The following review was written especially for the Crimson by Lyman H. Butterfield '30, Instructor in English.

MR. CALDWELL'S latest offering of short stories will enhance his reputation among those who already admire him, but it will certainly add to the indignation of those who fail to find in his widely praised artistry a compensation for the insensate violence of his themes. Kneel to the Rising Sun is in the author's most characteristic manner. The stories are for the most part laid in the South (which once provided us with our most romantic fiction) and deal with such subjects as lynching, starvation among the share-croppers and unemployed factory workers, criminal assault, black and white "naturals," and childbirth in a claypit. In what now seems to be settling down into a serious contest between him and the other most eminent fiction writer of the South, William Faulkner, Mr. Caldwell has here delivered the latest blow. He has equalled if not outdone himself and his rival in inventing novel and repellent forms of rape and violent death. In the title story one of the characters amuses himself by cutting off dogs' tails, of which he keeps a large collection in a trunk. As a fitting accompaniment to these actions, most of the people in the book display the usual pathological symptoms: they drool, twitch, giggle, and gibber in the most authentic manner.

Such fantastic sensationalism of theme invalidates any claim of the author's to represent life as it is lived, except, of course, in the paranoiac's dream world, which is admittedly the level of reality with which the Surrealist painters and writers are concerned. As it happens, most of the critical enthusiasm for Mr. Caldwell's work has been devoted less to defending his "realism" than to pointing out the beauties of his style. There is no denying the hypnotic effect which the rhythmic dialogue of the mental defectives in "Tobacco Road," in its stage version, exercises on the spectator. One leaves the theatre on the point of babbling oneself. Mr. Caldwell's stylistic devices are, though effective, simple rather than subtle. As in all his earlier books, there are paragraphs in this latest collection which could be broken up into regular metrical lines. Reading aloud the first story, "Candy-Man Beechum," with its rhythms which invite a singsong intonation and its refrain-like repetitions and variations of phrase, one gains much the same impression as from a Vachel Lindsay chant. There is, besides, the method familiar since Hemingway of crowding together important and unimportant things without emphasis or subordination.

When Pearl, the eldest girl, was nine, Hugh was knocked down by an automobile, while he was jacking up a rail to replace a rotten cross-tie, and run over and killed. The company sent his body home that evening, when the rest of the workers got off at five o'clock, and Cora did not know what to do. After she had put the children' to bed, she went out and walked down the street until she met a policeman. She told him what had happened to Hugh, and he said he would have the body taken away early the next morning. She went back home and looked at Hugh, but she could not notice any difference, in him; at home, Hugh was always asleep.

The passage illustrates Mr. Caldwell's peculiar virtuosity. The incongruity between the horrible matter and the prattling manner results in a slightly ludicrous effect which is deliberately aimed at. This is ingenious, but is scarcely makes the book all that its dust jacket says that it is. The book will no doubt sell very well, but for quite other reasons.