DATE: Sunday, November 23, 1997             TAG: 9711130667

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY BROOKS MILES BARNES

                                            LENGTH:   69 lines

AUTHOR WANDERS HISTORY IN PURSUIT OF HIS ROOTS

POWER IN THE BLOOD

Land, Memory, and a Southern Family

JOHN BENTLEY MAYS

HarperCollins. 286 pp. $24.

In 1990, John Bentley Mays, a middle-aged art critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, returned to his childhood home of Greenwood, La., to inter the remains and settle the estate of his Aunt Vandalia. To Mays' surprise, the papers, photographs and artifacts he discovered in his aunt's attic embarked him on ``a long season of remembering,'' a journey in pursuit of his ancestors across four centuries and thousands of miles of Southern history and landscape from Tidewater Virginia to the hills of East Texas. Power in the Blood is Mays' attempt to gain an understanding of the South and of his family's place in it.

Mays brought to his odyssey a set of unique attributes. He has a thorough grasp of the classics and of art history and a serviceable knowledge of Southern history. He is a Christian believer possessed of a firm sense of right and wrong, leavened by generosity of spirit. Finally, he has won a hard victory over mental illness. His conclusions are deeply considered, and his prose tightly controlled, even, at times, tense.

In developing his narrative, Mays ruminates, sometimes brilliantly, on topics as disparate as architecture, social mores, photography, German art and the penchant of elderly Southern ladies for genealogy. He strives to remain objective, to avoid both the ``smug contempt'' of the expatriate for his native land and ``the subtle elevation of the ancestors from ordinary people into paragons.''

Mays believes the Southern mind to be torn perpetually between, on the one hand, aristocratic predilections for classical stoicism, order, moderation and love of the homeplace and, on the other, redneck tendencies toward frontier individualism, restlessness, violence and bigotry. Mays, himself of gentry stock, clearly admires the classical virtues, but acknowledges that vestiges of the frontier cling even to the most cultured. He realizes also the terrible price that Southerners have paid for their characteristic pride and sentimentality.

When in 1861 a Mays ancestor helped propel the South into secession and civil war, ``he exposed whatever was decent, and whatever was of encouragement to the human spirit in the pastoral, anti-Modern version of the republic . . . to merciless reprisal (from the industrialized North) and the scorn from which it would never - could never - recover.''

The South about which Mays writes is white and patrician, and for this he is unapologetic. Indeed, he is refreshingly unobsessed by race. He recognizes that the agrarian life he so admires rested on a foundation of slavery but declines to indulge in the histrionics of white guilt. The Confederate flag, he suggests, is less a symbol of slavery (or, for that matter, of glory) than of death, destruction and irrevocable loss.

For Mays, the beauty and power of the South rest in its fast-fading veneration of land, blood and memory. The homeplace at Greenwood, he tells us, ``was a complex event, a situation . . . composed of dirt and architecture, rose gardens and chicken houses and the ruins of Uncle Alvin's rabbit hutches. But also involved was history - the memories and facts of lives lived, the sum of traces left those who dwelt there, all of them, enduring or fading or coming forward through time into living memory.''

``Tell me about the South,'' demands Canadian Shreve McCannon in the greatest of Southern novels, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). And from Canada comes a response: John Bentley Mays' eloquent, absorbing and moving Power in the Blood. MEMO: Brooks Miles Barnes has a doctorate in U.S. history from the

University of Virginia. He is a librarian on the Eastern Shore.

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