Come, Die Along With Me

THE WOMEN ON THE PORCH--Caroline Gordon--Scrlbners ($2.50).

In a decaying Tennessee mansion, three women brooded in their porch chairs. Crazy Grandma Lewis mumbled to an imaginary visitor that her father was away "in the service of the Confederacy." Spinster Aunt Willy dreamed about her chestnut stallion--the only creature she could bring herself to love. Cousin Daphne (her bridegroom had abandoned her on their wedding night when he found she had no money) toyed with the more poisonous specimens of her beloved collection of rare mushrooms. Suddenly the rank growth that ringed the old house parted and Granddaughter Catherine Lewis Chapman stumbled onto the porch. Her husband had been unfaithful to her and she had fled desperately from Manhattan to the only refuge she knew.

Catherine is chief of a dozen characters who move through Author Gordon's seventh novel like shrouded figures on their way to the graveyard. For The Women on the Porch is a desolate, often poignant, hypersensitive study of life in death. Its theme: that in the world of today the dead are more alive than the living, memories more tangible than reality. Its chief quality: a sustained mood of doom that pervades every walk of life and hangs like a fog over the Tennessee landscape.

In her old home Catherine had hoped to find strength to start life afresh. Instead, she found a bleak world living on a dry fodder of deathly recollections -- little Cousin Bessie (died, aged eight, of a sur feit of ripe peaches); Heir Jack Lewis (broke his neck horseback riding) ; Confederate Soldier Joe (one leg amputated, the other gangrenous). The Negro servants were not much better; old Maria, whose favorite son was serving a life sentence for murder, simply believed that "if people only had the moral courage to quit putting food into their stomachs the Lord would solve all problems by taking them away from here." Maria's husband spent most of his time in bed, gloomily waiting for the day when the Lewises would throw him out. "It's all dead wood," snapped crazy Grandma, of her household. "Somebody ought to come along with an ax. . . ." But Catherine believed that two living things remained: Aunt Willy's stallion, and a vigorous neighboring farmer named Tom Manigault. Life began again for her when the stallion won first prize at the State Fair, and the farmer became Catherine's lover (they planned to marry after her divorce). Life ended again when the stallion was accidentally electrocuted, when her washed-out but repentant husband came to beg her to come home. Catherine decided that her new-found lover had better share a hopeless grave with the dead stallion.

The cold rage of Author Gordon's mood and prose gives The Women on the Porch literary distinction. Some readers may feel that, like the famed poem by her husband, Allen Tate, Author Gordon's novel might just as well have been called Ode to the Confederate Dead.

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