Seedtime & Harvest

As THE EARTH TURNS--Gladys Hasty Carroll--Macmillan ($2.50). Farmers have it hard, but some of them, luckily for the rest of society, like the life. U. S. newspaper readers know that George Bernard Shaw was not far wrong when he told a Manhattan audience last month that U. S. farmers are in "armed revolt." But readers of As the Earth Turns will be reminded that farmers' lives are long, farms' lives longer; that depression and prosperity come and go but farming goes on forever. As the Earth Turns, May choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, is no Growth of the Soil but it is a solidly conceived, pleasantly written, hopefully colored record of Yankee farm-dom.

Mark Shaw, Maine farmer, had a big family, as farmers should. Not all of them stuck as close to the soil as he would have liked. Ralph went off to be an aviator, and turned out to be a good one. George was shiftless, lazy, a loud talker, always in some kind of avoidable difficulty with his crops. Olly was frail; he kept his end up at harvest, but his mind was on debating triumphs at college, a lawyer's future. Mark's second wife would have been an invalid if they could have afforded it; pain made her sharp tongue sharper. Lois May's and Lize's dreams all turned towards the city. But Ed was a good farmer, and little John, from the time he could toddle, showed there was sound stuff in him. Prize of the Shaw family was Jen. Almost unbelievably calm, good-natured, efficiently hardworking, she had run the Shaw household ever since her mother's death. Idealized type of what a farm woman should be, Jen was as understanding as the next one, never bothered her head about not being appreciated; she was well contented to stay forever where Providence had put her. It was Jen who found time, over & above all her mending, cooking, sewing and cleaning, to keep the Shaw family running smoothly. When Ed's black New England sullenness was too much for the pretty school-teacher he was going to marry, Jen showed her how to get him over it. Her secret diplomacy got Lois May her chance to get away from the life she hated. When Olly felt misunderstood, Jen made him understand that he was not. When the Janowskis settled their squalling Polish brood on a neighboring farm, it was Jen's tolerance that kept the Shaw mind open until Stan Janowski proved his worth as a farmer. In spite of Jen's impregnable excellence Authoress Carroll makes her such an attractive character that finally even skeptical readers will agree with the Yankee Shaw family that if Jen wants to marry a Pole, that will be all right with them. The Author, like her heroine, has "never wished to live violently''; admits that her disposition is "naturally placid, content, comfortably optimistic--not unlike that of ... Jen Shaw." She does not believe that running the gamut of human experience is necessary to writing "acceptably." Born in New Hampshire (1904), she has lived most of her life in South Berwick, Me. After four years at Bates College she married another Bates alumnus, Herbert A. Carroll and went to Fall River, Mass. where her husband had a job as debating coach at the high school. Three years later they went to Manhattan, to study at Columbia. Now they live in Minneapolis; but she still hopes to go back to South Berwick, to "the house my grandfather built and in which my father was born . . . where I whispered up the chimney flue to Santa Claus, roasted apples in the ashes with my brother, started my first novel at the age of six, saw pumpkin faces at the window on Halloween, watched the marshes freeze over, the crab-apple tree blossom, the hay being hurriedly brought to shelter ahead of the storm and the wind blowing the last brown leaves about the yard."

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