Forever Monty

BAND OF ANGELS (375 pp.)--Robert Penn Warren--Random House ($3.95).

Amantha ("Manty") Starr is one of those field marshals of amour to whom every man is a potential casualty. The literary company she keeps is Amber and Scarlett O'Hara, and it is somewhat surprising company for Pulitzer-Prizewinning Novelist (All the King's Men) and Poet Robert Penn Warren. In this magnolia-scented potboiler of the Civil War era, he has little to offer his readers but blood, sex, sweat and crocodile tears.

Amantha grows up in pre-Civil War peace and plenty at Starrwood, a Kentucky plantation where the happy field hands gather round to serenade her burly father with such ditties as:

Ride Ole Massa

Ride him high,

If he give me the whisky, I be drunk

till I die!

Amantha goes off to a strait-laced school in Ohio and raises the temperature of one Bible-thumping fellow student to such a degree that he throws himself in a snowbank to cool off. When her father dies, Amantha gets a shock that lasts a lifetime. The sheriff hands Starrwood over to creditors for bad debts and tells her that she is the daughter of one of her father's Negro concubines. She is soon auctioned off in the New Orleans slave market. As a brash young dandy moves forward to finger the merchandise, he tangles with Hamish Bond, a jut-jawed local power, who breaks the dandy's wrist with one swipe of his silver-knobbed cane, and buys Manty.

Hamish is broody, aging, and he limps, but one stormy, skirt-ripping night, he takes uncontested ownership of his new property. Into their May-December idyl steps a French cad with a gold-headed cane, Charles de Marigny Prieur-Denis. Then the Civil War comes ("Yes sir, Hamish, a battle going on at Harper's Ferry"), and with the war Manty's freedom and an honest-to-goodness husband, Tobias Sears, a Massachusetts Yankee. On their wedding night he approaches her "like the statue of a Greek athlete . . . every muscle swelling strong and true in the white marble." Manty is not quite strong and true enough to tell him of her Negro blood and that is fodder for another 150 pages of on-again, off-again moral tussle. At odd moments. Author Warren has his heroine burn with a lofty love for freedom, which Manty, a girl with ants in her semantics, easily confuses with the freedom to love.

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