Descendant's Novel

Nowadays the Creole stories of gentle George Washington Cable seem amiable but shrewd, are taken as patent proof that Cable loved his native New Orleans. But when they first appeared he was denounced at mass meetings, damned as a "grim-humored dwarf" who had libeled the good families of the city. Southern literary tempers are not quite so testy now, but they still have a big pinch of gunpowder in them. Latest Southerner to get scorched is 35-year-old Ben Robertson of Clemson, S. C. (pop. 420), whose novel about his ancestors brought on himself the wrath of old settlers, neighbors and the D. A. R.

A descendant of Daniel Boone, a newspaperman who has worked in Honolulu, New York, the Dutch East Indies, Author Robertson called his family chronicle Travelers' Rest. When Northern firms turned it down he organized the Cottonfield Publishers with two friends, brought out the book at a cost equal to the price of "19 bales of eight-cent cotton." An honest, spotty book. Travelers' Rest traces the violent history of an old Southern family through their fights with nature, the neighbors, and each other, shows old pioneers with their buckskins off and their coonskin caps hanging from the wrong hatracks, wenching, gambling, stealing, murdering. What bothered old settlers was that Author Robertson attributed these activities to prominent people readily identified as his ancestors--Indian scouts, Senators, wealthy planters. Civil War heroes. When neighbors complained, "You've really slung mud over us all," when a regent of the State D. A. R. jumped to the attack, the Robertson family called a reunion at nearby Chauga Creek, and with clan spirit outweighing pride in their distinguished ancestors, defended the book and outspoken Descendant Ben.

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