THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512120440
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
Pride can be a good thing. Ask a Marine. It can also, pushed beyond proportion, be something else again.
Ask Oedipus.
``Anything carried too far can become its opposite,'' observed Alf Mapp Jr., author, teacher and voracious reader.
His new book and first novel, Bed of Honor (Northwest Publishing, 624 pp., $22.95), is about the far side of nobility, marrying American history to Greek tragedy.
``This book shows what obsession can do,'' said the Portsmouth native and eminent scholar emeritus from Old Dominion University.
Stop right there. Yes, this epic tale of Tidewater, extending from 1870 to 1909, possesses big themes and historic sweep. But it is also a toboggan-ride read; don't forget that admiring reviewers have said of Mapp's seven fine nonfiction works that they move like Mickey Spillane.
The propelling first line of Bed of Honor is this:
``I saw Robert E. Lee.''
Who could possibly stop there? And, as it turns out, narrator and protagonist Thomas Trent also saw Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Theodore Roosevelt. The reader does, too - vividly.
Trent encounters Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's opalescent homestead. Listen to the language:
``I rode up the mountain when the green depths of the woods were enlivened at every turn by the white of dogwood and the pink of redbud. I caught my breath when the last turn revealed the red brick house looking as if it were a continuation of the mountain's own red clay, its low dome capping not only the man-made structure but the hill itself. From the yard I looked westward to successive blue-mountain ridges like giant waves of an illimitable ocean.
``Any man with the capacity would have to think grandly if he looked daily upon such a scene.''
Certainly Trent, the man who would become senator, did. Mapp has the supreme ability to infuse his character with a sense of historic significance. The author has also penned two volumes of Jeffersonian biography that achieved academic acclaim as well as the popular status of Book-of-the-Month Club selections.
So you may be sure Bed of Honor has action.
``I have tried to hint,'' said Mapp in his habitually eloquent understatement, ``there was a lot of injustice in every part of America.''
In fact, he and his hero rage in these pages against endemic racism.
And Mapp, the endowed-chair Louis I. Jaffe ODU professor, has also supplied quantifiable servings of sex and violence.
``I tried to encompass all aspects of life,'' he conceded.
Mapp hastened to add that readers would be prudent not to assume that the book is in any way autobiographical.
But it is all about ambition, which is at the center of Mapp's work. He has not only tackled such august subjects as Jefferson but Lee and his generals (in Frock Coats and Epaulets) and Alfred the Great (in The Great Dragon) as well. Bed of Honor attempts to display the political and financial landscape of late 19th and early 20th century America, as well as document details of not only local Hampton Roads turf but that of Washington, New York and New Orleans.
Like Trent, its central character, the volume itself attempts much and achieves much. Still you won't find Mapp ever making great claims for himself. Ask this winner of the Medal Comite Francais du Bicentenaire de l'Independence des Etats-Unis if he has accomplished in fact the acute clarity he has embraced in fiction, and Mapp will respond thus:
``I suppose my humanity is broad enough to embrace each character when I am writing about him or her, but I am aware that much empathy is more easily achieved in writing than amid the frictions of real life.''
Alf Mapp Jr. is an authentic local treasure gone national and international, and you can find him in person this week, signing copies of Bed of Honor or simply saying hello, at the following places:
Today, 2 to 5 p.m., Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum, No. 2 High St., Portsmouth (including a brief talk at 2).
Tuesday, noon to 2 p.m., Prince Books, 109 E. Main St., Norfolk (including a brief talk at noon).
Thursday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Old Dominion University Bookstore, Webb Center, ODU, Norfolk.
Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Pfeiffer's Books, 434 High St., Portsmouth.
Saturday, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., Turn the Page, 1701 Colley Ave., Norfolk. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Alf Mapp Jr.'s first novel, Bed of Honor, is about the far side of
nobility, marrying American history to Greek tragedy.
by CNB