Of Slime & the River

THE RIVER ROAD--Frances Parkinson Keyes--Messner ($3).

WRITTEN ON THE WIND -- Robert Wilder--Putnam ($2.75).

Somewhere between the rise of the New Deal and World War II, the U.S. as a community fell apart. No chart registered the collapse more quickly and more clinically than U.S. literature. World War I had been preceded and followed by unprecedented bursts of U.S. writing. The American Renaissance, as it was bravely called, was studded with innovators like Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Amy Lowell, Sherwood Anderson, Vachel Lindsay, Sinclair Lewis, and with solidly good writers like Willa Gather and Ellen Glasgow. Their books were often fiercely critical of U.S. mores and motives. But they spoke to a whole nation, and in their writing itself there was a sense of national achievement. By the '305 the bang and sparkle of this literary Fourth of July was as spent as a dead rocket. To an inquiring Briton, an American would have to reply: the outstanding U.S. novelists are John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls), and John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra). Protest had turned into corrosive petulance or special pleading for the Left. Frustration had replaced anger. No U.S. writer saw U.S. life whole; and even the scrap he saw, he usually saw over the rim of a cocktail glass. The belief grew that U.S. novelists could not write novels.

Both these novels prove that this is not true. Neither of them is a great work, but both are remarkable jobs of novel-writing craftsmanship. If Robert Wilder could report U.S. life as brilliantly as he probes the iridescent slime on top of it, Written on the Wind might have been more than neurally exciting. If Frances Parkinson Keyes (rhymes with eyes) could write a novel as well as she can organize one, The River Road might have been a relevant resuscitation instead of a 747-page monument to the past. If both novelists had been stirred by the vitality of U.S. life, instead of by dead ends, these novels might have been milestones instead of epitaphs.

Plantation Family. Frances Parkinson Keyes is the widow of New Hampshire's former Governor Henry Wilder Keyes, and author of some 23 books, including 1943's best-selling Crescent Carnival. In Louisiana in 1939, she was impressed by the old River Road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Most of its once gracious plantation houses were boarded up or falling apart; most of their predominantly Creole, sugar-planting owners had moved on. But among the thronging revenants in this graveyard of a once graceful provincial culture, there were a few surviving residents. Novelist Keyes decided to report their struggle to survive.

Her fictional plantation is Belle Heloise and its owners the d'Alverys. There is Madame Mere, who uses her imaginary invalidism to rule the plantation from her bedside. There is Gervais d'Alvery, the heir presumptive. He marries a Baton Rouge stenographer who proves to be a strong prop of plantation life. There is Gervais' sister Cresside, a wild sprig who turns into a solid prop of the proprieties. There are, in fact, so many d'Alverys and other characters that some readers may wish that Novelist Keyes had supplied a dynastic chart and dramatis personae as meticulous as her map of Belle Heloise.

The novel is simply a chronicle of the lives of three generations of d'Alverys from World War I to World War II--their loves, hates, ambitions, marital alliances and misalliances, financial crises, the problems of a sugar economy (among them: blight and the OPA), and politics (Huey Long appears in pajama-clad person).

Most of the d'Alverys and their neighbors accept the gentle conventions with which societies strong in tradition try to offset the ravages of change and chance. Their culture is Creole and Catholic. It is also wise in the sense that it is humane and orderly. It enables them (and the readers of The River Road) to accept with equanimity the fact that their quiet lives are as full of scandalous skeletons as the snake-infested plantation burial grounds.

Murder, rape and sudden death scarcely stir the branches of this moss-hung family tree. Only uncultured Huey Long's drooling henchman is really outraged by the discovery that the heir to Belle Heloise is not his father's son, but his father's sister's bastard. Even stern Madame Mere accommodates herself wisely to the marriage of her daughter to the son of The River Road's "Dago peddler" (who becomes a millionaire purveyor of fancy groceries), and her granddaughter's marriage to the pilot of a river tug. For under the conventions is a shrewd stockbreeder's intuition that blood lines are strengthened by a little exogamy. If The River Road sometimes seems as long and leisurely as the Mississippi, it also has some of the river's cumulative impressiveness. Sales to date: 270,000 copies.

Tobacco Scions. There is nothing genteel about the skeletons in Written on the Wind, and they never stay in the closet. They include second and third generations of a multimillionaire tobacco family, the Whitfields. Their native habitat (at Winton, N.C.) is a vast Gothic architectural horror built by the founder of the family fortune. Their pathological capers later take them to Manhattan, Florida and Europe. Some readers may think that they can trace an allusion, in the heir in this novel, to Zachary Smith Reynolds (of the Tobacco Reynoldses), whose wife, Libby Holman, was exonerated after his death by shooting in 1932.

Exhibits A & B in this clinical study of the disintegrative effect of great wealth on weak characters are the family heir, Gary Whitfield (whom his sister commonly addresses as "Stinker"), and his sister, Anne-Charlotte (whom her brother sometimes characterizes as "a nasty little bitch"). There is also Reese, a sharecropper's son who is brought up with Gary and Anne-Charlotte to act as an elevating influence. He succeeds chiefly in being sardonic and truculent. Written on the Wind reports the lifelong intellectual homosexuality between Reese and Gary. It also reports one or two murders, a suicide or two, a raid on a dingy brothel (in which Anne-Charlotte is caught), and an unflagging succession of orgiastic parties at which the tobacco scions and their bibulous set try to drown their boredom. Out of these Freudian fandangos, Author Wilder has written a highly readable novel whose episodes are frequently breathless, whose dialogue is crisp, crackling and gamy. The total effect is like watching laboratory rats whirl around more & more madly in a botr tie exhausted of everything but oxygen. The prose paces the pathology.

*Keeping his nose to the grindstone

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