Charleston

PETER ASHLEY--DuBose Heyward--Farrar &Rinehart ($2.50). The Civil War, a rich mine of historical romance with plenty of still untapped veins, is beginning to be reworked again. Taking as his subject the four tense months in Charleston that culminated in the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Author Heyward has brought to light a whole shining age. Peter Ashley--a carefully unimpassioned but compelling tale that even Abolitionist-grandsired readers will be loath to leave--makes vivid and convincing a crucial scene in U. S. history.

Peter Ashley, scion of one of Charleston's first families, had no wish to be a planter. His skeptically intelligent uncle adopted him, developed his doubts, protected his sensitiveness, sent him to Oxford to finish his education. He was to come back to a literary career. But the first sight Peter saw as his ship entered Charleston Harbor was the shelling of a U. S. Navy ship by Charleston batteries. Peter, like his uncle, was Southern to the core, but he thought he was a Unionist too. While he watched the young hotheads race each other into uniform he took a newspaper job. Beautiful Damaris Gordon complicated his situation by appearing to prefer his rival, Captain Holcombe. When his editor cut his Race Week story to tatters, with Damaris avoiding him and Holcombe forcing him into a duel. Peter felt his story was over. But the end was not yet: he quit his job, survived the duel, married Damaris. Action cured him of doubt: by the time Beauregard's guns had opened on Fort Sumter Peter was in uniform too. After two sweet months with Damaris he rode off with his comrades to their gay cavalier war. One authentic incident of Sumters bloodless siege which Author Heyward has dug up may be news even to some Charlestonians. One Louis Tresvant Wigfall. ex-Senator from Texas, had offered his em barrassingly fire-eating services to General Beauregard, had been assigned to a battery on James Island. At the height of the bombardment Col. Wigfall commandeered a skiff and two Negroes, ordered them to row him to Fort Sumter. "He was wearing his red sash, his huge Texas spurs, and at regular intervals he would wave his bared sword with its pocket handkerchief flag, and send his enormous voice roaring toward the fort with a demand that it surrender." By some senatorial miracle Wigfall escaped annihilation, interviewed Sumter's commander, Anderson, made terms which Anderson took as official. Beauregard, embarrassed, annoyed, "very cheerfully" abided by them.

The Author, The War he writes about left Author Heyward's Charleston family little but proud ancestral memories. Young DuBose, man of the house at 9, sold newspapers to help out, left public school at 14 to work in earnest. His unrobust health broke twice. At 30 (he is now 47) he left his successful insurance business to go and live in the North Carolina mountains. There he painted, wrote poems, published nothing. When he met Pittsburgher Poet Hervey Allen after the Armistice, they hit it off so well that they decided to go into literary partnership. Carolina Chansons (poems about Charleston) was the result, also the Poetry Society of South Carolina. In New Hampshire's literary MacDowell Colony. Heyward met his wife, playwriting Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns. who helped him dramatize Porgy, his first novel, into a Theatre Guild success. Other books: Angel, Mambo's Daughters, Half Pint Flask, Brass Ankle (a play, Broadway-produced 1931).

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