It is good to see these stories made available between hard covers, but one would be mistaken to regard this small collection as a simple recycling of already-published work. The stories need to be read together, in the achronological sequence in which Styron has arranged them, if one is to experience their collective force. A Tidewater Morning is a small, carefully crafted volume of fiction that most closely resembles, in technique, such fictive sequences as Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and Hemingway's In Our Time. Styron has linked his stories together in ways obvious and subtle: this arrangement gives them a cumulative weight and thematic resonance that they would not possess if read separately.

All three of the stories are narrated by an autobiographical character named Paul Whitehurst. In "Shadrach" Paul is ten years old, in "A Tidewater Morning" he is thirteen, and in "Love Day" he is twenty. Styron might have arranged the stories in this straightforward chronological order, but he seems to have recognized that he could make his structure more dramatic and throw his themes more sharply into relief were he to take "Love Day," the last story chronologically in Paul's life, and place it first in the volume.

He has made a second change as well. "Love Day," in its original Esquire text, describes Paul as a young Marine Corps officer participating in a feigned assault on Okinawa toward the end of World War II. Paul meditates in the story about the nearness of death and the incomprehensibility of war; and, toward the end of the story, he witnesses a frighteningly swift kamikaze attack on a destroyer only a quarter of a mile away from his own ship.

When Styron took "Love Day" from Esquire and placed it in the leading position in A Tidewater Morning, however, he removed the kamikaze attack and ended the story ambiguously, at an earlier point, with Paul brooding about his fate and attempting to convince himself that he is where he wants to be. "You love the Marine Corps, it's a terrific war," he says to himself. "You love the Marine Corps, it's a terrific war . . ." With these strokes of rearrangement and revision, Styron turned "Love Day" into a prelude for the two stories that now follow it in the volume. In these two stories he shows us how Paul did come to be standing on the deck of that troop ship on that particular day in 1945.

"Shadrach," the second narrative in the collection, leads into the final story in a similar fashion. Vernon Dabney, a down-at-the-heels aristocrat living on the remnants of his ancestral demesne in Tidewater Virginia in the mid-1930s, muses on the death of an ancient black retainer who has hobbled all the way north from Alabama to die on the plantation on which he was born a slave almost one hundred years earlier. Dabney is not much impressed. "When you're dead nobody knows the difference," he says. "Death ain't much." "A Tidewater Morning," which follows immediately, shows that Dabney is mistaken. This story, which is closely autobiographical, tells of the cruelly painful death of Paul's mother in the hot Tidewater summer of 1938. The narrative, based on the death of Styron's own mother, is heartwrenching, and it must have cost Styron a great deal to write it.

The three stories in A Tidewater Morning are interconnected by many images and devices, some of which were present in the original Esquire versions but some of which were added or highlighted in revision. One discerns linked pairs of characters—old and young, black and white. One discovers repetitions that tie the tales together—odors, insects, flowers, large families, working-class people, negroes, profanity, FDR, southern food, movie stars, and commercial products of the 1930s and 40s. One sees other links as well, though they are understated: a white child who is holding the hand of an older negro, the presence of fireflies and honeysuckle, the stifling heat of the Tidewater region, the constant thirst of the characters.

The strongest cords binding these stories together are thematic. Styron is working through familiar territory for him, contemplating the fearful mysteries of grief, remorse, memory, guilt, race, rebellion, warfare, and death. The dominant theme of the related stories is that these features of human existence can be brought under control and made bearable by the power of art. At crucial points in all three of these narratives, Paul retreats into his unconscious mind, lifts himself above his doubt or pain, and fashions and imaginative rendering of the moment. This, Styron seems to be telling us, is the only way finally to address some of the almost intolerable ambiguities and injustices of our time.