Books: Bell’s Shackle

FISH ON THE STEEPLE—Ed Bell— Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50). In late years attentive observers have noted two contrasting literary movements developing in such centres of native culture as Knoxville, Sewanee, and the hills of Tennessee. Most widely publicized of these has been the new agrarian group led by Poets Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, who condemn modern industrialized society, advocate a social order based on small farms, celebrate the forlorn gallantry of the pre-Civil War South. Although they preach the urgent necessity of living close to the soil, these writers advance their views in forbiddingly highbrow essays, in metaphysical verse that seems closer in spirit to the work of T. S. Eliot than to the hillbilly ballads of their native region. Readers who assume that these intellectuals speak for all Tennessee are in danger of missing some of the most picturesque writing in current U. S. letters. Opposed to them is a younger set of mountain folk who possess much more enthusiasm, much more humor, much less book-learning. One member of this second group is Jesse Stuart, 28-year-old author of Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow, a volume of 703 colloquial sonnets characterizing the poet’s neighbors, sweethearts and kinsfolk. Another is Don West, six-foot radical poet released fortnight ago from the death cell in Pineville, Ky. jail where he had been held on a charge of criminal syndicalism. A third is Ed Bell, who last week published Fish on the Steeple, a rowdy, hilarious novel that captured the flavor of life in the small hill towns where all the males pack guns and where all strangers are automatically considered revenue agents. Born in Smithville, Tenn. in 1910, Ed Bell worked in a brickyard at 10, has since worked in a rock quarry, on a bridge construction crew, in a grocery store, as a janitor, plasterer, chicken farmer, newspaper reporter. Attending college briefly, he quitafter he had been suspended three times for his writings in the college paper. Tall, bushy-haired, expressing himself in the twanging speech of the hill country, he now lives in Murfreesboro, where he began his literary career by conducting a newspaper column for which he received no salary.

Fish on the Steeple is laid in a little town, 60 miles west of Nashville, that has 14 street lights, four churches, a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, a large number of local drug addicts, bootleggers, bad girls, small-town eccentrics. Every few years its inhabitants burn down part of the town for the insurance. Central character is Shackle Redmon, tall, 17-year-old, dirty-faced boy who worked in his father’s brickyard, occasionally got into knock-down fights with the old man, fell violently in love with the village heiress. Dorothy Hopper had been called “Pete” since girlhood. At 19 she was a sophisticated young lady who had been to Nashville, read the works of James Oliver Curwood. and belonged to the fashionable Campbellite Church. When Shackle learned that she painted her toe nails red, he thought: “She sho must be a hot rock!” But Pete ran around with “Pewee” Williams, who had his own car. On the front of Pewee’s car was a sign that read “Here Comes Pewee.” On the back was another reading “There Goes Pewee.” When Shackle was perplexed that such a sweet girl should consort with such an offensive man of the world, his friend philosophized: “It’s that auto at does it. They’ll raunch anything to git to ride round in a auto.” When Shackle took her away from Pewee, his troubles began. She teased him about his awkwardness when he kissed her, but when he asked her darkly how she knew so much, the blonde replied: “It just runs in our family.”

Suddenly their adolescent gropings became desperately serious. Shackle’s father was cheated out of his summer’s work by the church elders, was left with a great store of bricks he could not sell. At the same time Ma Hopper, who thought Shackle was not good enough for her daughter, separated them, and Shackle found his girl back in Pewee’s arms. He got an old shotgun and started to town to kill them all. Drunk with grief and fatigue, crying, Shackle stumbled along the road, talking to himself:

“It’s a fine day. Much oblige, Heavenly Father. The sun shines so pretty. The purtes thang. . . . Hush, son, you talkin like a fool. Hush now, son, old boy. . . . Pore old Capm man. Pore old hoppin and cussin rascal. Make bricks all summer. . . . And, Heavenly Father, who art up yonder, all we got now is bricks. Mom and Violet and Macon and Big Sister and me squattin in corners munchin a brick apiece. Not eem gravy or sweetenin either. . . . Hello, Tooter. How you? . . . Oh, kissin runs in our family. . . . Hello, Shackle. Hidy-do, good-lookin. How you? Oh, I’m all right, thank-you-mam. . . . Pete won’t care much. She’s kissed everbody they is aready . . . and I’ll stand there and watch them go down and they’ll die lookin up and bein afraid of me.”

Although, like most young novelists, Author Bell makes his long story work out a little too neatly, introduces more characters than the tale calls for, his small-town figures are a memorable crew. Students of Southern womanhood are likely to be amused at his portraits of dizzy and delightful girls who call everyone “Honey,” “Precious,” “Sugar,” who say “everthang” for “everything,” and who manage to combine religious devotion with moral standards baffling to any male. Climax of Fish on the Steeple comes when a big fire destroys part of the town, makes more work for Shackle’s father. Shackle, his murderous impulses stilled by love, learns that Pete will never marry him, since her folks have given her a car if she will go with someone else. But he also learns that poor Pete, who is “right sweet in her way,” starts remembering him whenever it rains hard, will sneak out of the house to find him, no matter whom she marries. There is no logic in her intermittent infidelity. It just runs in her family.