Books: Big Book

• Share

(2 of 3)

In Paris he met his first love again, but now she was a famous actress and Bonaparte's mistress-of-the-moment. Soon disappointed in Europe. Anthony willingly engaged himself in an international financial scheme which took him to England, Spain, then permanently to New Orleans. There at last he married and settled down on his own plantation. But a disastrous fire killed his wife and child. Anthony left civilization and took to the wilderness. Captured first by Indians, then by Spaniards who were rounding up interlopers on Mexican soil, he survived the long trek to Mexico City only to be condemned to a lazar-house. Here one of his early loves, Dolores, found him, married him; together they spent peaceful years in a remote mountain village. Before he died he had at last come home.

No mere adventure story by a long shot, Anthony Adverse is packed full of shrewd comment, tart gossip, homely saws. Thus Carlo Cibo, Havana epicurean, on young man's estate: "My God! . . . did you ever think what a terrible mess a young man really is? I mean a youth. That is — a kind of portable apparatus or attachment to three troublesome globes, one who has just stopped being a mad boy and has not yet been scared into being a decent man. One feels profoundly sorry for him. The only peace he can get is for a few hours after a girl has nearly killed him. The rest of the time he goes drifting about making a lot of noise like a ship upon which a perpetual mutiny is going on. He is always steered in the direction which his bowsprit indicates." Napoleon telling Anthony why he does not like bankers: "And in another hundred years if I do not stop them they will own Europe — the world. Financiers cannot act. They never do anything. They are passive, they spin webs and every wind, blow peace blow war. brings them flies. They are not the fit repositories for power."

Sometimes the masculine author of this masculine book speaks in propria persona: "Historically the increasing dominance of woman is marked by emotionalism and revolution, romanticism, feminism triumphant, hysteria. The end is either a return to the balance, a reaction where the man reasserts his authority in the family, or anarchy. The paternal state, which tries to be Our-father-which-art-on-earth, is always accompanied by the loss of the subtle qualities of fatherhood in individual men. When patriotism becomes matriotism, nature and force reassert themselves in human affairs. Sympathy has been mistaken for the truth.''