Rome Hanks

ADMIRERS of Thomas Wolfe will experience a nostalgic thrill in reading this strange, inchoate book: The History of Rome Hanks, and Kindred Matters. The comparison between the work of Wolfe and this young author is inevitable, for Mr. Pennell has, consciously or unconsciously, adopted the is inevitable, for Mr. Pennell has, consciously or unconsciously, adopted the form — or lack of form — of his brilliant predecessor. The method of casting back, of re-creating the past and the past lives of many people through their own Soliloquies or those of their contemporaries, all being strained, sifted, and annotated in the consciousness of the narrator, has obvious virtues and corresponding defects. The sharpness and brilliance of occasional episodes or characterizations do not always compensate for the irrelevancies, the gaps in narrative, and a disturbing atmosphere of confusion.

In this book the author has chosen as the compère of the piece a modern young man, Lee Harrington. In love with a coldly modern girl, Mr. Harrington finds himself romancing about his family — how his grandfathers fought on different sides in the War Between the States, how brothers, even, were divided in that struggle, how his great-uncle Pinckney marched in Pickett’s Charge, and so on. To these not wholly untrue stories, his beautiful but bored Christa replies with a notable absence of enthusiasm: “I am sure your grandfather must have been a fine old Southern gentleman.”

A doubt lifts its ugly head in Mr. Harrington’s spirit, and he sets out to discover and determine what kind of people his grandparents, their forebears, and their descendants really were. So he visits the homes of certain of his relatives and listens to long stories about others from men and women who had known them, and in reporting these scenes and memories, he re-creates the Civil War years and those who were his people sixty or seventy years ago.

They were neither noble nor aristocratic, neither plumed knights of the Southern tradition of chivalry nor picturesque Yankee adventurers. But they were people, real people who had known great moments and years of shriveling trivialities. They were profoundly American in their virtues and their vices, but why? In some — perhaps in most — instances, that curiosity is satisfied by the presentation of a person whom one understands and accepts. In others, there is debatable ground, there are unanswered questions, curious, inexplicable actions.

The portrait of Brigadier General Clint Belton, the political soldier, who rose to be Secretary of War and then fell like Lucifer, is brilliant and objective. Great-uncle Pinckney Harrington, a hillbilly hedonist who has gladly retired from a life involving effort in any form to the vine and fig tree of his unpainted cabin in the North Carolina mountains, has an authentic philosophy about him. All of us have known an American not too unlike him.

But Rome Hanks himself is the least clear figure in the cast. We are repeatedly assured by his friends and family that he is a very fine man. We know, from the book, that he was a good soldier and a modest one in the dreadful carnage of Shiloh and the campaign of Grant and Sherman which followed. We know, too, that he was loath to think evil of any man or to suspect his motives, and that he had great difficulty in arriving at any clear or definite opinions about life. But the reader is left unhappily uncertain as to whether Rome’s trustfulness, his readiness to indorse a rogue’s note and thus ruin his own family and his own career, proceeded from a kind of spiritual weakness or an almost inhuman goodness. One has a similar difficulty in seeing the narrator himself. In short, the development and exposition of the characters in this book are uneven and uncertain.

There can be no doubt, however, as to Mr. Pennell’s ability to re-create the atmosphere and the emotion of a past episode. Through “Uncle Pink at Gettysburg, Rome Hanks at Shiloh, Tom Beckham at Gaines’s Mill, he presents the red fog of Civil War battle as brilliantly and convincingly as any writer since Stephen Crane. Quite as competently he handles the American small town, whether in Kansas, or Iowa, or North Carolina. He falls into the error he despises, the old Southern myth, when he describes the decadent family of Mississippi aristocrats whose ghostly daughters play hob with Clint Belton. Obscure, as it can be, this is yet a book of real power and promise. Here, we feel, is a writer who conjures up hot frenzy and cold despair, horror and base, violent death, courage and fear, hatred and love, out of the smoke and dust of battle. Scribner, $2.75.

RICHARD ELY DANIELSON