Dark & Bloody Ground

BROTHER TO DRAGONS (232 pp.)--Robert Penn Warren--Random House ($3.50).

Just before the earthquake hit on the night of Dec. 15, 1811, there were some truly terrible doings out at the Lewis place in old Kentucky. Doc Lewis' son Lilburn had murdered his manservant George with an ax. Then, before the terrified eyes of his younger brother Isham and the other slaves, the body was thrown on the fire, the flesh burned off, the bones gathered and buried. What was young George's crime to fetch such dire punishment? He had broken a pitcher that had been prized by the boys' dead mother.

The murder did not stay hidden long, and one day the sheriff came around to the Lewis place. Found out, the boys agreed to kill each other with pistols as they stood over their mother's grave. Isham did his part, and Lilburn went down dying. But Lilburn failed to kill his brother. Isham, unscratched, was tried, convicted and sentenced to hang. Instead, he broke out of jail, and later the rumor went that he was killed in New Orleans, fighting against the British under Andy Jackson.

What gave this true, grim story its special interest was the fact that the Lewis boys were nephews of Tom Jefferson; their mother was Lucy Jefferson of Virginia, the President's sister. For Poet-Novelist Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men), this was enough to induce a stream of narrative free verse that runs to book length, with a cast that includes the shade of the murdered George, the murderers, their parents, and Tom Jefferson himself. Author Warren takes the part of commentator and uninvited amateur psychiatrist. Stripped of its turgid pretenses, Brother to Dragons asks two questions: 1) why did Lilburn do it? 2) how could Thomas Jefferson reconcile his own noble ideals with so dark a deed done by men of his own blood?

In trying to answer these questions, Author Warren clutters up the story and gives it a bogus air by putting long-winded rationalizations into Jefferson's mouth. Southern violence has always had a heady appeal for Warren, and villainous hotheads seem to have some lien on his sympathies. Even in All the King's Men, the Huey Long-like Willie Stark was perhaps handled with too much solicitude. Now, in Brother to Dragons, Lilburn's crime is so hedged in by sympathy that it sometimes seems as if poor George should have been proud to be dismembered by so tragically troubled a man as Lilburn. Says Author Warren of his murderer-hero:

No, Lilburn had no truck with the Evil

One, But knew that all he did was done for good, For his mother and the sweetness of the

heart, And that's the instructive fact of

history, That evil's done for good, and in good's

name--Robert Penn Warren, a poet of proven gifts (Thirty-Six Poems, Selected Poems, 1923-1943), took more than seven years, off & on, to write this book. But for all the labor and the love he spent, it is a narrative poem which almost never achieves the emotional disturbance and enlightenment of true poetry, is too often content with such smothering lines as

The victims of the obsolescent labor system

Had been conditioned, by appeals to the ego,

To identify themselves with the representative

Of the superordinate group, i.e., the mistress--In other words, they liked her "tol-bul well."

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