Reds, Purples

MARCHING! MARCHING! -- Clara Weatherwax--

John Day ($1.90).

A STONE CAME ROLLING -- Fielding

Burke--Longmans, Green ($2.50).

By last week, middle-class U. S. readers had been subjected to enough proletarian novels to know what to expect when they opened a new one. They knew that the proletarian-heroes would be heroic, the capitalist-villains villainous; that in many a purple passage minor characters would hold forth like major prophets; that the gloriously tragic defeat of the heroes would leave its ineradicable Marx. Readers of Marching! Marching! and A Stone Came Rolling found them obedient to this pattern.

Though Clara Weatherwax spent her infancy in a papoose basket and though her name looks too good to be true, she is no made-over Choctaw or Czech. She claims descent from Roger Williams and 14 Revolutionary ancestors; her grandfather was a pioneer on the Northwest coast of which she writes. But her violent Marxian melodrama will never be recommended by the Daughters of the American Revolution. (The one Daughter in the book is a throwback, impoverished into sympathy for her Red neighbors.) Marching! Marching! obeys the law of Marxian fiction in having no hero but half-a-dozen protagonists, each symbolizing some aspect of the proletarian struggle. In spite of her ancestry and her creed, Clara Weatherwax writes first-rate, first-hand U.S. prose that will remind more than one reader of Dos Passes. Her propaganda will propagate few proselytes, but her winged words should strike home to even a carapacic conservative.

Pete was thought to be the bastard of Old Man Bayliss, soundly-hated lumber tycoon who ground his workers' faces in the sawdust and worse. Pete was even suspected of being Bayliss' spy. When a lumberman was killed because of faulty machinery, Pete, who was handy, came in for a thoroughly popular licking. Pete took it and said nothing, but when he had proved his paternity he went on to show his brotherhood by joining the workers fight against Boss Bayliss. Mario, the Filipino who had beaten Pete, was almost killed by vigilantes. But the organization he had started went on, through the hell & high water of frame-ups, terrorism, raids, arrests. The big strike came off as planned--but what its outcome will be Author Weatherwax leaves to the realistic reader. Her proletarian agonists are last seen marching bravely down the street to meet the bayonets of the National Guard, not yet forced to believe that bullets will stop their song.

The many readers who missed Fielding Burke's Call Home the Heart (1932) might get through several hands of A Stone Came Rotting without thinking they were sitting in on anything more antisocial than a game of hearts. But sooner or later they will realize that Author Burke's pastoral pack has a dialectic joker in it. A sequel to her first book, A Stone Came Rolling reintroduces Ishma, the hillbilly Judith; her physical but saintly husband Britt, et al. In tone and texture a kind of reincarnation of the works of Gene Stratton Porter, with Rose O'Neill and Fannie Hurst thrown in, A Stone Came Rolling is a strange mixture of unabashed sentiment and social indignation. When Britt moved down into North Carolina's Piedmont to farm, his easygoing charm, church-going habits and knowledgeable affection for the soil would soon have admitted him to honorable citizenship. But his wife Ishma's goings-on set tongues wagging, heads shaking. A beauty, intelligent and subversive, she set the neighboring town of Dunmow on its ear, was sure to be found at the storm-centre of all industrial disturbances. Mill-owner Bly Emberson, sanctified by a lifetime of patient subservience to his steel-jacketed wife, fell in love with her. So did his lawyer pal, Derry. Ishma might well have thought she was a fatal woman: Bly drowned himself because of her while Britt was killed defending her fair name. Author Burke, true to her literary gods, cannot ring down on her heroine the curtain she deserves: the book ends with Ishma in her prison cell hearing the thunder of proletarian feet rushing to release her.

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