Bloody Chew

THE SUMMER SOLDIER--Leane Zug-smith--Random House ($2.50).

In the hills of Kentucky's Harlan County, one day three years ago, a crusading prosecuting attorney named Elmon Middleton climbed into his coupe, stepped on the starter, blew himself to Kingdom Come. One of 18 sticks of dynamite wired to his engine had gone off. That "accident" and a whole bumper crop of anti-labor sluggings, shootings and gaggings made Harlan's rich coal veins throb with miners' blood. Last year, the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee tried applying a tourniquet; but bloody Harlan proved hemophilic.

Kentucky-born Leane Zugsmith's Summer Soldier is about Harlan County. She calls it Chew County. Seven slightly screwy liberals join a committee to investigate conditions in Chew. Five of them, riding down in a stuffy train, get a wire from their chairman, Hankemer, who> has gone ahead: Do not get off at Chew get off at Zara. . . .

At Zara, the only hotel that will accept the committee is the Bonnie Bell, crawling with roaches and lechers. In the night, dark sedans run round & round the hotel. May Diehl, the committee's case worker, whimpers atop a chair. In another room the teacher, Tom Pettee, strokes the pretty hair of Carol Gillman, an impetuous divorcee. The others discuss tactics. A gang of local "antis" come in, carry out the committee's two leaders, take them to a dark swamp, thrash them unconscious. Then they turn lights and police on their victims. "I swear!" they say. "They have been beating each other up. . . . Goddamn. They want to get us into trouble." The liberals leave Chew still bloody and uninvestigated.

Author Zugsmith's characters talk their share of balderdash. They pause in two dullish chapters to discuss martyrdom of left-wing professors and preachers. Nevertheless, their talk has the ring of an uncracked Liberty bell, rich with authentic undertones, strident with neurotic overtones. If Leane Zugsmith s novels have not been monuments, they have been milestones along the U. S. road. This novel, her sixth, indicates that she is still headed in the proper direction, uphill, going places.

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