Valley of Pioneers

GENESEE FEVER--Carl Carmer --Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Carl Carmer's four volumes of non-fiction (Stars Fell on Alabama, Listen for a Lonesome Drum, etc.) have made him one of the most popular of U.S. regional specialists. This, his first novel, is just as regional, just as competent, and will probably be even more popular than his nonfiction. Scene: Carmer's favorite Genesee country of upper New York State, where he spent his boyhood. Time: the 1790s.

In those days the loam in the Genesee bottom lands was 18 feet thick, and the whole valley sprang with grass so rich that wild horses by hundreds roved in it invisibly. It was a stage where the conflicts of a nascent nation played themselves towards ultimate compromise, and it was peopled with some interesting characters.

Colonel Williamson, an English land agent with two million acres to dispose of, dreamed of establishing a landed aristocracy in the most spacious European tradition. The Publick Universal Friend, a female embodiment of Christ on earth, lived and prophesied there with her seven handmaidens; she was determined that the land should become an American Canaan. A European fourflusher named Berezy made trouble with a deluded rabble he had brought with him from the gutters of Hamburg. The Maryland aristocrat Peregrine Fitzhugh freed his 40 slaves to found a settlement of free Africans. Simcoe, Governor of Canada, still had hopes of retrieving the country for his King. Only the Indians were really hopeless.

Among these historical drives and personalities Author Carmer sets his fictional machinery in motion. Hero Nathan Hart, as a fugitive Whiskey Rebel and amateur portrait painter, leads readers on a Cook's tour of the whole valley civilization, from the Williamson mansion to the Indian village of Squawkie Hill. He also has three love affairs: with The Friend's pet priestess, with patrician Eleanor Fitzhugh, and with Catherine O'Bail, whom at long last, despite her Indian blood, he marries in defiance of the Valley gentry.

Best thing about Genesee Fever is the wealth of Carmer's authentic, affectionately painted regional period detail. He makes such dusty props as oiled-paper windows, Conestoga wagons and Liberty Poles as fresh as a glimpse at the youth of one's greatgrandparents; makes a succulent novelty of such frontier diet as pickerel, wild turkey, the bright yellow Indian corn.

As a novelist, he must be credited with one novelty: he endows his heroine with boyish rather than feminine charms. That was the fashion in early post-war novels, but faded during the Long Armistice. Author Carmer, who uses not one but two boy-bodied women, may be starting a new phase in the cycle of charm.

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