The Cropleigh Saga

THE VELVET HORN (373 pp.)--Andrew Lytle--McDowell, Obolensky ($3.95).

Most Southern authors have a marked tendency to breathe harder than other writers, especially when they tackle historical fiction. Out of the huffing and puffing come purple imagery, melodrama of incest and murder, sentence structure as involuted as an express highway cloverleaf. The dividend from this school of writing is that the reader achieves a total immersion in the scene; the danger is that he may drown in words. Fortunately, Author Lytle (of Murfreesboro, Tenn.) comes up for air every now and then, and gets on with his story of life in the Cumberlands of Tennessee during the 1870s.

He is chiefly concerned with the Crop-leighs, who move through the wilderness like giants and mostly come to ends both brobdingnagian and foul. The first Cropleighs are blown sky-high in a steamboat explosion; of their four sons, Beverly and Duncan are blown earth-deep in a tunnel explosion (fratricide and suicide), Dickie loses a leg in the same disaster, and garrulous Jack is killed by a bullet aimed at still another Cropleigh. Daughter Julia causes much of the trouble by giving birth to a baby whose father might be her brother Duncan, her lover Pete Legrand, or even possibly her husband Joe Cree.

Author Lytle, 54, has long been one of a group of regional writers, e.g., Robert Penn Warren. John Crowe Ransom, enraptured by the agrarian tradition of the middle South. He put eight years into writing The Velvet Horn, and it shows in the detailed research, the loving re-creation of events and places, the carefully archaic turn of phrase. Long after most readers have forgotten his flamboyant Cropleighs, they will remember such fine set pieces as the marriage of Julia and the wake of Joe Cree with its barbecue, and the excellent sketches of the mountain people, whose folk talk has the pith and point too often lacking in the rest of the novel.

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