LANTERNS ON THE LEVEE—William Alexander Percy—Knopf ($3).
One day last year William Alexander Percy, a slight, short Mississippian with a broad, tall forehead, gave up the management of his 3,000-acre plantation, gave up his 30-year law practice, and settled down to putter, think, remember. Last week Northerners and Southerners could read in Lanterns on the Levee just what kind of memories he had. They covered 54 years of an active, sensitive, civilized life. They showed their author to be not only the "poet laureate of Mississippi" and one of the South's bigger planters, but a U. S. aristocrat in the Greek sense of the word.
Percy could remember his French grandmother, Mère, who had to sit day & night strapped in a chair so that she could breathe. "One night [Mère] woke suffocating. Mother said: 'It will be all right, it will pass. . . .' But Mère gasped: 'C'est la mort.' Mother leaned to her and whispered: 'Tu n'as pas peur?' Mère steadied herself on the arms of her chair and said distinctly and firmly: 'Non.' "
There was an exalted memory of Percy's father: "Epstein with his heads neurotic, restless, ugly, is the appropriate portraitist of this generation, but . . . Father . . . would have been at home on the west portal of Chartres with those strong ancients, severe and formidable and full of grace, who guard the holy entrance."
There was the instructive memory of the time Percy Sr. ran against Demagogue James K. Vardaman for the U. S. Senate. Vardaman, who looked "like a top-notch medicine man," stood for the poor white against the "nigger." "He was not a moral idiot of genius like Huey Long; he was merely an exhibitionist playing with fire." When Percy Sr. won, they tried to pin a bribery charge on him. It was quickly disproved, but the man who made the charge went on shouting the lie from every platform in Mississippi. He "was a pert little monster, glib and shameless. . . . The people loved him ... not because they were deceived in him, but because they understood him thoroughly; they said of him proudly: 'He's a slick little bastard.' " Next time they threw out Percy Sr. "Wai," said an old man, wet with tobacco juice and furtive-eyed, "the bottom rail's on top and it's gwiner stay thar." That was Percy's "first sight of the rise of the masses, but not my last."
When World War I came, Percy got into bed, crammed down quarts of cream and dozens of raw eggs, made enough weight so that he could get into the A. E. F. He was made a captain, cited for bravery. He got back in time to help his father drive the Ku Klux Klan out of Greenville, Miss., after a two-year fight. That taught him what Nazis were like ten years before most people knew about Nazis.