New York Explored

LISTEN FOR A LONESOME DRUM--by Carl Carmer--Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

In Stars Fell on Alabama, Carl Carmer wrote an engaging, popular book about a State that is rich in local color. Now Author Carmer has tried hard to distill the native glamor from a region where the conventional trappings of romance are not nearly so conspicuous as they are in the South. His new field is upper New York State, superficially a prosaic region of farms, sprawling industrial cities, narrow towns.

Author Carmer's approach to Northern New York is suggested by the romantic legend that gives his book its title. Sometimes dwellers there hear a sound of distant drumbeats. Are they made by the ghost of an English officer executed during the Revolution? Are they echoes of the death drums of the Senecas? In this fertile field of supernaturalism mystics, fanatics, founders of religious faiths and Utopian colonies have long bred in the Empire State's northern hills. Author Carmer says that the roar of the cities overwhelms the sound of the drum, which may be interpreted as meaning that modern industrialization is death to the sort of myths once powerfully alive in rural New York, of which elusive evidence still remains.

In the Genesee Valley, Author Carmer went to revival meetings where the hysterical confessions of repentant sinners ranged from the grotesque to the pathetic, where two little girls tormentedly admitted that under the excitement of the previous night's revival they had walked home with their boy friends and done things they should not have done. Before such contemporary and embarrassing evidence of the persistence of the religious moods that inspired Joseph Smith and John Humphrey Noyes, Author Carmer maintains an aloof compassion, avoiding sentimentality as well as the mockery which used to animate Critic Henry Mencken when he wrote about backwoods emotions. In Chautauqua, fountainhead of the adult education movement of 40 years ago, Author Carmer found much that was pleasant, picturesque, inane, a disproportion of old people, a general air of faded, genteel charm. In Lily Dale, centre for spiritualists, he spent the most fantastic day in his life going to seances, listening to spirit rappings, interviewing mediums.

He collected lumberjack stories, lived with State troopers, made friends with a professional rattlesnake hunter and caught a rattlesnake himself, interviewed two surviving Shakers in Mount Lebanon, lived in the famed Oneida Community, went to a cockfight near Syracuse, always tried to find, in the local customs, turns of speech, characteristics, meaningful survivals from the richly spiritual past. Even readers who feel that Author Carmer has mistaken the pulsebeat of his own psychic interests for distant drumbeats are likely to be impressed by this sympathetic account of oddments in his native State.

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