Books: Teeftallow

The Story* jolts off down the clay ruts of Lane County, Tennessee — stretches of crowded, stumbling action; bursts of mulish power. Abner Teeftallow, a brawny illiterate of 18, leaves the poor-farm where his mother died insane, to labor as a teamster on a traction project of Lanesburg’s genius and potentate, Railroad Jones. From his fellow teamsters he learns the technique of hillbilly manhood— gulping moonshine, shooting craps Saturday nights in a wood, toting an automatic pistol for protection on “rambling” (courting) nights and for display at prayer-meetings. He reveres the four local gods— public opinion, money, wit and a glowering celestial Patriarch who, seeing all, likes little.

Over in Irontown (“Arntown”) where the teamsters are working, the villagers have their annual religious debauch — a revival. Following local custom, Abner and his mates engage female partners for the whole series of meetings. One night, during a lull in the hysteria, one Tug Beavers temporizes about going to the mourners’ bench. That same night he gets a backful of buckshot from Peck Bradley, a murderer out on bail. Religion picks up. Bloodhounds bay for three days and nights in the back hills and Bradley is brought in to jail, crusted with mud but full of bravado. Sharing his contempt for the law and seething with Old Testament, the community grows ominously quiet. Abner suggests a plan; feet tramp, a rope is knotted and what was Peck Bradley twists slowly in the air near his ambush.

The chief local henchmen of the Lord are Perry Northcutt, thin-lipped banker, and Roxie Biggers, merciless chariteer. Northcutt has it in for young Teeftallow, having failed to mulct him of some intricately inherited timberlands. So Abner learns more about humanity when he and Nessie Sutton come up for public judgment. Nessie is the milliner’s assistant— tall, honey-haired, pious, nourished on novels. She and Abner live in the same lodging house, where laws of proximity and physiology grope through a natural course. Roxie Biggers sees their farewell embrace when Abner’s work-gang moves away, and the blasting of Nessie’s fame is simply a matter of a few street conversations and telephone calls. Brother Northcutt turns out his masked inquisitors, and Nessie not being found, the bastinadoes of righteousness descend upon Abner when he returns to marry the girl. Nessie, seeking refuge under an express train, is rescued and married by the village infidel, Belshue the jeweler, a mournful, middle-aged creature, who was the chief object of her missionary work before her downfall.

The story stumbles and lurches back to Lanesburg. Matured by his flaying at Irontown and believed to be a man of property, Abner becomes involved in the operations of Railroad Jones. The latter, obese, unlettered but wily beyond compare, plays an elusive role, now angel, now devil, but always a hero for the ingenuity of his countless victories at law and his unrivaled wealth. Possessed of an astonishing “rickollection” and pioneer shrewdness, he harps on the folly of tainting man’s natural intelligence with education. He has a daughter, Adelaide, highly modernized by upstate schooling, with whom Abner’s fortunes are further involved. The complications pile up alarmingly until, puzzled by Railroad’s tactics, acquaintances cremate him alive in his office. Adelaide goes to India. Abner, poor again, goes to take care of Nessie and their baby, the worn-out Belshue having committed suicide at a chronologically proper moment.

The Significance. Here, exhibited with simple declarative irony much like that with which Author T. F. Powys has exposed the rotten boroughs of England, but without that writer’s bookmanship, are the hill and village folk that made possible in this land and century the preposterous “monkey trial” at Dayton, Tenn. Following no plot, pointing no moral, it is simply a contemporary pageant of ignorance masquerading as “smartness,” bigotry as uprightness, mob violence as morality, pleasure as the unpardonable sin, among isolated people whose surroundings seem to have become a spiritual wasteland, stunting and evaporating in them all but their physical vigor, malicious wit and crudest humanities. Scores of characters crowd the stage, each closely observed in real life’s unmistakable habiliments, from the principals clear down to Schallburger, the labor organizer, and Sim Pratt, slick soda-jerker. There are smashing scenes, but toward the end the cast gets completely out of hand.

Critics. Burton Rascoe. “Mr. Stribling will probably get the Pulitzer Prize he deserves for this book.”

Isabel Paterson: “. . . devastating. It is a book for the tough-minded.”

New York World: “Teeftallow is as important as Main Street. We venture the belief that it is better.

The Author. Among all the 96 counties of Tennessee there is no Lane County. But there is Wayne County in the south-central part, and there Thomas Sigismund Stribling was born in the reversible year of 1881. Preternaturally indolent and talkative, he successfully resisted his father’s efforts to make a storekeeper or lawyer out of him. He wrote incessantly. His failure to sell anything was just as incessant, until he caught the knack of turning out moral tales for a Sunday school magazine. These, turned off at the rate of seven a day, permitted him to live in New Orleans, Cuba, Europe, Philadelphia. About 1918 he sold a story to Adventure and at once went home to become a novelist, which he speedily and notably did with Birthright, Fombombo, Red Sand. He is a sociologist only by indirection, an artist by accident. He is humorous. He dislikes work. Sound physically, he writes in an invalid’s chair, between frequent naps.

*Teeftallow—T.S. Stribling&#151Doubleday. Page ($2).