Lebanon

Miss MILLER has set her tale of Lebanon Fairgail in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. But despite her extensive use of the vocabulary of the time, the book bears as little relationship to a modern historical novel as, say. The Big Rock Candy Mountain does to the beachhead communiques of Ernie Pyle. Here is a strange, bemused far away and long ago, unfolded against a tranced, shimmering background of virgin cypress, myriad egrets, fabulous flowers — a deep South still nearly untouched by exploitation or settlement.

It is a land of fantasy, spun out in cadenced and skillful prose. It is, in Miss Miller’s own words, “a foundering maze of beauty.” As author she miraculously has foundered very little. Nor does she misstep into the bogs of whimsy or bathos. She believes — and if you go along with her, you believe too.

Lebanon herself is the only character who emerges nearly flesh and blood from this delicate imagery piled on delicate imagery, and Lebanon s nobility is of poetic rather than human proportion. Iler ill-starred great love was for Sebastian Kateliffe, a weakling. Her first marriage was to Fernald, whose complete degeneration sets something of a speed record. We leave her marrying for the second time, a sort of shadowy, aging preacher-saint. There have been other pioneer women in fiction whose courageous and enduring strength put to shame the weak or evil men who pioneered with them. One wonders, reading such books, how this country got settled at all.

The words of the book are lovely words. The winds and ihe trees and the black water of the cypress creeks are fragrant and authentically beautiful. Miss Miller loves first the dark, secret earth — and perhaps that is why the human beings who people it must inevitably come out second-best. Doubleday, Duran, $3.50.

FRANCES WOODWARD