A Lost Lady

ON A LONESOME PORCH (237 pp.)--Ovid Williams Pierce--Doubleday ($3.95).

The theme of this book is one of the great, enduring cliches of U.S. literature: the dowager of a North Carolina first family finds her old way of life in ruins after the Yankee barn burners go home. But the variation on the theme--how in shoring up the fragments she found a little of herself as well--is, in Novelist Pierce's skilled hands, made almost new.

For "Miss Ellen" Gray, the well-bred widow who is the wispy heroine of Pierce's story, self-discovery is not easy. She spent her prewar life in an indolent dreamworld as soft and sheltered as a cotton boll, with endless maids and mammies to tend every want that a dutiful husband and son could not fulfill. The war killed both, and drove Miss Ellen from the family plantation to live with relatives in Raleigh; even then the protective cocoon of her gentility was scarcely damaged. In June 1865 she returns home with her widowed daughter-in-law, "Miss Lucy," and her grandson Garrett, intent on recapturing the past; it is as if the March through Georgia had been no more than some annoyingly loud parade.

Miss Ellen finds it hard to understand why her plantation fields are untilled and weed-crested, her mansion ransacked, her retainers gone or too old to work. Under Miss Lucy's direction the house begins to live again, but Miss Ellen withdraws to the calm solace of memories. In time she learns that a widowed war veteran has helped Miss Lucy hire labor for the field, that the estate may have to be sold for taxes. She learns, too, that for her sake Miss Lucy has rejected the man's proposal of marriage. At novel's end, in the one great loving act of her sheltered life, Miss Ellen prepares for a visit to Raleigh from which she will never return, setting Miss Lucy free. She has accepted a harsh truth: that the plantation can never be the same, that the mansion she aches for is no earthly abode but exists, with other memories, only where her heart is.

Compared with The Plantation (TIME, March 2, 1953), Author Pierce's impressive first novel, On a Lonesome Porch suffers from literary jerry-building. What saves it is its subtle, flexible prose, which can gallop in tense, comma-strewn sentences when Northern cavalry slashes through the Carolinas, or laze through a hot summer afternoon with three plaintive, motherless Negro children. And when Pierce softly traces Miss Ellen's genteel footsteps, he enlivens in a rare, vivid way the mind of the Old South.

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