Kentucky Cloud-Land

Kentucky Cloud-Land

THE HAUNTED MIRROR -- Elizabeth Madox Roberts--Viking ($2.50). Of the South that William Faulkner writes about, it has been said that no one else has ever seen it. The same comment could be made on Authoress Roberts' Kentucky. Her Kentuckians, their ways of speaking and their goings-on, are as much a sublimation of actual Kentucky as the late John Millington Synge's Aran Islanders were of the Irish. This collection of seven short stories (of which only three have not before been published) will help fence in more securely her well-established claim to her Kentucky cloudland. Readers who pine for action had best look elsewhere. Nothing much happens in these stories; they are a mirror, not a silver-screen. Some of the reflections: A mountain boy, fired by his teacher with a vague desire for "learning," sets off across the hills to see the world. On the way he meets an old man coming back, sick for home. The boy listens to the old man uneasily, but he goes on. A brother watches his sister being made into a nun, falls in love with the novice kneeling by her side. When he hears the priest take away their given names and christen them anew, it is as if the world ended.

An old lady remembers cautiously how her father killed a villain.

The Author. Like the people she writes about, Elizabeth Madox Roberts is Kentucky born & bred, though she has more "learning" than most of them aspire to. Contemporary of Wisconsin's much-touted Glenway Wescott at the University of Chicago, after taking a Ph.B. there she went to Manhattan, worked at writing. Critics fell over themselves to praise her first novel, The Time of Man, have continued to bow gravely in her direction. Unmarried, calm, grave, handsome, Authoress Roberts, 46, lives at Perryville, Ky., plans to write many another grave, calm, handsome Kentucky tale. Other books: My Heart & My Flesh, Jingling in the Wind, The Great Meadow, Under the Tree (verse).

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