Feverish Fascination

STRANGE FRUIT--Lillian Smith--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

At first some Atlanta bookstores refused to stock the book. Strange Fruit, they charged, was "dirty," its picture of the South was dated. By last week Atlanta booksellers, bug-eyed perhaps at the 22,000-copy first printing (and advance sales of almost 20,000) of Lillian Smith's first novel, had changed their minds, ordered heavily.*

Strange Fruit takes its title from a Negro song about a lynching, written by Lewis Allan and sung by Billie Holiday:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. . . ./-

Like a score of similar Southern novels, the book is a story of racial conflict in a small Southern town (called Maxwell, Ga.), in which the dramatic action is the love affair of a white man and a Negro girl, the climax is his murder by her brother, and the end is a lynching. The same story has been told & retold, expertly or awkwardly, with Freudian variations (as in the novels of T. S. Stribling), with Marxian overtones (as in proletarian novels). The main theme has been repeated in fiction almost as frequently as the lynchings that inspired it have occurred. It is a somewhat inhibiting theme, costly in that it imprisons literary imaginations that might otherwise be free to write of the rich and varied Southern life that is sufficiently exciting without it. But the story deals with a harrowing event, perhaps the most harrowing event in the social history of the United States and it has a melodramatic fascination for first novelists and their readers as feverish and unhealthy as the event they celebrate.

Heat, Sin and Revival. Strange Fruit tells of Nonnie Anderson, a tall, slender, black-eyed, gentle Negro girl who has been in love with Tracy Deen, the son of Maxwell's doctor, since she was six years old. Now, when he is home from the war, with his college career broken off, with his father urging him to become a doctor and his mother after him to join the church, their love affair has grown into a deeper companionship. He also likes to talk to her. Strange Fruit begins (and reaches its most moving passages) with Nonnie's discovery that she is pregnant and that she wants to bear Tracy's child. Miss Smith handles well the scenes in the Anderson household, their pride in Nonnie as the most promising member of their educated family, their affectionate concern for her and their stupefied distress at the ghastly events that begin when Tracy, drunk, sick, increasingly demoralized, tries to buy a black husband for her. The town of Maxwell in the windless heat of Georgia midsummer, with a revival meeting in full swing, with nice girls (white) also discovering they are pregnant, sins being sweatingly confessed while the old Methodist hymns roll out over the darkened houses, has the quality that explorers attribute to native villages in Africa. People are fever-stricken, enervated and blinded by headaches. And after the first unexpected actions that start them on the way to tragedy, Miss Smith's characters move less like Struggling human beings than like prisoners on whom literary sentence has been passed, torpid, dazed, well-nigh speechless, and locked in the confines of her narrow plot like Georgia chain-gang prisoners.

The Author. Lillian Smith is a vehement, forceful, articulate spokesman for a new Southern reformist movement that still needs to be explicitly defined. Of medium height, youthfully middleaged, with her prematurely grey hair piled high above her 'high forehead, she reached literary work and social reform way of music teaching in a Methodist missionary school in China, secretaryship to a city manager in Georgia, running the swanky girls' summer camp her father founded in Clayton, Ga., and editing a literary magazine.

Lillian Smith's paternal ancestors were hard-working plantation pioneers in the flat, baking, featureless country of Ware County, Ga. Her father made a fortune in timber and turpentine, lost it at the end of World War I, at a moment when he was fighting the unions and the war's end had tied up business in naval stores. One of eight children, Lillian Smith studied in Piedmont College, Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory, Columbia University. In 1922 she went to China (where her brother-in-law was American head of the Y.M.C.A.), taught Methodist hymns to Chinese moppets in revolutionary Hu-chow, just as the Chinese revolution was reaching the boiling point.

When she returned to Georgia in 1925 she decided there was enough missionary work there to keep her busy. She tools; over Laurel Falls Camp at Clayton, staffed it with progressive Bennington College counselors. With Paula Snelling, critic and riding instructor, she started a literary magazine, Pseudopodia. In demand as a speaker, gifted with a whispery, well modulated voice, she began work with Southern church groups, also interviewed prospects for the Julius Rosenwald Fund,* changed her literary magazine to the politically conscious South Today, and began to put into practice the new credo of Southern racial reform.

That credo is hard to link to any coherent political philosophy. Its main focus is on that maze of human emotions that is known to theoreticians as the race problem. It combines practical common-sense proposals for bettering race relations (which intelligent Southerners do anyway) with doctrinaire opinions on what is wrong with Southerners (and what they should do about it) that irritate most Southerners.

* Ten years ago first novels, with rare exceptions like Gone With the Wind, sold about 2,000 copies. Publishers considered 5,000 copies all they could risk on a first novel, used to brag in their ads if any first novel topped that figure. Now first novels like Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend and John Hersey's A Bell For Adano have both sold nearly 35,000 copies. Most publishers, by tacit agreement, have stopped using sales figures in advertising because, with the Government stressing the paper shortage, big printings might be misunderstood.

/- Copyright Edward B. Marks Music Corp. Used by permission.

* Which provides funds for the improvement of education, especially in the South, and the betterment of race relations.

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