Balisand*

Mr. Hergesheimer Uncorks the Spirit of 1780

The Story. Lavinia Roderick, light of step and heart, the fairest flower of Henrico County, was coming down to dinner in Todd Hundred, Va. For three days a party had been in progress to celebrate her engagement to Gawin Todd. But of all the company which, assembled in the hall, waited for her to descend, it was for Richard Bale that she wore a yellow rose in her bodice--for him that she sang, as she came, the dying fall of a sweet air. He, a Bale of Balisand, had been, like other Virginia gentlemen, a soldier. Fire and ice had altered the temper of his youth. Back again where riddles were playing, an elegant and austere figure, somewhat of a stranger to gaiety, he had fallen in love with Lavinia and she with him. The night before, he had challenged Gawin Todd to a duel for her hand; now he stood and watched her com ing down the stairs. He saw her silhouette above the banister, heard the thread of her frail singing and her cry, as she caught her heel in the carpet, slipped and fell down, down the great stairway--the thud as her head struck the oak floor. In the years that followed, he iso lated himself from men and affairs, rode about his plantation, distracted his loneliness with the pursuits that became a gentleman--drinking, dicing, riding. Sometimes he talked politics. Citizen Genet was rebuked; the country expanded westward; John Adams was elected President; Jefferson, with his large affectation of the homespun, became a power in the land. By degrees Bale became concious that he, always a staunch Federalist, was owning loyalty to a party discredited. He affixed to his hat the black cockade of his ances tors, and broke his riding-whip over the head of any man who looked askance at it. There were times when, whatever he might fee doing, the memory of Lavinia, vagrant and unsummoned, would bring about him the sense of invisible flowers chilled under webs of cold dew, and a voice would weep and implore in his heart, like the weeping, the imploring, of the fiddles of Todd Hundred. Mastering the longing of his thoughts to lose themselves in the past, he married Lucia Mathews, a lovely and courageous woman, who bore his children and loved him well. His hatred of Gawin Todd never slept. At last the two met, high words passed, a challenge was given. They fought at dawn by the river. As Richard Bale lifted his pistol, the rising sun fell in his" eyes and, his own shot missing, he received a mortal wound. The cartel per mitted a second exchange if either 'demanded. Bale, strapped with his scarf to a sapling, shot his enemy dead and died himself in the the arms of his second while his slaves were rowing him, chanting as they rowed, over the dawn-lit river to the lawns of Balisand.

The Significance. In this novel, Mr. Hergesheimer does not borrow from a century but presents it. He has achieved a book that has the tex ture of velvet and the rigor of bright iron. His method of dating the narrative with politics and giving history's skeleton,' flesh and wit in the lives of his characters is, though a difficult artifice, perfectly persuasive. To say that we have advanced in our system of government since Revolutionary times is to say that Jefferson was right and Richard Bale was wrong. It is an opinion generally accepted. Mr. Hergeheimer, indeed, holds no brief for the proud Virginia Federalists. Their courtly manner of life was maintained at great social expense. This book reminds the reader that government by gentle men for their peers as against government by "the unbred for the. un desirable was a question once hotly debated in the U. S.

The Author. Joseph Hergesheimer went first to a Friends' school in Phil adelphia, later studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Of Quaker descent, his preoccupation has always been with beautiful surfaces, in landscapes, women, old furniture, centuries. A symposium of critics last year voted him America's most important novelist. His works include Mountain Blood, Three Black Pennys, Java Head, The Happy End, Cytherea, The Bright Shawl.

*BALISANB -- Joseph Hergesheimer -- Knopf ($2.50).