Books: Cold Corn Bread

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LIGHTWOOD — Brainard Cheney —Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Lightwood, a first novel, is the account of 16 years (1874-1890) of war between a northern lumber corporation and squatters who, since the early 19th Century, have inhabited the pine barrens of southern Georgia. It carries the Corn family (squatters) through the whole of it—lawsuits, fraudulent surveying, sabotage, murder, abortive revolution—and, on the side, develops some creditable focuses in the enemy camp and in the mind of an ambitious and unscrupulous small town lawyer. By the time it is over Micajah Corn has lost nearly everything a human being can lose and stay alive; the company, inevitably, has got what it was after; the lawyer's veering ambitions are disposed of, and Mr. Cheney has done a number of things which even better equipped novelists might envy.

In nearly 400 pages about these embattled primitives, Author Cheney never once skids into histrionics, bitterness or those tones of romantic compassion which mar the larger talent of Steinbeck. He presents these types of inarticulate and stony heroism not as sentimental literary properties but as if they had a dignified, unobstreperous standing in human existence. With a constant and expert attentiveness to exactitudes of speech, gesture, action, he writes of violence (a negress cutting a white man's throat), horror (a father incapable of restraining his vomit over the 19-day corpse of his son), brutality (a man's foot pinning a fighting woman to the earth by her pregnant belly), without any slackening into the merely melodramatic. He achieves all this in a dulled, plainfeatured, transparent prose. Lightwood has the unimpeachable honesty, goodness, flatness, of a mouthful of cold, excellent corn bread.