Crinolines & Corruption

HOUSE DIVIDED (1514 pp.)--Ben Ames Williams--Houghton Mifflin ($5). Ben Ames Williams made his reputation as a writer of brawny short stories, many of which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Like good hybrid corn, his yield has increased until it has overflowed into novels--novels that get bigger as Williams gets deeper into the American past. In Thread of Scarlet, he covered Nantucket Island during the War of 1812, in a mere 374 pages. Come Spring, a Revolutionary War novel, ran to 866 pages. His latest, House Divided, sprawls over fifteen hundred pages and four years of Confederate history.

Hardworking Author Williams is said to have spent over four years writing House Divided, consulted 500 reference books and used up a quart of ink. Readers will find the result a brackish mixture of Northern blood and Southern guts, held in solution by a lively plot. House Divided lacks the nostalgia of MacKinlay Kantor's Long Remember, the flinty humor of Hervey Allen's Action at Aquila, the sexy folderol of Gone With the Wind. In sticking closer to the pedestrian facts of history, it is more convincing--if less exciting--than its predecessors.

Like most Civil War novels, it rustles with crinolines and chivalry, tells its story through the decline of an aristocratic family. But Author Williams' Currains are haunted by a unique skeleton in the plantation closet: it seems that Papa Currain, long since dead, "like a young torn turkey on the prowl, lightly dandling a hedge wench named Lucy Hanks in some hidden thicket ... had fathered Abraham Lincoln's mother."*

The novel's revelation of this embarrassing patrimony, bequeathed along with the family silver and several hundred slaves, is the cream of Author Williams' jest. By the time he has skimmed it, Grant has taken Richmond, hunger has become the chief enemy and the Currains have scattered all over the map.

As fiction, House Divided is often contrived and melodramatic. As history, it is the war dimly seen through a haze of corruption, mismanagement, profiteering, draft-dodging, mint juleps and delusions of grandeur. Tedious as that is, readers can hardly fail to be impressed by the author's epic attempt to disinter the whole Confederacy. Says one character: "The Lord is on our side, but in consequence of pressing engagements elsewhere He could not attend at Fisher's Creek, Winchester, and Atlanta." If the Lord could not attend, history-grubbing Author Williams could, after a fashion.

*According to most biographers, Nancy Hanks was the illegitimate child of an unknown father.

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