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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE HISTORY OF RoME HANKS.
By Joseph Stanley Pennell. Charles
Scribner's Sons.,
$2.75
T
HE HISTORY OF RoME HANKS is a Book of the Dead. Joseph Pennell
assembles as it were the torn bodies of his ancestors, not in loving
piety, as Isis once gathered together the fourteen fragments of Osiris, but
in corresponding fear for the integrity of his own body, about; which he
has a great deal to say. In its tribute to the grandfather, Rome Lycurgus
Hanks, the novel makes reparation for the destructive, almost cannibal–
istic fantasies, which are its real reason for being. Although attended by
fear, these fantasies are made psychically possible because they are
shared with the readers, for whom they have similar value, and because
they are projected back to historic events, to the battles of Shiloh and
Gettysburg, where the bearded fathers fought. There occurred real
slaughter as horrible as those imaginings with which Branwell Bronte,
under the same compulsion as Pennell, used to thrill and frighten his
sisters in the day dreams in common from which the sisters' novels
evolved.
On another level
The History of Rome Hanks
is an attempt to mas–
ter the fact of infinite suffering in its greatest intensity and most imagin–
atively repulsive forms. This is the alternative to finding strength in a
responsible philosophic or political attitude. The Civil War was chosen
as something both remote and ;familiar in which Pennell's ancestors had
a part, something to be treated not as intelligibile history but as an event
of nature, like a flood or a hurricane. For Pennell the common soldiers
of the North and South simply faced in opposite direction when they
fought. The few Negroes we see are craven or corrupted. The issues of
the war are cant in the mouths of ambitious politicians. Lincoln is men–
tioned only twice, and when we are shown political Washington, it is in
the depths of the Grant administration. A historical novel like
The His–
tory of Rome Hanks
is necessarily about the present war as well, but it
implies a present war in which world politics are an administrative mat–
ter for General Eisenhower and the State Department, and in which sol–
diers are technicians who survive or do not survive, and who suffer be–
cause it is man's lot to suffer.
Although Pennell's novel serves a political function, it does it by
negation. Its great positive appeal is its imaginative exorcism of fear,
even a very specific fear that underlies adolescent swagger and self-test–
ing, and is widely, almost universally shared. The need Pennell has to
explicate horror, the horrors of burial alive, of eyes eaten by maggots,
of piles of intestines in the sun, of heads blown off by cannon and legs
cut off by doctors, extends beyond the sphere of war, and as it does,
a familiar pattern emerges.
There was necessarily much marrying of the forefathers in order
that the author's double should be born, this empty young man who
considers his childhood ailments more significant than his ideas, and who
