Books: Florida Scrub

GOLDEN APPLES -Marjorie Rinnan Rawlings-Scribner ($2.50).

Two years ago Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote a moving, nostalgic novel of the Florida scrub, South Moon Under, in which proud and good-natured backwoodsmen were pictured retreating more and more deeply into a wilderness that seemed as homey as a village street. Mrs. Rawlings’ second novel deals with the same region, but pictures along with the natives a queer group, composed of an English remittance man, a doctor and his son, a female orange grower, evidently intended to typify unhealthy sophistication. As in South Moon Under, the drawling natives, with their profound knowledge of the secret ways of the country, and their strange talk, filled with phrases like “right smart” and “hit’s a pity,” carry conviction. But Mrs. Rawlings’ educated folk are so plainly artificial figures that the story is often swamped in their moody philosophic talk and incomprehensible doings.

The rewarding passages in Golden Apples are those dealing with Luke and Allie Brinley, children of poor farmers who were left orphans when Luke was 14, Allie 10. Avoided by their neighbors, who felt guilty at deserting them but did not want to be burdened, Luke and Allie tried to farm, then ran off into the wilderness where they took over an abandoned house owned by an English family. Their independence, isolation, and desperate attempt to make the place habitable seem to promise that Golden Apples is to develop into one of those honest fantasies of man’s barehanded struggle with Nature, of which Robinson Crusoe is the masterpiece. But at this point Mrs. Rawlings introduces Richard Tordell, late of Tordell Manor, an embittered gentleman who fulfills all the requirements of the stage Englishman except that of dressing for dinner. With him she introduces a dull melodrama revolving around his affair with Allie, now grown to womanhood, Luke’s anger, a marriage and two convenient deaths which clear the way for the Englishman’s choosing a woman more suited to him and for his complete regeneration under the beneficent influence of the wilderness.