volumes of short stories, and two of the most influential books of criticism of the twentieth century, Gordon never allowed the fame of her better-known literary husband, Allen Tate, to discourage her own writing. She was deeply concerned with preserving a history of the South and particularly women’s roles in it. To that end, she portrayed a diversity of feminine personalities, many of whom struggled under duress and without the support of men. Gordon believed strongly that women occupied a special space in the Southern community, and in many subtle ways she explored the perimeters of that space.

The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon is characterized by meticulous craftsmanship; by clarity of style and vividness of detail; by subtle nuances of allusion and imagery; and, in the main, by a strongly Southern sense of place.

As a short-story writer, Caroline Gordon is perhaps best known for her cycle of Aleck Maury stories. The classic story of this group, and probably the most frequently anthologized of all her stories, is “Old Red.” Here the various facets of Aleck’s character are set forth. A highly intelligent classical scholar and teacher, he has chosen to forsake his gifts, his potential for academic achievement, and devote himself to the appreciation and enjoyment of life. For Aleck Maury, this means good food, good hunting, and good fishing. In “Old Red” the reader learns that he has outlived his wife, a worthy and loving adversary, who had struggled unsuccessfully for years to persuade him to conform to the imperatives of society. She failed, and with her passing he has been set free, only to discover that he must constantly be on the alert to escape the snares of convention. In the course of making a reluctant and long-deferred visit to his family, he finds himself being pressured to attend a relative’s funeral—what is for him a meaningless ritual which will deprive him of an afternoon of pleasure in the field. He leaves the bosom of his family on the pretext of the need to see his physician but with every intention of moving to new fishing territory where he will not be subject to the disapproving eye of social custom.

Though Aleck Maury is not cut from the mold of Falstaff, he has something in common with him—a subtle, devious intellect and a capacity for cherishing his own existence that seduces readers into admiration, amusement, and affection. What redeems him as a man, however, and makes him something more than a charming, irresponsible loafer is the intensity of his imagination and his feeling for nature. The most remarkable and moving passage in the story occurs when, on the point of slipping away from family ties and social responsibility, he slips the bonds of humanity and, through a brief flight of the imagination, becomes one with nature.

“To Thy Chamber Window, Sweet” is an amusing, if minor variation, on the theme of “Old Red.” During his sojourn at an inn while on a fishing expedition, Aleck falls prey to vanity and shows off his erudition and magnificent speaking voice. In so doing he unwittingly hooks a handsome widow. Now in the December of his days, he is far more interested in the inventiveness of a fishing genius whom he has just met than the charms of the widow, who has in subtle ways begun an attempt to reshape him according to the code of society. So it is that he decides to join the fishing genius for a trip to virgin fishing territory; as he slips away at nightfall he quotes to himself a line of poetry which identifies him with Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy. Like the Scholar Gypsy, Aleck will remain elusive, on the run, vigilant to escape the perils of polite society.

The weakest of this group of stories involves Aleck’s encounter with an old fishing companion who has returned “One More Time” to a favorite fishing resort—this time accompanied by his wife because he is in the last stages of a terminal illness. This story is not, like “Old Red” or “To Thy Chamber Window, Sweet,” carried by the charm of Aleck’s personality, and its startling climax is not moving enough in itself to make the story memorable.

The two final Aleck Maury stories are more subtle and powerful in their effects. “The Last Day in the Field” is a description of Aleck’s last hunting trip. His situation is made more poignant because of his young companion’s cheerful obliviousness to the pains and physical limitations that come in the twilight of life. The theme of mortality is subtly underscored throughout the story in ambient descriptive details that suggest the inexorable movement of natural law.

The final story of this group, “The Presence,” though less well known than “Old Red,” may be the finest of the set because of the greater resonance of its themes. The reader sees the rogue scholar with all his old charm and wit enjoying vicariously the sports which have made up his life because he can no longer participate physically; he soon becomes subject to a set of circumstances that accentuate the vulnerability of old age. In this last view of him, the reader finds that, though Aleck is capable of affection and friendship, his basic concern is, as always, his preoccupation with himself. At the story’s end he is haunted by a vision from his youth, “The Presence”—a harbinger of death.

Three of the more impressive stories in the collection reflect in different ways Gordon’s sympathy with the plight of the Southern blacks in pre-Civil Rights America. “The Enemies,” a powerful story which explores the world of the primitive black imagination, has a sensationalistic ending, but it is far superior to a story such as “One More Time.” The primary impact comes not so much from the grisly actions with which it concludes but from the thematic repercussions of those actions. They reflect a fierce sense of pride and justice, strong feelings to which it is clear the white characters are oblivious and which are ironically juxtaposed with the posture of obsequiousness assumed by the black characters in their dealings with whites.

“Her Quaint Honor” deals with a young white tobacco farmer’s reaction to a problem that develops when one of his white employees makes sexual overtures to the high-yellow wife of one of his black employees, a young man conscious of and unconcerned about his place in white society but nevertheless prepared to defend the honor of his wife. To avoid bloodshed, the employer gets involved and, as a result, suffers some hard physical knocks as well as a significant financial loss. The primary impact of the story comes from the good-natured narrator’s half-puzzled, half-amused reaction to his embryonic sense of the black man as a human being with the same sensibilities as whites.

“One Against Thebes” also deals with a white person’s awareness of the injustice of the racial system in the early nineteenth century in the South, but the protagonist, a precocious eight-year-old girl, has a far more profound understanding of the problem than the mature protagonist of “Her Quaint Honor,” though her perception is formed more by her instincts than her reason. Through a combination of casual unobtrusive classical allusions, this story forecasts the revolt that sprang from the dragon’s-teeth-heritage of the Old South.

Four stories of varied quality deal in one way or another with the theme of initiation. “The Long Day” is a story which, though well-paced and well-written, lacks thematic resonance. The grisly conclusion is perhaps too predictable to be compelling. The primary impact comes from the young protagonist’s discovery of the horror that can project itself suddenly into a familiar, ordinary, comfortable frame.

“Brilliant Leaves” deals with somewhat the same theme, the projection of tragedy into the frame of beauty, but the action is more artfully developed through the depiction of young love against the backgrounds of spring and fall, and through the subtle suggestion of a kind of genetic destiny that moves less discernibly but almost as unremittingly as the pattern of the seasons.

“The Burning Eyes” presents a child’s initiation to hunting and to the jolting discovery of the contrast between the excitement of the hunt and the sickening transformation of the spirit and beauty of the life force into the ugly shape of death. The child’s growing awareness of the constrast between what he had been led to expect on the hunt and what he observes brilliantly anticipates the climax of the story.

One of the most remarkable stories in the collection deals with a precocious child’s initiation to the feelings of adult love and passion. The rhythm of the story is set through the juxtaposition of the child’s perspective with that of the cosmopolitan, sophisticated adults around her. The child’s resentment at being an outsider is dispelled for a short time as she leads an adult poet friend to a beautiful waterfall set deep in the woods. Something magical transpires. The poet’s response to her charm and the natural setting awakens in them a feeling that brings her to the edge of emotional adulthood, but the spell is broken by a circumstance that draws her fairy-tale-like prince back to the contemplation of real passion, and she finds herself once again cast outside the pale of the adult world.

Three stories are presented within the frame of the Civil War. In “Hear the Nightingale Sing,” Gordon presents the basis for a spirited young Southern lady’s deep hatred of the Yankee invader. The protagonist’s callous reaction to the accidental death of the basically good-natured soldier who confiscated her pet mule stems from her sense of a future destroyed by a war that has robbed her of the man who might well have become her husband. “The Forest of the South” depicts the effect of a war-stricken Southern culture on a young imperceptive Yankee officer. Ironically, the protagonist finds himself taking home in the form of a bride the legacy of horror which the war has brought to the South. “The Ice House,” which also deals with the legacy of war but less compellingly, focuses on the reactions of two young Southerners to the greedy, unscrupulous Northern contractor who has hired them to provide a decent burial for the bones of Yankee soldiers.

“The Captive” represents another, more impressive, flight of the imagination into the deep past. In a long story remarkable for the swiftness of its pace and the vividness of its detail, the reader follows the adventures of a woman who is abducted by Indians and experiences unspeakable tragedy. The qualities of character which she displays during her ordeal suggest the significance of the American frontier spirit—a spirit which seems summoned up at the conclusion of the story in the laconic expression of relief which the protagonist utters upon reaching at last the safety of white society.

Two stories center on the theme of marriage, and the impact of each is determined in large measure by the point of view from which it is presented. The narrator of “The Petrified Woman” is a young girl who, though she herself is unaware of the reasons for the breakup of a marriage, provides the reader with the information about the personalities and actions of the principal characters necessary to illuminate the situation. A highly conventional husband, bound to a family distinguished only by its long lineage of mediocrity, is unable to appreciate the high-spirited individuality of his young wife. What he wants from a wife is reflected in the central symbol of the story, a fake carnival exhibit which intrigues the narrator and her friends.

The protagonist of “Emmanuele! Emmanuele!” is a young poet who misjudges the characters and relationship of a famous narcissistic French man-of-letters and his stolid, peasantlike wife. This intricately plotted character study gradually moves toward an incident that reveals the shallowness of the writer’s spirit and the strength and integrity of his wife’s mind and heart.

“The Olive Garden” and “Tom Rivers” are beautifully written stories which present different perspectives on the theme of time. The narrator of “Tom Rivers” muses over how ephemeral and chance-stricken human relationships are in contrast to the slow, unhurried patterns of nature. The poet-narrator of “The Olive Garden,” on the other hand, moves from a feeling of sadness over vital human relationships that have been swallowed up by time to a sense of quiet exhilaration over his sudden realization of the potential for human renewal—a feeling triggered by his knowledge of mythological lore and his sense of a kind of permanence in the heart of nature.

Two of the finest stories in this distinguished collection are “Mr. Powers” and “All Lovers Love the Spring.” “Mr. Powers” brilliantly traces, through an ingenious but unobtrusive pattern of light-and-darkness imagery, the way in which a gradual, almost imperceptible accumulation of knowledge, acquired both directly and indirectly, can radically change one’s evaluation of another human being. “All Lovers Love the Spring” presents the most poignant, most deeply felt portrayal of human character in the collection. As delightful as the Aleck Maury stories are, they do not belong in the same category with these two stories. In none of them can one find anything comparable to the masterfully developed illumination of psychological truth that is at the center of “Mr. Powers,” nor can the charm and pathos of Aleck’s character and fate compare with the complex of feelings generated by the portrait in “All Lovers Love the Spring” of the strong-willed, lively, engaging spinster who became the victim of a young man’s misguided superficial judgment. These stories, like many of the others in the collection, take one into the heart of life and provoke thought about the complex nature of human values and the human situation.