Amen, Sinner

GOD IN THE STRAW PEN--John Fort--Dodd, Mead ($2).

Itinerant Methodist Preacher Isham Lowe sat his horse through the mountains of Tennessee, setting his course for the Georgia uplands. At his heels brooded Assistant John Semple. The time was 1830, the climate good for camp meetings. Preacher Lowe had been doing it for years; he had grown grey, unctuous, successfully stout in revivalism. Preacher Semple was young, thin, a little peaked; a poor mixer and not yet really saved; he sometimes found it hard to face crowds, hard to bear Preacher Lowe's booming optimism.

Ryall Springs, Ga., was ripe for salvation. Nothing had happened there for a long time; even the wicked women-chasers, cardplayers, boozers were bored, welcomed the prospect of a camp meeting. Everything went even better than Brother Lowe's cagey schedule had planned. People swarmed in from miles around, sat themselves in rows on square-hewed logs, shivered expectantly as they waited to get the jerks, the barks, the hysterical whoops-&-jingles. Brother Semple preached the opening sermon at nightfall, on The Death of a Sinner. He panicked the crowd, laid them in holy rolling rows. Aristocrat Lou Crawford, who had come curiously with her uncle, soon wished she hadn't. Mob hysteria laid her low, nearly scared her out of her skin. Up front in the ''straw pen" (an enclosure made safe for writhing revivalists by strewn straw) male & female sinners flopped in convulsions.

When Uncle Crawford tried to take his niece away Preacher Lowe tried to prevent him. Their argument impressed Brother Semple, brought him a real conviction of sin. He ran away into the darkness, wrestled with himself, decided to turn loose from glory-shouters. But conscience drove him back to confront Preacher Lowe and announce his defection. While Lowe forgivingly prayed for him Semple went away.

Author John Porter Fort has been in the U. S. most of his life (he was born in Mt. Airy, Ga., educated at the University of Georgia, Harvard Law School and the Sorbonne, lives in Chattanooga, Tenn.) but does not write the language very well. He makes short work of articles (a, an, the), turns many an otherwise inoffensive sentence into pidgin English, e. g.: ". . . her eyes made quick look up. . . ." "Here, being with people was great event." ". . . It was preposterous thing. . . ." But he writes with serious conviction, does not exaggerate nor satirize. John Fort's great-grandfather, unmoved by a camp meeting, fell from his horse on the way home, struck by conviction of sin. Says Fort: "I share his conviction of sin. The thunderous words still follow me as other thunderous and like words follow countless Americans as we ride into the darkness of unknown years. There is no complete escape from the ancestral mould."

God in the Straw Pen is the August choice of the Book League of America.

Old Comrade River

THE VOLGA FALLS TO THE CASPIAN SEA --Boris Pilnyak--Cosmopolitan ($2.50.)

The slap Theodore Dreiser gave Sinclair Lewis (TIME, March 30) resounded so loudly that people may have forgotten the guest of honor on that distressful evening. It was Russian Author Boris Pilnyak; the occasion was a dinner given by able Cosmopolitan Editor Ray Long to introduce his protege fresh from the wilderness of Russia. Editor Long is astute; Russians are still considered woolly but are no longer mistaken for wolves. If anyone has yet to be convinced that even Bolsheviks may be human beings he has only to read The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea.

In the background is the Five-Year Plan; in the foreground one of its (imaginary) ambitious projects: the harnessing of the rivers Oka and Moskva. Characters of the story are the people who cluster around the construction site: old Professor Poletika, whose life work is the reclamation of deserts; Engineer Laszlo, married to Poletika's former wife; Chief Engineer Sadykov, who has never had time to tell his wife he loves her, loses her to Laszlo; Sabotager Poltorak, whose illness is women, who has been bribed by English pounds to blow up the dam; dropsical old man Karpovich, who, when he got angry, "resembled a steamed beet instead of a turnip"; Madman Ozhogov, who is as near a hero as the book allows. The narrative returns on its course like a meandering stream, follows the eddies of each individual's story; but Pilnyak, engineer-like, controls the floodgates, never lets the levees break. Madman Ozhogov gets wind of the plot to blow up the dam but nobody will pay any attention to him. When Sadykov finds Laszlo has seduced his wife he makes him divorce his own wife and marry her. When she hangs herself the women workers strike in protest, want to lynch Laszlo. Because they are Russians, because they drink, philosophize, despair too much, the conspirators never blow up the dam; instead, they betray each other. The construction is eventually finished, the land flooded according to schedule; obstinate Madman Ozhogov dies willingly in his cellar.

The Author. Onetime president of the All-Russian Union of Authors, Boris Pilnyak (real name: Boris Andreyevich Vogau) lost his office, was ejected from the Union because some of his writings were considered counterrevolutionary. Reinstated as a Union member, he holds no important position. Last year he published (in Berlin) The Red Trees, a novel described as "a cry of despair against the Soviets." When the Soviet press attacked him Pilnyak apologized, offered to go to the "industrial front." Instead he went to the U. S., returns to Russia this week, promising to write his next book about the U. S.

Home-Grown Parnassian

This week Publisher Alfred A. Knopf is proud. Well he knows that the U. S., leading nation in bathrooms, does not lead the world in books. He knows that U. S. readers generally prefer magazines to books, that U. S. publishers issue fewer books proportionately than their European colleagues, that many a U. S.-published book is foreign-born. He realizes, too, that out of the 10,000 titles published annually in the U. S., few stand out as obviously Good Books, fewer still are homegrown. So this week, when Publisher Knopf issues Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock,* he is pleased and proud to be purveyor of what is sure to be acclaimed as a Good Book written by an obviously home-grown author.

Like its predecessor, that great & good seller Death Comes for the Archbishop, Shadows on the Rock is concerned with the American scene, colonial times. But Authoress Cather has moved from Spanish Southwest to French Northeast: the rock her story shadows is Quebec, at the turn of 1700. If you expect to encounter shades of Wolfe and Montcalm, of the storming of the Plains of Abraham, you will be disappointed; the story does not move that far (Quebec fell in 1759). There is not so much as an Indian fight and even the deeds of pioneering derring do are all messengered action. Explorers Daniel du Lhut, Robert Cavelier de la Salle are mentioned, but they are only names. Heroine of this quiet tale of a quiet time is a little girl, Cecile Auclair, and nothing happens to her except that she and her apothecary father do not return to France after all.

Papa Auclair, family apothecary to the Frontenacs in France, followed his patron to the New World when Frontenac was made Governor General of New France. In Quebec he lived as far as possible the quiet bourgeois life he had known at home. A philosopher, Papa Auclair believed in good manners, good cooking; well-behaved Cecile adored him, cooked beautifully. She liked Quebec and its people, made friends with many of them: courtly and disgruntled old Frontenac; grim old Bishop Laval; cross-eyed Blinker, ex-torturer from the King's prison at Rouen; Pierre Charron, coureur de bois; little Jacques, accidental son of a sleazy, sailor-loving woman; Father Hector, dilettante by nature, missionary by vocation. Once a year the boats from France came in, bringing letters and supplies from home; missionaries and trappers came from the wilderness with tall and terrible tales, but in Quebec itself nothing much happened except the change of seasons, the slow passage of time. Weary old Frontenac expected his King would recall him, let him die in France; the Auclairs were to accompany him home. But the King sent no summons. Death came for the Governor General in his draughty Canadian mansion; Papa Auclair resigned himself to Quebec, and Daughter Cecile married Trapper Pierre.

It does not sound very promising, perhaps. But Authoress Cather is better than her implicit word: if she does not hold you breathless, she never lets you nod. And when you have finished her unspectacular narrative you may be somewhat surprised to realize that you have been living human history. Willa Cather's Northeast passages are never purple. Captious critics might complain that she sometimes simplifies too far, that her people are sometimes so one-sided as to be simply silly, that she sometimes, for one who can write like an angel, gives a fair imitation of poor Poll: "When Pierre had made a landing and tied his boat, they went up the path to the smith's house, to find the family at dinner. They were warmly received and seated at the dinnertable. The smith had no son, but four little girls. After dinner Cecile went off into the fields with them to pick wild strawberries. She had never seen so many wild flowers before."

But quotation, often unjust, cannot do Willa Cather justice. Her manner of writing has little in common with her noisy day. Characterized by an English critic as "that rara avis, an autochthonous American author," she is most conveniently classified by negatives. Says the same critic: "The King Charles's head of psychoanalysis and experiment in genre does not keep continually turning up in her books as they do [sic] in those rather Mr. Dick-like compositions of Mr. Sherwood Anderson for instance." Unlike Sinclair Lewis, she does not bite her country's hand; unlike Edith Wharton (whose example influenced her early work) she casts no nostalgic backward glances toward Europe; unlike Ernest Hemingway, she carries no gnawing fox in her devoted bosom. Her simple, colloquial language obeys the canon of good prose (she rereads Pilgrim's Progress annually), and in that is unremarkable. But she has an individual quality, positive attributes which hide their light under a phrase or even a paragraph, but which shine through her pages like moonlight under water. When she was much younger (she is 54) she used to read Henry James and try to write "beautifully"; experience has rescued her writing from self-consciousness and quotation marks.

The Author. Willa Sibert Cather looks and talks like a kindly, sensible Middle-Western housewife, stout, low-heeled, good at marketing and mending. Her motherly hats are fluttered by no mercurial wings. A spinster, there is nothing old maidish about her comfortable appearance; only her keen blue eyes belie her look of somewhat stolid placidity. Though you would never guess it from her voice she comes from Virginia, but her father moved the family to a Nebraska ranch, near Red Cloud, when she was eight. Instead of going to school she rode her pony around the country, getting acquainted with her polyglot neighbors: Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Bohemians, Germans, French Canadians. "I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if they had told me so much more than they said--as if I had actually got inside another person's skin." She likes Nebraska: "It's a queer thing about the flat country--it takes hold of you, or it leaves you perfectly cold. A great many people find it dull and monotonous; they like a church steeple, an old mill, a waterfall, country all touched up and furnished, like a German Christmas card. I go everywhere, I admire all kinds of country. I tried to live in France. But when I strike the open plains, something happens. I'm home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea--it's the grand passion of my life. I tried for years to get over it. I've stopped trying. It's incurable." When she was living in France she used to haunt the wheat fields; once while she watched the harvesting she burst into homesick tears.

Willa Cather's two grandmothers, to whom she read aloud from English classics, and a storekeeping uncle who, an Oxford graduate, taught her Latin, were important aids to her education. Her first writing was for the Lincoln State Journal. After she was graduated from the University of Nebraska, Willa Cather went to Pittsburgh, became dramatic critic on the Leader. Then she tried teaching English at the Allegheny High School, wrote verse in off-hours, published a book of it (April Twilights) in 1903. Famed Editor Samuel Sidney McClure, to whom she sent her first stories, published them, gave her a job on McClure's Magazine; for four years she was managing editor. Critics paid her work attention almost from the start, but not till One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize for 1922 was she admitted into the popular Hall of Fame. With A Lost Lady (1923) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) Willa Cather settled comfortably into her niche. Last June she was respectably canonized by Princeton University, which broke its long Presbyterian tradition to make her its first female recipient of a degree.* Once a mere squatter, Willa Cather is now a taxpaying, permanently-located resident on the U. S. Parnassus.

Other books: The Troll Garden, The Bohemian Girl, Alexander's Bridge, 0 Pioneers! The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, Youth and the Bright Medusa, The Professor's House.

The Book-of-the-Month Club was lucky enough to get Shadows on the Rock as its August offering.

*SHADOWS ON THE ROCK--Willa Cather--Knopf ($2.50).

*WiIla Cather also has honorary degrees from Nebraska, Michigan, Columbia universities.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.