Word: jed
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TIME PAST AND TIME PRESENT: neither can impinge on the solitude of Jed Tewksbury. Jed clings to his solitude and mourns it. Other characters are constantly telling him things like, "You don't know what you are, Jed Tewksbury." Jed's response is invariably an access of self-pity or an attempt to escape, through sex or work, into the "shadowy sanctuary of timelessness." Without a sense of geographical belonging--Jed has rejected his Southern roots--he lacks the resources for self-definition, and his cry of homelessness "I had no place to go. Not in the world." becomes...
...Tewksbury is Author Warren's candidate for modern, alienated man of the year. He skillfully moves him through his life, touching most of the important events and ideas of the century. There is the grotesque legacy of the South's Lost Cause in the person of Jed's father. At college Jed is taken under the wing of a professor whose faith in the ideal of humanist culture was shattered by World War I. Tewksbury himself participates in the horrors of World War II: he cold-bloodedly shoots a German prisoner whom he has been interrogating...
There are confrontations with 1930s left-wing intellectuals and de facto existentialists of the wartime '40s. There is Jed's marriage to an unnervingly placid girl from North Dakota who dies young of cancer. The longest and best-furnished setting of the novel is Nashville, Tenn., during the postwar years. There Tewksbury teaches at a university, bends elbows with the horsy set and conducts the great love affair of his life. Significantly, it is with a girl from his own home town, now married to a rich sculptor. In Rozelle Hardcastle, Warren has forged a considerable Southern heroine...
...writing about sexual love, Warren seems to take great pleasure in letting down his literary credentials. He can be romantically Wagnerian or barn yard raunchy. Orchestrating Jed and Rozelle's love affair, he is wise enough to know that passion thrives on obstacles-the more, the greater the passion. Beyond the obvious legal and social hurdles, there is Jed and Rozelle's shared yearning to accept what they are in terms of their Dugton past. In this sense, they ransack each other's bodies for the answer...
...Place to Come To is ruminative, but it is not a novel of ideas or analysis. Jed Tewksbury may reflect the disaffected rootlessness of his generation, but he constantly touches earth through the women in his life, his interest in medieval courtly love poetry and Dante, and in his grand solitude, which whistles mournfully through the book. Warren tells us much about the forms of love-not the least of which he has elsewhere set forth in poetry: "In our imagination/ What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge. " R.Z. Sheppard