Self-conscious Hillbilly

MEN OF THE MOUNTAINS--Jesse Stuart --Duffon ($2.50).

Kentucky Hillbilly Jesse Stuart (Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, Trees of Heaven) is something of a Professional American. It shows in his tendency to machine-gun a page with overlabored dialect, and to indulge a special fondness for plants, farming terms and place names. It is an unlucky affectation for a young writer. But even if he never gets rid of it, Jesse Stuart has body and vigor enough to carry it off.

Nearly all of the 21 stories in Men of the Mountains are self-consciously rural, but nearly all are good. Some are simple drawls picked up around the place--a pig that sucked cows and escaped butchery for a vaudeville career, a 14-year courtship trustrated by moonshine, an unbeatable corn-hoer who had a mania for stealing brass. Others are extravagant part-inventions: a politician who uses both wings of a feud to win an election; a sad comedy about a one-eyed man whose girl two-timed him. Some of the best are merely rich descriptions of farm work masterful records of the quiet talk that runs over it. More ambitious is a poetic essay on graves, generations and the mountain heritage. Toward the end of the volume Hillbilly Stuart breaks into plain English and writes a story of two snakes which is the shortest, best piece in the collection.

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