Men From the South

I CAN LICK SEVEN--Robert Richards --Atlantic-Little, Brown ($2.50).

RIVER ROGUE -- Brainard Cheney --Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

For two decades the tough, subtle, sub-sinister landscape of the South has been a notable breeding and hunting ground for new writers. The hunting is still good. Neither Robert Richards, with a first novel, nor Brainard Cheney, with his second, is as imposing as Thomas Wolfe or William Faulkner. But both are exciting.

Robert Richards manages, remarkably, to say some new things about the Civil War and its aftermath, and to say them with as much irony as pity. Remarkably, too, he says them as tersely as a good pulp story. More important, he has a flair for realistic allegory.

Melancthon Fowinkle returned from the Civil War wishing it had never ended. It had cost him his right arm. But it had given him, a baldish intellectual, years of equality with his dumb, knightly brother Fairfax, who had died in the Southern apogee of courage, under Pickett at Gettysburg. Dealing death, and living with it constantly, was the most heartening experience Melancthon had ever known.

But the New South was too cruel for Melancthon. The New South deflowered him on his first night home, in the person of Gaberiel, stripling daughter of Overseer Haley Sanders, from the Arkansas bottomlands. The New South was a heartbroken half-wilderness in which dogs "had become as pagan as wolves, tearing down stock in the open field"; in which anarchic marauders of both races assaulted Mel-ancthon's home and had their heads blown off or were hanged in too-cold blood. The New South was the Confederate deserter, Haley Sanders, with a calm about killing which shocked war-hard Melancthon.

The New South was also Melancthon's riding with the Klan, or, retching, watching the castration of a Negro. It was Storekeeper Casper Fleming, who used Melancthon as a war-haloed decoy to swindle poor whites out of their land in a railroad hoax. It was his own conscience when, realizing the hoax and achingly needing money, he had to decide what to do. More dubiously, the New South was his brother's ice-hearted, erogenous widow Rachel, willing to back the hoax, eager to watch men die, dallying with a nincompoop Yankee officer whom Melancthon felt a need to kill in honorable duel.

The New South was, in sum, violence, cruelty, humiliation, poverty, despair, sorrow, murder, a confusion between self-interest and selfless patriotism, of which Author Richards can write like a blow between the eyes, and which sometimes he overdoes. If corpses dropped less often than ripe plums, in less tricky postures of amazement at death, and if fingers moved less automatically to triggers, this would have been a better novel. Even as it is, a queer cross between a Freudian dream and a Grand Guignol shocker, it is good enough to suggest that it will almost certainly sire a better. --

Brainard Cheney follows his Lightwood (TiME, Oct. 30, 1939) with a book which puts him high among the strictly regional novelists--a book so good (when it is) that its weaknesses are doubly deplorable. Through the career of Hero Rutliff ("Snake") Sutton, Cheney tells the history of raftsmanship along Georgia's Oconee and Altamaha Rivers, and describes the business of lumbering in Darien, on the Georgia coast, toward the end of the last century.

Snake Sutton is a hard-muscled, sensitive, moral dimwit who climbs, tooth & nail, from social dereliction (a childhood among swamp Negroes) to the throat-cutting peak of local business and society (a timber firm of his own, a blueblood marriage). Then he goes back again. On the way up, he has an affair with a bordello keeper (part real, part Hollywood) and a fascinating raftsman's apprenticeship to a gigantic veteran of the rivers. He is the center, also, of some superb fights, crooked and raw deals, and river adventures.

Brainard Cheney writes with the homely hardness of a grindstone. At his best he is a master at making detail, action and physical sensation palpable, and almost Homerically fresh. At his worst he is a pedestrian writer, capable of serious lapses of literary judgment, but enormously sensitive to a certain landscape and a certain people. If he ever wrestles a subject his size with grace as well as grit, he may make literary history.

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