Kentucky Home Brew

HEAD O' W-HOLLOW--Jesse Stuart--Button ($2.50).

When homespun Kentucky Poet Jesse Stuart sat down and wrote a big stack of "sonnets ' (Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow --TIME, Oct. 15, 1934), a few critics sat up, called him a modern Bobbie Burns. Others just laughed at his unconscious, bull-tongued humor. Last week Poet Stuart made the scoffers scratch their heads over a book of stones that were partly funny, partly serious, in the main tantalizingly good. These tales of Kentucky farmers were written in racy Kentucky dialect, with a wild-eyed, straightforward outrageousness that reminded readers more than once of Erskine Caldwell, at times of the ingenuous slyness of Chekhov. Readers who liked to laugh with a clear conscience, however, were still puzzled by Author Stuart's refusal to make the most of his Munchausenish humor. But in spite of a preoccupation with death and burial that will seem to many a reader adolescently morbid, some of his yarns were well worth inclusion in any anthology-of-the-year. Some of them :

P: A "Forty-Gallon Baptis" gets a token he is going to die at 10 o'clock that night. He makes the event an occasion to prove to his benighted Free-Will neighbors the error of-their ways.

P: Uncle Casper, running for State Senator, hogties at least one vote by a series of amiably amazing yarns.

P: The founder of a new sect digs up his wife's grave, is bitten by a copperhead. His corpse is then arrested by the constable on the charge of "Public Indecency."

P: When T. J. Lester and Daisy Bee Redfern get married, the whole neighborhood turns up to "bell the bride." The jollifications end for once with no bones broken.

P: The shade of a murdered Indian returns to lift tables, answer questions by raps. Ben Sexton, a mean skeptic, tries to hold the spirit down by wrestling the table. He gets laid out good & proper.

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