Two Traditions

Both these novels are about love and, wonder of wonders, they are both delicate, gentle and, in differing degrees, fine. The World of Suzie Wong is the world of a Hong Kong brothel, and she is a prostitute; Sojourn of a Stranger takes place from the early 1800s through the Civil War, and it concerns the loves, hates and passions of a man whose mother was a New Orleans octoroon. Also, it is the better and more sensitive novel, and it promises a brilliant future for Walter Sullivan, its author.

These two love stories signify current trends in English and American fiction. Mr. Sullivan writes from the South, with all its passion, all its melancholy and poetic love of land and tradition. He is of the Robert Penn Warren school; and echoes of Mr. Warren’s heroine, Amantha Starr (Band of Angels’), undoubtedly reverberate. But Mr. Sullivan, in portraying a man whose blood taint makes him a stranger to friends, country, and even God, has in many ways excelled the masters of his tradition. As Allen Hendrick (a hero in the old sense) works his way through the dilemmas of his status—grandson of a wealthy and respected planter-general, but son of a mother who cannot be accepted—he acquires a perception that is rare in the heroes of Robert Penn Warren. And his achievement comes without the melodrama into which Mr. Warren is so often trapped. Nor is there the degradation to which Mr. Warren is likely to descend. The development from hate and revenge to love and forgiveness is a moral progression; the heavy emotive facets of the prebellum pioneer setting are under scrupulous control; the sensitivity is never marred by lapses into brutality and sadism and carnality; and the lovingkindness of the protagonists rises gloriously above the potential welter of the story’s passions.

Both these novels are about love and, wonder of wonders, they are both delicate, gentle and, in differing degrees, fine. The World of Suzie Wong is the world of a Hong Kong brothel, and she is a prostitute; Sojourn of a Stranger takes place from the early 1800s through the Civil War, and it concerns the loves, hates and passions of a man whose mother was a New Orleans octoroon. Also, it is the better and more sensitive novel, and it promises a brilliant future for Walter Sullivan, its author.

These two love stories signify current trends in English and American fiction. Mr. Sullivan writes from the South, with all its passion, all its melancholy and poetic love of land and tradition. He is of the Robert Penn Warren school; and echoes of Mr. Warren’s heroine, Amantha Starr (Band of Angels’), undoubtedly reverberate. But Mr. Sullivan, in portraying a man whose blood taint makes him a stranger to friends, country, and even God, has in many ways excelled the masters of his tradition. As Allen Hendrick (a hero in the old sense) works his way through the dilemmas of his status—grandson of a wealthy and respected planter-general, but son of a mother who cannot be accepted—he acquires a perception that is rare in the heroes of Robert Penn Warren. And his achievement comes without the melodrama into which Mr. Warren is so often trapped. Nor is there the degradation to which Mr. Warren is likely to descend. The development from hate and revenge to love and forgiveness is a moral progression; the heavy emotive facets of the prebellum pioneer setting are under scrupulous control; the sensitivity is never marred by lapses into brutality and sadism and carnality; and the lovingkindness of the protagonists rises gloriously above the potential welter of the story’s passions.