Air Conditioned South

FELICIANA -- Stark Young -- Scribner ($2.50). For cool summer fiction, few readers turn to the snarling, high-pressure, melodramatic novels of the new South. But the South that Stark Young has described in River House, So Red the Rose and other volumes is one of the coolest and sweetest tempered areas in U. S. letters, a gracious, rainless land in which the people all seem to be kin, where liquor and food are always excellent, and where oblique, unconsciously-poetic remarks can be plucked like ripe figs from the most casual conversation. Although the inhabitants of Stark Young's South seem to grow animated only when they discuss family history, they are distinguished by their even tempers and their love for their own quiet sections of the temperate zone. They may suffer like gentlefolk from post-Civil War melancholy but never from prickly heat.

A collection of sketches dealing largely with Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas scenes and characters, Feliciana offers few surprises to readers of So Red the Rose. Sitting in an old plantation house, the author broods over the career of a dead kinsman, Cousin Micajah, who loved the girl his brother loved and joined Fremont's expedition to California because "he did not wish to complicate things." In brief and amusing sketches, Stark Young reports his conversations with a good-natured Negro boy, Virgil, writes of old Eph of Texas, whose one idiosyncrasy, even as an old man, was to chase fire engines; of a Texas game warden who told him, during a long discussion of crime, chorus girls, Western cinemas and the use of cavalry in modern warfare, that in Prohibition days more game wardens than revenue agents were killed in the line of duty. Unlike So Red the Rose, which contained implicit and explicit criticisms of modern society, the tales in Feliciana are casual and fragmentary, contain only marginal sociological comment. Some times Stark Young seems little more than a leisurely collector of old Southern impressions, exhibiting dissociated bits of conversations, rare historical items, with the polite, after-dinner wit of one displaying trophies of a hunt. Always contrasting feverish urban affectations with the contented days and rich histories of small Southern and Western towns, he finds humor, common sense and human decency characteristic of the provincials. His portraits of them would carry more conviction if occasionally human sweat and hot temper broke the serenity of his air-conditioned South.

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