Books: Worlds of Childhood

A LONG Row TO HOE, by Billy C. Clark (233 pp.; Crowell; $4.50), at first seems to tug too unashamedly at the reader’s sympathies. In fact, this autobiographical sketch of a Kentucky boyhood is flecked by neither self-pity nor stuffiness, and its markings of American life are so authentic that a latter-day Mark Twain could reshape it without much trouble into a new Huckleberry Finn.

Billy Clark was born in 1928 near Catlettsburg, where the Big Sandy empties into the bigger Ohio. Father was a shoemaker and occasional fiddler, a fine man and poor provider who boasted that he had gone through the second grade. Mother washed other people’s clothes with bleeding hands, but would spend her money on fortunetellers, and believed in spirits. In Billy’s book, the four sisters are hardly seen or heard, but for the four boys the problem of life was simple: how to get enough to eat.

Billy’s methods made the conventional odd jobs of Horatio Alger heroes seem sissified. He hung around barrooms waiting for drunks to come out fighting and perhaps lose some money for him to pick up; he parched stolen corn, swam to the Ohio shore and pushed back watermelons, set trotlines for catfish and trapped muskrats for the local doctor, who was an abortionist and fur dealer on the side. For a while he had as partner a deaf ex-moonshiner who had done a stretch in the pen, and from him he got a recipe for making corn likker that is one of the highlights of the book.

A Long Row to Hoe makes no mawkish attempt to glorify poverty, but it is crammed with woods lore and river-rat doings that Billy might well have missed had his family been prosperous ; after all, few of the more sheltered boys got to know Mountain Mouse, the Hogarthian local whore. With a passionate hunger for education, Author Clark eventually made it to the University of Kentucky, is now a freelance writer. Far from trying to forget his boyhood miseries, he has dignified them through grit and awareness of the natural beauty around him.

THE PARATROOPER OF MECHANIC AVE NUE, by Lester Goran (246 pp.; Houghton Mifflin; $3.50), also tells of a tough childhood and of growing pains, but in fictional form and in a city world far removed from Billy Clark’s Kentucky.

The novel’s central character is Ike-o Hartwell, who was born in a toilet in a Pittsburgh slum called Sobaski’s Stair way. He grew up amid the neon glow of pawn shops and poolrooms on Mechanic Avenue, where the purple nights resounded to the clank and clatter of the street cars, the prancing polkas from Souick’s Social Hall, the plaintive hymns filtering from store-front churches. His huge, im mobile mother and most of his neighbors were Poles, and there were street fights with encroaching waves of Jews, Italians, Syrians and Negroes. Young Ike-o served an apprenticeship as sneak thief, pimp, and hanger-on of Catfish Gedunsky, a small-time politician, until the army drafted him before the start of the Korean war. Months later, he was out again on a dishonorable discharge, but dressed up as a paratrooper and Claiming a hero s wel come back on Mechanic Avenue.

In this excellent first novel, Pittsburgh-born Author Goran ranges familiarly through the yawning tenements and squalid streets of his slum, and even drops an unsentimental tear when bulldozers in the 1950s level it to a field of bricks in prep aration for the sterile rectangles of public housing. With the death of the slum, Goran makes an effort at redeeming his unsavory hero; it does not quite come off, compared to the snarling realism and cool, street-corner observation that shapes the rest of this story of Ike-o’s growing up. The raucous garbage heap of Sobaski’s Stairway has been scraped off like a scab by the welfare state, but in this novel its aroma of gamy decay still hangs heavy on the Pittsburgh air.