In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews EDITED BY CHARLES T. MILLER B-Il University HaU Iowa City, Iowa AndersonvUle. By MacKinlay Kantor. (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company. 1955. Pp. 767. $5.00.) andersonvtlle is a great novel. But it is no more a great novel because it is set in die time of our Civil War tìian Tolstoy's War and Peace is a great novel because it has the Napoleonic campaign as a background. Although bom books capture to perfection the grim dynamics of the wars, their true magnitude flows from the sensitivities and compassionate understanding of die authors. Both writers have an extraordinary quality of insight that allows them to pass back and forth between the exterior viewpoint and the very hearts and minds of their characters. This fluidity of perception illuininates dieir people for us so diat we see not only diat diey are caught in a web, sometimes not of their own making, but how it was that they came to be caught. We know what forces, from within and without, hurry them toward their private precipices, and behind them we hear the shrill cries, dominant and harrying, of their pursuing individual furies. If this reviewer does not name AndersonvUle as the American War and Peace, it is not because he believes Mr. Kantor's book to be unworthy of the comparison. Rather, it is due to a profound respect for both novels and a conviction that not only great critical judgment but time as weU are required for such bracketing. AndersonvUle is a story of captivity. The author's preceding novels of the Civil War were but prelude to its major statement. Long Remember (1934), centering on Daniel Bale at Gettysburg, poses but does not resolve the problem of war and the individual. Arouse and Beware (1936), concerning the flight of Oliver Clark and Prentiss Barrow from BeUe Island, is a classic novel of escape. Now in 1955, after the slow distiUation of two decades, the author seems to declare as his matured opinion that "in war as in life there is no escape except through die gate of the human spirit." For here he makes it plain that each finds his precipice to be an abyss of engulfrnent or an escarpment to surmount . 431 432civil war history The diapason of this book is hunger—the driving frightening hungers for food, water, and sex, and the dread sickening hungers for things lost, for the beloved, for the dead, for freedom, for admiration, dignity, and self-respect. In his superb delineations of Ira, Veronica, and Lucy Ciaffey; of Harrell Elkins, Winder, and Wirz; of die limber-legged Widow Tebbs and her malignant brood; of Willie Collins, Cato and Effie Dülard, Willie Mann, Seneca Bean, Eben DoUiver, and perhaps most of aU, Nathan Dreyfoos—to name but a few—Mr. Kantor has created three-dimensional men and women with pulsing motivations. When they are left alone for a time while the author looks and probes elsewhere, we know that they are not hung up like marionettes to await their next call on stage. And when we see diem again, die continuity is unbroken ; diey have changed, aged, dwindled, or grown greater as men and women change in actual life. The world of diis novel is divided into AndersonviUe and non-AndersonviUe. The drama and tragedy are not confined to die fetid prison world, steaming and fuming within those few acres in the Georgia clearing. The outside world centers around die planter, Ira Claffey, die husbandman and universal watcher, the choros of the book, his wife Veronica, and dieir lovely and delightful daughter, Lucy. Before the first axes fell the first trees for AndersonviUe's fifteen-foot stockade, die Claffeys have lost two sons in die war, one at Crampton 's Gap and die odier at Gettysburg; and on die very day diat Claffey meets the prison survey party, he learns of the death of die third. Lucy's fiance, Rob Lamar, also has fallen in battle. As the family struggles with these losses, compounded by die mental coUapse and deadi of Veronica, Ira and Lucy are as receptive to the seeds of hatred for the enemy...

pdf

Share