Doctor's Son

TO MY FATHER--Charles Wertenbaker --Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

After the Civil War the migration of ambitious Northerners to the South was sufficiently widespread and significant to win the careful attention of historians and sociologists. The reciprocal movement of Southerners to the North has been a subject for novelists, since it took place slowly and unobtrusively and since it involved the transplanting of people who were still tied emotionally to the regions they had lost. Last week the uprooting of one Southern family formed the subject of a brooding, sympathetic novel by a young Virginian whose seriousness of purpose had not been revealed in his earlier books. Born in Lexington, Va. 35 years ago, Charles Wertenbaker began his career as a novelist with a lively story of adolescent cain-raising called Boojum!, followed it with another cut in the same pattern, Peter the Drunk, and with an amusing volume of short stories about his school days at Episcopal High. A more ambitious and responsible piece of work than any of these, To My Father tells the story of the Chastain family in its costly struggle to locate itself, is written with an intensity that sustains its interest through its 499 pages.

It begins with Charles Chastain's memories of his first trip North. Traveling with his patient, tactful, observant mother, Charles was old enough to wonder if the Yankees were still having a war up in their country, to sense his parents' social isolation in New Castle, Del., where they settled. Capable, indecisive, troubled, Dr. Chastain at 32 had left Charlottesville because he could not wait for a post at the University to be offered to him. He told his son that the Yankees had been licking Southerners at business for a hundred years, but that the South still turned out good doctors, good officers, good lawyers, in such abundance that they could not make a living at home. Dividing his boyhood between Delaware and Virginia, Charles found himself at ease with his easygoing, impractical kinfolk in the South, wary but impressed in the circles of his Northern companions. He fell in love with a series of amiable Virginia belles, formed a deeper friendship with a tall, unaffected girl named Terry Mullikan, loafed at the University of Virginia until he was suspended, shipped on a freighter, worked on newspapers, married the beautiful, domineering only daughter of a well-to-do family. With her he went to Paris, lived a life of futile anxiety until, under the pressure of conflicts and suspicions that are not clearly described, he grew increasingly morbid, tormented his wife with his nervousness. Meanwhile his mother had died, his talented brother had gone through a cycle of bitter conflicts and his father, old Dr. Chastain, had prospered in Wilmington without making an adjustment with his environment. Charles returned to the U. S., recovered his sanity when he met Terry Mullikan again, fell in love with her. Back in Virginia with her, he studied medicine, prepared to take the University post his father had missed years before.

The best portrait in To My Father is that of Dr. Chastain, whose plaint was always that he could "never understand these people," and whose lack of acceptance of Northern ways made him vulnerable to his enemies. Wrhen he encountered a frightful scandal in the hospital--the chief of staff was supplying maidens to an aged voluptuary--he insisted on exposing it, took the story to the man for whom the virgins were provided. Soon his lack of understanding of the people around him made him see enemies everywhere. He drove away patients by telling them his troubles. But when he died Charles could see his career clearly, realized that from then on "he must live his father's life and complete it."

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