Nostalgia (47 page)

When Whitman first began to think of himself as providing a national voice for that wonderful, comradely experiment, the United States of America, he probably couldn’t have imagined anything like the Civil War. Probably nobody could—certainly nobody could imagine what the war eventually became. The longstanding and widely accepted estimate of Civil War deaths (620,000) represented about two percent of the American population—a rate that, if applied to today’s population, would yield a loss of more than six million people.
A new study by historian David Hacker, as reported in
The New York Times
in April 2012, recommends increasing those former estimates by as much as 20 percent. It’s believed that the three days of combat in Virginia’s Wilderness, in May 1864, produced close to thirty thousand casualties. The battle, though considered a draw, marked a turning point in the war, the beginning of Grant’s Overland Campaign. I urge readers wanting to learn more about this conflict to read Gordon C. Rhea’s excellent book,
The Battle of the Wilderness
.

Because so much of the historical record is available nowadays on the World Wide Web, doing the research for a novel like
Nostalgia
is easier than it once was. But I expect that bringing any small portion of history to life through the devices of fiction is about as challenging as ever. I’m indebted to a number of other writers for their thoughtful works about Whitman, baseball, nineteenth-century medicine, the war, and what’s known today as post-traumatic stress syndrome: George Worthington Adams, Louisa May Alcott, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Leigh Davis, Eric T. Dean, Drew Gilpin Faust, Frederick Clark Floyd, Shelby Foote, Justin Kaplan, Jonah Lehrer, Ilona Meagher, Peter Morris, Robert Morris, Gordon C. Rhea, Robert Roper, Francis Amasa Walker, and of course, Whitman himself. Any errors of history I may have committed are entirely my own and shouldn’t be construed as a reflection of these fine writers.

I also owe thanks to many good people for their help with preparing the manuscript: Steven Alexander, Clarissa Atkinson, Susan Betz, Michael Downing, Ann Eggers, Lisa Fitzgerald, Kathleen Fridella, Nancy Hausman, Jeanne Heifetz, Gail Hochman, Juris Jurjevics, Rodger Kamenetz, Paul Magid, Gordon C. Rhea, Gordon Ritter, Marcia Scott, and Nancy Rubin Stuart.

Lastly, I extend my heartfelt gratitude to my wife, writer and poet Michelle Blake, who first suggested I include Whitman in this narrative; who for more than thirty years has read every word I write before anyone else does; and who, with her equally fierce powers of love and intelligence, improves most everything she touches, including me.

D
ENNIS
M
C
F
ARLAND
is the best-selling author of six previous novels:
Letter from Point Clear
,
Prince Edward
,
Singing Boy
,
A Face at the Window
,
School for the Blind
, and
The Music Room
. His short fiction has appeared in
The American Scholar
,
The New Yorker
,
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards
,
Best American Short Stories
, and elsewhere. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, where he has also taught creative writing. He lives in rural Vermont with his wife, the writer and poet Michelle Blake.