Ten-Gallon Gothic

By Melvin Maddocks

PROUD FLESH

by WILLIAM HUMPHREY

330 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

In his first novel since The Ordways, William Humphrey has remained true to the once effective formula for the Southern novel--using the Southern family to melodramatize the passing of a way of life through the death of the elder. Only in this instance it is not a dying patriarch, but matriarch--not a Big Daddy but a Big Mommy.

Setting his one-long-deathbed scene in Texas, Humphrey has made all the proportions of his tragedy bigger than life, almost to the point of Texas self-parody. As the mother of ten children, the dying Edwina Renshaw commands an audience of 47 descendants at her slow demise. "Bold, touchy, trifling, headstrong, wild" hemen, the Renshaw boys constitute a John Wayne collective. Their only allegiances are to the South, Texas and the Renshaws, in that ascending order. The Renshaw women flutter in the male-chauvinist background, near-hysterical victims of Big Mommy's preference for boys.

The more Humphrey flashes back, trying to individualize the Renshaws, the more they seem to merge as a single literary convention, the official folk hero of latter-day Southern fiction: epic hunter, epic drinker, epic lecher, with the classic weakness for a maddening black girl down among the cabins. Humphrey is accomplished at what he does and is moved by his own myth. But he cannot surmount the cliches.

Proud Flesh includes, however, one fine set piece of the absurd: the mock-epic failure of a farmer named Hugo to get his cotton to the town gin, in a truck with five bad tires (counting the spare), on a road monopolized by a brindled milch cow named Trixie. Here calculated excess works in the cause of comic relief, suggesting that the future of the Southern novel may belong to the tall tale rather than further variations on the gothic. Melvin Maddocks

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