The Healing Power of Irony : C. VANN WOODWARD, SOUTHERNER <i> by John Herbert Roper (University of Georgia Press: $24.95; 393 pp.) </i>

A recluse scribbling history in some creaky-floored library he has never been. When his name showed up in December in The New Yorker’s Christmas charivari to stylish newsmakers, the scholar was metrically matched to a rock star:

Hey, Chuck Berry--what’s the good word?

Say hi, guy, to C. Vann Woodward.

Hale fellow though he is, it is for weightier reasons that historian Woodward now achieves book-length notice as well.

And that is because for decades, in imaginative and moral monographs and magazine essays and in overflowing classrooms and academic convention halls, this Yale professor has proclaimed a brilliant understanding of the black/white, rich/poor complexities of the American South that he loves. His life’s work is a mastery of the ironic story of a people who once espoused slavery and lost a war, yet like everyone else spring from a country priding itself on its rectitude and--up until Vietnam--its national invincibility.

More important still, along every step of the way, Woodward has been concerned to show how such ironies speak healing words to the present. Without preaching, he has sought especially to prod the American conscience toward this one lofty objective: that we examine our discriminatory past, discern its flimsy basis in economic and class conflicts, and resolutely construct a more just future for us all.

The U.S. Supreme Court sought Woodward’s thoughts before its 1954 school desegregation decision; Martin Luther King Jr. defined Woodward’s “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” as “the bible of the Civil Rights movement”; and summing up the whole of his scholarship, biographer John Roper declares the 79-year-old Southerner “the most significant historian of our age.”

Growing up in family-founded Vanndale, Ark., amid Confederate veterans, ex-slaves and Klan lynchings, Vann Woodward learned from a maverick uncle--the rascally family radical--that Southern-born youth need not abide the racism on which they were being reared. Admiringly, young Vann followed Uncle Comer Woodward to his new academic post at Atlanta’s Emory University and enrolled himself as an undergraduate.

Then, as now, a move to Atlanta from rural Arkansas was a not-inconsiderable cultural realignment. In the early 1930s, the city was already stirring with people and notions that disputed many of the South’s old-style manners and mores.

Woodward, drawn to these then-heretical voices, was educated as much off the campus as on it, and had, by the time he was 29, written a doctoral dissertation at the University of North Carolina that debunked conventional, self-serving interpretations of post-bellum Southern history. Published as “Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel,” the biography was lauded on the front page of The New York Times Book Review in 1938, and to this day, like many of Woodward’s challenging ideas, its thesis is esteemed--and debated--by other American historians.

Of the thousands of students who have benefitted from the man’s dissenting erudition (before Yale, he taught at Georgia Tech, Florida, Virginia, Scripps and Johns Hopkins), one must include the reading public who may know him only through his deft and ironic reviews and articles in such periodicals as Harper’s and The New Republic, and through two popular books.

One of these, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” is Woodward’s demonstration that while racism has its ugly Southern legacy, strict, Jim Crow segregation was not a longstanding, social reality (as it is, say, in South Africa). Rather, he argued, it was a post-Civil War scapegoat policy devised by Conservative opportunists. The other is the widely read “Mary Chestnut’s Civil War,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning editing of the journal and memoirs of an iconoclastic South Carolina woman that brings out, among other things, the linkage between slave owning and 19th-Century sexism.

John Roper, himself an astute historian, did not design to write “a biography in the traditional sense”; he chose rather an “extended essay” format detailing Woodward’s intellectual struggles to understand the South--an exacting task. And that seems to account for the major shortcoming of this book. Roper’s flair for graphic storytelling is lively enough, but his penchant for inserting leaden historiographical disquisitions into the narrative is deadening. General readers will find these academic intrusions daunting indeed.