Land of Johnsonese

WINTER ORCHARD AND OTHER STORIES --Josephine Johnson--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

With her Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, Now in November, Josephine Johnson impressed some critics as a writer possessed of fine sentiments and a talent for description rather than of a strong imagination and a firm grasp of character. Her farmers and their boys and girls, tense, neurotic, esthetically inclined individuals whose emotional boiling points were low, were constantly being shaken by brief but elemental passions which were all out of proportion to any apparent cause. In moments of peace and release they seemed to wander over the farmlands in a daze of sensuous awareness, savoring barnyard scenes and country beauties like city people spending their first vacation out of town.

Last week Josephine Johnson presented more portraits in her gallery of overemotional farmers in a book of short stories, written in the cadenced prose of her first novel. Long descriptions of rural sights and smells alternate with obscure adolescent fits of temper and weeping. Most of Josephine Johnson's farm tales are no more than well-written, undergraduate, descriptive essays, but in the best of them the real torments of hard times and hunger seem to struggle to escape the strait jacket of her fluent and mannered prose. Among the 22 stories in Winter Orchard:

P: A girl wrecks her sister's love affair by burning letters from a radical sweetheart, leaves the sister brokenhearted, spiritless, but still safe at home.

P: A condemned man waits for a last-minute pardon, which does not come.

P: Stefan, impressionable baker who could not endure the sight of hungry people looking through his window at freshly baked bread, escapes to the country where the "soft and quiet undulation of the wheat fields" gives him a momentary vision of unmeasured miles of wheat, of stores of food so enormous that no one need go hungry.

P: An imaginative, poverty-oppressed girl goes off by herself to read and write, sneaks home ahead of schedule to surprise her family, overhears them confessing they are glad she is gone.

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