Hoosier Melodrama

THE WITCH DIGGERS (441 pp.) Jessamyn West Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

An Indiana county poor farm swarming with moronic Peeping Toms, addlebrained paupers and unmarried mothers might not be the cheeriest place to spend Christmas, but Superintendent Link Conboy and his family had to make the best of it. And the best of it, as the superintendent saw it, was daughter Gate's romance with the young insurance salesman who had come down from Indianapolis to spend the holidays with the Conboy family. Wife Lib made popcorn balls, daughter Cate decked out the dining room with red-and-green streamers and piled pine cones and cedar boughs in the middle of the table. "Your beau's going to think you've emptied the woodbox on the table," Lib objected. Cate knew better. It would "look like Christmas to Christie, like winter and the woods" and their being alone together.

Jessamyn West's first novel has a homespun beginning, but a rough trail lies ahead. As she showed in The Friendly Persuasion (TIME, Feb. 18, 1946), Author West can take a graceful path with a short story. This time she sets her compass for some 400 pages of turn-of-the-century ironic tragedy and mires down.

The tragedy begins to break in on the Conboys a few weeks after Christmas, when Cate's twelve-year-old sister Em horrifies the family by taking off her clothes for the poor farm's Peeping Tom "to cure him." Then Cate's brother, who has eloped with one of the farm's wayward girls, learns the name of his wife's seducer and emasculates him. For a girl of curly-headed Cate's puritanical upbringing, all this is shocking enough, but when she finds out that daddy has been unfaithful to mother, she breaks off her engagement, runs away to the city to find work and purify her soul.

Author West seems as confused as Cate herself in trying to explain this erratic behavior, and as determined as a Hollywood screenwriter in making melodrama out of it. Cate winds up marrying a prissy neighbor boy whom she despises; jilted Lover Christie goes to his death in a blazing barn. Meanwhile, two crazy inmates (the witch diggers), convinced that "the truth" is buried somewhere in the earth, dig tirelessly away on the poor-farm grounds.

By the end of it all, despite the fertile pastures of authentic Hoosier talk and scenery she finds to work in, Author West turns out to have been digging with much the same fruitless energy.

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