Squalid Life in Mississippi: The Same Old Tale Retold

Cambridge has turned up more than its share of young literary discoveries recently, so few will be shocked at the publication of a novel by a Harvard freshman, or even surprised that he wrote it while at Hotchkiss. What would be surprising would be the publication of a good novel by a Harvard freshman, but for that I'm afraid we shall have to wait until at least next season.

Philip Alston Stone '62 is a native of Oxford, Mississippi and a godson of William Faulkner, which explains why No Place to Run concerns itself with derring-do and decadence in Dixie. The South is, of course, just about the best place in the world for an American writer to be born, and Stone has certainly wasted no time in cashing in his chips.

As everybody knows, novels about the South must have a cast of tormented characters, preferably demented, a generous supply of sex, mostly illicit, and some Negroes who hang around and endure. Then, if you really want to pull out the stops, add some crafty politicians who exploit the race situation out of callous disregard for their constituents. No Place To Run has all this and more, being billed as a "tense, extraordinarily powerful novel of demagoguery and personal conflict in Mississippi."

The principals in this affair are Gene Massie, a lecherous old politician running for governor, and Harrison Garner, a local schoolteacher and a liberal. Garner's wife, who is a nymphomaniac, also figures prominently in the plot, and ultimately proves the undoing of both Massie and her husband.

It is tempting, in fact, to put the whole thing down as an elaborate joke on those who are prepared to believe that the sun never rises in Mississippi except on a couple of rapes, several lynchings, and a few good murders. In the first twelve pages of No Place To Run two whites and an unspecified number of Negroes die violently.

What will most grasp the reader's attention, however, is the no-holds-barred sex which enlivens the mid-summer campaign for the governorship of Mississippi. In this connection it is useful that the protagonist, although paunchy and past his prime, is possibly the biggest man with the girls south of Memphis. Also that the two fully developed female characters are nymphomaniacs allows for frequent relaxations from the business of capturing the statehouse. The only problem with all this is that it imposes the necessity of building up to greater and greater exploits and more improbable melodrama. With the first seduction on the green-felted conference table of the county judge, the difficulty arises of where to go next.

If you desire, then, set down No Place To Run as a rather impressive first installment from a talented young hack suffering from a fertile imagination and not much control. But I find it difficult to do that not only because Stone does have talent as a craftsman, but also because the book irritates me.

Without arguing that the myth Stone exploits is necessarily because it is so hackneyed and largely untrue, I am more than satiated with the South-is-so-sick theme. Especially from a new writer, it is disappointing that the old cliches are hauled out once more. No Place To Run is supposedly about events in the Mississippi of the present and Stone is not writing fantasy. In fact, he goes out of his way to inject as many contemporary references as possible while evading the law of libel and slander. Without in any way acting as an apologist for the South, I am prepared to believe that the governor of Mississippi is not a boozed up old lecher who only did one decent thing in his disgusting life, which was to die.

But though this may seem too personal a view on a subject affording little general agreement, I do wish that Stone could stop the horror show long enough to develop some sympathy or understanding for his subject. Good guys are not necessary. A few comprehensible bastards would suffice.