Three American Novels
powerful novel, Arouse and Beware (Coward-McCann, $2.50), recounts the desperate journey of three fugitives strangely leagued: two Union soldiers escaped from the Confederate prison of Belle Isle, and a woman who has murdered her lover under some monstrous provocation that is only hinted. Though the terror of capture never slackens till the end, the book is far more than a study in suspense. The great background of warfare never fades out. The far-off roar is never muted for long; the desolation wrought appears at every turn. The personal drama of the three fugitives, the emotional conflicts that result as love and jealousy intrude upon their oddly brotherly relation, are given pathos by the sense of their being after all three atoms among myriads of atoms as agonized and as evanescent.
Arouse and Beware is an able piece of story-telling. Mr. Kantor’s style is vigorous; it also can be subtly cadenced. Rapid, violent, and often brutal as the narrative is, it has its passages of beauty; the young Northern soldier who is made the author’s mouthpiece is a boy of sensibility ami reflectiveness.
This reviewer makes a deep reverence to Mr. Kantor for his subjugation of the adjective. The scenes pictured in this novel, and the episodes recounted, leap at the reader’s nerves. I recall no narrative of recent years in which the adjective is held so firmly in leash, with such a result of power. Oddly, the hold relaxes in a passage that I take to be the heart of the novel, a passage that I must quote. Here the author-for the only time, or my vigilance has failed me — stands up out of the page and speaks in his own person. ‘It is this fearful resiliency of the human soul, he says, ‘this rebounding ability to climb out of the grave and play marbles among the headstones, that gives to war its ghastly permanence, and the certainty that we shall see more people willing for war in the years to come.’
Like Arouse and Beware, Sterling North’s Night Outlasts the Whippoorwill (Macmillan, $2.50) has for its theme the eternal recurrence of war; but here all likeness ends. The time of Mr. North’s novel is the period of the World War; its setting is a small town in Wisconsin. The chief characters are a young woman whose husband has gone overseas; a sensitive boy extraordinarily unhappy in his home; a newspaper man who is the best mind in the community and the loneliest spirit; a gentle German butcher who buys all his meat ready-slaughtered ; and the butcher’s empty-headed adolescent daughter. Of these figures the dominating ones are the competent and plucky young woman who shifts for herself and her baby, and the journalist, a man who thinks with detachment and feels quite otherwise.
I suppose there is no more important requirement for a man who is to write a novel concerning war than that he should be without sentimentalism; and that there is no more valid insurance against sentimentalism than the training of a journalist, Mr. North, himself a journalist, consistently avoids the sentimental pitfall. To this negative asset he adds the positive one of rapid and energetic narrative. Such incidents as the burning by the mob of the German pastor’s treasured musical library, and the pitiful end of the good little butcher, are admirably effective.
On a question of taste there is no profitable disputing. However, mindful that since the memory of man the prudish have said in effect, ‘ Heaven knows I am no prude, but really . . , ’ I yet record with firmness my well-cogitated opinion that one bawdy episode serves no purpose, casts no light where light has not already been plentifully cast. The physiological starvation of mates separated by war is an integral part of the author’s theme. His taste in comic relief I cannot admire.
The irony in Samuel Rogers’s new novel, Lucifer in Pine Lake (Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50), begins with the title. The Lucifer of this narrative is a very petty demon indeed. In two qualities his endowment is large: personal beauty, and insensibility. His looks cast a spell; his heart is incapable of a deep feeling. In every other respect, his mediocrity is perfect. At the opening of the novel he is perfunctorily teaching English at a small college in his native MidWestern town, his boredom slightly alleviated by his pleasure in his own accent and manner, acquired at an Eastern school and at Harvard.
Obviously, a young man superficially enchanting but essentially callous must leave a devastated area as he crashes on his way. To everyone whom his life touches, Hugh Trowbridge brings unhappiness: to the girl with whom he has had his latest affair; to the girl whom he marries; to his ineffectual father, an elderly professor at Pine Lake, aware of essential failure; even to his adoring mother, a fatuous woman sustained in her disappointing life by her belief in her possession of Southern charm.
Until now, I have thought Mr. Rogers’s best gift his extraordinary power of conveying the spell of the sea. I confess to an initial disappointment on finding that his new novel has an inland setting. This disappointment shortly yielded to pleasure in the psychological subtleties of Lucifer: whether in such comedy as the state visit of Hugh’s mother to the scared mother of her future daughter-in-law, or in such tragedy as the slow, ignominious death of Hugh’s father. To my thinking, the most significant and the most strongly imagined scene in the book is the one in which Hugh, fighting his repulsion and his impatience to be gone for an evening of pleasure, sits inattentive by his father’s bed, while Professor Trowbridge desperately labors to save him from such failure in life, such a sense of ultimate nothingness, as his own.
The fine clarity of Mr. Rogers’s style, his sense of comedy, and his power of driving home the grimmest of truths with his quick light blade, have never shown better, to my thinking, than in this novel.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS