Books: Prize Novel

HONEY IN THE HORN—H. L. Davis— Harper ($2.50).

Shortly before the turn of the century, the last frontiersmen surged through the plains and valleys of Oregon in a vast tidal movement without precedent in U. S. history. Cities and railroads were built before the Indians had been pacified; industrialization was developed before the country was fully explored; the passage of history that in other sections of the West was spread over generations was here compressed into little more than a decade. Last week Harold L. Davis won the seventh $7,500 Harper Prize Novel Contest with a story laid in this period of Oregon history.

A long (380 pages), slow-moving tale, Honey in the Horn is distinguished for its easy humor, for its wealth of authentic local color wrapped around a slight and artificial plot. Clay Calvert, Oregon orphan, was herding sheep for Uncle Preston Shiveley when Wade Shiveley, one of Uncle Preston’s worthless sons, was jailed for having murdered and robbed a gambler. Uncle Preston did not want to be bothered any longer with an offspring who had caused him only misery, persuaded Clay to slip Wade a defective pistol, on the assumption that Wade would try to escape with it and be killed. Clay was about 16, a resourceful boy with a “mean-spoken sassiness that kept people from being pleasant to him even when they wanted to.” He risked his neck to get the pistol to Wade, who, instead of being killed, bluffed his way out of jail. Thereupon Clay took to the woods for having aided a jailbreak.

Clay wandered from the mountains to the hop fields, from the wild coast on the west to the parched lands on the east, dodging sheriffs, thinking they were after him even when they wanted someone else. His Oregon wanderings were so extensive that Honey in the Horn sometimes reads less like a novel than like a travel book. A six-fingered Indian boy, also one of Uncle Preston’s wards, befriended Clay, hid with him. Then Clay fell in love with Luce, tall, fair-skinned daughter of a wandering horse-trader, rode away with the horse-trader’s outfit.

Clay, still dodging the police, found his love affair troubled. He and Luce picked hops together, quarreled, outwitted mean-spirited settlers, camped together in a cabin on the desolate coast. Clay lied about the circumstances that had made him a fugitive; Luce would not disclose some dark secret that burdened her life. When the settlers left the coast to trek inland again. Wade Shiveley bobbed up in the wagon train. Clay killed another boy while trying to kill Wade, then accused Wade of the killing. Almost exposed, he assisted at Wade’s lynching. Luce had a miscarriage. Leaving her with her horse-trading father. Clay rode on alone. He saw a countryside that had been opened to settlers dry up and drive them out; he worked in the wheat fields and on a Columbia River steamboat, met the six-fingered Indian friend of his boyhood just before the Indian was murdered. Deciding that Luce’s father had killed the Indian. Clay set out in search of him, met Luce again, learned that, for reasons he found understandable, she had killed not only the Indian boy but the gambler years before—the gambler for whose death mean but innocent Wade Shiveley had been imprisoned, harried in the mountains, and finally lynched.

The Author. Born in Yoncalla, Ore., in 1896, Harold L. Davis at 9 started to work as a typesetter for a country newspaper. At 10 he herded sheep, at 11 punched cattle, drove a derrick-team for a haying-crew, herded sheep again, again set type for a country newspaper. At 21, he edited and printed the Antelope Herald, expecting to be enriched by a land rush, abandoned the paper when the land rush fizzled. He surveyed public lands, spent a few months in college, joined the Army for the War. Demobilized, he clerked in a bank and for a power & light company, wrote poetry which won Poetry Maga zine’s Levinson Prize in 1919. In 1932 he was awarded a Guggenheim exchange fellowship, went to Mexico, where Honey in the Horn was completed.

Author Davis’ wife was cutting his hair in the patio of their home at Cuautla. Mexico when he received word that he had won the $7,500 prize. “I felt stunned,” he reported, “and I felt foolish, and I knew that I must be looking queer. I noticed that the left side of my hair was cropped short and the right side was still long and brushy so I went in and asked my wife if she would mind finishing the job.”