Books

MACKINLAY KANTOR is one of the most astounding young men to come out of the West, out of the deep West of Iowa and the intermediate West of Chicago. He is young in years, young in spirit, young in vitality, but he is one who already has laid deep the foundations for a secure reputation. He is rooted in America, despite what the Germans would choose to call his “non-Aryanism.” But although his heritage, as his name indicates, is divided, he is one of the most integrated writers I know, integrated in his love and knowledge and understanding of the American present and the American past.

His first novel, “Diversey,” published in 1928 when, I suspect, Kantor had hardly begun shaving, was the first novel of Chicago gangsters, as contemporary a theme as America could provide. His present, and fourth work, “Long Remember,” is on a theme out of the American past which always will engage the heart and mind of the American so long as America has an identity. The theme is the Battle of Gettysburg.

But with a difference which marks Kantor as a man of great talent, if not of genius. Ten thousand books and more have been written on the Civil War, and many of these exclusively on the Battle of Gettysburg. The chief thing even the informed American knows about that battle is that Lincoln made a speech about it some months after it was all over. That speech is a classic of the American school room and the heaps of books that have been written on the Battle are so much feathers and fustian–I read a number of them in my boyhood–concealing the reality in phraseology and revealing, where there is any revelation, the strategy and the accidents of battle.

“Long Remember” is about the Battle of Gettysburg and a lot more. It is the story of the village and the villagers of Gettysburg before and during that battle. The battle cuts athwart a love story and a miserly German’s farm and a finicky woman’s flower garden and brings into high relief the dander of the village constable, seventy-five years of age if he’s a day, who shoulders a musket against Johnny Reb, and the quiet and unflagging heroism of the village doctor. The strategy of the battle lines is not the center of Kantor’s story; it is as generals and captains and soldiers become detached from the mainlines and impinge upon the consciousness of our villagers that they achieve human interest and gain human recognition. The center of the story remains throughout those frightful days the village and the villagers, their fears, their concerns, their passions, beginning with the major passion of Daniel Bale for Captain Fanning’s wife, down to the concern of old Mrs. Duffey for the quiet old hero that Dr. Duffey is and Mrs. Wurke’s worry for her garden.

I think “Long Remember” may well be regarded as a classic of the poetic and fictional imagination turned back upon a week of our historic past. It would have been an easy thing for Kantor to have told the story of the Battle of Gettysburg and make it pulsate with vitality. He chose the harder way, that of telling us of the battle as it impinged upon the workaday world of a little Dutch Pennsylvania village. “Long Remember” is the classic of the civilian in the midst of battle, for even the central character, Daniel Bale, is pacifist enough to stand on the sidelines, but young and vigorous and eager enough to open up his consciousness every moment to every pulsation of battle as it reaches him on the threshold of his home, and as, sometimes, he goes out to reach it.

“Long Remember” is a beautiful performance. It is the work neither of a Northerner nor of a Southerner. It is an American’s.