Coming Out of the Wilderness?

...The man Adam shoots is a starving soldier he had been happy to feed a moment before...

...Robert Penn Warren's powerful talents sometimes seem lost in the thicket of his bad habits...

...Wilderness has a peculiar tendentiousness, perhaps not conscious in its author...

...It begins "If the mountain had not gleamed so white," followed by five other rhetorical "iffy" clauses without predicates, to explain why Adam cannot go back into the old life of his dead father...

...Adam realizes at one point that "I am nearly thirty years old, and I have never lain with a woman...

...Yet they have been increasingly flawed by the most preposterous hokum, and the plot of one recent one, a beautiful Southern belle's discovery that she is a Negro slave, would seem too corny for Frank Yerby...

...A major fault is that Adam, an educated libertarian whose father fought in the German Revolution of 1848, is motivated entirely by mystic slogans, without a single political idea...

...As a folk tale, the book has a coherence that it lacks as a realistic novel: Aaron's invitation to Adam to replace his dead son, the farm girl Maran's implied invitation to Adam to replace her dying husband, are visibly the temptations that would turn the hero from his quest...

...But his six previous novels—Night Rider, At Heaven's Gate, All the King's Men, World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, The Cave—show a developing inability to express his theme in fictional action...

...Wilderness, subtitled "A Tale of the Civil War," is the story of Adam Rosenzweig, a young Bavarian Jew with a deformed foot, who comes to America to fight for the cause of freedom in the Union Army during the Civil War...

...Some of Warren's short stories show, particularly in their endings, the influence of Hemingway's understatement...

...After the erotic teasing of Band of Angels and the pervasive sexuality of The Cave, Wilderness is a remarkably chaste book...

...He is our only best-selling novelist who is also an important poet and critic, our principal "man of letters" novelist in the European tradition...

...At the climax of the book's action, Adam's employer Jed Hawksworth, a sutler with the Union army, is robbed and murdered in the night...

...the novels unfortunately show the increasing influence of our alternative tradition, Faulknerian overstatement...

...Another scene, in which a murderous hillbilly named Monmorancy Pugh is controlled by Adam with a revolver Pugh knows to be empty, is simply ludicrous...

...Not only has Adam never heard of Karl Marx, he has never even heard of Carl Schurz...

...he is stubbornly determined to be a soldier "with that thing hung on me...

...When Warren wants to say that Adam's voice sounded harsh, he writes: "No, it was not like a croak...

...More and more the characters become puppets, and the philosophy blares out in great gusts of rhetoric from one or another mouthpiece, or from the author himself...

...It was as though the creature that would croak had bulged his throat and then broken forth, croaker and croak in one...

...At times, Warren shifts into the dreadful second-person he sometimes favors, and Adam pictures a scene, "Where all the hard eyes fixed on you and withered you away...

...Some of the symbols in the book are extremely effective...

...Adam lands in New York in the midst of the Draft Riots, and he sees his first Negro as a hanged and mutilated corpse on a lamp post, followed by scenes of Negroes being horribly massacred with kitchen knives...

...Adam assumes that the murderer is the Negro Mose Crawfurd, Jed's other employe and Adam's friend, but Mose never reappears in the book, the matter is never cleared up, and the novel simply goes on about other business...

...If the book's covert point is Northern guilt toward the Negro, its overt point is the futility of war...

...That theme, he said, "is the nature of justice, the relation of human will to Divine Will, the relation of Good to Evil: in short, as Milton put it, the justification of 'God's ways to man.' " Warren might have been writing about himself...

...All the sins against the Negro it exhibits are the sins of the North...

...The effective cause of Mose's killing Jed, if he did kill him, is a thoroughly unbelievable sequence in which Mose threatens Jed if Jed ever again calls him a "black sonof-a-bitch," and Adam then says the fatal phrase...

...He is fascinated and held by both visions, the innocent and the depraved, but he flees a relationship with Maran as resolutely as he flees a roll in the hay with Mollie...

...To fight for freedom" is his most concrete articulation, followed by: "I must do what I have to do," "I must not hate him or I shall die," "Only in my heart can I make the world hang together," "We always do what we intend," and such...

...They is killen fer killen," she says bitterly...

...Adam is shown two sexual visions in the book: the sight of Maran's large beautiful breast as she nurses her baby, and the sight of Mollie the Mutton's large unbeautiful rump as she is whipped for prostitution in the Army camp...

...Compared to Warren's previous three novels, it is a spare and economical work...

...In this novel, a sailor who helps Adam enter the United States illegally insists that his concern was impersonal and whimsical, Jed explains that he defied a North Carolina courtroom and testified on behalf of a slave for no better reason than hatred of his father, and Mose reveals that he saved Adam's life out of the purest selfishness...

...The sport of the Union troops in the book is having Negroes with their hands tied behind them duck for crumbled dollar bills in a tub of flour, and we watch a brutal and sadistic Northern soldier hold their heads under the flour until they are almost suffocated...

...Warren once wrote of John Milton that his poems present a variety of subjects, but only one theme...

...By the last scene he has become a man, but he is still virgin...

...If some of its details seem preposterous, we can read it, not as realism, but as a symbolist fable like Kafka's Amerika...

...Warren has always shown a tendency to debunk or debase motives in his work, as though a reductive explanation for an act were automatically truer than a noble one, or at least more acceptable to the world...

...In the year of that ghastly farce the Civil War centennial, when we have bigger weapons than minnie balls, Warren reminds us that even where freedom and slavery stand opposed, their differences are relative rather than absolute, and war is not the way to resolve them...

...The special boot and the satchel, his only possessions, symbolize his divided inheritance, and after the last scene he will walk out of the Wilderness leaving them both behind...

...The uneducated Jed lectures Adam on the philosophy of freedom and being, one more in Warren's long line of backwoods ontologi'sts...

...Mordecai Sulgrave, a W. C. Fields type at Gettysburg, has no connection with the action, but allows Warren to write a comic set-piece in the picaresque tradition...

...Ultimately, Warren transcends his regional loyalties in an affirmation of undifferentiated America, and beyond that of undifferentiated mankind...

...Some of the book's events are preposterous enough to fit the pretentious style...

...the theme he finds in Milton is the theme of almost everything he has ever written...

...But Wilderness may represent not where he is going but where he has been, and may mark his emergence into the clearing...

...Perhaps the murder of Jed is never solved because the only important thing about it is Adam's realization that Jed died in his place, died sacrificially to save him...

...It is important and useful for the North to be reminded of its own guilt toward the Negro, but it is perhaps necessary to remind the author of Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South that Southern guilt was and continues to be infinitely worse than ours, and that no one would learn that fact from this Civil War tale...

...and the book's final transformation is quite properly Adam's replacement of the special boot he had had made for the foot with the ordinary boot of the man he killed...

...The hardest thing to remember," Aaron had told Adam back in New York, "is that other men are men...

...Another episode, an encounter with "Dr...

...Adam's foot, deformed from birth, symbolizes the nature and fate that he and every man must bear...

...The plot is unusually episodic for Warren, consisting of a series of scenes without connecting narrative...

...In Adam's case, his motives are not exposed as selfish, they are merely evaporated away...

...Actually, Wilderness is a better book than these strictures suggest...

...Warren's latest novel, Wilderness (Random House, 310 pp., $4.95), offers an opportunity to explore this paradox...

...Through all his adventures, right to the final battle in the Wilderness, Adam carries the satchel his uncle had given him, containing prayer book, prayer shawl and phylacteries...

...Adam discovers his consubstantiality with the Confederate soldiers only in the act of murdering one...

...Aaron Blaustein, a rich Jewish merchant who befriends Adam, tells him that he no longer prays, but that when he goes to his store and puts on his old black alpaca coat, "it is, in a way, like praying...

...Kept out of the Army by his deformity, Adam manages, after a series of ironic adventures, to shoot and kill a Confederate soldier on the Wilderness battlefield...

...Warren is enormously gifted, and his novels are intensely serious, resolutely devoted to the major problems of the ethical and religious life...

...Much of the book's style is pretentious and overblown, like a bad poem...

...Pugh was a Christian pacifist...

...As such, it is initiatory, the transformation of a crippled Jewish immigrant boy into a whole American man, the Americanization of Adam...

...in his effort to evade Confederate service he shot a conscripter, and he ends as a murdering bushwhacker...

...Pugh, warning Adam against her husband's murderous intentions, arming and instructing him, is obviously the ogre's wife or king's daughter of fairy tale...

...Pugh rejects any motives for the war...