Books: The Siberian Bastion

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Fortnight ago (in a letter Writer Thérèse Bonney published in Vogue) Gertrude told. Part of the time she hoes potatoes in the little peasant village of Billignin par Belley Ain in Unoccupied France. Food is scarce. The peasants idolize her: she is one expatriate who did not run away from defeated France. She is also writing a novel, called Mrs. Reynolds. Both Hitler and Stalin are in it. Gertrude has already written 25 pages. Alice B. Toklas is typing them. Gertrude believes the novel will not be finished for some time. Wrote Gertrude: "You know I did start to write about how America looks to Europe I did a little bit, and then I began to put it in a novel I am doing now, and so I did not go on with it, it might be fun to do, what do you think, well anyway the nightingales are singing and the frogs, and we are gardening and the potatoes are coming up and we love you a lot, we do."

The Roosevelt Generation

MUD ON THE STARS—William Bradford Huie—L. B. Fischer ($2.75).

This novelized autobiography is a confused, cynical, sharply intelligent scenario of a young man's struggle to tie himself to a set of beliefs with which he can live at peace. It is also a somewhat garish finger-painting of the genesis of a New Dealer.

Garth Lafavor of Garth's Island, 150-year-old Tennessee Valley plantation, started off by believing in the eternal rightness of Garth's Island. Its 3,000 acres supported 20 Garth families of various blood relationships, and 52 families of Garth sharecroppers.

He discovered the New Deal when the Civil Works Administration "kidnapped" some of the poorer and lazier Garth Negroes and put them on relief. Later he saw his way of life disappear forever when the Tennessee Valley Authority forced the Garths to sell out, made the plantation a lake behind one of the TVA's dams.

Five years on a Birmingham newspaper left Garth with a weird jumble of contemporary catchwords. For a while he was a New Dealer himself. He dallied with the Birmingham Reds (especially with Millionaire Comrade Adeline Reed, who had revolutionary and biological fervor. He turned against them after watching their tactics in a steel strike.

Appointment of Hugo Black to the U. S. Supreme Court turned Garth into a fascist. When the fascists murdered Comrade Adeline, Garth became a New Dealer again. Back in Tennessee Valley, he got a job with the TVA, set up housekeeping with his childhood sweetheart in one of TVA's model subdivisions, found his final faith in the hope that "all the forces for good [are] marshaled under one banner."

Author Huie, now associate editor of the American Mercury, has written one of the best novels about the "Roosevelt Generation," might have written a better one if he were not so close to his subject. As a rudely realistic story of what has happened to the Tennessee Valley and to Alabama under the New Deal, his novel is an exciting footnote to current history.

In fact, some readers may feel that Author Huie has mistaken his calling, that he is a better reporter than novelist.