Books: Books, Aug. 3, 1942

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America & Lebanon

DRIVIN' WOMAN — Elizabeth Pickett Chevalier—Macmlllan ($2.75).

TAP ROOTS — James Street — Dial ($2.75).

Both these period novels trick out huzzy-ish heroines and irresistible, blackguardly heroes in hoop skirts and heelstrapped pants. Both ballast the light fantastic course of love with a few tons of lore from the national past. Both are light heavyweights in length (593 and 652 pages, respectively). Both are fun to read. Drivin' Woman has already run to 150,000 copies (including the Literary Guild), brought its author $75,000 from M.G.M.

Drivin' Woman reads like an inspired high-school prize composition packed with cinematic moments. It revolves about a character who may turn out to be the most satisfying heroine since Scarlett O'Hara. America Moncure catches the womanly public coming & going: she is at once a Jezebel, a faithful wife, a W.C.T.U.-pledgee, a patrician, a pauper, a farmer, a mother of ingrate children sired by a worthless husband, a passionate creature, an unsatisfied creature, a high-grade businesswoman. Her hair is "glossy as a fresh-shucked chestnut," and even in old age her "crooked little smile" only adds to her good looks.

Sorrel Top. She is first seen in a Virginia mansion surrounded by pretty sisters and priceless antiques. The War between the States has just ended. A Yankee brute assaults America's sister, Palestine. America is forced to kill him with a two-foot corn knife. America flees other lady-chasing Yankees along a row of fruit trees. Later she flees lady-killing Fant Annable down a row of tobacco plants. Still later (because of the murdered rapist and to be near Fant) she flees to relatives in Mason County, Ky.

Fant calls her "sorrel top" but tells her frankly that he is "not the marrying kind." Nevertheless, when she wins a horse race for him, he can't resist. In mid-honeymoon in New Orleans, America learns the truth about him: Fant is a gambler and a dastard. For a while she supports him by selling off her trousseau to pleasure women (Fant is fit to die laughing). But Fant kills a fellow gambler, then dives off a sternwheeler. America returns to a Kentucky tobacco farm, gets to work supporting herself, surrounded by some of the richest Scottish, Irish, German and end-man brogues to be found outside vaudeville.

Now & then Fant turns up, a love-hungry fugitive, among the tobacco leaves. There are trysts like "that moonless July night, when Fant's whistle had wooed her out to the walnut grove." Two daughters are the result of these whistles. In their wake comes ostracism. For nobody on earth must know that hunted murderer Fant is still alive.

Later on, Fant's death restores America's good name. She still has her moments. She powders the webs of 100,000 Mississippi Bayou spiders with gold and silver dust for a treacherous daughter's highfalutin wedding. But the latter part of Drivin' Woman is an account of the bracing fight of the small tobacco farmers against the Trust. Descriptions of raising, grading, priming and selling tobacco result in a fragment of U.S. social-and-economic history so simple and sound that not even Mrs. Chevalier's panchromatic prose can make it much less.