Tennessee Talk

HOMEPLACE--Maristan Chapman--Viking ($2.50).

To marry a Tennessee hill girl, one must first have a "homeplace." The $50 a 'legger gave Fayre Jones to keep quiet about dynamiting the Howard house would have sufficed to let him marry Bess Howard, only the money proved counterfeit. What could Jones do but return it? Bess moved to town, began going to "play-parties." Fayre remonstrated but could do nothing until a man to whom Jones turned out to be a brother on the left side, died, leaving a "homeplace." Then Fayre moved in with Bess for his "wife-woman." She gladly planned, by bringing along "child-things," to become a "mother-woman."

Character in a novel begins with the physical. Author Chapman has few physical descriptions, thus she has a hard job delineating character. Almost wholly she lets her people talk and describe themselves thereby; that far, at least, she succeeds with character. Indeed, her plots being fragile and her style under the influence of Thomas Hardy, the Tennessee idiom remains as her only virtue. Says she:

"I have been haunted always by the Southern highlanders' need of a recorder. Being driven to frenzy by the futility of outland interpretation, I at last took up the work of their defense. To do this it has been necessary to make a long study of their idiom and the dialects from which it is compounded, and to reduce their grammar and syntax to a definite working scheme."

Another name for Maristan Chapman is Mrs. John Stanton Chapman. She, 34 next month, surprises native Tennesseeans often, since she looks and dresses almost as would a male. Her previous book, The Happy Mountain, sold 80,000 copies, was Literary Guilded.