[In the following essay, Frank provides an overview of the central themes, regional settings and motifs, prose style, and narrative presentation in Hoffman's fiction. Frank's analysis, which aims to enlarge Hoffman's readership, focuses on several representative works—the novels The Trumpet Unblown, The Land That Drank the Rain, and Godfires, and the short story collection By Land, By Sea.]

During the past thirty-five years William Hoffman has published ten novels, two collections of short stories, and over three dozen additional short stories in such quarterlies as the Transatlantic Review, The Virginia Quarterly, and The Sewanee Review; he is perhaps best known to the readers of the latter, for The Sewanee Review has published more short stories by William Hoffman than by any other author. Although Hoffman’s fiction has been the subject of at least one doctoral dissertation and numerous master’s theses, and although reviews of his novels have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time and Newsweek, his work has not received the attention of the critics that it should command. The purpose of this essay, then, is to introduce to a larger audience the fictional world of William Hoffman, focusing on his first novel, The Trumpet Unblown (1955), two recent novels, The Land That Drank The Rain (1982) and Godfires (1985), and his most recent collection of short stories, By Land, By Sea (1988). The first novel, described by the critic Hassell Simpson as one of the finest novels ever written about World War II, deals with a subject and theme identified by both Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway as the most universal of all subjects, war; the second demonstrates that redemption is always possible, even for the most jaded among us; and the third novel recalls the enormous redemptive power of love. These three novels, collectively, together with the short story collection, demonstrate the range, versatility and power of the fiction of William Hoffman. (Hoffman’s other seven novels, in the order of their publication, are Days in the Yellow Leaf (1958), A Place for My Head (1960), The Dark Mountains (1966), Yancey’s War (1966), A Walk to the River (1970), A Death of Dreams (1973), and Furors Die (1990).

Although The Trumpet Unblown is actually Hoffman’s second novel, it is his first published novel. It is largely autobiographical and, ironically, because Bill Hoffman is a gentle, caring man, contains more violence and more gratuitous brutality than any of Hoffman’s other nine novels. Early on in the novel one sees the influence of Hemingway, especially the Hemingway of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the careful reader also finds the influence of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, especially in scenes and descriptions in Trumpet where men in action in the military hospitals are depicted as mechanical, detached, automaton-like. But although the novel is autobiographical, its protagonist, Tyree Jefferson Shelby, is not William Hoffman. He is a twentieth century version of Crane’s Henry Fleming and becomes in the course of the novel another casualty of war, this time World War II, similar to Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s impotent casualty of WW I in The Sun Also Rises:

‘I know about the Army, I volunteered for it.’

Moody sighed and took a long drink from the bottle.

‘May I ask why.’

‘What do you mean why?’

‘Why’d you volunteer?’

‘Because it was right, that’s why.’

Moody looked at him a moment, then began to laugh …

‘I’m sorry,’ Moody said between the laughter.

‘I’m sorry but I’d forgotten there were still people who could believe that sort of thing.’

But war, we discover, does more than change idealism—it destroys it. In a scene near the novel’s conclusion, Shelby is back in Richmond, talking with the girl he had left behind, Cannon, who says to him,

‘I was afraid you had fallen in love with some beautiful foreign woman. Did you?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t fall in love with anybody?’

‘I fell out of love with a lot of people.’

What happens to Shelby between these two scenes is the essence of The Trumpet, and scenes, incidents, encounters throughout the novel reveal in almost incomprehensible and graphic detail the total inhumanity of man toward his fellow human beings. Whether the horror is that of single combat between two individuals or horror inflicted by one people—the Germans who made up the SS—upon another—the Displaced Persons of the Nazi-conquered Slavic states, it is unspeakable. Two examples should more than suffice: in the first, Blizzard, the company bully, tries to break Shelby’s will, using sixteen-ounce gloves that inflict pain without breaking bones or tearing flesh. But Shelby won’t break, so Blizzard leaves off the gloves:

Blizzard lashed him on the ears, and they burned with pain.

Blizzard knocked him through a bed, and as he was getting up hit him in the stomach with an uppercut.

It knocked the wind out, and Shelby half stood, half fell. But Blizzard never gave him a chance to fall. He hit him in the face, and Shelby felt the cartilage in his nose go.

The pain had color and shot through him red, and he realized he was crying and standing with his arms helpless at his sides. It didn’t seem it could go on with so much hurting, and he wished for unconsciousness. But somehow it did go on, and he could no longer breathe.

The second example is more horrific, perhaps only because the brutality exhibited by the Blizzards of the world is multiplied a thousand-fold:

Everything was almost fine until the day the wind changed. That happened late one afternoon, and the wind brought smell across the grass. They all knew the smell and looked at each other. The Germans in the village avoided them that day. It took two more days to find the source of the smell … From a distance it looked like any other concrete barn … When they got close enough to see, other men turned and walked off. The barn was so full of the stinking dead that they were pouring out the doors and windows. The Germans had evidently used flame throwers on them. From what Shelby could tell, the dead looked like Slavs, and perhaps the SS was hard put to get rid of them as the armies closed in. At any rate, the Slavs had been made to lie down in layers on the barn floor until they were stacked high as the windows. Then the flame thrower … The men in the outfit were hard, but none of them had ever seen it this way. Some were sick, and Shelby had to go back down the hill … Moody looked furious and at the same time as if he were about to cry. Nobody said anything. They looked at the barn, then at the steeple of the church in the village. They smelled the charred flesh and remembered the fine dark beer and the laughter of the tavern keeper …

‘I guess we’d better clean up,’ Coger said finally. They followed Coger back to the outfit. Coger got his.45, cocked it, and stuck it in his waist … The others got whatever guns, knives, and clubs they could find. The officers were told, and strapped on sidearms … They skirted the village, placing it between them and the barn. They formed a line like a party of bushbeaters, then entered the village and swept the people before them. No exceptions were made. Women and children as well as the aged had to go. The Germans looked frightened, but they looked as if they knew, too. Some went stoically … Others cried and begged. But they all went. When they got close to the barn, the women began to wail … The men of the outfit pushed them on towards the barn. The Germans were made to take a good look … and children cried and tried to hide behind their mothers. Moody translated Coger’s order; the Germans looked at the ground … The Germans were to collect and bury everything in the barn. They would not be allowed to use shovels or tools of any kind. The tavern keeper broke down and cried like a child.

It took the rest of the day to complete it, and there was much sickness before it was over. Most of the dead had begun to decompose and had to be scraped up and held in the palms of hands. Sometimes there were pieces left over, but everything was buried. The graves were dug by hand too. Men fainted, women sobbed, and children became hysterical. They were all sent back to work …

Finally it was finished, and Coger let the Germans go back to their neat little village with its fine old church and religious paintings. The men of the outfit washed as soon as they could to get the smell off, but there was not enough water in the world to wash off that stink …

After he has witnessed such compelling instances of man’s shame, it is no wonder that Shelby’s very soul is annihilated. Deadened by the war he had volunteered to enter, Shelby “recovers” in a hospital in Europe, and upon his return to the states is sent to a rehabilitation center, where he puts off as long as he can his eventual return to Richmond. Upon his arrival in Richmond, Shelby realizes that Thomas Wolfe was right—“You can’t go home again.”—and Wolfe hadn’t even been to war.

There are no heroes in this novel, only, as Moody has already said, choices between evils, or the lesser of two evils. The book’s title, of course, tells us early on there will be no heroes in this saga of WW II; The Trumpet will not only not blow for Tyree Shelby, it will not blow for any of the assorted characters of death and destruction. Such a rich and complex book has many themes, primary and secondary, but ultimately the book reflects a strength and a belief that despite everything encountered, there will be a tomorrow for humanity, and perhaps—we can at least hope so—a brighter tomorrow. At one point in the novel, Shelby’s friend, Sgt. Moody, who has witnessed all that Shelby has seen, expresses a basic optimism that denies at least some of the lingering horror created by many of the novel’s scenes:

‘You know,’ Moody said one day when he and Shelby were lying in the sun, ‘sometimes I get a crazy thought.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I think maybe the human race will survive in spite of everything.’

‘The sun feels good all right.’

‘That’s what I mean. Maybe there’s hope for a man who can enjoy the sun.’

‘I tell you what. Let’s not talk.’

‘I just want to ask you one question.’

‘All right. One question.’

‘You think we’ll survive in spite of everything?’

‘Today the sun feels pretty good.’

Moody’s comment anticipates, almost ironically, the prayerful belief of another victim of the horrors of the German concentration camp, the remarkable Anne Frank, writing in her diary a scant three weeks before she and her family were placed in a concentration camp where she died shortly before the end of WW II:

It’s twice as hard for us young ones to hold our ground and maintain our opinions, in a time when all ideals are being shattered and destroyed …

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart … I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

In the quarter of a century that has passed since the publication of Hoffman’s bleak first novel, the seed of hope, symbolized by the appreciation of the heavens, has taken root and its fruit can be seen in his later works.

In Hoffman’s eighth novel, The Land That Drank The Rain (1982), religious symbols, Biblical allusions and Christian themes of innocence, awareness, recognition and redemption characterize the entire novel, from its title and opening lines until its concluding “Christ-sacrifice” scene. Gary Davenport, writing in a recent issue of The Sewanee Review on the “tradition of Southern writing,” says of Hoffman’s Land:” … it is at once familiar and strange, real and unreal, temporal and timeless. In fact, although I hesitate to use a term so glibly applied nowadays to such a variety of situations, it is mythic.” (SR, Summer, ’83, 443) Initially the novel focuses on the attempt of its symbolically named protagonist, Claytor Carson, to rid himself of the sin, degradation and shame that had characterized his materialistic life in California. In an obviously symbolic journey to the East, Clay seeks salvation in an abandoned coal field in the mountains of Kentucky, where, in contact and conflict with a stream of minor characters, Clay undergoes the modern equivalent of the trials of Job.

For several days after his arrival Clay’s life becomes a process of purgation: he builds a small pyre to burn all connections with the past, his country club membership cards, his auto license and insurance papers, his credit and business cards, his wristwatch—any link to his shameful past. Determined to wrest a living from the land (Thoreau-like, as T. D. Young has pointed out), Clay “… worried that the land was so wounded nothing would grow.” But with the arrival of spring Clay’s hopes for a new start quickened: “He looked at the sun, and it appeared larger and a brighter yellow … He felt warmth settling around him.”

Thus far the images in Land have been suggestive and evocative, rather than direct. One recalls Fitzgerald’s description of “The Valley of Ashes” in Gatsby’s Long Island, or that of Eliot throughout much of The Wasteland. But Hoffman’s Claytor is still a long way from recovery and redemption, and it is here, early in the novel, that the reader meets one of the most unlikely means to grace and salvation found in any fictional world except possibly Flannery O’Connor’s. If ever an author has successfully created a character with whom the reader undergoes a constantly changing love-hate relationship, that character is Hoffman’s Vestil Skank, the illegitimate son of Renna Skank and any one of twenty-eight members of a high school football team. Vestil, in the hope of convincing Clay to finance his career and launch his professional debut as a song-writing, guitar-playing entertainer, watches Clay by night and day, hoping to discover some secret about Clay’s background that would give him the means of blackmail. When Clay, not wishing to have any relationship with anyone, repeatedly runs Vestil off and reports his illegal moonshine still to the local sheriff, Vestil seeks vengeance by assuming the role of Job’s tormentor. He sets fire to Clay’s cabin, uproots his garden, and uses a sledge hammer to knock down at night the newly mortared stones of a fence that Clay has set by day.

Vestil has long since been repudiated by his family, his mother who deserted him and his father who could never acknowledge him. Even his grandfather labels him “a child of sin … I believed I could sear evil from him with the hot power of Jehovah’s word, but he smelled out sin like a stallion sniffing mares.” And yet Vestil’s cries to escape the mountains before they overwhelm him become prayers that Clay ultimately responds to: “Oh God, I need to get out of these mountains before they bury me.” “Oh God, I got to get out. Jesus, ain’t anybody listening? I got to go.” It is this view of Ventil—“… so small and vulnerable on the river bank, folded, an embryo on its feet”—that prompts Clay to see Vestil in a new light, and to determine to help Vestil escape his fate. The view of Vestil that Claytor has at this moment is sudden, unexpected, almost visionary, like that of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner when he blesses the sea snakes unaware; or like the calm, peace and repose that come to Ivan Ilyich when, on his tormented death bed, he too, takes sudden pity on his child and wife, forgives them, and ceases the screaming that had gone on endlessly for three days and three nights.

If Vestil becomes the means to Clay’s eventual salvation, it is Hoffman himself who insists on the Biblical parallels one finds throughout the novel, but especially in the novel’s long and haunting climax. In Chapter 71, the longest and last, Clay, now dedicated to save Vestil in what could be a repudiation of Hawthorne’s unpardonable sin—the separation of the heart from the head—enters the town’s only hotel, the third floor of which serves as the local house of prostitution. He is ushered into room thirty-three, where he is greeted by “an oil painting of a naked white woman lying on red feathers.” From the moment that Clay enters Room 33 he is increasingly identified with the Christ figure, prepared to lay down his life to save his fellow man, even seemingly the least worthy. After Clay carries on a savage battle with the house’s protector, Coon, in attempting to give Vestil enough money to free him from bondage as a male prostitute, Coon finally corners Clay, and the white-faced Madame orders Coon to cut Clay with Coon’s omni-present knife:

‘Do it!’ she screamed.

‘Going to!’ Coon said.

A drop of powdery sweat fell from his chin onto Claytor’s face. Claytor wept, whimpered, and retched … Yet there was something else. The difference was that under all the riot of fear was a quietness, among all the terror a sureness … It found its way into his face, and he smiled—the bravest act of his life …

Coon made a double carving motion. Claytor heard cartilage being sawed and parting, heard it not from the outside through his ears but from inside along his bone, skin, throat and skull. A calmness and serenity flowed into him. He could have been dozing in the warmth of the summer sun.

Clay is then allowed to leave the hotel, to bear perpetually the scars of his Calvary. And Hoffman reminds the reader—as Clay makes his slow, painful journey to his home in the mountains—of Christ’s ascent:

Snow fell faster … Claytor swayed past mounds which were again clean … A tipple appeared virginal. He left drops of blood in the snow. Wind blew flakes that like wafers settled on cinders … His blood sprinkled snow, the stains sinking like red seeds. … Slowly he gathered his body to rise. He would climb to the house, clean himself, and meet them standing.

(245)

In this, the novel’s conclusion, Hoffman repeats the image that has become a motif throughout the novel: the reference to the wafer, a symbol of communion or union with God. Thus Clay’s spiritual odyssey ends, and like Billy Budd in the conclusion to Melville’s novel, Clay, too, ascends. Perhaps the clearest evidence of Hoffman’s intention in Land is found in the book’s title, the source of which is found in Hebrews 6: 1–9: “For the earth which drinketh in the rain that cometh off upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God.” The chapter ends recalling God’s promise to Abraham, “And so after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise.” Clay’s ascent, the time setting of the novel from late fall through winter to the promise of spring, and the allusions and parallels cited clearly combine to reveal Hoffman’s thematic intention: redemption and salvation are always possible, but they can come only after expiation, contrition, and sacrifice.

Hoffman’s ninth novel, Godfires (1985), returns to Hoffman’s present locale for its setting, and to the land and the people he knows so well. The novel unfolds in rural southside Virginia, in the region encompassing Farmville, Lynchburg, Richmond and points adjacent. Hoffman employs a highly unusual point of view for him, a radical departure from that employed in his other novels, one which allows him to present concurrent plots running throughout Godfires: one traces the murder of one of Tobaccoton’s most prominent citizens, Vincent Fallen Farr; the second explores a gothic inner world of mystery, spiritualism, kinky sex, hypocritical religion, guilt, expiation and redemption. Tobaccoton is described by its protagonist, Billy Payne, as “… tick infested, chigger infested, but most of all … religion infested. If religion were oak trees, we would’ve been living in a primeval forest instead of a thirsting land where the red soil of fields flowed into the sun’s glare like rivers of dust.”

Godfires is a double ‘who-dun’it’: who murdered Vincent Fallen Farr and why, and who is the Master who keeps the narrator in chains for three-fourths of the novel, teaching him about God, sin, and salvation. The novel opens with a scene that can readily be seen in any one of the seemingly endless horror and sci-fi flicks that are the “in” movies of the 80’s: Billy Payne, the narrator-protagonist, is lying “belly-down … my chain clanking as I shift to gaze out the crooked doorway of the cabin toward motionless briers, tangled kudzu, and drooping swamp weed blooming yellow. I await the precise tread of the master.” Hoffman then plays with the reader for over 200 pages, describing “the Master” as an erect military figure who wears a Smith & Wesson.38 police special and a sheath knife “used to skin out deer.”

There are many characters who play minor roles in Godfires: Florene Epes, Billy’s secretary; Harrison Adams, a former silent business partner of Farr, who, not long before the discovery of Vin’s body, had fought with Vin over a business venture gone sour; Doc Robinette, the small town family physician and county medical examiner; Billy’s father, an alcoholic so bent on reforming Billy that he pours vinegar into Billy’s carefully hidden bourbon; Sheriff Burton Pickney, one of Hoffman’s finest portraits, a description of whom also conveys Hoffman’s skill in using imagery:

The sheriff sat at his oak desk, a man whose flesh was so loose it seemed the only thing holding him together was his rumpled tan uniform. Unbutton his shirt or drop his pants and he would’ve flowed across the floor like lard melting in a skillet. He moved no more than he had to, and when he had to, it was with a slow, rolling gait, as if he perpetually paced the deck of a pitching ship and needed to compensate for rough weather.

And finally there is Rhea, Vin’s wife, now widow, a beautiful woman and a complex woman haunted by ancestral pride always present in the massive portrait of her mother that hangs in the living room of the Farr mansion; Rhea, who tells Billy that after the marriage with Vin had begun to sour “… I read a lot, even did a little private drinking, nothing like Vin’s, yet I’d sit in the quietness of the parlor sipping whiskey and looking at my mother’s portrait, trying to draw courage from her.” Rhea, cursed by the family pride she wore so proudly laments, “I considered leaving him. I went to a Richmond lawyer, yet couldn’t go through with divorce because my mother would never have. I am a Dillion woman. We won by lasting.”

The characters in turn force us to focus on Hoffman’s real concerns: the power of religion, even hypocritical religion; and the need for expiation to achieve redemption on the part of the individual. While Godfires is not a satirical novel, there is certainly much satire in it, almost always directed against “the religious nuts” of Howell county, principally the members of “The Ministerial Alliance,” led by the Rev. Buster Bovin (read Bovine). In one instance Hoffman calls religion “the Howell County Disease,” and in another refers to Howell County as “a community of less than 3,000 people supporting 23 churches, one for every 130.4 human beings … Two men could stop to light a cigarette or spit and a church would spring up.” Everything in Howell County is touched by, tainted by, religion: the bank “still loaned money as if dollars were serious and solemn as communion.” Even Rhea, with whom Billy has obviously been in love all of his life, does not escape the disease: “… she has gone too far. She burns with God fire … I do not like her eyes. They are fanatical beyond what I have ever seen there before. Lavender flames they are.” (333)

Ultimately, however, Godfires is a novel of forgiveness, and of reconciliation, and of love. In the final analysis, Hoffman seems to say, all we have is love: the love of a Father for His Son, of a wife for her husband, of a friend for a friend, of a son for his father, of a man for his ideal. When all else is shorn away, stripped from us, leaving us naked and afraid, the redemptive power of love appears, to clothe our nakedness, cover our shame, purge our guilt. What Billy Payne agonizingly and painfully discovers step-by-slow-step is that no man need be an island, that we all need one another, that love covers the proverbial multitude of sins. Although Billy and his father find solace in the bottle throughout the novel, ultimately they find courage, and comfort, and strength, and forgiveness and love in each other.

If the novels of William Hoffman by themselves have not earned for William Hoffman a permanent place in the twentieth century canon of American Literature, then surely the novels combined with his short stories should more than carve out for him a place of distinction. In the past twelve months two of Hoffman’s stories have been awarded the best-story-of-the-year-designation, first by the Virginia Quarterly Review for “Sweet Armageddon” (initially published in the Summer, 1988 issue) and in October of 1989 by The Sewanee Review (its distinguished “Andrew Lytle” Prize) for the short story “Dancer.”

The marvelous discovery that one makes in reading through By Land, By Sea, Hoffman’s most recent short story collection, is that there’s something for everyone, from stories dealing with age-old questions of faith and belief, doubt and certainty, relationships and commitments to stories that can best be called “good old-fashioned love stories.” In each story the reader discovers people as real as his neighbors—indeed, family members, and subject matter and themes as compelling as any that great literature has to offer.

Of the twelve stories that comprise the collection eight take place in settings familiar to Hoffman’s readers: rural southside Virginia, Danville, Richmond, and towns and counties adjacent to these; four are set on or near water, and to Hoffman water is the sea: the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay. But regardless of the setting, the characters and the daily conflicts they confront are, as always, the essence of Hoffman’s fictional world, and the real world as well.

In “Fathers and Daughters” a wealthy lumberman worries that his daughter, well-educated, physically attractive, and “groomed” for William and Mary and high society beyond college will run off with one of the “rowdydowdies,” the epitome of the familiar “poor white trash” of southern fiction. In “Indian Gift” a dirt-poor but honest and hard-working farmer, trying to afford to send his son to the university at Charlottesville to give him a chance at a better life than he has had is a victim of the weather and a con man, Dip Cooley, who unloads a stolen tractor on the father and then disappears, leaving the farmer to face the authorities, and consequently losing his pride and dignity as well as the means to his livelihood. And in “Smoke” a young boy on the verge of manhood discovers the real meaning of courage when his sick and dying uncle makes the county bully back down during a life-and-death confrontation.

Hoffman also has a lot to say about growing old as well as growing up in these stories. In “Moon Lady” a soon-to-be forty year old “boy” discovers beauty and longing, mysticism and ritual in an old woman whose “lavender eyes were like wild, confederate violets that grew along the churchyard wall.” And in “Lover,” a plaintive hymn to youth and innocence, a sixty-four-year-old widower, who has forgotten what it is like to love and enjoy life, attempts to turn back time and re-enter an adolescent world. “I wake during the night thinking of her … her face stays in my mind, a shimmering seen through darkness.” And when Dave, the widower, arranges a meeting with Gail, the young girl, and invites her to his home, first for tennis and then for a house tour, he can no longer distinguish between the real and the unreal: “I must live it one last time—the youth and Helen, the hope, the promise of glory, the soaring. Gail struggles but finds I am indeed strong. She’ll no longer think of me as old.”

But as compelling and spell-binding as “Lover” is, it is not the strongest story of the several “love” stories in the collection; “Landfall”, “Altarpiece” and “Faces at the Window” all vie for this designation. To say much about “Landfall” is to reveal too much of this fine story’s emotional impact. Suffice it to say that ‘greater love hath no man than that of Chris for his dying wife, Belle.’ In “Altarpiece,” another story of a lonely widower, Peck, the protagonist, discovers life’s renewal with one of the least likely of society’s cast-offs, Jenny, a thrice-married and divorced dreamer. While initially Peck is drawn to her because they share “… great sadnesses: the fellowship of grief,” ultimately he reaches out to her, literally and figuratively, because of their mutual need and desire for communion and compassion.

The third of this trilogy, “Faces at the Window,” is perhaps the most positive of the three. Again Hoffman’s basic theme is one of renewal, this time between a still young and quite aristocratic Robenna and the recently widowed new minister in Tobaccoton, Dave Carson. While it is Dave’s preaching that initially attracts Robenna to him, it is his rugged masculinity that gradually brings her to accept the failure of her first marriage and to realize that life is not yet nearly over for her. After a brief courtship consisting largely of golf dates and afternoon teas, Robenna invites Dave to the annual “Fall Cotillion,” and in her home that night their love is consecrated.

There is, of course, a great deal more that could be said of the individual stories in this collection, of Hoffman’s lyrical imagery, of his sensitive ear for dialect, of his sympathy and compassion in presenting to his readers characters and shared moments that remain long after the story ends, but such a treatment will have to wait another time and another place.

What, then, is the place of William Hoffman in contemporary American Literature, and especially in Southern Literature, suggested by this brief sampling of his representative works? One can begin by claiming for him a range and a richness that few of his contemporaries possess: whether Hoffman is writing of the horrors of World War II or of the permanent scars inflicted by war both on its participants as well as on those who stand and wait, Hoffman’s words and images touch our raw nerves, and make us wince, blink, or cry. Probably one of his strongest assets as a writer is characterization—with many of his major character creations, Hoffman can make spiritually dead men come alive; additionally there are dozens if not scores of minor characters who remain long after one has put a particular novel aside. Third, there is Hoffman’s mastery of the comic element, that which separates man from the other animals to let us, as Burns said, ‘see ourselves as others see us,’ and at least to smile if not to laugh at the results. (When one thinks of humor in the writings of William Hoffman he recalls primarily three novels, and one particular scene, setting, or incident in each of the three; in A Death of Dreams it is contained in the chapel scene and the dining room scene of the Richmond hospital for the treatment of alcoholics; in A Walk to the River it is the motel scene where Jackson has taken Val and where their futile attempts to make love are interrupted repeatedly by the motel clerk, who, convinced they are not married, enters their room three times in the space of thirty minutes, each time sending the half-dressed Val scurrying to the bathroom; and in Yancey’s War perhaps Hoffman’s finest comic scene occurs early in the novel when Yancey, unfit for command but a Captain through brown-nose and bribery, manages to lose, during War Games, an entire company of 150 men for seventy-two hours.) Fourth, there is Hoffman’s style and language, the ability to convey with a phrase, a sentence, or a metaphor a wealth of meaning and expression, much as a great actor or dancer can do with a single gesture, shrug, or movement. And finally there are Hoffman’s themes, and his subjects that in the course of a novel become themes: honor, courage, love, self-sacrifice, war, the Darwinian theme of survival of the fittest, the Wolfe theme of You Can’t Go Home Again, the southern agrarian theme of the rape of the land, seen in many of Hoffman’s novels, especially A Place for My Head, The Dark Mountains, and The Land that Drank The Rain.

The final word in an essay such as this belongs to Hoffman himself. If William Hoffman were asked to add a word or two about his own spiritual odyssey over these past thirty years, from The Trumpet Unblown of 1955 to Godfires of 1985, he might say along with Billy Payne, the protagonist of Godfires: “I’ve come to admire man’s search for God. It’s noble and heroic, and to be contemptuous of religion is to be contemptuous of all that’s best in man’s history and achievement.” In many ways William Hoffman’s novels comprise such an odyssey, one man’s spiritual quest for God in an ever-increasingly God-less world.