Free Forester
by
[Little, Brown, $2.50]
THIS book is subtitled, ‘A Novel of Pioneer Kentucky,’ but it might better have been called ‘A Study of the Natural Man.’ It is such a remarkable picture that at times it seems almost a tour de force. The very haphazardness of the story is accurate, for it is instinct with the way of thought of the people it expresses. These are the trappers and hunters, the first fringe of civilization, that moved westward against the Indian country in the years immediately preceding and during the Revolution.
In brief, it is the story of one Harley Boydley, who seduced a girl in South Carolina, went West alone when she refused to follow him, returned to marry her when her child was born, less from the fact that her brothers came to notify him of the birth than because, being notified, his primitive instinct led him to preserve the integrity of the family.
He does precious little thinking and he does even less useful work. His two preoccupations are woman and his own body. Everything he himself does (happens to do, I might say) and everything that takes place in himself fascinates him. How he feels about eating, about drinking, about taking a bath, about making love, about killing an Indian. He ’saw a naked Indian squatting on a log and busy with fishing, his chin forward upon his breast, his hair raised stiff on the centre of his crown like the feathers of a woodpecker. With a movement of his head, he revealed a nose like the beak of some bird; with a splash he drew up his line with a fish on the end of it; and Harley, slowly raising his rifle, let fire, the Indian falling forward in the stream.’ The Indian had n’t been making trouble. He was there. It occurred to Harley to shoot him — that was all. That was all the first step in ‘winning the West’ consisted of — I do not mean the people who came to settle and plant and till, but the men who exterminated the Indian and planted the seeds of tlie white race. It would have taken a century more without this offscouring to go before the settled mind. Their preoccupation being only with themselves and the land they lived off, they were able to be ruthless without feeling it. It was a peculiar manifestation. ‘His sensation was that he was encompassing the land, or that the land was encompassing him; half amorous and afraid, he lay on the leaves with it.’
It gives a peculiar sensuous green quality to the story, as of something at times dreamed. Though violence is always present, with Boydley it never materializes quite with the unexpected force one would expect. His weakness is never allowed to express itself with the violence that begets it. That would be my one ! quarrel with a book that brims with good things and that offers one woman who, for me at least, is realized with rare vividness.
WALTER D. EDMONDS