Gesture of Despair

ACT OF DARKNESS--John Peale Bishop --Scribner ($2.50).

John Peale Bishop is the proudest literary boast of Charles Town, W. Va. where John Brown was tried and hanged. Of the same Princeton generation as Novelist Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Critic Edmund Wilson, he has for years been regarded by his contemporaries as a dark horse who had not yet shown his real paces. He placed in the money four years ago when his story, Many Thousands Gone, won a $5,000 prize. His collection of poems. Now With His Love, got him a good rating on form. Last week bystanders saw him perform for the first time on the full-length course of a novel. Slow over the first hurdles, he picked up in the straightaway, came home in style.

Act of Darkness is an emotional tale. For the first 50 pages it reads like a minority report on literary atmosphere ; then the action quickens, the figures take on clearer outline. Author Bishop's mist- clearing method is deliberate: the gradually opening eye which observes and slowly understands the story is that of a young boy. Observer-narrator is John, youngest member of a Virginia family whose blood is proud but queer. His grandfather is an eccentric lawyer. His dead father was a doctor who painted strange pictures. His Uncle Charlie has been a wildly attractive scapegrace from his youth up. As John grows into adolescence he becomes an increasingly sympathetic witness of Charlie's outrageous but somehow innocent goings-on. Charlie is married, and his wife has brought him a lovely old house and a good farm. Charlie does his duty by all of them but occasionally he will break out. When his wife is in the hospital he seduces a willing mountain girl, who afterwards dies. He takes his innocent nephew to a brothel. But when he rapes Virginia, 37-year-old spinster friend of his wife's, Charlie goes too far. Virginia has him arrested. At his trial Charlie breaks out on the witness stand, tells too much of the truth. He is sent to the penitentiary for a long term. As the story ends his pardon is imminent, but the nephew-narrator will not be there to greet him; he is leaving home for good, going North to college. But John has begun to understand that his uncle's criminal outbreak was a gesture less of lust than of despair -- "repeated and forever repeated, the rape of the mind by the body."

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