In & Out the Window

THE MARRIED LAND (41 2 pp.)--Charles G. Bell--Houghfon Mifflin ($5.95).

The severest test of the novel reader is not the interior-decorating lady author whose every point is petit; nor is it the literary bedroom peeper of the huff-puff-periphrasis school ("Metaphor pounded at his temples and his heart swelled with simile"). The most egregious trier of patience is, surely, the Author Who Has Read Proust. He will send his hero into the kitchen to mix a drink, say, but sure as Remembrance of Things Past comes in seven volumes, the ice tray wall remind the hero of another, earlier ice tray, half-shrouded in the mists of memory, and it will be 40 pages before the reader gets his vicarious taste of Scotch.

Novelist Bell writes this way, and it must have seemed to him that the technique was ideally suited to his scheme, which was to portray a marriage as the turbulent confluence of two mighty streams of lineage. Daniel (Southerner, painter, battler with Furies) and Lucy (descendant of Philadelphians, Quaker, placid repository of honor) have been married for several years when family duty demands a temporary separation. He flies to Mississippi to straighten out the affairs of a dotty aunt; she travels to the bedside of a stern Quaker uncle. The distance between husband and wife and their return to their beginnings quicken the webbed roots of memory. Recollection exfoliates until at last, over the distance, the leaves touch.

At least, that is what the leaves are supposed to do. But very soon the reader is lost in the flickering, apparently patternless shift of focus from decade to decade, family to family, nephew to third cousin to great-great-grandaunt.

Family legends are well told; Daniel's aunt, almost blind, terrorizes the home-folks by veering around town in her Studebaker, and lectures severely all cops who stop her; one of Lucy's Quaker forebears was renowned for advising a burglar, "Friend, I am going to shoot right where thee is standing." The author's charged, highly colored prose is almost always impressive, but occasionally it slops over into italics and suggests Robert Penn Warren at less than his best.

The book has its strengths; Bell has a powerful sense of dynasty and a mystic's attraction to the land. The irony of his failure is that the more he tries to express the interconnectedness of all the land and all the dynasties, the more the reader rebels. It may be true, as Thomas Wolfe believed, that "every moment is a window on all time," but Bell crawls in and out these windows with the objectless glee of a boy exploring a vacant mansion.

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