GOD IN THE STRAW PEN—John Fort—Dodd, Mead ($2).
Itinerant Methodist Preacher Isham Lowe sat his horse through the mountains of Tennessee, setting his course for the Georgia uplands. At his heels brooded Assistant John Semple. The time was 1830, the climate good for camp meetings. Preacher Lowe had been doing it for years; he had grown grey, unctuous, successfully stout in revivalism. Preacher Semple was young, thin, a little peaked; a poor mixer and not yet really saved; he sometimes found it hard to face crowds, hard to bear Preacher Lowe's booming optimism.
Ryall Springs, Ga., was ripe for salvation. Nothing had happened there for a long time; even the wicked women-chasers, cardplayers, boozers were bored, welcomed the prospect of a camp meeting. Everything went even better than Brother Lowe's cagey schedule had planned. People swarmed in from miles around, sat themselves in rows on square-hewed logs, shivered expectantly as they waited to get the jerks, the barks, the hysterical whoops-&-jingles. Brother Semple preached the opening sermon at nightfall, on The Death of a Sinner. He panicked the crowd, laid them in holy rolling rows. Aristocrat Lou Crawford, who had come curiously with her uncle, soon wished she hadn't. Mob hysteria laid her low, nearly scared her out of her skin. Up front in the ''straw pen" (an enclosure made safe for writhing revivalists by strewn straw) male & female sinners flopped in convulsions.
When Uncle Crawford tried to take his niece away Preacher Lowe tried to prevent him. Their argument impressed Brother Semple, brought him a real conviction of sin. He ran away into the darkness, wrestled with himself, decided to turn loose from glory-shouters. But conscience drove him back to confront Preacher Lowe and announce his defection. While Lowe forgivingly prayed for him Semple went away.
Author John Porter Fort has been in the U. S. most of his life (he was born in Mt. Airy, Ga., educated at the University of Georgia, Harvard Law School and the Sorbonne, lives in Chattanooga, Tenn.) but does not write the language very well. He makes short work of articles (a, an, the), turns many an otherwise inoffensive sentence into pidgin English, e. g.: ". . . her eyes made quick look up. . . ." "Here, being with people was great event." ". . . It was preposterous thing. . . ." But he writes with serious conviction, does not exaggerate nor satirize. John Fort's great-grandfather, unmoved by a camp meeting, fell from his horse on the way home, struck by conviction of sin. Says Fort: "I share his conviction of sin. The thunderous words still follow me as other thunderous and like words follow countless Americans as we ride into the darkness of unknown years. There is no complete escape from the ancestral mould."
God in the Straw Pen is the August choice of the Book League of America.
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