Swamp Idyll

QUIVERING EARTH (248 pp.)--Wilma Russ--McKay ($3).

Like many of her fellow U.S. citizens fan estimated 1,000,000), Mrs. Wilma Russ of Mariana, Fla. had written a lot of fiction in her early years without ever getting any of it published. Since she had reached middle age, it seemed less & less likely that any of it ever would be. So when the Boy Scouts came around collecting wastepaper, Mrs. Russ philosophically donated a boxful of her manuscripts. Obeying some obscure impulse, she held back one unfinished novel. When her duties as a small-hotel owner permitted, she finished it and called it Quivering Earth.

For Author Russ, it was a lucky hunch. Quivering Earth finally brought her the heady experience of first publication. What it brings to the reader is a story of the Florida Everglades that has more heart than art. So long as the heart beats firmly (about half the distance), this story of the big swamp has the endearing ingenuousness of a primitive painting, and some of the lushness.

In 1898, to a lazy, middle-aged loner like Jesse Geronimo Gundyhill, the Everglades were a paradise on earth. Food was everywhere. In a matter of minutes he could have him a royal feast of turkey, fish and exotic fruits. A little hunting produced the pelts and hides for trading. Jesse's ignorance was colossal. He couldn't read, write or count and he didn't know what year it was. But he had a good life and he knew it.

Jesse's troubles began when he picked up a white child of six or seven who had somehow escaped during an Indian raid. Keeta was a nuisance, but she also became a wonderful, silent audience for the old man's boastful, preposterous yarns. Author Russ is at her best describing the uneasy but affectionate relationship between the two, the child's awareness of the 'Glades' endless beauties and dangers as she grows up. Few writers have had much luck in trying to describe a lonely child of nature in a natural setting. Author Russ does better than most. But just as swamp drainage and encroaching civilization tarnish Jesse Geronimo Gundyhill's idyllic way of life, so do they cheapen the second half of Quivering Earth. Jesse and Keeta wind up in a boom town, and in final chapters as lurid and contrived as the first are lyrical and artless, Jesse finds his long-lost children and the woman who bore them, while Keeta gets herself just about the nicest man in Florida. Its last part reads as though some publishing expert finally explained to Author Russ what it takes to get a book published these days.

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