Band of Angels (review)

122CIVIL WAR HISTORY felt it worthwhile to procure a glossy print of Sherman to reproduce for his portrait in the book. Instead, a half-tone was shot from another haU-tone. The result, of course, is a shoddy illustration. CURTIS L. JOHNSON Western Springs, Illinois. Band of Angels. By Robert Penn Warren. (New York: Random House. 1955. Pp. 376. $3.95.) here is a work with faults, irritating ones that may make some readers put it down, yet one of the most deeply-felt works of fiction of the past few years. In this novel a major American writer, who is also a Southerner, attempts to come to grips with central issues strongly pertinent to the story of the nation. Like many another literate Southerner, Mr. Warren is a man of conscience, warmly concerned with the bitternesses, the injustices of a system by which men of one color crush down those of another. In page after page of Band of Angels he struggles eloquently, at times compulsively, with the manifold complexities growing out of human bondage based on race. But the author is interested also in larger questions: the meaning of freedom itself, of human personality, of self-gratification and ambition. This is, in essence, a moral novel, one dealing in elemental human motivations. Mr. Warren has chosen to tell it in terms which a number of critics have considered over-melodramatic. Drawing his plot from an actual incident in the past of New Orleans, he re-enacts the Ufe of Amantha Starr, a girl who had been brought up as white, only to learn suddenly that her motiier had been a slave, the mistress of her Kentucky father. Overnight the girl becomes a despised bondwoman, and the issue of slavery and freedom is dramatized in her story, with slave-owners and abolitionists, Confederates and Unionists taking part. The Civil War and questions relating to it have a large role in this novel, which includes chapters of stirring miUtary events and of many repercussions of the conflict. Mr. Warren remains one of our dependable tale-tellers, with an understanding of the dramatic Une, the evocative phrase. He is known also as a poet, and numerous passages have an arresting lyric beauty. The book may not be his best, but it has won a popularity exceeding that of All the King's Men and World Enough and Time — earUer novels sharing the sensationahsm of this work. Many readers will wish that he had exercised a firmer blue pencil with some of his lengthy cogitations and of the tortured self-searchings of his characters. At times his material and his preoccupations overwhelm him. Still, this novel of human gropings offers meanings on several levels, and its faults do not seriously detract from the author's intense concern with the problems of identity and freedom amidst the violent tumult of the modern world. HARNETT T. KANE New Orleans, Louisiana. ...