BOOK REVIEW : A ‘Dream’ Romance Unwinds Down South

Charley Bland by Mary Lee Settle (Farrar, Straus, Giroux: $17.95; 186 pages)

Narrowing her field to one small town in West Virginia, Mary Lee Settle has created a literary region as memorable as Faulkner’s Mississippi, Marquand’s Boston or Jessamyn West’s California; a place with language flavored by folk song, hollow social customs patterned on English county life, and a family structure with the destructive tenacity of kudzu.

Widowed before her 20th birthday when her RAF bridegroom was killed in a training accident, the narrator of this piercing story of obsessive love remained in Paris for 15 happily unsettled years. Home for her annual duty visit in 1960, she meets Charley Bland, 10 years older, at 45 still the town’s most eligible bachelor, a title he’s held by default for at least two decades.

To Charley Bland, stuck in a dull business in a provincial town, the storyteller seems a woman of the world who has not only known war, love, loss, and poverty, but most glamorous of all, independence. To her, secretly yearning for tranquillity and familiarity, he seems to offer safety; the chance to become a novelist instead of dissipating her talent in dead-end jobs. They are both deluded; she more tragically than he.

For more than half the book, Charley Bland seems a private fantasy; vivid in the imagination of the woman who loves him but a cipher to us. For all this time, we have only her word for his charm, wit, and tenderness. Our attention is seized by his indomitable, vain mother; his sister-in-law Sadie; his spinster Aunt Dearie, secretly guzzling gin in her room after the ritual juleps on the veranda rouses our curiosity; and Charley’s browbeaten father, desperately trying to impress the narrator with his culture. All of them defer to Mrs. Bland, who runs the town as if it were her private fiefdom.

Charley, himself, is seen obliquely, as a country-club cavalier, a mama’s boy, a man for whom hunting “was another word for life.” We may never comprehend his powerful attraction, but then, what outsider--reader, friends, relation--can ever wholly understand why a gifted and intellectual woman will fall hopelessly in love with a self-indulgent and totally unremarkable man, stubbornly refusing to recognize that his drinking is not gentlemanly, but pathological, that his attention to his mother is not devotion but weakness, that his refusal to commit himself to the woman who loves him is childish conceit? The acutely perceptive narrator cannot understand it herself.

Ultimately, the book belongs not to Charley Bland, but to his mother. She is the third in the triangle, “the deepest, oldest, most insoluble triangle of all.” Any other woman might be routed in a contest between equals, but this is a battle where one contender has had almost half a century head start.

His feeble virtues are peculiarly Southern: loyalty to good buddies fallen on hard times, an astonishing capacity for alcohol, elegant manners; his trite vices exactly the same. He’s all of a piece, our Charley making it almost impossible to tell when he slips over the line that separates generosity from patronage, the sport from the lush, the courtier from the sycophant.

Finding out takes only a little while, but accepting the truth about Charley Bland consumes six long years during which the narrator lives in an emotional limbo and a social vacuum. The end of the relationship is implicit in its beginning; even the manner of that final break predestined. A Southerner born and bred, the writer knows her men the way a river knows the way to the sea, but her knowledge only makes her more vulnerable. Unable to save herself, she has written a sophisticated cautionary tale warning us that to Southern men, “women are dictators or servants. The souls of dead slaves have crept into their habits to haunt them, and they learn only two ways to live, obey or rebel.” Charley Bland has tried both, and couldn’t manage either.