March's Book: Bring the Jubilee

Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore

Alternate History (1953 - 199 pp.)

Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee takes the reader on a wild ride through alternate time: the South wins the Civil War (to the characters, "the War of Southron Independence"), the North becomes an oppressed backwater, abolitionist characters have to hide their views, World War I is drastically different, and Germany (the "German Union") and Spain become superpowers, with a German-Spanish war set to occur at some unknown future date. As if this were not jarring enough, our protagonist, Hodge Backmaker, endures a series of bizarre events including a mugging, six years as a bookseller's assistant punctuated by frequent philosophical discussions, and then over a decade in the Haggershaven think tank, where he obtains permission to use a time machine that he uses to go back to the Civil War. The best summary of the book is its opening line, which is arguably the greatest opening line in mid-20th-century American literature:

Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. (1)

Throughout Bring the Jubilee, Moore's characters grapple with the ethics of the alternate world. Backmaker's dissatisfaction with the current (i.e. independent South) order foreshadows his eventual time travel: “Spectator? Why not? Spectators had no difficult decisions to make.” (43) In traveling through time to change history, Backmaker becomes the ultimate participant. Moore, through Backmaker, also praises the value of general knowledge, which was not lost upon the contemporary community of World War II veterans and general business managers: “Specialisation, the division of labour, is certainly not cheap in anything but dollars and cents, and not always then.” (106) The Southern victory, and its attendant survival of slavery, leads America down a race-obsessed path that Moore could see, in our timeline, in Jim Crow laws: “Only the Americans, in the United States and the Confederate States, too, judge everything by colour.” (147) Bring the Jubilee succeeds in alternate history in that it shows the real world (true events) through the telling of a fantastical, non-existent timeline (false events).

Events in the alternate universe between the Civil War and Backmaker's birth are believable and safe rather than distracting from the novel's main points. Although William Jennings Bryan becoming President of the United States is realistic in Moore's alternate timeline, as the Republican Party would no doubt have gone into hibernation if the South had won the Civil War, it is completely unexplained why Bryan's first term would begin in 1896 rather than in 1900. (173) Bryan (Nebraska), William McKinley (Ohio) and Grover Cleveland (New Jersey) were all from the North. Similarly, although Spain as a 20th-century superpower seems farfetched to us now, the lack of a powerful United States means that the Spanish-American War never happens, which combines with Spanish neutrality in World War I to create an at least somewhat plausibly more powerful Spanish Empire: “He [the Spanish diplomat] had patiently pointed out that a Spanish subject was a citizen of a wealthier nation than the United States; as an heiress she could enjoy the luxuries and distractions of Madrid or Havana and eventually make a suitable marriage.” (141)

The failure of the alternate history United States is reflected in the failure of its institutions, a concept that in 1953, when Bring the Jubilee hit the market, would have been utterly terrifying. Moore anticipates later non-fiction authors in having Backmaker's friend and sometime romantic interest Barbara decry the state of American higher education: “The colleges have not only decayed, they have decayed faster than other institutions. They are mere hollow shells, ruined ornaments of the past.” (89-90) If you ascribe to the view William Deresiewicz takes in Excellent Sheep (2014), Moore's line is not alternate history at all. Similarly, as the North is humiliatingly poor but proud to the end, a customer in Roger Tyss's bookshop notes about the poor Northerners: “Necessity makes ‘em have a lottery; Puritanism keeps ‘em from buying tickets.” (67)

As a book of alternate history, Moore meta-analyzes his own work by discussing the nature of historiography itself. An alternate Henry James, who appears as a UK citizen in the court of a fictitious King William V, embraces the sort of nihilism one might expect if the nascent United States had been smashed in the Civil War: "'History,' said Sir Henry [James], who had renounced his United States citizenship and been knighted by William V, 'history is never directed or diverted by well-intentioned individuals; it is the product of forces with geographical, not moral, roots.'" (38) This sentiment reflects Backmaker at the beginning of the novel: a drifting youth who is desperately searching for purpose. Moore later combines philosophy with foreshadowing when he tips off the reader as to the immensely difficult task awaiting Backmaker, to travel in time back to the Civil War: “There are no shortcuts in writing history.” (160)

Backmaker's romantic interests needle him profusely, but sometimes Backmaker needles them back.* Tirzah Vame, one of the earliest friends Backmaker makes upon his arrival in New York City, demonstrates a cynical attitude toward money and one-upmanship. When Backmaker tries to divert her from operating as a paid companion to the few wealthy New Yorkers who remain, she rebuffs him:

“There are other things besides money.”
She [Tirzah] drew away. “That’s what those who can’t get it always say.” (48)

During one of the Haggershaven scenes, when Barbara decides not to write a book, Backmaker's response is hilarious and insightful. As those of us who have written unpublished novels can attest, book writing is not a financially secure endeavour. Backmaker goes one step further in decrying the waste of writing materials:

‘Hodge,’ she [Barbara] said, her grey eyes greenish with excitement, ‘I’m not going to write a book.’
‘That’s nice,’ I answered idly. ‘Saves paper, time, ink.’ (149)

Backmaker marries another of Haggershaven's residents, Catalina "Catty" Garcia, a shy but extremely intelligent woman a few years younger than him. When they confess their love for each other, a moment that figures prominently in Backmaker's memoirs, he notes: “The shock of desire was a weight on my chest, expelling the air from my lungs.” (145) One of the book's tragedies, of which there are many, is that travelling back in time costs Backmaker the rest of his married life.**

One of Moore's underappreciated talents is his ability to invent characters' names. Surnames like Pondible and Backmaker sound realistic, but a Google search of either shows no one with either last name; accordingly, no real-life reader can have that name. A Back-maker is apparently "a trade useful to brewers", according to Malachy Postlethwayt's The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, Volume 1 (1774), though. For those less inclined toward complete fabrication, this list of extinct surnames is useful for everything from good uses like writing novels to bad uses like making fake IDs (or, if you agree with Backmaker, writing novels).

Moore's influence is felt, as in other places, in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), Another scenario I've looked at on here include Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). What all these authors do is say "how would people respond to living in a world that, for some key reason, is radically different from our own?" In The Man in the High Castle, the mechanics of how Germany and Japan partition the United States are irrelevant; what is important is the way in which they, as well as the Americans and the British, all act so reprehensibly that the reader is left queasy about the Americans' attitudes toward dropping the bomb. The Man in the High Castle is about moral relativism, not U-boat strike capabilities. In The Years of Rice and Salt, reincarnation occurs as an obvious alternative when most of Christian civilization is wiped out; precisely how the Black Death kills 99% of Europe is beyond the point. Similarly, if the South winning the Civil War in Bring the Jubilee seems unrealistic, consider that the other main storyline involves time travel. I, personally, view time travel as less realistic than the South winning the Civil War, but to each their own. The fact that the HX-1 time machine's physics are completely unexplained (165) is an asset, not a liability; the reader's focus remains on the ethical and political struggles the characters face.

The only qualm I have with Bring the Jubilee is how late in the novel Backmaker travels through time. The stunning visuals of the Civil War battlefield are relegated to the last 10% of the book, which spends far more time in Tyss's bookshop and Haggershaven. Although the characters' philosophical debates challenge the reader, the reader is left to eventually wonder: "When will we see the Civil War already?" much like a child during a long car ride asking "Are we there yet?" Backmaker's seemingly trivial actions during this time alter the course of history irreparably, locking him into the past, and leading to Backmaker's observation that shows at once the climax and the denouement:

A poisoned continent, an inheritance of hate. Because of me. (193)

Read in 2020, Bring the Jubilee becomes even more labyrinthine. Hodge Backmaker is born in an alternate 1921, lives out the years 1921-1952 in an impoverishment rump state, then turns an alternate 1863 into our actual 1863, and then, finally, writes his memoirs in the real 1877. When Bring the Jubilee was published, a real-life Hodge Backmaker was the age I am now. Backmaker in an alternate 2020, if he had somehow missed the opportunity to travel through time, would be almost a century old, writing memoirs of a world we could barely fathom but that, in some small way, would remind us of our own.

Ease of Reading: 6

Educational Content: 1***

*The arch-example of romantic needling is probably F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, which was released during the same year Ward Moore turned 17. I have not seen any extant interview or diary in which Moore notes having read This Side of Paradise, but the latter's jittery banter would not be a surprising influence on Moore. Contrast Philip K. Dick openly discussing Bring the Jubilee in the acknowledgments to the first edition of The Man in the High Castle.

**Contrast Richard Matheson's Somewhere in Time (1975/1980), in which the protagonist has a doomed love life in 1971 but meets the love of his life almost immediately upon traveling back to 1896. It is highly likely Matheson read Bring the Jubilee, as Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman" and Bring the Jubilee itself were both published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the early '50s.

***Alternate history is, by definition, the one genre in which the author must be describing falsehoods. While other genres may include events that are wildly unrealistic, the question What if reality were different? presupposes events that have a probability of zero. This leads to the conclusion that realistic-seeming, but false, past events have the same probability (zero) as fantastical past events. For example, I didn't go grocery shopping yesterday, rendering the phrase "I went grocery shopping yesterday" completely, 100% false. I also didn't ride a dragon yesterday. The phrases "I went grocery shopping yesterday" and "I rode a dragon yesterday" are equally false regardless of how likely they might have been if I'd been able to run a hundred simulations of my life. Real life isn't a series of simulations, though; it only gets one iteration. Keep that in mind when you read alternate history. Even the most realistic possible deviation from the course is just as likely as dragons.