DEVIL MAKE A THIRD. By Douglas Fields Bailey. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1948. Reviewed by EDWIN S. MILLS, JR. 

 MACHIAVELLI IN ALABAMA

 It's a refreshing experience, these days, to pick up a period novel— which also happens to be a first novel —and find in it both careful devotion to character and honest comment on American culture. It is even more refreshing when that comment is made so completely through character that one seems quite inseparable from the other. "Devil Make a Third" is all of these things, and—with allowances for the fact that it is a first go—perhaps more. For in Mr. Bailey's saga of the turn-of-the-century urbanization of an Alabama town, seen through the eyes of the man who virtually single-handed brought its growth about, there can be found some profound, unstated conjectures as to the nature of the lust for power in a man, its association with frontier America, and the brawny heritage of American enterprise. It is a creditable piece of work. 

  From the first to the closing page, Mr. Bailey's story never leaves the side of big, lusty, amiable Buck Bannon. Buck is very simply a strong man. With a massive, unsentimental (and/or immoral, depending on where you sit) thirst for domination, which Buck explains to himself as a desire to win anything he sets his mind to, he arrives as a rube farm boy of eighteen in the backwater Alabama town of Aven just a length ahead of the industrial revolution—in the form of a railroad spur. And when we leave him, about thirty years, two wives, and several million dollars later, he has become Aven. Colossus-like, he stands athwart it politically, financially, and (perhaps most peculiarly American of all his achievements) in property ownership.

 It is an odd and significant fact that although "Devil Make a Third" must be thus synopsized as the story of a man's climb to urban power, its author tells us little if anything about the specific means by which Buck Bannon achieves his Machiavellian ends. Rather than explain how, Mr. Bailey seems to prefer to investigate why. True, at first we do witness some of the seamy deeds Buck believed were necessary to achieve his ends: we see Buck as a usurous teen-age money-lender; we catch him in ruthless twenty-one-year-old villainies which are quite legal. But more and more, as the story progresses, Mr. Bailey unfolds his saga by selecting only intimate scenes in Buck's personal life. He avoids dramatizing the public scenes, and substitutes hearsay, reference, occasional soliloquies by Buck, and sporadic episodes in a pretentious "chorus" device for the scenes themselves. Instead of seeing Buck express his deep, insatiable hungers in public actions, we watch the effect of those action on his personal life. And from the succession of intimates personal scenes, we begin to draw conclusions of what the public scenes must have been. From a poker game, in which Buck quietly breaks the arm of a colleague caught dealing off the bottom of the deck, we can imagine two-score meetings between Buck and the ward bosses and politicians we never meet. From Buck's tough, implacable fight with his equally tough mother for control of the money he has amassed, we can project innumerable boardroom meetings with unintroduced Aven financiers. It is always in terms of character, rather than incident, that Mr. Bailey regards the lust for power. We concentrate on the fabric of a man and from the man measure the fabric of an era. This is a highly creditable approach to the task of writing a novel.  

Although Mr. Bailey seems to want to avoid editorialization as to Buck's merits and demerits as a social being, I'm afraid that the very absence of the seamier public scenes somewhat gilds his portrait. Buck fares a little too well in Mr. Bailey's hands. Many men who have performed major evils sincerely like to kiss babies and help the poor—and since we see Buck only intimately we witness only the baby-kissing and the Robin Hooding. The artist has flattered his model, and painted out the moles. To me this is a serious flaw; in losing some of its objectivity, the novel loses some of its not inconsiderable stature as American comment.