Books: Womanly Strength & Weakness

NOT BY STRANGE GODS—Elizabeth Madox Roberts—Viking ($2.50).

Since 1932 Elizabeth Madox Roberts (The Time of Man, The Great Meadow) has published two novels, a book of verse, no short stories until this week. Not by Strange Gods is a set of six. They concern themselves 80% with sensitive females, 100% with Kentucky.

Best of them is The Betrothed, in which a farm girl, nudged subtly toward it by animals, the comments of her kin, the gruesome half-incantations of her grandmother over a vat of hogs' entrails, is curdled against marriage. Good too is Holy Morning, in which, in an almost magically beautiful atmosphere, two sisters prepare for Christmas.

High-middling is I Love My Bonny Bride, a virtuoso piece in which the preparations for a 19th-Century wedding are perceived through a child. Weakest is Love by the Highway, in which a man and woman talk finishing-school folk poetry, skid off the thin edge into silliness.

In these as in all her elegant, strange writings Elizabeth Madox Roberts combines the qualities of a dancer, a painter, an anthropologist and a woman. As a dancer she handles space and motion with uncommon delicateness: the void of a deserted mansion, the soft shiftings-together of barn beasts, the motions of two small sisters who, with entwined arms, "pulled and twisted each other about as one creature." As a painter she delivers some of the most firmly structural, curiously cleansed landscapes in U. S. writing. As an anthropologist she is almost too sharply aware of the symbolic undertones of rural living: she cannot describe a torn sheep or a potato-digging without suggesting The Golden Bough or the poetry of St.-Joan Perse (Alexis Leger). As a woman Elizabeth Madox Roberts has her principal strength, her ultimate weakness. Her strength is an exquisite sensitiveness to the subtlest personal emotions, and to the quieter values of a well-executed prose. Her weakness is a sort of thin though sentient primness; a love of the archaic for its own sake.

For all that she is one of the few U. S. writers who give evidence of knowing a) precisely what they want to do, and b) precisely how to do it.