Books: Living Woman

KIT BRANDON—Sherwood Anderson— Scribner ($2.50).

When Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio in 1919 he laid the boundaries of an imaginative world that has occupied him ever since. It is a world such as no other U. S. novelist has presented, a world of small towns and cities that are quiet on the surface, inwardly seething with inarticulate poetic restlessness. Its inhabitants usually seem plausible and matter-of-fact at first acquaintance, but they brood, talk to themselves, take long walks at night, sometimes shout out incoherent poetry, have a tendency to leave wives, homes, business. Naïve, unpredictable, constantly bemused by the world around them, they have nevertheless possessed a homely reality, emerged as far more life-like U. S. types than the creations of more conventional novelists. Last week, in a novel that is in some respects the most unusual he has written, Sherwood Anderson added the portrait of an active, wilful, adventurous girl to his gallery. Although it has its share of shadowy eccentrics—including one young fellow who wants to be a horse—it differs from Anderson’s previous works in its melodramatic fire & smoke, since it is a tale of moonshiners, murders, narrow escapes and successful crimes.

Kit Brandon is the wild daughter of a Virginia mountaineer. One of her earliest memories is of ringing a bell to warn her father at the still that the sheriff was coming for him. A tall, slender, dark-eyed girl, Kit runs away from home at 15, after her father reveals an unpaternal interest in her. She gets a job in a textile mill, learns fast. Kit is befriended by a hard, homely girl, feels humiliated by being called a “lint head” by the townspeople, is loved by a boy dying of tuberculosis. It is at this period of her life that she meets the young man who wants to be a horse. He has practiced until he can run on all fours and leap fences. As she watches him, Kit wonders if all men want to be horses. Sometimes Kit speaks to Author Anderson. “We howled,” Kit tells Author Anderson, “it was such a crazy idea.”

Marriage takes Kit out of the working class, lifts her into the family of a powerful bootlegger named Tom Halsey. Despising her husband, Halsey’s weak-kneed son, she breaks away from him as soon as she discovers that the comfort he provides cannot end her restlessness. She loves to drive, gets a job running liquor over the mountains. Once she drives her car into the car of Federal agents to prevent the capture of a valuable liquor stock. She becomes notorious as the girl rumrunner, dresses expensively, always carries a telegram saying her husband has been hurt to explain her speeding when she is stopped. She sees a young, romantic descendant of an old Virginia family made the instrument for killing one of Halsey’s enemies. She grows fond of a reckless college boy who runs liquor for the excitement until he is killed in a crash. But the strained, desperate life ends when Halsey turns against her, the gang breaks up. Halsey is killed by his son. Kit hides in the hills, where an easy-going Virginian befriends her. She decides to seek a less adventurous life.

With this spinal cord of a narrative to hold it together, Kit Brandon is less diffuse than Sherwood Anderson’s earlier novels, and Kit’s candid puzzlement lacks the somewhat forced naïveté that weakened Beyond Desire and Dark Laughter. Sometimes the author intrudes with speculations about machinery, forest conservation, unemployment, strikes, the TVA, but his interruptions are brief and often effective. “The reader should bear in mind,” he says simply, in describing Kit’s marriage, “that Kit Brandon was and is a real person, a living American woman. How much of her real story can be told? You sitting and reading this book have also a story, a history. How much of that could be told? How much do we writers dare let ourselves go in the making of portraits? How close can we keep to truth? How much do we dare try to be true historians? . . . And then, too, another danger, always the danger of the historian’s imagination also thrusting in. Who has not asked himself the question: ‘Do I know my own wife, my brother, father, son, friend?’ Moments of intense loneliness, known to all people.”