Books: Kentucky Home-Coming

BLACK Is MY TRUELOVE’S HAIR—Elizabeth MadoxRoberts—Viking ($2.50).

Blind alleys are familiar streets in literary biographies. Writers seem to lose their way just when they ought to be going strong—as Melville, after writing Moby Dick, turned out the weird, confused, unreadable Pierre. Sometimes writers escape quickly; sometimes, like Melville, they are gone for good. But when a writer begins to follow his genius up a blind alley, all that admirers can do is wait and hope they will return together.

That Elizabeth Madox Roberts was lost in one of these treacherous literary culs-de-sac became painfully clear to most critics three years ago, when she published her obscure, mystical novel, He Sent Forth a Raven. A difficult, humorless book, it had nothing of the earthiness and quiet backwoods simplicity that made her first novel, The Time of Man, a best-seller and a critic’s favorite. Instead of plain Kentucky hill folks, its characters were strange, unreal philosophers who explained at great length, in highly polished sentences, that they did not know what it was all about. It thus became that most embarrassing of literary performances— an extremely bad book by a distinguished writer—and critics, murmuring politely about Miss Roberts’ style, looked the other way.

This week, when she publishes Black Is My Truelove’s Hair, it is plain that Author Roberts has escaped from her blind alley in brilliant fashion. Her new novel reads like a folk tale of the Kentucky countryside, depends on no archaic trappings or high-flown language for its effect, takes place in a recognizable world of village gossip, youthful lovemaking, Kentucky feuds, with characters who are farmers, truck drivers, wise widows and runaway girls. The telephone and radio have reached Miss Roberts’ countryside but the people have not changed much: they are superstitious, religious, poetic, great musicians, ballad makers, storytellers. They are also high-spirited: 23-year-old Dena Janes runs away with a truck driver, leaves him when he threatens to kill her, lives in dread of a shot from ambush while she lives down her disgrace in her home town. Weakened by a few cloudy, symbolical passages, Black Is My Truelove’s Hair is nevertheless a lively story, and Dena Janes is a right pretty girl. But to her admirers the book’s biggest news is that Elizabeth Madox Roberts is out of her blind alley and safe again in her old Kentucky home.