Living With Books

...Something About a Soldier has been thoroughly worked over since I last saw it, and the labor that Harris and his editor have expended on it has made it a considerably better book, though it was good to begin with...

...The soldier is Jacob Epstein, once Epp but then Epstein again, a preposterously brilliant, preposterously innocent boy of 17, who has enlisted in the Army in the middle of World War II...

...They are summoned back by the death of Lucius's supposed father in an accident that may be—and, as we eventually discover, is—suicide...

...Lytle places his novel when and where he does...

...Tt is the work of a bold and resourceful novelist, large in scope and ambitious in method...

...This is a rich novel, the work of a mature and uncommonly resourceful writer, one who is only slightly less gifted than those Southern contemporaries whose reputations have so far-outdistanced his [ wish ] could believe that it would be widely read...

...They often glanced up at the untidy head and sighed nostalgically, as if thinking of other stone saints in niches in great cathedrals, softly worn and mellowed by centuries of gentle English weather...

...When the parents were killed in a steamboat explosion, there were four boys, the oldest 19 and the youngest 10, and a girl of 6. We learn, as we follow the novel's involutions, of the death of two of the brothers and the crippling of a third...

...In wintertime the snow blew in on him, burying his feet and frosting his episcopal garments, filling in his deep-set eyes and giving him a blind, prophetic look...

...Cuthbert's, not only because she is irked by the austerity of her grandfather's life and the decorum imposed by the school's staff, but also because she has found that this is an easy way to win the popularity she craves...

...This is...

...But there are human beings as well as causes in Jacob's world, and, fortunately for him, two of these human beings are capable of love and understanding...

...Throughout all this, however...

...Lytle has also permitted some of his characters, notably Jack Cropleigh, a kind of speech that cannot be accepted as realistic but may be justified by the poetic intensity it often achieves...

...He engaged in a strange adventure with his Uncle Jack, who has a taste for whiskey, a philosophical mind, a gift of language, and a reputation as a water witch, a dowser...

...This is, indeed, a very tender novel, though it is at times a comic and always an entertaining one...

...I liked it, too, and I reviewed it with enthusiasm in The New Leader for March 26, 1956...

...I'll Take My Stand, published in 1930--Allen Tate...

...There has been, I think, no better account of the ferocity with which a youthful intelligence, exposed to new experiences, can plunge from cause to cause...

...It is a book about love and death and the human condition, and many long and solemn volumes have had less to say on these subjects...

...It is also a story about the strangeness and the importance of love...

...Oblensky...

...This, too, is a novel about the end of innocence, but Lucius Cree, unlike Jacob Epstein and Nicola James, has to define his identity in relation to a family...

...But it is a long time before we know all this...

...If The Velvet Horn has a fault, it is that the author tries too hard...

...the other, Joleen, loves him and in a way understands him...

...Whether the author needs to demand as much effort as he does is a question—as, to be sure, it is with some of Faulkner's novels—but, since the effort is rewarded, we give him the benefit of the doubt...

...It was then—more than two years ago—called The Phases of Jacob, and the manuscript was sent me by the Macmillan Company, which sought my opinion as to "its merits and availability for publication by us...

...The real story, as I have indicated, is the story of the family, and this the reader has to piece together with the kind of tenacity required by William Faulkner...

...The situation could be treated with a cheap kind of irony, but Harris portrays the complicated relationship with great tenderness...

...Lytle is old enough to have contributed to the famous manifesto of the Southern agrarians...

...Cuthbert's is described with excessive sweetness...

...But this is a fault of some of Faulkner's novels, too...

...I am doubtful about many of Jack's speeches, although at their best they have an Elizabethan quality: more consistently successful are some of the long speeches in the vernacular...

...Cuthbert supervised the comings and goings of the girls in the school whose patron saint he was...

...His right hand was raised in benediction, while with his left hand he kept a steadfast grip upon his pastoral staff...

...Old Cuppy has hay in his ears,' the girls said, and giggled, but the headmistress and her staff found the effect pleasing...

...By that time I had read The Southpaw, to which Bang the Drum Slowly is a sequel, and also Harris's biography of Vachel Lindsay, City of Discontent...

...Matthew...

...Andrew Lytie's The Velvet Horn (McDowell...

...It is only at times, however, that technique becomes obtrusive...

...Nicola's disillusionment becomes a turning point in her life, and this I can easily believe, though her subsequent awakening to the virtues of her grandfather and the mistress of St...

...This is charming, and charming is the word for the first part of the book, which is organized in a rather desultory fashion and sometimes is little more than a series of sketches...

...As the story begins, the approval of her schoolmates in general has suddenly become less important than the approval of a particular girl, Tammy Olson, who seems to her a paragon of sophistication and poise, and the novel proceeds to explore the relationship between the two girls...

...We begin in 1879, with Lucius Cree, son of Julia and (so far as he knows) Joe Cree, on the eve of his 18th birthday...

...Nicola, at 16, is the enfant terrible of St...

...John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren were among his fellow-contributors and this is his fourth novel...

...Something About a Soldier is a story of the pure, unself-conscious dissent of youthful innocence...

...He becomes an ardent Zionist, a belligerent advocate—he is stationed in the South—of Negro equality, a member of the Communist Political Association, and a pacifist...

...Margaret Creal's A Lesson in Love (Simon & Schuster, $3.95) is also a novel about youth and innocence and, of course, love, and it, too, goes deeper than a casual reader might suppose...

...As I observed in my review of Bang the Drum Slowly, Harris has a strong sympathy with nonconformists, such as Vachel Lindsay and that brash young pitcher, Henry Wiggen...

...When one untangles the story, it proves to be an account of the Cropleigh family of Tennessee from just before the Civil War to 1880...

...At the same time, though she deals sardonically with the vulgaritv of the Olsons, Miss Creal does not miss the poignancy of Nicola's disillusionment...

...His Army career is a series of disasters, with some brighter interludes, but he scarcely notices because his mental development is proceeding at such a frenzied pace during the few months he spends in uniform...

...We learn, too, of the little girl, Julia, brought up as a boy in a family of boys, loved to the point of incest by her brother Duncan, seduced at 14 by Pete Legrand, and married for 19 years to a cousin, Joe Cree...

...Joleen, who is the daughter of a local labor leader and works in the PX, is in some ways as innocent as Jacob, but if he is uncommonly intelligent, she is extraordinarily wise, and what Jacob learns from her influences his life more deeply than all his causes put together...

...He is constitutionally suspicious of organized forms of rebellion...

...Dodd protects Jacob from the first, and in the end, by getting him a discharge on psychiatric grounds, saves him either from a tragic conflict with Army discipline or from the death in action that Dodd himself suffers...

...She treats Nicola's emotions from start to finish with complete seriousness, and finds in this affair, which could so easily be dismissed as a schoolgirl crush, an instructive example of the course of love...

...I mean merely that the reader becomes so conscious of the effort, of what Mr...

...Long passages—again I cite the section on the wake - arc so solid and so absorbing that one analvzcs their technical brilliance only as one looks back on them...

...There is a magnificent section on the wake for Captain Cree, and then Lucius, abruptly forced into manhood, begins his struggle with the past, which is progressively revealed to him, and for the future...

...While Dodd is protecting Jacob, he is initiating Joleen into the ways of physical love, to her satisfaction as well as his, and out of affection as well as desire...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Novels of Innocence by Mark Harris, Margaret Creal and Andrew Lytle By one of those accidents that are common enough in the publishing world, though seldom referred to in literary discourse, my first acquaintance with Mark Harris was by way of an earlier version of the book that has now been published as Something About a Soldier (Macmillan, $3.00...

...Miss Creal, whose first novel this is, writes with distinction, as the opening paragraph shows: "From his stone niche above the arched doorway, St...

...Lytle is trying to do and how he is trying to do it, that he finds himself appreciating the doing instead of enjoying what is done...

...3,951 was published last August and received some highly favorable reviews, which...

...One of them, Captain Dodd, understands Jacob and in a way loves him...

...But every spring sparrows nested in his miter, and then his crown of straw and string gave him a rakish air...

...So I come back to my starting point, but as something of an authority on Mark Harris...

...of course, a reason why Mr...

...Since then I have read his interesting but awkward first novel, Trumpet to the World, and his rather slight coda to the Henry Wiggen series, A Ticket for a Seamstitch (NL, February 25...

...I liked it so well that when, a few months later, I received from Knopf an advance copy of Bang the Drum Slowly, I read it eagerly...

...I have discovered, it deserved...

...It is a notable irony that his three novels about the Great American Game are all studies in dissent...

...Its heroine, Nicola James, is an orphan who has been brought up by her grandfather, the retired Dean of the Pro-Cathedral of St...

...The setting is a Church of England school for girls in western Canada, a setting that has, at the very least, the charm of novelty...

...but he is fond of come-outers...

...Miss Creal keeps a perceptive eye on Nicola and Tammy, and when she takes Nicola to Tammy's summer home, and Tammy's sophistication is exposed as the selfishness of a spoiled child and the brashness of the prosperous middle class, charm gives way to ruthless insight...