Through A Glass, Darkly

Readers of Charlotte Miller's first novel, Behold, This Dreamer, should enjoy reading her second, in what might be termed the Eason County trilogy. Like her first novel, Through A Glass, Darkly is a good read, a page turner, with suspense generated on almost every page.

The novel continues the on-going story of Janson Sanders, the son of an Alabama tenant farmer who dreams of owning his own land, and his wife, Elise, the pampered daughter of a self-aggrandizing Georgia planter. The action takes place in the late twenties and thirties. Escaping the vindictiveness of Elise's father, who resents Elise's having married a poor white with Cherokee blood, Janson is obliged to seek work in the cotton mill owned by Walter Eason, who runs Eason County with an iron hand. Janson struggles with the harsh exigencies of a mill worker's life, with the bigotry of the townspeople, and with Eason's vicious grandson, Buddy. In the Depression, he turns to sharecropping, then gets a job with the WPA. The aging mill owner ultimately recognized Janson's worth, and at the novel's end, Janson has a better job at the mill, with some hope for the future.

On one level, Through A Glass, Darkly renews the naturalistic novel's emphasis on economic exploitation, from Emile Zola's Germinal through John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. The rich and powerful, driven by greed and lust, are the evildoers; the tenant farmers and mill workers are the salt of the earth. Miller complicates the paradigm by implying that the rich and powerful, falling into materialism, erecting William Blake's "dark, satanic mills," are self-blinded, seeing through a glass darkly, like those they exploit.

The story is told in the third person subjective, shifting from character to character, without losing the impetus of a strong narrative line. At times, the tone becomes strident ("all that hope, all his dreams gone again"). The last section is diffuse, wavering from Janson's struggle to make ends meet to his son's alienation, before culminating in a melodramatic succession of shocking episodes involving Buddy Eason. I would have preferred having the novel end earlier; on the other hand, given the passage of time necessitated by the trilogy form, implying ongoing experience instead of closure, I can understand the author's procedure. The problem, as I see it, with Buddy's viciousness lies in its implications. Buddy's obsession with fire and burning, his compulvsive need to get back at his enemies are close to psychopathic. His father and grandfather are accountable for letting him run loose--far too long, it seems to me--but we don't know in what ways they helped shape him.

For me the novel's primary appeal lies in its re-creating of the times, its relevance as a slice of life, a chronicle of what southern poor white mill workers and sharecroppers went through in the twenties and thirties. MIller shows us what it's like to live in a mill house, lacking electricity and plumbing, canted on a hill, stone pillars supporting the skimpy porches, cordwood stacked against one wall. These details are not inert, as in a researched period piece. The cordwood is for the wood stove Elise burns biscuits on. Elise sees, and responds to, "gaudy flowered curtains" hanging in one window of a mill house, "sedate lace ones in the other."

Janson's attempts at sharecropping are also powerfully realized. We are shown how hard it is to get through the winter without money or credit, the nagging worry about making the crop, the backbreaking labor. "With spring came work, hard work with seemingly no end, plowing, planting, later chopping the cotton to remove the weeds and thin out the cotton plants, running around the rows with the plow then going back to bust the middles and uproot any weeds still there, poisoning the fields to keep the insects from destroying the plants." Here we see a committed writer at her best.