesota and who happens back to his home town of Gettysburg on these fateful days, summoned by a family funeral.
This book is the unvarnished truth of the violence of war. There is no heroism, just endurance, those who live and those who are no longer extant. The protagonist collides tangentially with historic figures, but - except when forced to violate his personal ethics - as an unremembered bystander.
This book is not as polished as "The Cellist of Sarajevo," nor as callous as "My War Gone By, I Miss It So," yet it resonates with the truth of war as much as those two efforts, joining my top three of books about war and its actuality. Give it a read.
This book is the unvarnished truth of the violence of war. There is no heroism, just endurance, those who live and those who are no longer extant. The protagonist collides tangentially with historic figures, but - except when forced to violate his personal ethics - as an unremembered bystander.
This book is not as polished as "The Cellist of Sarajevo," nor as callous as "My War Gone By, I Miss It So," yet it resonates with the truth of war as much as those two efforts, joining my top three of books about war and its actuality. Give it a read.
May 9, 2019
While I had heard of MacKinlay Kantor l had never read any of his books. I found this book and was drawn by the cover and I’m glad I was. This story focuses on the civilians just before and during Gettysburg. The small town feel, the fear of the war coming towards them and the confusion and ugliness of battle were all here. You feel the claustrophobic nature of war and the effect on civilians. Then you see the confusion and madness of battle through the eyes of a civilian. I enjoyed this book and have lined up Valley Forge, Spirit Lake and Andersonville for future reading.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 31, 2022
I enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would. However I found it was long and the narrative was very slow at certain parts. And I really did not like the ending.
Touted as one of the most realistic novels about the American Civil War, I could certainly see that when it was published in the 1930s, but there are better places to start when looking at Civil War fiction, especially if you are looking for realism. Start at the Ralph Peters series (one that I find much more approachable and realistic) if you are looking for Civil War fiction.
Touted as one of the most realistic novels about the American Civil War, I could certainly see that when it was published in the 1930s, but there are better places to start when looking at Civil War fiction, especially if you are looking for realism. Start at the Ralph Peters series (one that I find much more approachable and realistic) if you are looking for Civil War fiction.
April 17, 2018
Even though it took me a while to finish this book I thoroughly enjoyed it.
February 6, 2020
Not as well written as my favorite war novelist, Jeff Shaara. As I write this a few months after the fact, I can't remember a single character. India trip book.
April 21, 2020
Convoluted story but good descriptions of the sights and smells oft he battle.
January 30, 2022
Didn’t finish
October 11, 2014
This was a good book dealing with the Battle of Gettysburg from the perspective of the civilians who had to deal with the chaos that the battle brought to them. The characters represented the whole spectrum of thoughts about the war and the interactions and personal lives of those characters connected in ways not imagined. How the war affects outcomes in the book is also intriguing. Good read for Civil War buffs.
June 28, 2015
I liked this book very much. It was an early book by him, 1934, so he was able to interview survivors and soliders that were yet still alive adding to the realistic portrayal of the events at Gettysburg. I enjoyed it because it also told civilians stories, not just battles. The ending rather baffles me though because it is not what I expected Daniel to do after he had seen the war first hand and been in the trenches.
October 9, 2015
Man opposed to Civil War heads to Gettysburg on family business in July 1863. Hilarity ensues. Well, not hilarity. Action ensues. I appreciated that the pace picked up with each page. It didn't slow down for the conclusion, though. Might have needed a big "the end" on the last page.
May 3, 2009
Bob thinks it was trashy, but it is an incredibly detailed accounting of the Battle of Gettysburg. Civil War geeks take note.
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