A Wounded Thing Must Hide: In Search of Libbie Custer Poolman, Jeremy

Description

Product Description
A vibrant, deeply personal portrait of the wife of General Custer.Brilliant, inventive, but not in any conventional sense a biography, A Wounded Thing Must Hide is Jeremy Poolman’s first foray into nonfiction, taking as its subject the fascinating wife of General Custer. He relates key scenes in Libbie’s extraordinary life-her brushes with Empress Elizabeth of Austria, Tsar Alexander III, and Henry James, to name a few-each episode proving rich in relishably surreal detail. We see Libbie ferrying dung from Vienna to St. Petersburg (a present from empress to tsar, to ward off cholera and typhus); taking delivery of the present of a bear from Alex himself; stumbling into a soldier who might perhaps be the great-great-grandfather of Bob Dylan. Throughout it all, we catch glimpses of the glorious, wayward career of the General himself, culminating in the famous slaughter at Little Big Horn.Far from an aridly factual outline of who did what where, Poolman offers us a vividly, tangibly real re-creation of historical events. He gets to places other biographies can’t reach, bleeding, at times, into autobiography. Haunted by the death of his own wife, the narrator follows Libbie’s itinerary in search of something unnamed in himself. Through exploring a widow’s determination to protect her husband’s damaged reputation, he hopes to find a way to deal with his personal loss. By exploring Libbie’s and Custer’s enduring love and devotion, he finds a form for his own.
Amazon.com Review
Surviving a legend can be hard work. Consider Libbie Custer, widowed after her husband’s death at [Little Big Horn], and who spent the next 60 years arguing against Ulysses S. Grant’s judgment that “It was Custer who was responsible–and Custer alone–for the deaths of so many.”
English writer Jeremy Poolman follows a looping, sometimes loopy path across the world on Libbie Custer’s trail, celebrating the life of a decidedly modern, self-assured, even driven woman who lived in a time when women were too often voiceless. Poolman’s approach is, well, idiosyncratic: he communes with Custer’s ghost, argues the Georgia-born Libbie’s case for having married the Yankee Custer at her graveside against a group of unimpressed Southern ladies, and invokes his hard-drinking father, who harbored a scholar’s passion for Custeriana, an obsession that “was like a virus (one for which, I know now, there is no cure).” Throughout it all, though, Poolman keeps Libbie Custer well in his sights, telling her tale even as he spins plenty of his own. And quite a tale it is.
It’s far from the usual biography, far from the usual journey–but it works, and fans of Western history will enjoy Poolman’s wild ride. –Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
Few historians have written about Libbie Custer, the frontierswoman, author and lecturer who outlived her famous husband, Gen. George Armstrong Custer, by more than 50 years (she died, aged 90, in 1933). Fascinated by the smallest details of Libbie’s life, British-born novelist Poolman (My Kind of America) tries to visit every city, town and outpost she experienced His own father had been obsessed with Custer, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript on the famous general, and Poolman, propelled partly by the loss of his wife to cancer, continues his father’s quest. Along the way, the author meets an array of odd, disarming characters: Oskar, a former school chum turned neo-Nazi; Herr Taschenbach, an Austrian curator who insists that Libbie believed horse dung held special healing properties; and a husband and wife who live in Libbie’s former home and claim to be the Custers. With such larger-than-life characters, the book reads more like a postmodern novel than a straightforward biography. Poolman’s reconstructed conversations are far too crafted to be taken as fact; they read a bit like a David Mamet screenplay, with stuttered, questioning, repetitive conversations rife with misunderstand