From an Aeolian Cave

FLOOD by Robert Perm Warren. 440 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Those who have admired Robert Penn Warren for his criticism, poetry or fiction cannot fail to be puzzled and dismayed by Flood. The inflated emotion, imprecise language and theatricality of situation that bubble up in Flood all but submerge Warren's virtues, which are considerable: a great talent for narrative and a sense of place as keen as an animal's.

Warren moves as sure-footed as ever through an intricate plot. Fiddlersburg, a town in Tennessee, is about to disappear under the waters of a federal dam; its citizens are thus caught at a time when they are most inclined to be articulate about themselves. Preachers, philosophers and local grotesques abound. But although Fiddlersburg has been condemned to death, the sentence does not (Samuel Johnson to the contrary) result in wonderfully concentrating its collective mind. On the contrary, an aeolian cavern of Southern garrulity is opened up and the air is thick with all the Confederate cliches about honor, guilt, familial dooms and expiations, the Civil War and slavery. There is much speculation on the quintessential nature of Southernness. "Lonesomeness" is one explanation. "The lie that is the truth of the self" is another more portentous reflection. Whatever it is, those who feel it most are inclined to go off and hole up with muskrat skinners in the swamp drink a jug of likker and just weep into the warm mud.

Slow Motion. The action of the novel centers on the town's preparations for a farewell chicken-fry and the efforts of a film producer and scenarist to make a great film of the life and death of a Southern town. The characters involved in all this might seem a shade unsubtle even to the simple eye of Central Casting Office file clerk, and their names are something that S. J. Perelman would love to give a droll roll on his tongue. They include Bradwell Tolliver, Lettice Poindexter, Gomp ("Frog-eye") Drumm and Mortimer ["Jingle Bells") Spurlin. Everybody seems to go by a nickname in Fiddlersburg; even the electric chair in the local pen is called "Sukie."

All these characters and many more are duly set in motion as Bradwell Tolliver, a native son who is now a successful Hollywood writer, cases Fiddlersburg for material for the film, and simultaneously seeks the springs of his own perjured promise. A snob, a bully and a coarser man than his creator seems to believe, Brad has a Southernness as sensitive as an aching eyetooth.

A mistress called Prudence Brandowitz once confided to his hairy armpit a distaste for "Southern vulgarity." The effects upon him were startling. "My heart knobbed up and started a wild swing," Brad reminisces. "It was as though all those hairy flea-bit, iron-rumped and narrow-assed, whooping and caterwauling, doom-bit bastards on hammer-headed nags, gaunt as starvation, who rode with Gin'l Forrest had broke loose and there was fire, rape and unmitigated disaster all the way to the Canadian border." In short, fastidious Prudence had had it.

Heart County. Flood will win a large audience unlikely to be daunted by this tendency to lapse into an emotionally besotted verbal debauch just when a clear eye and unblurred speech are called for. Nor will Flood be damaged on the bestseller lists by its old-fashioned bawdiness.

The pity of it is that for all its melodramatic hurly-burly and all the idiomatic rhetoric, a serious and moving novel has not been created. At the book's end, Brad Tolliver is left in a convulsion of romantic agony, thinking, in the usual important italics, "There is no country but the heart." This seems to be a mere cliche until examination proves it something less than that--an untruth. Surely if Flood has any solid theme, it is that the physical shape of a loved object--in this case, Fiddlersburg--is important, that its loss is irrevocable, and that the spirit cannot make do without the flesh. In an understanding of this lies one of the differences between tragedy and sentimental melodrama.

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