Arts and Letters

Bruce Catton, who was elected to the Institute in 1955 and to this Academy, nominated by Alan Nevins and seconded by Henry Steele Commager and Jacques Barzun, in 1962, died last August 28 in his native Michigan at the age of seventy-eight. Through his vivid panorama of the Civil War and his conveying of the feelings and reactions of the citizen soldiers involved, he won countless readers who might not otherwise have been drawn to historical literature. A Stillness at Appomattox, published in 1953 as the third volume of his trilogy on the Union Army of the Potomac—which marked his first appearance as a historian—won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in the following year. Citing "one of the most brilliant battle canvases since Carlyle," Alan Nevins wrote of these books, "We have no abler writer of military history, written with scholarly care and literary finish, than Mr. Catton."

The first trilogy was followed by fourteen more books as well as by columns and reviews for American Heritage, the hard-cover periodical which, under the irresistible impetus of Alan Nevins, Catton launched in 1954 in association with James Parton. The books included several studies of General Grant and in the 1960s a second trilogy was commissioned as The Centennial History of the Civil War. The carrying out of this immense project, as he once confessed to me, began to weigh on him before it ended like the stone of Sisyphus, yet he was able to charge it with his own emotion and with his sense of the courage and tragedy of the nation's strife. Of the final volume, Never Call Retreat, Henry Commager concluded that, "Better than any other history of the Civil War, it combines narrative vigor, literary grace, freshness of view, and independence of judgment." What more complete accolade could a historian wish for, or win?

Catton went on to publish another study of his favorite general under the rather inadequate title Grant Takes Command followed by an autobiographical memoir of his boyhood with, by contrast, the lovely title Waiting for the Morning Train. For all his finely articulated prose, Catton was curiously deaf to titles, alternating the toneless with the felicitous as if he could not tell the difference. The flat, dull Mr. Lincoln's Army was followed by the bell-like Glory Road, the poetic This Hallowed Ground by the pedestrian Grant Moves South. He did at least hear something wrong in the most awkward of all, A Stillness at Appomattox, admitting to a friend, "I don't know whether I like this title too much, but it's too late to change it."

He remains; for his last work, written in collaboration with his son William, professor of American history at Middlebury College, is soon to be published posthumously with what I can only call a Cattonesque title, The Bold and Magnificent Dream: America's Founding Years, 1492-1815.

Tall, lean, casual, colloquial, with a fondness for bawdy limericks and five martinis before lunch, he had both a capacity for amusement and a deep reserve of dignity. He was a private man, with locked-up emotions, who loved his martinis and the outdoors equally, and in later life returned every year to his home in the Michigan north woods for prolonged summers, only coming back to New York when the northern snows fell.

In his optimism and patriotism—which he once defined in conversation as "having, to begin with, a love for your own country and an understanding of what it is all about,"—Catton was an unmistakable product of his heritage and his boyhood surroundings. While some people ab-react to their genes and environment, Catton was permanently formed by them and cannot be understood except in their context. He was born in 1899 in the lumber country of the northern tier of Michigan, the son of a Congregational minister. His family settled in a tiny town oddly and purposely named Benzonia, intended to mean "good air." Founded, Catton wrote, "as an act of faith," in 1858, it was the only town in the region not established by men who wanted to cash in on the lumber boom, and it never had more than 350 inhabitants. The founders were an earnest band from Oberlin College who believed in the competence and benevolent intent of Divine Providence combined with discontent with things as they are, who maintained a passionate belief in the perfectibility of human society plus a conviction that faith without works is of no account. To serve the purposes of Providence, people had to be educated, and so they created Benzonia as the site for a college "for both sexes without distinction of color," at a time when the entire county in which it was situated had a population of no more than five hundred. Its first students numbered thirteen, to be supported by jobs in manual labor offered by the community. Each household was to give a fourth of its land to provide an endowment fund.

This high-minded enterprise, succumbing to realities, ultimately declined to the status of a no less high-minded preparatory school, of which Catton's father became the principal and which his son attended. The boy who grew up amid these influences was the father of the man. His mother had her photograph taken wearing a pince-nez. His home was a hamlet of wooden houses with an unpaved main street under spreading shade trees and horse-drawn buggies parked in front of a one-room Post Office. His land was a country of forest and lakes and lonely streams for fishing and canoes.

After two years' enlistment in the Navy during World War I, and three years study at Oberlin, Catton left in his junior year for a career in journalism. He reported for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Boston American and other papers and after 1939 as Washington columnist for NEA, feature syndicate of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers. He contributed book reviews and editorials as well as his daily columns. Too old at forty-two for the draft when the United States entered World War II, he took service as Director of Information of the War Production Board under Donald Nelson. He emerged an angry man, all too knowledgeable of the way the dollar-a-year corporate businessmen used the war effort in their own interests. All this he put into his first book, The War Lords of Washington, published in 1948. It did not mince denunciation and was ignored. Garry Wills, author of Nixon Agonistes, on borrowing Catton's War Lords from a college library, found he was the first one who had ever taken it out.

The writing of the book, even if ignored, did something for Catton. Breaking with journalism, he started work on the Civil War which had long been a hobby. His triumphant second career as a historian began after the age of fifty. As a foundation for communicating with readers, the daily output of journalism with its requirement of a readable, comprehensible product had been an excellent school from which he clearly benefited.

In the last piece he wrote, Catton characteristically looked forward to a twenty-first century that would be an improvement on the century he had known. In his column for American Heritage called "As I See It" which appeared in the issue of August/September just as he died, he wrote of his own twentieth century as a time when "incalculable forces burst up from no one knew quite where, treating established institutions the way a tornado treats a prairie town…. All the guide lines have been erased." With invincible faith, he went on to state that the century's turmoil was "leading inevitably to a more settled orderly way of living together, man with man, nation with nation." His vision of the future rested not on a historian's hard evidence, but rather on the quality he had once found in Sleeping Bear Point, a high sand dune of Lake Michigan slowly drifting to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand. "In the way this shining dune looks westward toward the storms and sunsets," he wrote, "there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance."