COTTON AND COURTSHIP

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 92, 19 April 1941, Page 17

COTTON AND COURTSHIP

Of the making of American novels of the lengthy family chronicle type there seems no end. The latest is "Foundation Stone," by Leila Warren. It follows the by now standardised theme, but its long sequence of fragmentary little scenes and incidents hardly sustains the reader's interest. Away back in the 1820's old William Whetstone", as patrician a name as any in South Carolina, fretted harder than usual over his slave-ridden plantations, drank a swig too much for noonday, and expired. His son Yarborough, "proportioned to a race at its zenith" and as handsome and dashing a Whetstone of South Carolina as any of his fascinating line, decided that cotton needed new land: he would leave the home place, cost what it might in homesickness -and worse, and migrate to the south-west. This was the cue for his cousin Gerda van Ifort in New York State, to whom William had bequeathed a plantation and the blacks on it. Gerda was thirteen, "a maid being swiftly prepared for womanhood," a great hand at romping and tea cakes and tumultuously and exultantly alive. She came at top speed to South Carolina, swept the fascinating Yarborough off his feet in a demure but whirlwind courtship, married him, presented him with twins, and set off with him for Alabama to blaze a trail for every female pioneer in the South. Yarborough fells trees, Yarborough slays Indians,, Gerda boils and bubbles with energy, great harvests of cotton are gathered in, and it is all a little too ingenuous in style and sentiment to seem to matter very much. The narrative continues until the close of the Civil War.