Books: Buried Evil

FIRE IN THE MORNING (275 pp.)—Elizabefh Spencer—Dodd, Mead ($3).

At first glance, Fire in the Morning is one more novel about little foxes—post-bellum Southern variety. Years back, old Daniel Armstrong (of the hardy and gallant Armstrongs) had been cheated out of a large inheritance of land by Simon Gerrard (of the grasping, industrious Gerrards). One family blights the land with its deceit and vulgarity; the other hopelessly defends the old code.

Blood had been spilled between the Armstrongs and Gerrards, and until Daniel Armstrong’s day there seemed no likelihood that the feud could end. Then Daniel, by an act of moral renunciation which was the measure of his strength, voluntarily abandoned both his claim to the land and his claim to revenge. To young Kinloch Armstrong this action is simple cowardice. He finds the ultimate proof of the Gerrards’ ‘original fraud. But then Kinloch, in his turn, is repulsed by the discovery that his own family has been involved in the death of an innocent man. He and his kin have sinned too.

No man, Miss Spencer implies, can fully extricate himself from the evil of the heart which winds through the lives of generations; no man can remove the burden of his ancestors from his back. Only a frank recognition of one’s involvement in evil can bring any sort of relief from it or triumph over it.

Miss Spencer handles this theme with genuine skill. The things this young writer can do with the novel form are astonishing. But all too often she writes like a bright student mimicking the best models. She is especially irritating when she adopts the frenzied style of the sort of “woman novelist” who worries her subject and prose to death by merely vibrating portentously when she should be letting her narrative move along. If Elizabeth Spencer, a writer of large and natural talents, can find her own voice, she may develop into an important American novelist.