Books: Country Living

TREES OF HEAVEN—Jesse Stuart— Dutton ($2.50).

When Anse Bushman rents ground to a shiftless squatter, Boliver Tussie, he offers an inhuman contract forbidding whiskeymaking, fishing, frolics and immoral conduct, on pain of eviction and confiscation of crops. Boliver has to take it or leave the land; he takes it. Living up to it is another matter. The latter half of the novel develops a desperate contest between two types of land-lover — the owner and the enjoyer. For perhaps the first time since Huckleberry Finn, the squatter’s anarchic, slovenly, sensual life is presented as enviable. Meanwhile Bushman’s son Tarvin and Subrinea Tussie, the length, strength and brownness of whose legs are too often, too favorably mentioned, work out a romance. Tarvin talks like this: “Good mornin’. I’m glad to be here. I’ve seen two redbirds on my way. They have made me happy. Spring is here.”

Author Jesse Stuart also presents many lush, loving descriptions of the weather, lore and labor of a Kentucky year, a rich anthology of the deliciousness of country living which does not dodge the fact that country living can break backs, brains and lives. Shaggy and slewfooted, Trees of Heaven is good all the same, with the fragrance and, in spots, the inedibility, of a large warm country supper.