Grand Manner

SWORDS AND ROSES--Joseph Hergesheimer--Knopf ($3.50) Author Hergesheimer's concept of the Civil War does not startle. He employs no impelling format such as Stephen Vincent Benet's in John Brown's Body. In his graceful manner he merely fashions what his publishers are pleased to call belles lettres. In spite of this he commands a host of readers. Sensitive to nuances of a bygone age, he distills the essence of proverbial Southern romance, imprisons it in luxuriant prose: "The deep South, like a conservatory, was sweet with flowers. The isolated burial grounds, approached by avenues of cedars, and shaded with willows and live oaks and linden, were planted with white flowers--Cape jasmines, bridal wreath, white japonica, sweet alyssum and white althea. In the strange white radiance of Alabama moonlight white flowers--Cherokee roses, the night-blooming cereus, moon flowers and honey-suckle--were sweeter than at any other time. . . . "Yet, against all that tenderness of beauty, in spite of an apparent transcendent peace, the intense heat bred its intensity of emotion, a dangerous bitterness of conviction, hatred together with loyalty and a fatal pride. The deep South reacted deeply, darkly, from its heart; its passions were not tempered by deliberate intelligence. It had, together with its fineness, an unrestrained brutality of act destructive like the blaze of its sun. It had an integrity but it was not the measured dignity of mind. Its integrity lay in the virtues of extreme loyalty and unassailable courage. It was magnificent in battle, in battle rather than in war. It was, after all, General Lee, Virginia, who led the South; but he had Alabama tigers to lead; men born for fighting, capable of fighting throughout all their long or short lives. They made the four years of the Confederacy possible. Then they too vanished." The scene set, Hergesheimer silhouettes against it nine representative actors: ". . . the eloquent Mr. Yancey; Varina Howell who loved Jefferson Davis all her life; Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, cast in an obligation of honor dark and ringing like bronze; Albert Sidney Johnston in the loneliness of early Texas; Captain Maffitt driving precarious steamboats, heavy with cotton, and priceless with morphia and powder and gold, into the blockaded night; Nathan Forrest charging at the head of his troops, with his great sabre ground to a razor edge; Belle Boyd, who was more dangerous, more destructive, than canister or solid shot; Jeb Stuart decorated with a rose, wound in a yellow silk sash; and John Worsham, a foot soldier with Stonewall Jackson in the Great Valley."

Most ably cast are Jeb Stuart, whom some thought greater than Jackson; and Belle Boyd, for: "A female spy is an engaging creature, but in crinoline she has an especial, a romantic and absurd, charm." The Author. Stolid in appearance, Hergesheimer's round face and owlish goggles belie his predilection for romance. Of old Pennsylvania Dutch stock, he at tended Quaker school with indifferent suc cess, listlessly studied painting, blundered into a career of writing which will be long remembered for The Three Black Pennys, Java Head, Cytherea, San Cristobal de la Habana. In lush West Chester, Penn., where airedales gambol clumsily on the lawn and bullfrogs croak monotonous love at dusk, he inhabits a picturesque house. He delights to slander horses, which he is unable to ride, as "high, grotesque animals," but he does his writing in somnolent, horsey Charleston, S. C. Last week he appeared in Manhattan to help publicize his new book. Wearing a blazing orange sweater under his grey suit, he told his public things old and new about himself: how he once studied to be a painter; wrote for twelve years before he sold a line; has not much use for women writers; does all his "stuff" in longhand first; is a fool to keep on writing because it is such exhausting work ("God knows why I keep on!"); would like to be, if he could live his life over, "the fat, spoiled son of a midwestern manufacturer with lots of money to spend on a drugstore full of girls."