Delta Doings

GREEN MARGINS--E. P. O'Donnell-- Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Last week about 50% of the 165,000 members of the Book-of-the-Month Club received, in addition to the regular October choice of the organization, a special "book dividend" in the form of a Bible. Designed to be read for its literary interest rather than as divine revelation, the Book-of-the-Month Club's Bible, edited by Ernest Sutherland Bates, proved to be a fat, well-printed volume with wide margins, connected narrative passages and texts arranged in prose and poetic sequences rather than in the traditional numbered chapters and verses of the King James version.

In addition to this surprise package of sacred literature, the profane reading of members was supplied with a heavy, repetitious, 499-page regional novel revolving around the dwellers of the Mississippi Delta country south of New Orleans. With a central character named Sister Kalavich, a proud, self-possessed girl who bore an illegitimate son, defied her neighbors, lived alone and achieved a life of harmony with nature, Green Margins contains almost all the essentials of a good novel except a narrative to hold it together or a clearly-defined purpose that would give its episodes significance. Pursued by hearty, headstrong Mitch Holt, who makes a good living smuggling Chinese into the U. S., Sister is captured by a poetic Northern hunter who ties up his boat at Grass Margin for the night. When she becomes pregnant the hunter wants to marry her. Sister is being forced into a shotgun wedding by her dying father and casual sweetheart when her intelligent, cultivated grandfather saves her by taking her across the river to his own camp. The grandfather, a backwoods philosopher who reads Shakespeare, carves wooden figures and talks "noble platitudes" to the girl, also cares for her during her pregnancy, gets a wealthy New Orleans doctor who is his friend to deliver the child, drives a lingering sense of shame and guilt from Sister's mind.

Introduced by her grandfather to the intellectual life, by the doctor's wife to sophisticated social and artistic worlds, Sister remains in the wilderness after her grandfather dies. The villagers make fun of her, her highbrow friends desert her, and she often goes hungry. Her girlhood sweetheart Mitch Holt serves a prison term in Atlanta, returns to the River, marries her, settles down. Infidelities, doubts, constant hardships mar their marriage, but Sister, pained more by Mitch's growing contentment than by his occasional wildness, dreads most of all her power to tame him, fights the tendency to do so in herself and the consequences of it in him.

Like many regional novels, Green Margins seems most authentic in its portraits of unspoiled backwoodsmen, most high-brow and overblown in its accounts of intellectuals, city dwellers, artists. Readers who can appreciate descriptions of Sister knitting nets, hunting ducks, learning to cook, are likely to be thrown off by the conversations of Rene, a painter who finds inspiration in the wild scenery of the Delta and in Sister's naturalness. Thus Rene makes love to the girl: "I am a virgin," he murmured low. "I have prowled the darkened avenues of the earth. I have talked by candlelight in barren attics. I have gnawed a crust under a bridge. I have trodden soundless carpets and looked on lovely whores without desire. Now it is the dreadfully gorgeous quagmire. . . . You! It is the end. . . . I have reached my beginning. . . . Does one meet an artist every day in the week?"

With characters ranging from the unreal to the conventional, and with a sequence of episodes undirected and confusing, Green Margins is most successful in picturing the sleepy, slow-moving panorama of marsh and river, the drowsy towns and dormant inhabitants. So powerfully does Author O'Donnell evoke the slumberous qualities in his scene that readers may often find their eyes closing softly, their breathing growing regular and even, the book slipping from their nerveless fingers.

The Author. Born in New Orleans 40 years ago, dark, bushy-haired Edwin Philip ("Pat") O'Donnell worked at some 33 jobs before he won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1935 and devoted all his time to writing. The son of a rail-road fireman, he has earned his living as a bootblack, newsboy, boxing instructor, boilermaker's helper, railroad clerk, bartender, information man in a railroad station. While working for Ford Motor Co. he guided Sherwood Anderson through the New Orleans plant, explained its operations so vividly that Anderson told him he ought to be a writer. O'Donnell's first short stories were published soon afterward. Married, the father of two children, O'Donnell spent $50 of the $1,000 Fellowship buying a one-room shack and an orange grove 90 miles down the Delta from New Orleans, stayed there until he completed Green Margins.

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