World Enough and Time by Robert Penn Warren. Random House. $3.50
Mr. Warren’s new novel has not had a very good press. One reviewer, noting its subtitle (“A Romantic Novel”) and that its heroine, Rachel Jordan, is a woman “with a bosom rounded to high beauty,” has even concluded that it is a pot-boiling historical novel of which Mr. Warren is a little ashamed. But the be-bosomed females of popular historical novels do not suffer Rachel’s fate, even in this particular: at the end of Rachel’s career La Grand’ Bosse says to her with simple brutality: “Va donc, sans-nichons.” Out of Mr. Warren’s contemplation of the actual murder, in 1825, of Colonel Solomon P. Sharp of Kentucky by a young lawyer named Jeroboah Beauchamp there emerges gradually a compassionate and tragic view of the human situation which makes the whole romantic paraphernalia of the novel (invented by Jerry Beaumont, not by Warren) into a deadly irony. It is Jerry who sees his career―and Rachel’s―romantically, who invents a dignified, 18th Century, domesticated heroic drama for them to live. But after they have called each other “Bright angel of the noble brow” and “Stripling of the seraph’s might” and struck all the heroic poses and drunk poison together, it is Warren who sees that the poison contains an emetic and that their grand gesture ends in vomit; and it is Warren who says:
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