Conscience in Warren
KELVIN, NORMAN
Conscience in Warren The Cave. By Robert Venn Warren. Random House. 403 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Norman Kelvin Department of English, City College of New York SEX AND THE travails of the...
...The style is typically Warren's— which is to say...
...Jack Harrick and MacCarland Sumpter, the two older men for whom Jasper's death changed the world, confront themselves...
...He exists as a center toward which the emotions of the major characters are directed and as the man through whose ordeal and death other people's lives are transformed...
...But present everywhere, as these aspects of the novel develop, are sex and the Protestant conscience, and they flourish apace...
...Isaac Sumpter...
...He alerts the newspaper and television world to the human interest value in Jasper's plight, charges a high price for the information, and sells to a restaurateur concession rights to feed the crowd which gathers around the cave...
...I wanted your son to die...
...MacCarland had never forgiven Jack for the child Mrs...
...Warren's latest novel, The Cave, forays into new territory, but it never cuts loose from the old tethers...
...This is a significant shift for Warren, for the Reverend Sumpter is essentially a secondary figure, and in the past it has been the major characters in Warren's novels who have been plagued by conscience...
...Monty: and Jo-Lea Bingham, a girl pregnant with Monty's child...
...Jasper Harrick, son of Ole Jack Harrick...
...Its weakness lies in the constant talking and fantasizing about copulation (significantly, there is more talking and wishing than action, though the inordinate number of pregnant women testify to some deeds done ). Moreover, passion, love and lust are never distinguishable from each other...
...The Cave is also about modern America in all regions...
...is really a minor figure in the story...
...It is a satire on mass-media deceit and sentimen-talism, and it is a refreshingly realistic study of the ways in which failure—not success—corrupts character in contemporary society...
...Not only is he fascinated, almost to the point of morbidity, with the themes in question, but he characteristically dissociates them...
...The Cave stands somewhere below All the King's Men but considerably above such stories as Night Rider, At Heaven's Gate, World Enough and Time and Band of Angels...
...Sumpter's first lover, and Jack out of envy of his own son who was young and strong and whom he wanted to see buried in the ground as a substitute for himself...
...Dying himself, he affirms youth, life and love...
...Television and the press have by this time made Jasper into a national hero, and the next step is for a Nashville newspaper to launch a fund-raising drive to provide for the unwed mother of the hero's child...
...When Jasper Harrick gets trapped in a cave...
...who owns the land on which the cave is located and who three weeks previously had been expelled from college, sees his chance to escape from Johntown and failure...
...From the promotion of Jasper's plight, Isaac Sumpter emerges with money in a New York bank and an atrophied conscience...
...At his best, however, as in All the King's Men, he has a saving grace: He transcends the limits of time and place...
...This sketchiness should, incidentally, discourage any attempts to see him as a symbol for Jesus...
...Conscience, as a theme, has a successful and integral role in the novel...
...He says and does very little in his own right and is quite dim as a personality...
...Thus only MacCarland Sumpter is left as the center of the unquieted conscience...
...They never do reconcile them, but Jack at least discovers an alternative to worrying about the problem...
...During the long night of Jasper's entrapment, he had led the multitudes in prayer for his safety, but now he says to Jack: " 'Tonight when that boy . . . said that Jasper Harrick was dying, my heart leaped again...
...The story concerns the changes that take place in the lives of some residents of Johntown, Tennessee, when Jasper Harrick is trapped and dies in a cave...
...Oh, God, I loved my son— but . . . but I know it's true.' " Both old men have sinned out of envy, MacCarland out of envy of Jack, who was Mrs...
...Sumpter carried when she wed...
...No,' Jack Harrick said...
...But now I recognize it as joy...
...Both men are trapped in the dilemma of the Protestant conscience: the need to reconcile free will with the compulsion to sin...
...In that large gallery of Southern portraiture beginning with the inhabitants of Faulkner's Yoknapa-tawpha County and on down to the creations of lesser writers, we look in vain for any studied relationship between the two...
...At his worst, as in World Enough and Time, he not only writes about sex unconvincingly and makes the Protestant conscience seem curiously irrelevant, but he never gets out of Dixie...
...This shift indicates Warren's new commitment to life as possibility, a change which first became noticeable in Band of Angels, unfortunately an inferior work...
...Why?' " 'Because —' Jack Harrick said, and paused, then seemed to come to grips with himself...
...Beneath this comic story is the drama of those most closely involved with Jasper...
...because it was your son.' " The Reverend Sumpter, consumed by guilt, then asks Jack to spit upon him...
...Indeed, the power of The Cave derives from the efforts of various characters to come to terms with conscience...
...As a literary achievement...
...Because,' he said, T wanted my son—my own son—to die...
...Robert Penn Warren, the most intellectual of the Southern writers, is true to his heritage...
...Because —' "He leaned closer...
...Reviewed by Norman Kelvin Department of English, City College of New York SEX AND THE travails of the Protestant conscience have long preoccupied our Southern writers...
...He then goes into the cave—but not far enough to reach the trapped man—and emerges with the phony information, ostensibly from Jasper's lips, that he has left a girl pregnant...
...the prose is somewhat thin and laxly strung but shot through with racy colloquialism that Warren uses expertly if not with large effect...
...Isaac Sumpter, son of the Reverend MacCarland Sumpter and a young man who recently lost both the favor of his mistress and his right to attend his college: the Reverend himself, who married a girl pregnant with Jack Harrick's child and then had his deepest wish come true when the child died at birth: Jasper's younger brother...
...Perhaps the same is true in society in general today, but it takes more than representation to make a truth live in a novel, and that somehting extra is missing in The Cave...
...Oddly, however, the two themes are seldom joined...
...In the old joy...
...He takes Jo-Lea Bingham into his heart, encouraging her to marry Monty and have her baby...
...More important than Jasper are his father, who spent his life brawling and seducing women and who is now dying of cancer...
...It is a complex fabric of character and event, successfully relating to each other a dozen individuals and their destinies...
...Sex is for pleasure or depravity, and conscience is for discovering God's will or a new Southern ethic...
Vol. 43 • February 1960 • No. 7
