America & Lebanon

DRIVIN' WOMAN -- Elizabeth Pickett Chevalier--Macmlllan ($2.75).

TAP ROOTS -- James Street -- Dial ($2.75).

Both these period novels trick out huzzy-ish heroines and irresistible, blackguardly heroes in hoop skirts and heelstrapped pants. Both ballast the light fantastic course of love with a few tons of lore from the national past. Both are light heavyweights in length (593 and 652 pages, respectively). Both are fun to read. Drivin' Woman has already run to 150,000 copies (including the Literary Guild), brought its author $75,000 from M.G.M.

Drivin' Woman reads like an inspired high-school prize composition packed with cinematic moments. It revolves about a character who may turn out to be the most satisfying heroine since Scarlett O'Hara. America Moncure catches the womanly public coming & going: she is at once a Jezebel, a faithful wife, a W.C.T.U.-pledgee, a patrician, a pauper, a farmer, a mother of ingrate children sired by a worthless husband, a passionate creature, an unsatisfied creature, a high-grade businesswoman. Her hair is "glossy as a fresh-shucked chestnut," and even in old age her "crooked little smile" only adds to her good looks.

Sorrel Top. She is first seen in a Virginia mansion surrounded by pretty sisters and priceless antiques. The War between the States has just ended. A Yankee brute assaults America's sister, Palestine. America is forced to kill him with a two-foot corn knife. America flees other lady-chasing Yankees along a row of fruit trees. Later she flees lady-killing Fant Annable down a row of tobacco plants. Still later (because of the murdered rapist and to be near Fant) she flees to relatives in Mason County, Ky.

Fant calls her "sorrel top" but tells her frankly that he is "not the marrying kind." Nevertheless, when she wins a horse race for him, he can't resist. In mid-honeymoon in New Orleans, America learns the truth about him: Fant is a gambler and a dastard. For a while she supports him by selling off her trousseau to pleasure women (Fant is fit to die laughing). But Fant kills a fellow gambler, then dives off a sternwheeler. America returns to a Kentucky tobacco farm, gets to work supporting herself, surrounded by some of the richest Scottish, Irish, German and end-man brogues to be found outside vaudeville.

Now & then Fant turns up, a love-hungry fugitive, among the tobacco leaves. There are trysts like "that moonless July night, when Fant's whistle had wooed her out to the walnut grove." Two daughters are the result of these whistles. In their wake comes ostracism. For nobody on earth must know that hunted murderer Fant is still alive.

Later on, Fant's death restores America's good name. She still has her moments. She powders the webs of 100,000 Mississippi Bayou spiders with gold and silver dust for a treacherous daughter's highfalutin wedding. But the latter part of Drivin' Woman is an account of the bracing fight of the small tobacco farmers against the Trust. Descriptions of raising, grading, priming and selling tobacco result in a fragment of U.S. social-and-economic history so simple and sound that not even Mrs. Chevalier's panchromatic prose can make it much less.

Tap Roots is exciting as history and as a story. The little-known history it highlights is the rise and bloody fall of the Free State of Jones (novelized as Lebanon), a county in southeastern Mississippi which seceded from Mississippi soon after Mississippi seceded from the Union. Like many Southerners, most of Lebanon's inhabitants were mild but firm abolitionists. Lebanon's leaders despised Jefferson Davis, the big planters, the innumerable fire-eating lawyers, preachers, sword-rattlers and politicians who helped make secession and war inevitable.

It took a regiment of "the finest infantry that ever trod the earth . . . soldiers that Caesar or Napoleon would have given their right arms for, soldiers that Lincoln would have given both arms for" to wipe out Lebanon. The 500 Lebanese nearly wiped out the 2,500 Confederates first. Readers North and South may be startled by Author Street's account of the sordidness, trickery, confusion and coldheartedness with which the most romanced-about of wars began, and by the role which he assigns to that "Machiavelli in homespun," Abraham Lincoln, in touching it off.

The story of Tap Roots is startling in a different way. Morna Dabney was betrothed to Clay Maclvor, but when infantile paralysis withered her right leg, he made off with her sister Aven ("graceful as a waterfall"). Morna had to content herself, illicitly, with the "incredibly handsome" Keith Alexander, while the leg limbered up. Keith (in nonfiction the remarkable Alexander Keith McClung) was the bitter bastard son of a great man in Washington. Keith shot 17 men for asking who. Author Street keeps his guesses to himself.

Another character is Indian Chieftain Tishomingo, a wizard with a bullwhip, who had spent his life trying to invent a Choctaw alphabet, and succeeded. Tishomingo has some of the fabulous charm which Fenimore Cooper gave his aborigines. And the last days and death of tough old Sam Dabney skirt the edge of really good romancing, only now & then breaking bounds to snatch a slice of ham.

But even James Street's ham is rich with cloves, hickory smoke and raw sugar. With Edison Marshall (Benjamin Blake, TIME. March 17, 1941), he is the most promising performer in his field since Margaret Mitchell got bored in an Atlanta hospital and decided to write a book.

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