Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks MacKinlay Kantor's 'Andersonville' and 'A Dream of Kings' by Davis Grubb MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville (World, $5) has been carried to a tremendous...
...But time has weakened partisanship and deadened pain, and at last we can face the cruelty and evil as well as the grandeur of the most dramatic episode in our history...
...On the one hand, the book is marked by careful research and, on the other, by compassion, and these virtues combine to make it almost a good novel...
...But "almost," as the saying goes, takes off half...
...Now and then the style seems too strained, but as a rule it does what Mr...
...A Dream of Kings, however, isn't about the Civil War in the sense that Andersonville is...
...The success of Andersonville has overshadowed an- other novel that has the Civil War in its background...
...Setting out to write a big novel about the Civil War, Mr...
...The memories were so painful, indeed, that for many decades certain aspects of the war could not be written about objectively, could scarcely be written about at all...
...The novel was intended not only to show war at its cruelest but also to reflect many other aspects of the Civil War through the portrayal of the lives of both the prisoners and their keepers...
...It isn't...
...The cast of characters is enormous, including scores of Union soldiers--scoundrels and heroes, wise men and fools, weak men and strong--and introducing us to compassionate Confederates as well as callous ones...
...Grubb displayed a notable talent for rendering the macabre and fearful...
...Kantor is sometimes a novelist, but there are long passages that are straight journalism...
...Reading the book, one sees clearly what is lacking in Andersonville, for this is a novel that has been imagined and felt and written from start to finish...
...It is perhaps significant that the New York Times Book Review assigned the book not to a literary critic but to an historian...
...There are echoes of a dozen battles, reminders of the heroic fortitude of Southern civilians as well as soldiers, intimations of the mighty issues at stake in the conflict...
...Fifty years ago, I am sure, neither Northern nor Southern readers could have stomached a novel about the miseries of the wretched Confederate prison at Andersonville...
...Tolstoy is always a novelist, always a creator, even when he is being most faithful to his sources...
...Grubb wants it to do, and he puts heavy demands upon it...
...It carries them through pre-adolescent rivalry and companionship into an adolescent period of misunderstanding and love-and-hate, and thence into passion, disillusionment, and a reawakening of passion doomed to tragedy...
...and, being an internecine war, it left deep and painful memories in all the American people...
...Cathie's combination of boldness with almost morbid innocence, her romantic and eager imagination, her capacity for the extremes of both love and hate make her an extraordinary and memorable character...
...No one has come up with an adequate explanation of this interest, but some elements in it can be discerned...
...It is a novel in the tradition of Wuthering Heights, concerned with powerful and often ambivalent emotions, and sustained by a style of remarkable intensity...
...The entire relationship is colored by the intense Puritanism of the woman who is bringing them up and by the romantic dreams that the girl builds around the figure of her vanished father...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks MacKinlay Kantor's 'Andersonville' and 'A Dream of Kings' by Davis Grubb MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville (World, $5) has been carried to a tremendous success by the rising tide of interest in the Civil War...
...That it has been so much less popular than Andersonville is merely proof that more people are interested in reading about the Civil War than are interested in reading a good novel...
...The hero of Davis Grubb's A Dream of Kings (Scribner, $3.95) campaigns for a time under Stonewall Jackson, and the account of his soldiering, though brief and unpretentious, is uncommonly vivid...
...Kantor chose to portray it in its most sordid phase...
...Its theme is the relationship between a boy and a girl, brought up in the same home though they are no kin...
...Andersonville was worse than other prisons, North and South, only because it was established late in the war, when the resources of the Confederacy were almost exhausted...
...The Civil War is the only major war to have been fought on American soil since the Revolution, which it greatly exceeded in scope and intensity...
...Kantor is a hard-working, practiced writer, but he is no Tolstoy, and this is the kind of novel that could have been really good only if it had been somewhere near as good as War and Peace...
...In his first novel, The Night of the Hunter, Mr...
...As Kantor shows, there were warped men such as Captain Wirz and harsh, vindictive, self-seeking men such as General Binder who were not unwilling to have the prisoners suffer, but the evils of Andersonville, unlike those of Belsen and Dachau, were not planned...
...That talent he exhibits here, but he has widened his range in A Dream of Kings...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 2
