After the Big Wind

NONE SHALL LOOK BACK--Caroline Gordon--Scribncr ($2.75).

When Allen Tate, critic and poet, had written most of a long-planned life of Robert E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman's four-volume, definitive R. E. Lee (TIME, Feb. 11, 1935) appeared, blew his house down before the roof was on. Last week the same meteorological hard luck seemed to be pursuing Caroline Gordon (Mrs. Allen Tate). For her Civil War novel came out in the wake of that typhoon of bestsellers, Gone With the Wind. Whether None Shall Look Back could weather the vacuum left by a super-seller covering the same ground, or whether the vacuum would lend it momentum, not even a publisher could predict. Sympathetic critics, just emerging from their cyclone cellars, wished Author Gordon luck but had to admit that None Shall Look Back, though it blew a neater, straighter course than its circling predecessor, could not be rated a first-class gale.

Laid principally in Kentucky, Author Gordon's story alternates between plantation scenes and eyewitness accounts of the shifting Western battleground. The domestic pictures are much the more successful. The war episodes, in which real but rarely actualized figures like Grant, Forrest, Bragg, Longstreet and Polk appear, are marred by many a lampy smudge. The narrative opens after the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run to Northerners), once gets dangerously near Gone With the Wind territory, touches such historic happenings as the fall of Fort Donelson, Forrest's raid on Murfreesboro, the Battle of Chickamauga. Principal characters are the Allard family, aristocratic Kentuckians. Jim, the elder son, lamed by a riding accident, stayed home; but Ned went, was captured, finally released from a Yankee prison a broken man. George Rowan married one of the Allard girls, was enjoying his favored position as aide to a handsome general when a sharpshooter got him at Chickamauga. Cousin Rives married Lucy Allard and went off to be one of Forrest's scouts. Lucy gradually learned what that meant, got almost used to the idea of his death. When the news came at last, it was hardly more than she had expected. The Allard place was plundered and burnt by the Yankees ; old Mr. Allard got a stroke from the shock. At war's end, with the slaves run away, the plantation ruined, stay-at-home Brother Jim brought discredit on the Allard name by swallowing his pride, keeping store.

Real hero of None Shall Look Back is Nathan Bedford Forrest, guerrilla fighter whom Lee called the best cavalry leader in either camp, though they had never met (TIME, June 22, 1931). To rescue him from the half-oblivion in which he lurks as a semiliterate, half-savage raider, Author Gordon pens many a panegyric page, sometimes lets her feminine enthusiasm get the better of military idiom, as when she speaks of Forrest's horse as being "shot out from under him."

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