Books: Sacred and Profane Grit

A PLACE TO COME TO

by ROBERT PENN WARREN

401 pages. Random House. $10.

Robert Penn Warren is one of the few distinguished literary men who can aim a novel at the gut and not offend the head. The reason seems to be that even in the age of the Uncertainty Principle and culture fracture, Warren has not lost his sense of life as a sustained drama. The classical Western values that have linked his fiction, poetry and criticism for nearly 50 years are largely responsible. He writes novels with beginnings, middles and ends. People are born, come of age, love, suffer loss, infirmity and death in much the same way people always have.

All of Warren’s strengths as a fiction writer—and some of his weaknesses—can be found in A Place to Come To, his tenth novel. At 72 the author retains his passion for the act of fiction and his faith that the English language can still make exciting sense of the world. Yet a recitation of the novel’s bare bones may give the reader the impression that he has seen this book many times before. Jed Tewksbury is a poor white boy from Dugton, Ala. His daddy is the dashing county drunk who falls down and kills himself ” while urinating on his mule. Jed’s mother is the pone of the earth. She supports her fatherless boy by working in a cannery. She makes sure he has clean shirts and does his homework. Her dream is to get Jed up and out of Dugton as soon as possible.

Jed makes it because he is cool and very smart. He starts as a student of the classics. At the University of Chicago he immediately impresses teachers with his grasp of Latin and Greek. As a graduate student he is already publishing acclaimed scholarly papers. Jed’s success in academe is never in doubt.

His happiness is, however, for Tewksbury is Author Warren’s candidate for modern, alienated man of the year. He skillfully moves him through his life, touching most of the important events and ideas of the century. There is the grotesque legacy of the South’s Lost Cause in the person of Jed’s father. At college Jed is taken under the wing of a professor whose faith in the ideal of humanist culture was shattered by World War I. Tewksbury himself participates in the horrors of World War II: he cold-bloodedly shoots a German prisoner whom he has been interrogating.

There are confrontations with 1930s left-wing intellectuals and de facto existentialists of the wartime ’40s. There is Jed’s marriage to an unnervingly placid girl from North Dakota who dies young of cancer. The longest and best-furnished setting of the novel is Nashville, Tenn., during the postwar years. There Tewksbury teaches at a university, bends elbows with the horsy set and conducts the great love affair of his life. Significantly, it is with a girl from his own home town, now married to a rich sculptor. In Rozelle Hardcastle, Warren has forged a considerable Southern heroine—beautiful, cunning, passionate and full of what the author calls “the mystic promise,” which must be enjoyed “purely as an art, as an illusion, as a complex poetry of the soul and the gonads.” In her middle age, a rich widow and an expatriate, Rozelle marries a swami who had been the cultural darling of her Nashville set. His attraction is that he is no swami at all, but a brilliant fraud—a Mississippi-born Negro who taught himself to compose poetry in Hindi.

In writing about sexual love, Warren seems to take great pleasure in letting down his literary credentials. He can be romantically Wagnerian or barn yard raunchy. Orchestrating Jed and Rozelle’s love affair, he is wise enough to know that passion thrives on obstacles—the more, the greater the passion. Beyond the obvious legal and social hurdles, there is Jed and Rozelle’s shared yearning to accept what they are in terms of their Dugton past. In this sense, they ransack each other’s bodies for the answer.

A Place to Come To is ruminative, but it is not a novel of ideas or analysis. Jed Tewksbury may reflect the disaffected rootlessness of his generation, but he constantly touches earth through the women in his life, his interest in medieval courtly love poetry and Dante, and in his grand solitude, which whistles mournfully through the book. Warren tells us much about the forms of love—not the least of which he has elsewhere set forth in poetry: “In our imagination/ What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge. ” R.Z. Sheppard