Shadow & Substance

THE CAVE (403 pp.)--Robert Penn Warren--Random House ($4.95).

Plato's famed metaphor of the cave (in The Republic) makes a cruel point: men see shadow and think they see substance. The image is brutal--cave dwellers chained underground from childhood, unable to see anything except fire shapes on a rock wall, never suspecting the existence of the objects that cast the shadows. When one of them is dragged into the open air and forced to stare first at the objects themselves, then at the agonizing reality of the sun, he fights to disbelieve his senses. So, when their hidden natures are thrust into the light, do the troubled characters of this violent novel.

Trapped. Author Warren's revelatory cave is in the Tennessee hill country. Lying near by, as the book opens, are a pair of boots and a guitar. Warren describes them at length, with a simplicity and precision that is somehow ominous--and a little too mannered not to be irritating. Their significance becomes clear when a country boy and his girl, wandering through the woods with their minds on country matters, see the boots and realize that they belong to the boy's brother. The news spreads in the nearby town that Jasper Harrick is trapped in the cave.

The sharp-minded son of the Baptist preacher, recently kicked out of the state university for general bad character, volunteers for the rescue job. Isaac inches into the cave, but not before he has arranged for delivery of a tape recorder and enough food to satisfy a hillside full of hungry sightseers. His report, when he squirms out. ensures that the gawkers will come: Jasper is pinned down by a boulder. As rescuers start drilling to the roof of the cave, Isaac spiels out a professionally emotional account into his tape recorder and fires it off to a radio station.* Soon the hillside is humming like a camp meeting and hurrahing like a circus. The food concession Isaac has arranged is selling all the barbecue it can fork out, and the preacher's boy is also making profitable deals with the TV people.

Invented. As the carnival death watch continues, townspeople chained in the Platonic cave of illusion begin "to break through to the heart of the dark mystery which was themselves." By the time Isaac has at last reported that Jasper is dead, a number of astonishing and preposterously pat character changes have taken place. A Greek restaurateur, sexually disturbed because his fat wife is not Jean Harlow, has begun to look upon her with fond normalcy. Jasper's half-illiterate old man, a skirt chaser and Homeric hell raiser in his bachelorhood, experiences a blinding illumination and begins to sound as if he had attended one of Author Warren's courses at Yale. Isaac himself realizes that he is damned to well-paid corruption among the sunless sinners of the communications industry; he never really reached Jasper, invented all the supposed messages from the dying man.

Kentuckian Warren, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for All the King's Men (based on the saga of Huey Long), has turned out a drawerful of novels since then that are exciting, expertly written, and disappointingly slick. In The Cave, he stays true to form.

*The plot recalls the fatal entrapment of Floyd Collins at Sand Cave, Ky. in 1925, and the heroics of pint-sized (110 Ibs.) Louisville Courier-Journal Reporter William Burke ("Skeets") Miller, who won a Pulitzer Prize for squirming to Collins' side, interviewing him. Miller, who became a radio singer and is now an NBC executive, for years was dogged by false stories that he had invented the entrapment as a hoax.

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