When Women Ruled the Roost

INTIMATIONS OF EVE (331 pp.) -- Vardis Fisher -- Vanguard ($2.75).

Grandmother was boss, and when she wanted anything she yelled for it. If it didn't come fast enough, she cracked someone on the head with a stone. When Raven was hungry, he snagged a fish from the brook and gulped it, head, guts and all. When Barren wanted a baby, she moaned to the moon, danced in the rain, hugged leafy trees.

Nobody worried much. If people sickened, Grandmother doctored them, and they either died or got well. Nobody bathed and nobody cared. People grunted "Yes," "No," "Food," "Ghost," "Blood," sometimes sighed "Ohhhahhh" or just plain "Ohhhh."

Vardis Fisher's saga of primitive man reaches Volume III with Intimations of Eve (earlier volumes: Darkness and the Deep, The Golden Rooms). Without doubt these are the most remarkable subhistorical works ever written in the State of Idaho. Unrelated to one another so far as "story" goes, they are part of what Fisher obviously regards as a serious attempt to trace "the origin and evolution of human morality" from the days of the ape man to relatively modern times. At what point of human development the saga will end is not clear, nor is it altogether clear how far along it is now. The period of Intimations seems to be vaguely Pleistocene. If so, there is still somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 years to go.

It's a Woman's World. Raven is the hero. He is identified as a "genius," a man with a "revolutionary" mind. Genius or not, he is deceitful, lazy, lousy, and hardly knows up from down. His cardinal urges are sexual, although he doesn't begin to understand why. Pregnancy, everyone believes, is a matter of solitary female ritual, magic; the child is a fruit of moonstruck female blood. "There was not much to feed a man's ego," Novelist Fisher explains.

Man's chief social function was that of hunter, but Raven is not a success at the job. He prefers to lie under a tree and scratch. It is Raven's bad luck to live in a woman's world, run by women for women. Grandmother screams, "Get up," kicks him on the side of the skull. Grandmother also cooks the food, plants the crops. Her daughters (Raven's sisters) bear offspring after exposure to the moon and the rain, seldom allow Raven to share their bed.

Canoes, Then Babies. The consequence is that Raven has spare time on his hands, and little better to do than think and dream. His genius begins to glow. One day, while holding some skins about a fire, he notices the smoke rising straight in the air. A great moment in history: "He did not realize that he was making the first chimney." Another great moment: Raven idly chips away with a flint knife on a fallen log, decides to try an experiment.

The experiment works. He is "discovering the principle of the canoe."

Intimations of Eve reads in part like an earnest effort at imaginative anthropology, in part like the adventures of an early Tarzan or Alley Oop. Experts may wish to argue certain fine points (e.g., whether the principle of the canoe was grasped before the principle of the baby), but Novelist Fisher is doubtless ready to take them on. Now 51, he has been fighting literary skirmishes for years, notably over his autobiographical Vridar Hunter tetralogy (In Tragic Life, No Villain Need Be, etc.) and his Mormon historical novel, Children of God. Currently he lives with his second wife and children in Idaho's Hagerman Valley. He farms by day, at night writes crotchety articles for the Idaho Statesman and plugs away at his history of man's weary climb.

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