Author in a Box

WILDERNESS (310 pp.)--Robert Penn Warren--Random House ($4.95).

It is long past time that modern business practice was applied to the important matter of the author's image ("image" in Madison Avenue's lexicon means what the public thinks about a person or corporation when it is not thinking very hard). Up to now, authors' images have been left, hit or miss, to book jacket eulogists and to the authors themselves.

When the image makers get around to studying the matter, they should consider the case of Robert Penn Warren. William Faulkner's image may have more dazzle, but for steady, omnidirectional glow, Warren's image holds a high place among living American authors. This is not entirely accounted for by Warren's talent; there are better poets, novelists and critics now practicing, and there may well be better professors at Yale. Diversity is the secret. For some reason, while a man who is superb in one field does not necessarily have a really ineluctable image, it is impossible to ignore someone who is almost superb in several fields at once, e.g., a reasonably good pianist who can conduct orchestras and write musical comedies. Author Warren, who has won, and earned, Pulitzer Prizes for fiction (All the King's Men, 1946) and poetry (Promises, 1957), is the Leonard Bernstein of contemporary literature.

$2,000 for Amantha. This is not all to the good. With respect to Warren's novels, it seems mostly to the bad. Almost unanimously, the highbrow-quarterly critics praise the author's fiction, searching harder for significance than they would in costume romances by authors who are not members of their own establishment. And the book club groundlings have discovered that Warren is a dual-purpose author; his sex scenes are as humid as one could wish, and his name adds prestige to a coffee table. Addled by the image, reviewers have praised excesses in Warren's work that they would have damned in Frank Yerby's.

In fact, the image has long obscured both Warren's faults and his real potentialities. But the fact is, as his new novel Wilderness vividly demonstrates, Warren has all too often used his remarkable skill as a novelist with carelessness and cynicism. His best-known book, All the King's Men, is a good novel with great flaws. Its strengths are in mood, speech and flow of action; its weaknesses are Warren's failure to see the viciousness in Willie Stark, his idealized Huey Long character, and his distrust of his own ability to get through the book without melodrama. The novel's too-obtrusive narrator becomes aware of the unfathomable intertwinings of guilt, for instance, only when he learns that the man he has destroyed at Willie's request is his own father.

This sort of supererogatory melodrama reached a peak of turgidity in Warren's worst novel, Band of Angels (Orville Prescott in the New York Times, 1955: "thoughtful reflections upon moral issues and psychological factors"). Amantha, the beautiful ante-bellum heroine, is setting divinity students aquiver at Oberlin College when she hears that her plantation owner father has died. Back in Kentucky, to her horror and the reader's titillation, she learns not only that she is the daughter of a slave woman, but that the plantation and she herself with it are being sold for taxes. Soon Amantha (Yvonne De Carlo in the movie) is trembling on the block at a slave auction. A lounging lecher decides to examine the goods, when whack!--a silver-headed cane smashes his wrist. The hero (Clark Gable) pays $2,000, and takes Amantha off to his manor house.

Lingering Seduction. Perhaps the most exasperating of Warren's novels was The Cave (Arthur Mizener in the New York Times, 1959: "Warren at his best . . . beautifully intricate"). The author continued to spoon out enough sex to keep matronly readers titillated. More offensive was the novel's fakery in character development. Warren staged a situation of violence (a youth trapped in a cave), exposed a dozen people to it, and then, without explanation, asked the reader to believe that each of them experienced a profound change of personality. This sort of dodge is a black box, in engineering jargon--a device whose purpose is given but whose wiring is conveniently left secret.

A Single Pebble. Wilderness, Warren's latest, is another black box. To conceal the fact that it has only 65,000 words, Random House spaced it out to 310 pages by means of air between the lines, tiny type blocks, and large page numbers. The space fraud does not matter, but the unfulfilled expectation of substance does. There is only one major character, and he is not very interesting, even to himself. His name is Adam Rosenzweig, a young Bavarian Jew whose crippled left foot requires him to wear a special boot (his Jewishness makes him an outcast and his lameness, melodramatically, makes him doubly so--Warren still does not trust his own skill). Exalted with a vision of freedom, Adam decides to migrate to the U.S. to fight with the union in the Civil War.

The story is full of events, but little happens. Adam's foot keeps him out of the fighting, so he works for a sutler selling provisions to Union troops, and eventually fetches up on the fringes of the Battle of the Wilderness (1863). There is a violent episode, the sort Warren has written twenty times, in which two men are shown to have the mark of Cain: a Negro clerk has the brand of a deserter on his buttocks, and Adam's employer wears a highly symbolic money belt. And at the end there is an intertwinedness-of-guilt scene; ragged Confederates have stolen Adam's boots, and he, soliloquizing on the oneness of man, takes a pair from a dead man. That is all there is.

Steely Art. What makes a succession of bad novels worth complaining about is that Warren, at his best, is one of the best there is. He deserves his high reputation, if not his image (which is another thing, and may not be the fault of the author but of indolent readers). His prose has the astonishing tactile quality that Southern writers seem to be born with, and a steely hardness that is not regional but all his own. Even through the string of failures, his language has continued to improve. With less visible effort than any other author who comes to mind, he can set the reader at a dirt crossroads at 3 a.m. on a quiet summer night, and make him feel the wet of the air and the scuff of a pebble.

In Night Rider, his first novel and a good one, there is a long passage in dialect in which an old buffalo hunter tells how it was. It is the work of an artist, and of a man who loves the land and the people. Warren's next novel will be a long one, he says, set in the present day. If the book is a success, it will be because the art, and the love, still exist beneath the image, and have never really dropped from sight.

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