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Theory of War
Interviews
A different kind of slavery
San Francisco Chronicle February 13, 1994, By Brian St Pierre
The granddaughter of a white slave recalls his life of servitude after the Civil War
Settling into an easy chair during a farrago of interviews and book signings at her London hotel, former San Franciscan Joan Brady looked abashed yet exhilarated at the sudden attention after living quietly in England for 30 years.
Brady has become the first woman and the first American to win the Whitbread Prize, one of England’s most prestigious and certainly most lucrative awards ($31,360) for her harrowing, lyrical novel, “Theory of War” (Alfred A. Knopf; 275 pages; $21).
To say the book is about “white slavery” may conjure up images ranging from exotic to sordid, and disconnected from our American experience. Just how wrong these pictures are is dramatized by Brady’s novel, which shows the devastation that has stalked her own family since her grandfather was sold to a tobacco farmer at the end of the Civil War.
When “Theory of War” was published in the United States last year (Review, April 11, 1993), the book was not reviewed by the major East Coast newspapers. In her interview with The Chronicle, Brady said she suspects an aspect of political correctness prevailed.
“The black experience in America was a truly dreadful one, but coming to terms with it doesn’t seem to include sharing it—yet this is my inheritance, too,” she said. As her narrator declares in the book. “My family tree stops short at my grandfather’s deed of purchase.”
The practice of selling white children in the aftermath of the Civil War, orphaned or from destitute parents, was fairly common, she says; it was known as “bounding out.” The children would be the property of their owners, unpaid and without civil rights, until the age of 21. in real life, as in the novel, Brady’s grandfather was sold, at the age of 4, for $15. Relentlessly beaten and ruthlessly worked, he survived by nursing a permanent, tightly knotted anger, which flayed succeeding generations of his family.
“The details of my grandfather’s life are fictionalized, but not the outline of it,” she said. “I am told that he was so cold you could hardly get near him. But you can see how dreadful his legacy was by our real lives—he had seven children, four of them, including my father, were suicides, and one was an alcoholic. We—his descendants—still have to cope with what he’d gone through.”
In the book, her grandfather, called Jonathan here, attempts to murder the tormenting son of his owner before running away; the other boy grows up to be a U.S. senator, haunting Jonathan and fueling his anger even more. “My grandfather always said the boy was George Norris, who became the force behind the Tennessee Valley Authority and was written up by John F. Kennedy in ‘Profiles in Courage,’ ” she said, “but I couldn’t prove ig, so what started as a documentary became a novel.”
The book weaves the story of three generations economically and tightly, with narrative lines often intertwined in the same paragraph, as the narrator interviews her uncle, his generation’s only survivor. “It’s the way many of us think, foregraound and background together, afloat in a sea of past and present, but it also fits the theme of present damage from past damage.”
Brady was 13 when her father, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, attempted suicide (he died of the aftereffects three years later). She took up ballet that year. “Ballet is completely circumscribed, orderly—a sanctuary,” she said. “I also turned out to be very good at it, which is always very appealing.” Even today, at 54, she is lithe andmoves with economic grace; she doesn’t so much sit as gather herself into a chair. At 14, she joined the San Francisco Ballet Company. “Lew Christiansen was running it then, a very attractive man but not easy to deal with. Three years later I went to New York to study with George Balanchine and later danced with the New York City Ballet, but then quit and attended Columbia University, majoring in philosophy” (she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa).
“Orderly, systematized disciplines, yes,” she said with a laugh, “What we called in philosophy a ‘bounded infinite.’ ”
Brady married an Englishman and moved to England in 1965 where their son was born (her husband died in 1989 after a lingering illness that created a long hiatus in the book’s writing). Late in the book, the narrator, sho sares some of this biography, writes, “I’ve always felt like an alien; living abroad more or less institutionalizes the feeling.” Brady smiled at the quote. “There’s something rather nice in the distancing of being a foreigner, although I’ve got dual citizenship. (Her accent is flatly American.) I’m comfortable in England, quite like it, except for the damp. It’s also a comfort knowing there’s a reason for the remoteness—it’s just the way the British are, nothing personal.”
She wrote a novel in 1979 called “The Impostor,” which was not very successful, and a book about her time in ballet, called “The Unmaking of a Dancer,” also unsuccessful for marketing rather than aesthetic reasons—it is being reissued this summer. She is now studying physics. “The novel after the one I’m working on now will be about a physicist, so I’m learning what I need to know. Also, physics appeals to me—another orderly discipline.”
She gathered herself to brave an icy London downpour for the sake of another book signing, then paused to explain the book’s title. The narrator involes Clausewitz’s “On War” constantly and surprisingly aptly, to illuminate her grandfather’s dark rage against the world. “It’s a marvelous book—very clean, clear, unsentimental. At one point, he wrote that there is very little difference between a war between two nations and a war between two people. I knew then that we were on to something.”
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