Books: Literary Guerrilla

THE GARDEN OF ADONIS—Caroline Gordon—Scribner ($2.50).

Serving modestly on the general staff headed by her husband, Poet-Critic Allen Tate (see p. 81), Kentucky-born Caroline Gordon belongs to that well-educated guerrilla band of Southern regionalists who about a decade ago took up where the Confederate Army left off in its fight against the Yankee cultural and economic invasion. Chief sallies have consisted of nostalgic biographies, fiction and poetry celebrating the feudal charm of the Old South, collective manifestoes (I Take My Stand) advocating return to an agrarian economy, magazines (The Southern Review et al.) and poetry societies whose interests are about equally divided between the high brow and the horny hand. To this rebel activity Caroline Gordon has contributed a five-generation family chronicle (Penhally), a novel glorifying the unindustrialized purity of a sportsman (Aleck Maury: Sportsman), a recent Civil War novel (None Shall Look Back)—thus following the approved regionalist tactics of firing from the safely concealed ambush of the South’s past.

In The Garden of Adonis Author Gordon unexpectedly opens up at close contemporary range to kill off the Yankee opinion which attributes the evils of sharecropping to Southern landlords. That few casualties bite the dust is due chiefly to Guerrilla-Author Gordon’s scattering fire, in her overanxiety to wipe out the entire enemy at one try. A possible source of her anxious haste may be the fear of being shot in the back by such unreliable Southern allies as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell.

Narrative of The Garden of Adonis is as involved as the writing is simple, alternately shifting from a debt-ridden Kentucky tobacco planter to his white sharecroppers to his daughter Letty’s decadent Southern urban life. Still another shift centres more than a third of the story on a Yankee diaper heiress’ frustrated Southern husband, who has an affair with the tobacco planter’s daughter. To readers who may complain at the chaotic literary result of these shifts, Author Gordon’s story argues that it is nothing compared to the living chaos of Southern life since the invasion of the North.

Big, youthful, steady-going Ote Mortimer, glad to get back South after a Depression which landed him in a Detroit automobile factory, proves that a sharecropper can still raise a paying crop, can keep from degenerating, enjoy pleasant relations with his landlord and his girl—Depression, drought and Erskine Caldwell notwithstanding. It is only when his desperately squeezed landlord cannot pay him enough to settle down to a normal married life that his girl runs off with a bootlegger and he smashes in Landlord Allard’s head with a singletree.

If plantation life still offered its pre-Civil War social opportunities, pretty Letty Allard would never have sought diversion in the city, would not have fallen in with the fast country-club set where she met her unresisted married seducer, Jim Carter. And Jim, if he had lived in the Old South, would have been a sportsman instead of a frustrated adman and then manager of his Yankee father-in-law’s diaper factory. And particularly, in the Old South there would have been no Yankee manufacturer to corrupt the South’s younger generation with show-off social vulgarity.