Books: Tellers of Tales

This week, in a grim, confusing world, U. S. publishers turned out some 40 new books of fiction—sizable harvest of a crop that will reach some 1,400 for the full year.

U. S. literature begins on courthouse steps, in general stores where men chaw, whittle and tell tales. With a fond ear for briarhopper speech the Tennessee Writers’ Project (WPA) gathered 25 well-chawed, well-whittled anecdotes from the Great Smokies to the levees in God Bless the Devil—(University of North Carolina Press; $2). Their themes are lady-killing fiddlers, horse races, knife duels, preachers, hunting dogs, log-cabin adultery, possums, milk snakes, the witch of Red River who chased brave Andy Jackson back to Nashville.

In The Ghostland (Lippincott; $2.50), Fred Rothermell looks in on similar folk in the Ozarks. The Fulton family of Brooklyn, N. Y. arrives in the drought country to inherit a farm about the time John Steinbeck’s Joad family (The Grapes of Wrath) leaves for California. Rothermell’s prose is less artificial than Steinbeck’s, his Ozark dialect more difficult than that of WPA’s Tennesseans. Sample: “I done lak seed a sicknun woming a widdur nur no bline gurl withouten no pappy, but shore ez youah name ez Hogner I makun yourn short a pappy, so help me Gawd!” Young Ned Fulton recounts the impact of drought on his father, his sisters, his starving neighbors in their little grey houses. Love interest is Ned’s tenderness for Milldy, a mute Ozark urchin. After a raid on the general store, in which Pop Fulton is shot, angry Ned leads the gaunt, drought-mad farmers to the county seat for a sit-down demonstration demanding Federal relief. Upshot is a wild battle between “Red”-fearing townsfolk and desperate rustics. Dozens of both are killed when a building collapses, leaving Ned in a hospital to wonder if sister Wilhelmina will carry on, readers to wonder whether Author Rothermell’s gory climax is not too convenient an ending.

Another U. S. folk group, the Italian-Americans, preoccupies John Fante, author of Wait Until Spring, Bandini in Dago Red (Viking; $2.50). It is perhaps 1940’s best book of short stories: the sort many people wish that William Saroyan, with a grip on himself at last, would write. With the emotional richness of his race and his Church, Fante writes mostly of his childhood—First Communion, baseball ambitions, parochial schools, his volatile father, long-suffering mother—always an easier trick than to write well of the adult world. But his best tale, “A Wife for Dino Rossi,” is grown-up stuff, sad, funny, brutal, tender.

Like the sectional tale, the picaresque novel is a natural form for a nation 3,000 miles wide, as it is for the writer who 1) wants to assemble incidents without pretext of a plot, 2) feels vague cosmic significances in man’s wanderings. This week two picaresque stories are mirror images of each other. In Transit U. S. A. (Stokes; $2.50) Author W. L. River leads simple-minded Curly Martin from California through Arizona deserts, a Missouri road gang, Chicago’s skid road, Ohio industrial warfare to Manhattan in a vain search for the capitalist who unwittingly ruined Curly ‘s business. Martin Flavin’s Mr. Littlejohn (Harper; $2.50) is a simple-minded capitalist who drifts from Manhattan to California in search of Truth. Like Curly Martin’s his simpleness is more absurd than lovable, his roadside adventures magnificently uninspired.

But the gusto and wit of the true picaresque fill Clyde Brion Davis’ recent Sullivan (Farrar & Rinehart; $2.50), though it is less original than his The Anointed (1937). Gilbert Sullivan (whose middle name was not “&”) leaves Chicago to wander through Texas, Mexico, California with a rogue who gathers funds for a monument to the “martyred” Judas Iscariot. Sullivan’s obsession is that he can float through the air by expanding his body cells. On an eerie Pacific beach he makes a brief will-powered flight, dismisses his talent for political reasons.

Good example of taleteller’s detachment is The Stone of Chastity (Little, Brown; $2.50), a bit of delicate bawdry in a warless, now almost mythical England, written by a Malta-born curlylocks named Margery Sharp, author of The Nutmeg Tree. Professor Isaac Pounce disrupts the village of Gillenham by uncovering a legendary steppingstone from which unchaste lassies, unfaithful wives invariably slip into the brook.* Miss Carmen “Smith,” the artists’ model, slipped of course; but nobody expected that the stone would reveal the professor’s mild nephew, Nicholas, to be a bastard—or that Nicholas would rejoice at the news.

There is no such unreal detachment in another English tale, Landfall (Morrow, $2.50) by Nevil Shute (real name: Nevil Shute Norway). Five months before World War II began, Shute’s novel, Ordeal, depicted its coming horrors with remarkable power and prescience. Onetime dirigible builder and airplane manufacturer, Shute is now working at the Admiralty, wrote Landfall in his spare time. It is the story of an R. A. F. pilot on the Channel patrol who sinks a submarine, falls in love with a barmaid. The Navy thinks the submarine was British; Mona, her ears open behind the bar, sets out to prove otherwise. Far as possible from a languid Tennessee whittlers’ bench are Author Shute and his material, but somehow even in embattled London men go on telling stories.

*Cornell, Duke, Wisconsin, other U. S. colleges attach similar legends to campus statues which are said to move whenever a pure maid walks by. Under like conditions the lions in front of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue are said to roar, have, according to Author Sharp’s appendix, “so far [been] observed only to yawn.”