FLOOD CREST, by HODDING CARTER, is yet another addition to the overburdened files of progressive fiction concerning the unhappy South. We are asked this time to consider the career and character of Senator Cleve Pikestaff, a most reprehensible old man, who, as is made abundantly clear, is not in the least worthy of his great office. For years his political career has been managed for him by his sharp-witted, strong-willed, seductive daughter, Sudie—who frequently makes Cleve feel bad because she cannot bear his lack of social grace. (Cleve is given to spitting in the fireplace and scratching his bottom in public.) These symbols of corruption are surrounded by various familiar excerpts from the Southern landscape, a landscape which is not, apparently, ever going to change. We have the liberal old Southern professor, fortitudinous and patient, fighting, as one of the more rhetorical characters—perhaps the professor himself—remarks, “to keep change within a channel.” In this he is aided by his sharp-witted, strong-willed, seductive daughter, Bethany. They are eventually joined by Sudie’s ex-lover Floyd, young, attractive, confused, and—ultimately—Progressive. There are others: a lusty young killer and prison trusty named Clyde; two dreadful Caldwell cretins, Georgie Mae and her man, Pud; and the Mississippi River, which rages fearfully throughout the book, threatening to drown them all—a finale, however, which Mr. Carter avoids, since he is concerned with Progress and flatly opposed to Defeat.
This, like most of its predecessors, effectively resists all attempts at intelligent analysis. It cannot, of course, be criticized in literary terms at all; whatever Mr. Carter’s convictions, his notions of trenchant characterization are shallow, not to say antique. The book, presumably, is meant as a study of public corruption feeding on public apathy; its moral is as neat and timely as the subway posters “Freedom Is Everybody’s Job.” The trouble is not specifically with the moral, which is fine as morals go, but simply with the painful vacuity and indecisiveness of Mr. Carter’s story. Mr. Carter manages to say about all of the right things, none of them very strongly, none of them clearly; it is, indeed, made increasingly obvious that he does not quite know what to say. Mr. Carter is concerned with Change, which he equates with Progress, and he is against Violence. Progress must, of course, be made; but it must be made neatly, wisely, there must be no messy unforeseen edges to trim. And it must be made in the American Way by all the Common People, acting, as they seldom do, in unison. This metamorphosis demands—naturally—an heroic patience and a fairly transparent condescension towards the Masses. Proving, perhaps, his point, Mr. Carter’s Common People—led by the uncommon Floyd—hold back the Mississippi, thus avoiding extinction. Senator Cleve Pikestaff, on the other hand, by a series of wild improbabilities, is assured of re-election, which is, I suppose, the same thing as saying that Rome was not built in a day. Novels and novelists of this genre serve no purpose whatever, so far as I can see, except to further complicate confusion. Mr. Carter knows, I hope, that holding back the Mississippi is not nearly so difficult as striking a bargain with time, which is neither polite nor predictable and refuses to be labeled in advance. And if he means to suggest that there must be men of wisdom and good will in the vanguard, he might also suggest that the wisdom be less vague and the good will less sentimental.
(1948)