Feeler

SOUTHWAYS--Erskine Caldwell--Viking ($2.50).

Because the 16 stories in Southways show less of Erskine Caldwell's customary satanic humor and forthright sexual symbolism, and because a number of them have appeared in such cautious magazines as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, some readers may conclude that Caldwell is mellowing into a merely successful writer. Examined more closely, they warrant another guess. More skilful, briefer than Caldwell's last collection, Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935), they suggest that Caldwell is feeling his way toward a less stylized, less repetitious, more complex kind of writing.

The first stories are told with almost straight humor. Example: Ineligible for the football banquet because he has no girl to take, a high-school second-string player gets a miraculous date with the prettiest girl in the State. But at the banquet he ignores her completely-- he just wanted a big feed.

Following these is a pure folktale, the nearest thing to a Southern Grimm's tale:

P:A fanatical hater of flies. Dose Muffin dies chasing one into a buzzsaw. Ready for burial, Dose jumps up, yells for a flyswatter. When it is brought he lies down again, swats the fly in his coffin, makes no further fuss as the dirt is shoveled over him.

Three stories attempt more complex situations. In the subtlest of these. Return to Lavinia, a storekeeper returns from his honeymoon with a schoolteacher, reassures his mulatto housekeeper that she will always come first.

Sharpest hint that Caldwell has no intention of mellowing into a sharecropper humorist is A Knife to Cut the Corn Bread With:

P:Paralyzed when a bale of cotton falls on him. a young sharecropper broods over his wife working in his place. When the plantation owner refuses to advance them two pounds of fat-bacon until the end of the week, he broods over a plan to cut off his numb, useless legs and eat them.

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