Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'The Innocent,' a Vigorous, Readable Southern Novel by Madison Jones Madison Jones is a serious young Southern writer, with a talent for portraying action and...
...More and more that life had come to seem to him a state of endless flux, a process of aimless and perpetual dissolution...
...The family still owns Brigadier's daughter, aging now but capable of bearing offspring, and Duncan resolves to find a suitable mate for her...
...But Duncan finds a purpose in life, one that links him in a satisfying way to the past...
...But otherwise the book is strengthened by the multiplicity of meanings...
...Jones, it seems to me...
...Now he appears with his grandson, whom he has trained to be his successor...
...He has made his hero as sympathetic as possible, and he has made despicable those characters who embody the qualities in contemporary life that Duncan dislikes...
...Like old times living over again...
...A bystander remarks: "And now he's done raised up that boy like him as a pea, and come down out of them hills...
...Duncan discovers that what men call progress has reached even to Bradysboro, and he learns that the man his sister is about to marry, a minister named Garner, is a fanatical advocate of change...
...He is a disenchanted man, and Jones tells us why: "As much as anything else it was the fault of the work, which had brought him by degrees to a perception of all the cant and half-truths and fraudulent ideals that prevailed in the life around bim...
...Duncan's father, who hates what Garner stands for as much as Duncan does...
...He has chosen a Faulknerian theme—the contrast between the present and the agrarian past—but he has dealt with it in his own way...
...Only once, it seems to me, does Mr...
...Jones's concern with symbolism get him into trouble: There is an ancient and clairvoyant Negro called Aunt Virgy...
...Garner says to him, "It's always a hard job to overcome traditional notions and prejudices...
...The colt is such a symbol, and so is the wrestling match in the prologue, and there are many others...
...The title, then, is bitterly ironic...
...Meanwhile Duncan has been involved in a disastrous marriage, his second, and has made the acquaintance of a moonshiner, who attracts him by virtue of his passionate self-reliance...
...Jones trying to say...
...Nearby lives an old man, a fierce individualist, who in his prime was able to defeat any carnival wrestler...
...The rhetoric is murky, but the meaning is clear...
...Nothing so simple...
...has conceived of his no\el in a truly tragic fashion—as portraving the hopeless struggle of a good man against the forces of evil...
...for Duncan is contemptuous of the kind of walking horse contemporary breeders have produced...
...His grandfather had once raised and lost by fire a great horse named Brigadier...
...It saved its particular venom for these...
...It came to suggest to him an interminable war waged against itself, between countless varying opinions, between companies, between classes, between individuals...
...Yet it is true that Duncan is beaten at every point and ends badly...
...The colt comes to a bad end, and so, after giving in to the moonshiner's vengeful counsel, does Duncan...
...he gets his neck broken...
...Besides being an act of family piety, this will be a protest against modern degeneracy...
...The hero of the novel, Duncan Welsh, who is merely an observer of the scene portrayed in the prologue, is returning to his father's farm after several years as a newspaperman in various cities...
...He is rotting, the sister says, predicting that Duncan will do the same...
...The one ideal shared by it all was that of sworn enmity to whatever was established, to whatever the past had held untouchable, worthy of love and transmission...
...Jones make extensive use of symbols, not the recondite and deliberately tantalizing symbols that some of our young novelists employ but, for the most part, strong, clear and appropriate symbols...
...I believe, as that it is wrong to live in the past...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'The Innocent,' a Vigorous, Readable Southern Novel by Madison Jones Madison Jones is a serious young Southern writer, with a talent for portraying action and especially violent action...
...And what is Mr...
...This is a vigorous and readable story, but it is something more than that...
...But the grandson not only fails to conquer the professional...
...How Duncan finds the right stallion makes a dramatic story, and the account of the birth and the training of the colt is exciting, even for a reader who knows little about horses...
...A carnival has come to the town of Bradysboro in Tennessee...
...Duncan is innocent enough In believe that honor and integrity can sumve in the modern world, and he goes to his doom...
...The novel opens with a prologue that is in Jones's best vein and that foreshadows the novel as a whole...
...His first novel, The Innocent (Harcourt, Brace, $4.75), suggests that he has read Faulkner carefully, but he is not in any important degree an imitator...
...and she and her crow are pretty hard to take...
...On their first encounter...
...has simply withdrawn from life...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 10
