Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS 'Peyton Place' and Other Fictional Treatments of Small-Town U.S.A. By Granville Hicks It isn't easy these days for a book to get a reputation as a shocker, but Grace Metalious's...
...It is significant that Duncan is torn by his love for Marcia Mae at the moment when he has to choose between principle and expediency in his political career...
...Downey was discriminating enough to choose Virginia Woolf...
...The memory of that atrocity plagues the town like an old wound...
...It is an exciting novel as well as a sound one...
...Stella visits her dressmaker, plays bridge, prepares to entertain official guests at dinner...
...Ohio, a "book of the grotesque...
...a doctor performs an abortion, in violation of personal convictions as well as professional ethics, and subsequently makes public confession of his deed...
...At lunch the women briefly see one another...
...Downey hadn't read Mrs...
...Addie," for instance, describes the death of an old Negro servant...
...Metalious suddenly braces herself, as if she felt that things were getting a little dull, and then the fireworks start...
...By the time the last corpse has been buried and the last scoundrel has got his comeuppance—Mrs...
...Metalious is fond of the idea of retribution—the only appropriate reaction is a snicker...
...Hence Lacey, Mississippi has the reality that Peyton Place, New Hampshire lacks...
...though Duncan is destroyed, there is a chance that his principles will triumph...
...Miss Spencer, whose third novel this is, has been praised by both Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty...
...But the method is the same, and when one compares Yancey with Mrs...
...Many of the incidents of the novel can fairly be described as shocking: A man brutally rapes his stepdaughter, and later on the stepdaughter brutally murders him...
...Beckwith Dozer pursues a strangely roundabout route toward the goal of social justice...
...Like Henry Bellaman in Kings Row and Madison Cooper in Sironia, Texas, Mrs...
...who is in love with Marcia Mae's sister: and Jimmy Tallant...
...There are even pelicans to match the sky-writing airplane in Mrs...
...The author, I felt, knew her small town, even though she knew its people only superficially, and she wrote with a certain vigor except when she took it into her head to show off...
...Somehow the come-on has worked, and the book is rapidly climbing toward the top of the best-seller list...
...For its first half, the novel struck me as merely mediocre...
...Other stories portray some of Blue River's misfits: Birdie Keller, the schoolteacher who makes up stories about his past...
...Lucy is unexpectedly visited by the man who was once her husband's closest friend, and they have lunch together...
...The result is an impressive and promising little book...
...I am afraid that all but the more naive purchasers are going to be disappointed...
...The principal characters are men and women who have grown up together in Lacey: Duncan Harper, who was in love with Marcia Mae but married Tinker, who loved him...
...Woolf's ill-fated Septimus Smith, the parallel is perfectly clear...
...A school board in New Hampshire helped by firing her husband from his job as principal, and the publishers have assiduously spread the word around that this is hot stuff...
...Mrs...
...Here, to be sure, we enter into the minds of two women, very different women, one of them selfish and essentially empty, the other generous and self-reliant...
...In Stella Madden he has given a fine account of a woman who has worn a mask for so long that she is not sure of her identity...
...Foots" tells of a veteran gardener who is unjustly suspected of theft by his mistress...
...Miss Lochridge is engaged in the same sort of inquiry, and, though her touch is not always sure, she succeeds with gratifying frequency...
...Although I doubt that Thunder in the Room would ever have been written if Mr...
...It is a pleasure to read a novel that shows so much respect for people and so much respect for the craft of fiction...
...Jimmy Tallant is an extraordinary combination of rascal and hero...
...Dalloway, of course, is unaware of Septimus's problems, whereas both Stella and Lucy are acutely conscious of what is happening to Yancey...
...The action takes place on a single day, the day on which a confessed murderer, David Yancey, is to be electrocuted...
...Metalious has the idea that a novelist presents the truth by yanking all the skeletons from all the closets and putting them on display...
...Thunder in the Room (Macmillan, $3.00), is located in a good-sized city rather than a small town, and it almost completely avoids the question of the relations between Negroes and whites...
...Rebecca Borosky and Tom Randall...
...Beckwith's father was one of a dozen Negroes slaughtered in the courthouse thirty years earlier...
...Stella shops, has an unsatisfactory talk with a psychiatrist about her rebellious daughter, lunches with a friend...
...Duncan gets the reputation of being unsound on the issue of segregation, as in fact he is...
...moving rapidly through a series of dramatic scenes...
...Dalloway, I don't want to suggest that it is merely derivative...
...not Henry Bellaman, as his model...
...But we spend more time with two women—Stella Madden, wife of the Governor, and Lucy Warren...
...but it is the work of a sound, disciplined novelist who doesn't look on fiction as a branch of confidential journalism...
...John O'Hara seems to have the same idea, but his work is at least partly redeemed by intensity, craftsmanship and insight...
...We follow the two women through the day...
...The only possible answer is that the novel doesn't give a true picture of life...
...But there is a midway point at which Mrs...
...If the question is put quantitatively, if one asks whether there could be so many sensational occurrences in one small town, I would have to grant that there could...
...who has always been in love with Tinker...
...The most difficult of the characters to portray is, naturally, David Yancey, waiting for death, and Mr...
...After a brilliantly condensed history of the town, there are fifteen stories about some of its inhabitants, white and black...
...the Reverend Hilary Arnold, with his conversion and reversion...
...In her fiction she is closer to the former than to the latter, not only because she can shape an intricate plot but also because she has a passion for moral complexities...
...Blue River (Macmillan, $2.75...
...there are suicides, seductions, fatal and near-fatal accidents...
...Beckwith Dozer...
...Elizabeth Spencer's The Voice at the Back Door (McGraw-Hill, S3.95) is also a novel about a small town, and one in which a good deal is going on...
...a darky of the old school," really loves the man who mistreats her...
...Samuel Green, a frustrated painter...
...My main objection, in these earlier chapters, was to the relentlessly expository tone, the constant pointing of a linger...
...Lucy Warren, on the other hand, has been true to herself, but at the risk, as she realizes, of eccentricity...
...Some of the best concern the relations between the two races...
...Downey has, in his own right, created three substantial characters...
...Downey's novel is full of echoes of Mrs...
...At the very least, one can be glad that Mr...
...She approaches the issue of desegregation not as a spokesman for either side, though her sympathies seem clear, but as one who relishes the way in which such a conflict defines character and clarifies motives...
...Kerney Woolbright...
...Tallant injects the race issue into the campaign by way of a remarkable Negro...
...This brings him into conflict with Tallant, who sells illegal liquor and is involved with a gang of gamblers...
...Miss Lochridge has Anderson's feeling for the mysteriousness of personality and for the incongruity between appearance and reality, and something of his gift for laying bare a mystery in a simple incident...
...Although there were people, back when Winesburg was published, who accused Anderson of parading small-town skeletons, we have recognized for a long time that his purpose was much more serious than that...
...Although Lucy's husband, long since dead, had once been in love with Stella, the only real link between them is Yancey, for Lucy has pity on him and wants to save him whereas Stella sees him only as a threat to her hard-won peace of mind...
...Claudie" presents another Negro servant, one on whom three aging sisters are completely dependent...
...Downey's resources are not always equal to the task of rendering his states of mind, though some of the Yancey passages are impressive...
...Dalloway...
...The scene of the novel is presumably Baton Rouge, but the reader is likely to be reminded more than once of London, Virginia Woolf's London, for Mr...
...Ambitious, love-struck Kerney Woolbright betrays Duncan twice, and his fiancee compounds the treachery, but...
...Metalious's failure comes from her inability to convince me that anything at all has happened to anybody...
...The Governor's dinner goes off smoothly, and Stella prepares herself for another day...
...The town is real, and this is important, for the town has a great deal to do with the story the novel tells...
...We are with Yancey in the prison at Iberia when he receives word that the Governor has refused him a reprieve, and we return to him periodically until he is taken to the electric chair...
...The characters are people, not pieces in a game, and we know them all...
...As we read these stories, we can identify one of Miss Lochridge's literary ancestors, for this is, like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg...
...The race issue is not her subject but something that illuminates her subject, which is the way human beings behave under pressure...
...In spite of the complexity of their emotional attachments, these people have all been close friends until Duncan Harper seeks election as sheriff...
...Lucy talks with the Governor in a futile effort to save Yancey, calls upon an old and comforting friend, and listens to a radio report of Yancey's death...
...By Granville Hicks It isn't easy these days for a book to get a reputation as a shocker, but Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (Messner, $3.95) has turned the trick...
...There are skeletons in Lacey's closets as well as in those of Peyton Place, but Miss Spencer's concern is with living men and women...
...Grotesqueness fascinated him because it opened a way to truth...
...Harris Downey is also a Southern writer, but his first novel...
...In "Lila" a woman is bewildered by the fact that her servant, "a jewel...
...People have asked whether Peyton Place gives a true picture of life in a small town...
...By defending Dozer...
...Her first book is a collection of related short stories laid in the small town that gives it its title...
...But we have read about such matters before, and since all we do in Peyton Place is read about them, since we don't at all experience them, there is no shock...
...Betsy Lochridge is another Southern writer, a very young one...
...We are always conscious of the town, and yet Miss Spencer never once breathes down our necks, saying, "Look, there it is, there it really is...
...Dalloway...
Vol. 39 • October 1956 • No. 44
