Books: Big Land

WINDS OF MORNING (344 pp.)—H. L. Davis—Morrow ($3.50).

"New country," says an oldtimer in Winds of Morning, "puts an edge on a man." It can put an edge on a writer too. About 15 years ago, H. L. (for Harold Lenoir) Davis marked a fictional trail through the big new country north of California and west of Idaho in a first novel, Honey in the Horn. Author Davis climbed astride the tired old cayuse of the western story, rode it through a bright panorama of the old West, and won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize (1936). In his latest book, Davis goes for the same sort of ride, but over a later terrain: the time is somewhere in the mid-'20s, and the old Northwest is fast becoming the new Northwest.

The story begins with a young deputy sheriff who is sent out to herd an old hoss-wrangler and his strays through the wheat country and into open territory. On the trip, by a series of stumbling inadvertencies, he runs down a murder story and falls in love. He chews over old times and old ways in dozens of small passages of talk with the oldtimer, and with himself. He also takes a deep breath of the wilderness around him, and the reader breathes it with him.

"The noise of a late-lingering flock of wild geese going out to its day's feeding in the wheat fields woke me the next morning," Davis may write, with a mildness that is really intensely restrained affection. "The sky was already beginning to fill with light, and there were a few cold yellow sun streaks on the high ridges

..." Such passages give Davis' prose, and his story too, a quality of imminence—as though at any moment they might break out in crashing event. They never do. The action of the book, though now & again it holds some excitement, has no importance ; it rises quietly out of the big land, and sinks quietly back into it. The natural world, in fact, is the only real character in Winds of Morning; the people in the book appear chiefly as traits of that character. Ordinarily, this would be a fatal flaw. The measure of Novelist Davis' success is that he will almost certainly make a great many readers decide that his favorite country deserves the affectionate priority he gives it.