THE ingredients of the historical novel are many and hard to mix. There are, first, the letters, diaries, and newsprints which have somehow been preserved in attics and libraries. Next are the family traditions and keepsakes — what Lincoln once said to Aunt Hetty — Uncle Peter’s dispatch case. There are maps of the countryside and enough ancient buildings still preserved to give an idea of what once was. There are the carefully documented evidence and the fine-spun theories of historians. There are the character analyses which psychology has encouraged us to pronounce upon our ancestors. Pervading all this source material and giving it lustre (and pathos) is that emotional tendency to defend an age which no longer is in flower. These are at least a few of the ponderables a novelist must reckon with when he chooses to illuminate a phase of our history; to enumerate them is not to disparage but to appreciate the undertaking.
In So Red the Rose (Scribners, $2.50) Stark Young has elected to tell a story of the Civil War— with a difference. In the first place, the war is felt solely by its impact upon some closely related and very leisurely families, the McGehees and their kin, of Natchez, Mississippi; the story never leaves their beautiful plantations, and, though death strikes home, the troops themselves do not appear until Sherman’s march to the sea. This confinement of the action intensifies our enjoyment of the gracious plantation life and our respect for the Southern women in defeat. The food and drink, the clothes and talk, the indolence and deterioration of a decorative society are perfectly illustrated.
But this objective design is not nearly so happy when it deals with the characterization. There are far too many people present from the first, and the fact that they are all cousins complicates the relationship to the point of impatience. People wander in and out of the book as freely as they must have wandered in and out of the plantations in life. They leave behind them this anecdote or that letter (many, I suspect, being genuine transcriptions), but this mass movement definitely distraets our attention from the individual. Thus Edward’s death misses its tragedy; Valette is only a dainty voice, and Duncan a daring horseman. More can be said for the elder women, whose courage is that of the Trojans. But courage is hardly enough to round out a character. This novel, with its multitude of detail, will have a nostalgic effect upon those who live in the South, hut most out landers, I fear, will find it pictorial rather than stirring.
Perspective comes by comparison. So Red the Rose is concerned with the outward and visible signs. For its inward and spiritual grace I urge you to read an exceptional first novel. Now In November, by Josephine Johnson (Simon and Schuster, $5.00). Here is the story of a valiant, poverty-stricken American family, the lather irascible, debt-ridden, and a failure; Willa, the mother, ‘marching by the beaten man,’ and the three daughters, one of whom is touched with insanity. The struggle of this little elan to hold their farm against the mortgage and despite the devastating drought is sadly typical of this past summer. But the novel holds a great deal more than special pleading. In its personal element it is the record of a young woman who, being utterly cut off from material things, finds a poetic, thoreau-like satisfaction in nature; her pity for her father, her devotion to her sisters, her sad little love affair with Grant — these emotional outpourings, together with her more sustaining passion for the land itself, have been set forth in prose of remarkable beauty. To city senses, hard-calloused by monotony, the clear, intense observation of Miss Johnson will come with positive refreshment.
