Book Review from The New York Herald Tribune, 9/20/42
NO BRIGHTER GLORY
By Armstrong Sperry. . . .
429 pp. . . . New York: The
Macmillan Company. . . .
$2.75.
Reviewed by
MARY ROSS
Against a dramatic historical background, Mr. Sperry projects forthright romance.
The time is 1810, when the raw young Republic and England were tensing for war that
began two years later. The scene is the Manhattan which knew John Jacob Astor, dreaming
practically of his commercial empire, and Eliza Jumel, storming social citadels,
and also, by a far remove, the Sandwich Islands and the bleak wilderness of the Columbia
River. The protagonists are MArk Denny, a young doctor Vermont born and bred, and
India de Chambord, whose short life had encompassed the extremes of savagery and
sophistication in both the old World and the New.
Born in Haiti of the Bostonian mother and a French aristocrat, India as a child had
seen both her parents slaughtered in a slave uprising. One slave, Mam Zélie,
had remained loyal and had spirited the child away, eventually to France. When Mark
first saw her, moving down the stairs of the Jumel mansion "as if to the sound
of bugles," shewas dressed according to the fashion of Napoleon's Court, in
white, her dark hair swept high, her wallet and throat blazing with topazes which
had been the girt of the Empress Eugenie Paris in April, St. Cloud in May, Versailles
in June -- the court had always been gay. Nothing could have been more remote from
the hard life of a Vermont farm which was the heritage of Mark Denny.
India, who had never had a land really her own, had thought that she would find America
a great young country where every one would be kindly and she would be happy. Yet
she found too cold, too stifling, "this little island, this little city, this
little people." . . . Looking out with Mark at the stars on a wintry night,
she felt sure that to join her fate with his would meem [sic] disaster for them both.
A few days later she suddenly married the fearless and supercilious Captain Godfrey
Tennant, who was on leave from the British Navy to command a ship then secretly building
in a Boston shipyard to hunt down and destroy the vessel John Jacob Astor purpsed
to send to the Columbia River to secure the Northwest corner of his fur empire.
Thus it happened the following summer that India and Captain Tennant set sail in
the Saracen for the Pacific at about the time that Mark, endeavoring to turn his
back on disappointment, sailed as ship's doctor aboard Astor's Tonquin. When the
Tonquin, battered by nearly sex months at sea,anchored at Oahu for rest and water
and fresh food, the Saracen was already hidden away in another stretch of the coastline.
Captain Tennant had had to lay over until India's child was born. Maman Zélie
came for him when India lay near death, beyond the reach of even her strongest magic.
When word came to them both that Captain Tennant was dead of yellow fever, it was
on the Tonquin that India and the child proceeded, for it might be years before the
islands saw another American ship which might eventually carry her back to Boston.
On the ill-fated call at the Northwest ilderness, when John Jacob purposedfounding
his Astoria, the fate which India had sensed dimly overtook them. But not until they
had known the brighter glory for which the book is named. In India's words: "We
met here for the moment -- we love, we pass. There's no brighter glory than this.
It is God's hand on one's shoulder."
Mr. Sperry, who began his prfessional career as an artist, has an unusual gift for
conveying color and movement in the dramatic events of his story, especially in the
scenes at sea when the Tonquin hurled her two hundred ninety tons against the weight
of the waves, toward the end under the command of a mad skipper, and in the section
of the story dealing with the Sandwich Islands. The persons and actions of King Kamehameha
of Oahu and his three massive queens, as of the spare eerie Maman Zélie, an
African queen in own right, are convincingly exotic. So, too, once one gives the
romantic measure its due, is the lovely India, a woman without a country save that
which she found briefly in her own heart. "No Brighter Glory" is not a
tale for those who like their realities stern and grat and familiar. But if you wish
a book which will carry you miles away to strange places and people, through dangers
and feats of valor that are happily remote by more than a century, Mr. Sperry' swift
and substantial story offers good sailing.