Books: Story Poems

OPUS 7—Sylvia Townsend Warner— Viking ($2).

JONATHAN GENTRY—Mark Van Doren —Boni ($2.50).

Many a U. S. reader found to his surprise that Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body was readable and even thrilling, though a poem and a long one. If you are one who cannot stomach left-wing lyrics or metrically muted cries of despair, you may well find one or both of these narrative poems as agreeable a surprise as John Brown’s Body.

Sylvia Townsend Warner is a competent novelist, so when she turns her hand to verse you expect some salty characterization. She does not fail you. Old Rebecca Random, heroine of these heroic couplets, lived in a picturesque, tumbledown cottage in the English village of Love Green. The cottage attracted tourists’ favorable attention; Rebecca might have sold it but always refused. Poor and usually wageless, she “lived on bread and lived for gin.” When she discovered that her untidy flowers were worth money she grew them for all she was worth, tottered home with many a bottle from the village pub. One winter night she got drunk in the graveyard and froze to death. Her cottage became an arty teashop, which was of course a failure.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, no subscriber to the pathetic fallacy that Virtue is at its best and simplest in the country, says some pretty sharp things about bucolic folk.

Two-headed monsters are the natural diet

of those pure minds which dwell in country quiet. . . .

Returning in the carrier’s motor van

she sat nid-nod, while conversation ran

blithe as a freshet over ulcered legs,

murders, spring onions, and the price of eggs.

Superficially more ambitious, Mark Van Doren’s Jonathan Gentry hits the high spots in a 100-year chronicle of a U. S. family. The first Jonathan Gentry, a Londoner, came to the U. S. to get away from the memory of what his wife and his best friend had done to him. He sailed down the Ohio in 1800 and settled in the Middle West. Jonathan Gentry III, his grandson, went to war in 1861 with the 19th Illinois, was wounded, got to be a sergeant, saw his beloved brother killed. After the war he went back to the Gentry farm. Jonathan V, a farmer like his forbears, married a beautiful wife, but she was barren. When his lawyer brother came to visit, she fell in love; Jonathan would not see. When his brother came again, Laura tried to make him run away with her; he refused, and she killed herself by jumping out of his speeding car. Thus the Gentry line ended.

The Significance. Poet Van Doren seems to say the old stock is dwindling into nothing or losing itself in the maelstrom of the city. The U. S. might have been a Promised Land but its chance is passing, perhaps has already passed.

The Authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a country mouse, Mark Van Doren a town mouse. Their view of country people is dissimilar: Poet Warner’s satirical, Poet Van Doren’s nostalgic. Sylvia Townsend Warner lives alone in her house in England with a big black dog, believes in witches although she has never seen the devil in person. Other books: Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, The Espalier. Mark Van Doren, lean and serious onetime literary editor of the lean and radical Nation, has also written Spring Thunder, 7 P.M. and Other Poems.