246
PARTISAN REVIEW
phere, the political background, which provide the set-up for the action.
The theme is essentially melodramatic: the white nymphomaniac, Katy
Barlow, caught in the act of attempting to seduce the young Negro Sonny
Clark, is persuaded by Mrs. Calhoun (whose mission in life is to send the
Negroes back to Africa) to accuse Sonny of raping her, and the resultant
horrors climax with Katy's hysterical confession of Sonny's innocence on
beholding his swinging body, and her consequent death at the hands of
the same mob that lynched the Negro. Yet there is little melodrama in the
telling. It is not a pure horror story, though the account of the gratuitous
torturing of innocent Negro girls by the lynchers in their search for Sonny
is grim indeed. The characters are human, the situation is understandable.
Behind the weak good-nature of Sheriff ·McCurtain lies the history of
hundreds of years of prejudice and oppression, and the Sheriff is the only
one who dimly understands this. This is so, we feel; these things have
happened and are happening still; we have been shown what
/w..ppens
if
not what really is. The pattern is woven by the sharp-eyed observer; there
is understanding of the situation, but not interpretation.
With Mrs. Slade's novel we are back in the city again: her study of.
family on relief is honest and careful in its presentation. The cruelties and
humors and ironies of the situation are brought out forcibly; the observa–
tion is clear, the knowledge is certain. But it has faults as a novel, faults
which seem to derive largely from Mrs. Slade's intense desire to make her
fable illustrative of absolutely all she knows about social work. So the
characters become well-documented generalisations, the minor characters
particularly-the various social workers-talking and thinking like phrases
from a thesis on typical attitudes of social workers. Their thoughts, as
reported by the author, are far too conscious, precise, wooden. The con–
versations between Miss Stalling and Miss Shonts, the meditations of
Miss
Southard, appear untrue because, paradoxically, they are too simply true.
The Pond family themselves are shown as more flexible and human per–
sons, but even in the presentation of these characters, done with so mud!
care and knowledge, the conversations are too formal, the reactions are
expressed too neatly-with the result that for all the author's understand·
ing and her careful use of detail the book presents not life but a study of
it.
River of Earth,
the first novel of a poet, is a beautifully balanced
story of a childhood in the Kentucky mountains. Written in smooth prose,
with plenty of local dialect in the dialogue, it tells in the first person of
the experiences, in the country and in the mining camp, of a young boy
growing from infancy to childhood close to the most elemental realities
of existence. Economic circumstances are never easy, and the family often
comes near starvation point. Yet there is a blitheness in the book without
sentimentality. It is the blitheness of organic nature, of simple elemental
existence, where the men may scarcely be able to read yet they can doctor
a horse or operate on a calf and they know how to make a bare living
from the garden
if
they have to_ The death of a child or of an old woman
is described quietly, evenly;
it
is all part of a process, and in spite of
