Books: Porgy

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PORGY—DuBose Heyward—Doran ($2.00). Straightforward story-telling in a poet's prose is always rich reading. Poet Heyward's province is South Carolina—Negro life along the waterfront of old Charleston, with the atavistic rhythms, religion and animalism firmly rendered, the dialect perfect, the antics convulsing. Porgy, a purple-black beggar with crippled legs and a pungent goat, croons to his scampering dice, prays with his neighbors in Catfish Row, contemplates the insignificance of man. In a shadowy triangle involving Crown, a cinnamon stevedore with a chest like a cotton-bale, and his big wench Bess, Porgy's soul undergoes the extremes of compassion and ruthless violence, much as the city now basks sleepily in hot sun, now is hammered with a furious hurricane, now basks again.