A Placeless Southerner

...what he feels at that moment is made to bear a heavy responsibility for his bitterness, solitude and inability to love in later life...

...That Warren lets the screen stand is evidence that the novel is not really "about" the South...

...But he writes (and here is the first intimation of the sort of stylization the narrator never breaks through), "It does not seem real...

...On the one hand, Jed carries the region with him all his life: His thoughts are often there and his speech is a wonderful combination of the academy and the back roads...

...In addition to the emotional facts, it is important to recognize something Jed does not: the social consequences of his father's death...

...If he had been born in 1840, he would have been just ripe for sergeant in a troop of Alabama cavalry . . . high in the saddle...

...Indeed, those who like narratives crowded with sex, conversation, changes of scene, and coincidence will enjoy the part of A Place to Come To (more than two thirds of it) that describes Jed Tewksbury's 40-year absence from Dugton, Alabama...

...or a picture found in one of those books of photographs about the South during the Depression...

...She is the mother of his only son—also perfunctorily described...

...the yell fades from his throat...

...the saber . . . flashing like flame...

...Yet he never makes it back to Dugton...

...There he becomes deeply involved with a woman who had been the belle of his high-school class 16 years earlier, and who is another exile of sorts from their hometown...

...or a scene from a movie or a stage set...

...When he goes back after her death, he learns from her second husband that she had kept his bed made up: "Catch him comen to Dugton," she had said, "I'll break his durn neck...

...In an interview given just before the book came out, he said he was writing about "a Southerner who hates (or is ashamed of) the South . . . and it is my observation that such a Southerner, even if a great success in the world, is always a 'placeless' man...

...It is like something I might have read about in one of those novels about the South if I had been old enough back then...

...Unfortunately, having this kind of figure narrate the novel makes Warren's task a more difficult one...

...Jed, nine at the time, learns what happened when the menfolk gather to discuss the accident the next day, after his father's body has been brought back to the house where the elder Tewksbury, while living, had often taken a header onto the stone hearth, to be dragged to bed like a "stunned beef" by his wife...

...Warren has, I think, made this doubleness a part of his point...

...Jed's homecoming is genuinely moving...

...Jed is dissociated from his home as well: He travels widely in Europe and in the U.S., yet the closest he gets to Alabama (or to passionate love) is a stopover in Nashville...

...She has married twice for money...

...Many of the novel's episodes, be it said, are dramatic and moving—after all, the writer is Robert Penn Warren —and even at its worst the plot has a lively soap-opera appeal...

...Had Warren achieved this design, A Place to Come To would have been a tour de force...

...Looking at a little church where the people "used to sweat and moan and anguish for their salvation," which has been abandoned to wind and weather, he says the scene "was the same as that of one of the more famous photographs by Walker Evans, but a generation of damage later...

...I do not believe he has...

...In fact, he tells us, as a graduate student he exploited the role of professional Southerner to gain social cachet...

...Jed's association, even now, is not with an actual place, but with a picture of it...

...in some last action under Forrest . . . meeting lead as...

...the danger of sentimentality lies not in revisiting the old house or his mother's grave, but in forgiving his father on the sight of the accident: "The only thing wrong with Buck was he was born out of phase...

...On the other hand, there is nothing particularly Southern about his experiences outside Alabama...

...We are also told, though, that "The scene was real in God's truth . . . The men were never characters . . . in . . . fiction . . . nor actors . . . nor items in a table of statistics issued by the Department of the Interior...

...her husbands, while described in detail, are never made real, and are allowed to die pointlessly offstage...

...Tewksbury is forced to sell the farm she inherited, and it could be said that in losing this Southern land, Jed is cut off from his patrimony...

...This is true in an almost literal way throughout most of the adult adventure of the hero and narrator, Jed Tewksbury—by birth a poor-white Alabaman, by profession a distinguished Dante scholar at the University of Chicago...

...It is Jed's status as a Southerner away from home, however, that accounts for some of the novel's most troublesome technical problems and, possibly, for the odd insubstantiality of the characters...

...And his characters—Billy Potts, Jerry Beaumont, Perse Munn, Jack Burden, and perhaps most memorably Willie Stark—share a quality Warren found in Thomas Wolfe's portraits of the Gant family: They are "permanent properties of the reader's imagination...

...It's only I like to make a bed for him...

...The region has become an abstraction for Jed and hence for the reader: Individuals become types, myths become clich6s...

...All the more disappointing, then, that in his latest novel, A Place to Come To (Random House, 401 pp., $10.00), we are given a series of absences, a gallery of missing persons...

...This may be why his mother, who goes to work in a local cannery to support them after they have moved to a mean house in the town, quickly begins to urge him to leave " 'this here durn hell hole.' . . . Day by day she expunged all possibility of any memory of Dugton . . . bleaching away the reality of the life there...

...He could have followed a different, more gradual course, showing in Jed's mind the slow unfolding of real memories behind the screen he has constructed...

...It's a way of sayen there's a place for him in my heart...

...if he is to be brought back at the very end, reconciled and forgiving, his change of heart must be convincingly accounted for...

...We remain, with the hero, at a second remove from his home...

...Poor Buck,' I thought...

...Jed's first wife, an innocent young graduate student, dies shortly after their marriage and serves mainly as a kind of Annabel Lee, lying in "patient devotion" under the South Dakota earth...

...So in a sense he has been deracinated since childhood, long before he left Dugton for a backwater college and thence for Chicago and the great world...

...He must contrive to provide the memories that Jed, in his hatred and shame, has blocked or blotted out...

...Through the long years of Jed's absence, she forbids him to return, although they correspond—she with tart letters, he with news of his marriages, his child and his honorary degrees...

...The scene?under the chinaberry tree in the middle of the patch of packed red-clay earth stippled with alkali-white chicken droppings," the men stopping their talk of the dead man's drinking and womanizing when they see "the pore little chap" is listening—would come vividly to Jed's mind at unexpected times and places ever after...

...Close to 60 when he tells the story of his life, he is divorced from his second wife, whom we scarcely meet...

...Moreover, if Jed is to be kept wandering for 40 years, his horror at his past must be satisfactorily established...

...The opening sentence states Warren's theme—Jed's patrimony, real and symbolic —with a poet's economy and force, and conveys immediately Jed's combination of classical locution and the vernacular: "I was the only boy, or girl either, in the public school of the town of Dugton, Claxford County, Alabama, whose father had ever got killed in the middle of the night standing up in the front of his wagon to piss on the hindquarters of one of a span of mules and, being drunk, pitohing forward on his head, still hanging on to his dong, and hitting the pike in such a position and condition that both the left front and left rear wheels of the wagon rolled, with perfect precision, over his unconscious neck, his having passed out being, no doubt, the reason he took the fatal plunge in the first place...

...Jed has certainly come back to the mythologized South, lost cause and all...

...Yet their struggles with lives "full of affliction, weakness, rage and vice but somehow capable of love and courage sustained by hope and irony" is merely asserted by Jed, not realized then or later...

...ll till, the novel begins with a brilliant promise of experience closely rendered...

...they could be those of any "alienated" American...

...Jed's own shame and resentment are not fully released until boys in the schoolyard reenact the ignominious scene of his father's demise...

...This process is not unrelated to the South's homogenization with the rest of the country, but Warren has not summoned up from his great resources the patience to make this connection effectively...