The road from Pompey's Head

Novelist, literary critic, an articulate voice within The New Republic and The New Yorker - Hamilton Basso gained his writerly bearings in his native New Orleans during the 1920s at the feet of Sherwood Anderson. In the first major biography of Basso, Inez Hollander Lake makes the appealing, illuminating argument that present memory does a disservice to this distinctive mind and talent. Between 1929 and 1964 Basso published eleven novels, including in 1954 The View from Pompey's Head, which spent forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was translated into seven languages. Lake suggests, however, that Basso's less popular works of the 1930s, particularly Cinnamon Seed and Courthouse Square, were his true triumphs and deserve new examination. Like no other writer of the Southern Renascence, she says, Basso portrayed the double alienation experienced by the southerner who leaves and then returns home; he analyzed the theme more often, more thoroughly, and less sentimentally than Wolfe, who has received most if not all credit for the motif. At the same time, Basso must be remembered for his southern "otherness." In published commentaries, he took the Agrarians to task for breeding plantation anachronisms out of the dead land and criticized writers like Erskine Caldwell and Faulkner for cultivating the other extreme of the southern grotesque and southern decay. Social realism was Basso's prescribed approach to depicting the South in fiction, and he would grind his axe against public vices such as racism, intolerance, "Shintoism" (ancestor veneration), and intellectual pretense, reserving his deepest sympathy - in life and in art - for the ordinary man, for the plight of the lonely individual versus a powerful and often insensitive society.