Southern Crop
The Affable Hangman. By Ramon Sender. (Las Americas Publishing Company, $4.)
IN the Broadway revue New Faces of 1952 a man disguised as a Southern novelist lounged in a hammock, plucked at his tattersall waist- coat and chatted of his recently completed novel. Its only characters were a boy and his mother, both of whom died at the end of the first chapter and were followed by
One hundred and eighty-seven pages of moss; green moss, red moss, purple moss, every damn kind of moss.
The annual harvest of dear old Dixie's fungus crop is one of the most picturesque of the New York publishers' traditional rituals. The air is filled with the tinkle of cash registers, the clank of prize medals and the cheers of the quaint old critics in the Saturday Review and the New York Times. The South does rise again, over and over again, and every time it comes up it looks the same.
Incest, murder, courtroom melodrama, fiends in human shape and drunken grandmaws are only a few of the charms of life under the mag- nolias, and they are all to be found in Mr. Willingham's book. Eternal Fire is an elaborate parody of the Southern novel, and like all good parodists Mr. Willingham knows when to keep a straight face. Briefly, a naive, rich young man and a naïve, beautiful virgin fall in love and decide to marry. The young man's patrimony has been gambled away by his guardian, who is therefore determined to break up the marriage. The corrupt old man employs every foul means at his disposal (and these Southern cities are rotten to the core), but the two young things walk in magnificent unawareness through the toils of his intrigue. The God of the righteous and the sanctimonious protects them, and on page 630 they head for 'the golden isles off the southern coast of Georgia'; behind them are hecatombs of dead and dying sinners and the young lady's virginity, taken from her by a wicked octoroon in one of the funniest seduction scenes since Gone With the Wind. The episodes of the tortuous plot represent the genre in its wholeness, from God's Little Acre to All the King's Men, and a good deal of the dialogue is high farce. Eternal Fire is the Southern novel that could end them all, and I hope it does.
The Tent of God is the story of two brothers who are bound to each other in love and fear. It is a detailed study of the problems of becom- ing. George, the younger brother, cannot exist in himself. Gordon is the vessel that contains George's life, the means by which he tries to close with life, but George has always been vaguely aware of his own dependence and of his brother's essential weakness. After a fight
between the two boys in which the blood feud takes on homicidal proportions, Gordon is sent away to a maritime college. With Gordon absent, George takes the first steps toward spiritual freedom, the acceptance of himself as a unique, independent being. For the first time he begins to take delight in life and in himself, but the shadow of his brother is always upon him. To his friends and to the girl with whom be has fallen in love he recites impossible stories of his ideal brother, the image of grace and strength. The girl instinctively realises the danger and attempts to bring it to George's con- sciousness. In the course of a remarkable scene (the two playing Beatrice and Benedick in their school theatrical) she demands that he exorcise the spirit of Gordon, and George, helplessly defiant, refuses. Gordon leaves the nautical academy because of his poor eyesight and George must now live with the physical presence of his fallible daimon. Catastrophe is inevitable, and at the end of the book Gordon lies dying in hospital as a result of George's blind ven- geance; George is faced with the unutterable burden of guilt and the task of living as himself.
Mr. Ward has written a very good book, tightly constructed and informed with passion. The intricacies of the relationship between the brothers are lovingly detailed, and George's love affair is extremely well done, with none of the awkward sentimentality with which adults usually approach the lives of young men. The prose is strong and direct. I find it occasionally fiat, but that may be a reaction to D. H. Law- rence, who has a hand on Mr. Ward's shoulder, and I mean that in no disparaging sense. Mr. Ward is apparently working on a sequel, which I should very much like to read. • - 1 confess to an instinctive prejudice against prize-winning novels, especially when the prize is awarded by publishers. Speculations About Jakob will probably do quite well for itself, but 1 am reminded of a remark by Dean Swift to the effect that some writers are like some wells; they appear wondrous deep only because they are wondrous dark. There is a specious profundity about Mr. Johnson's writing that cannot be dis- guised by clever, 'modern' techniques. Jakob is an East German railway worker who has been killed by a locomotive, and his life and times are analysed with a ponderous, Teutonic atten- tion to detail. While it is perfectly true that only the exhaustive is truly interesting, Mr. Johnson's thoroughness is enervating in the extreme.
The Affable Hangman is another chapter in the enormous book of the /team that Western civilisation has been compiling for the last several centuries.
Nature does not place us in life, but on the margin of life, and then we do or do not enter into it.
Ramon Vallemediano lives in that perpetual grey dawn where to desire means to pass the time and to sleep means to kill it. He is condemned to the margin by a mysterious insufficiency of the soul, but even the marginal man must attempt to define the blank spaces that he in- habits. Ramon wanders through Spain, like all picaresque heroes the darling of circumstance, patiently accumulating a mass of undifferentiated experience. Women are attracted to him, violence surrounds him, but neither love nor danger leaves more than the most superficial physical wounds. Quietism is his religion and indifference his creed. In the gratuitous cruelty of the Falangist massacres and in the meaningless, ineffectual deaths of his liberal friends he finds the perfect symbols of his world. The dim passions that
move him are of no utility, for he is searching for the connection between himself and humanity, and when he is damned for his virtues and praised for his vices he knows that for him the connection will always be metaphysical; `the entire social order rests on the hangman. . .
A Spanish critic has called this book 'one of the most arresting and important works of our modern literature,' and I would accept that judgment with few reservations.
PETER COHEN
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