Books: Stately Pastoral

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Now IN NOVEMBER—Josephine Johnson —Simon & Schuster ($2).

When the republic of letters was a monarchy, the grand manner was reserved for such uncommon themes as the death of kings, paradise lost or the celestial city found. Mass education has changed all that. Prizefighters, prostitutes, plain people of all kinds are the modern tragic heroes, and modern authors write about them in Promethean language. Time was when farmers figured in literature only as comic oafs or sullen clodhoppers, but Now in November pipes a more stately pastoral. Written with a slightly self-conscious sonority, this story of a Missouri farm reads like a poeticized almanac with a tragic ending.

Says 24-year-old Author Johnson of her first novel: "I wanted to give a beautiful and yet not incongruous form to the ordinary living of life—to write . . . poetry with its feet on the ground. . . . I have tried to show things as they are, but to show more also: the underground part of life that is unseen, and the richness which, though visible, is not noticed." Plain readers may find the ground a little flat, the poetry a little uncertain of its feet, but they will give Author Johnson high marks for an ambitious effort. More cynical critics will rate Now in November as big talk, too precocious to be profound.

Narrator and tragic chorus of the story is Marget, one of the three daughters of an embittered farmer and his saintly wife. As children, the girls lead a lonely but far from hopeless life. As they grow up they begin to realize the desperateness of the family struggle for existence. When Grant comes to live with them and help work the farm, Marget and Kerrin fall in love with him. He has no eyes for anyone but Merle, who will not look in his direction. Disasters come thick & fast. A long drought nearly ruins the farm, Kerrin kills herself, Grant goes away, the mother dies. Marget, Merle and their enfeebled father are left with the inescapable but hopeless task of keeping the farm going, from bad to worse.