FICTION: Heart & Flesh

MY HEART AND MY FLESH—Elizabeth Madox Roberts—Viking ($2.50). The Story. Theodosia Bell “was delicately modeled with strong slender limbs, swift in a game, quick-witted at play. Her red-brown hair hung in a ong braid or was twined braided about her head. Her fingers were small and thin, bent strangely about a fiddle, were quick among the fiddle strings, weighted with music.” She grew up in a Southern town, a town in which the strong rhythms of life were matched against a cold and dreadful rhythm of decay. There were three men who came to her house, listening to the dark music of her instrument, bringing with them some hot beauty from life. “Conway calling alone would talk of himself, sitting happily in the dim light of the parlor and enjoying his heightened self, his ease, his good looks, Theodosia’s beauty, all the delights of remembered being. . . . Albert would come heavily into the parlor although his feet were agile and his large frame was light to his motions. He filled the parlor with his seriousness. . . . Another,Frank Railey, would stop casually on his way up or down the street, or he would take her to row on the pool beyond the town.” But when Albert suddenly withdrew his challenge, releasing Theodosia for Florence Agnew, and when Conway Brooke was burned to death in a fire at night, Theodosia Bell began to hear the wild horns of disaster blowing more closely through the quietness. Among the papers of her grandfather she found letters saying that her father was the father also of two Negro girls and Stiggins, an idiot boy who lived over a stable in the town. Theodosia, drawn by a grim curiosity, spends long hours talking to them. On the night that Lethy, one of her half-sisters, kills the lover who has deserted her, Theodosia, seeing the parallel with her own experience, goes to the house made hateful to her by her father’s unforgotten lusts. Under this final strain of horror, her mind crumbles into delirium. When she recovers, Theodosia goes to the country to live with her aunt. Here another nightmare threatens her with black hands. Her aunt, in the narrow bitterness of old age, sustains her hatred of life upon meager leathery biscuits. The house is overun with savage dogs, the descendants of the hounds with which Theodosia’s uncle had once hunted across the wide fields. At last, drugged with horror, Theodosia goes into the back country to teach school. Hearing the small voices of children and the strong sounds of secure life, she begins to recover her poise. “She heard the noises of the night, the tree-frogs and crickets, the frogs at the wet place beyond the milk house. . .-. The leaves of the poplar tree lifted and turned swaying outward and all quivered together, holding the night coolness. . . .” The Significance. Essentially Author Roberts writes with the talent of a poet rather than of a novelist. Creating in a prose form, she sometimes goes far beyond the facts of her narrative into a poetic interpretation of their significance in her characters. Her feeling for heart and flesh is so complete, her understanding of it so thorough and so articulate, that her book, flourishing a rich and rhythmic language, seldom loses its acute power. The Author, a native of Kentucky whither her ancestors voyaged with Daniel Boone, graduated in 1921 from the University of Chicago, where she had shared the young literary enthusiasms of a clique which included Glenway Wescott (author of The Grandmothers, The Apple of the Eye). In 1922 after winning the Fisk Prize for poetry, she published her verses, Under the Tree, but not until she published a year ago The Time of Man, a novel dealing with the country people of the south, did critics realize her as an important and highly individual expert novice in U. S. letters.