FICTION

Moil

PREFACE TO A LIFE--Zona Gale-- Appleton ($2). What is to become of a small-town Wisconsin man who, having escaped once into the great world, visits home and is trapped there for the rest of his life by a childhood sweetheart and a deathbed promise to his epileptic father? Miss Gale's answer: his suppressions may drive him insane--that is, up or down the scale of sanity--especially if, having succumbed hastily to the sweetheart, he falls in love with a woman of the world when it is just too late; a woman who waits for him and writes to him for years after.

Thus Bernard Mead, timber magnate of Pauquette, Wis. There comes a day when, surrounded by his female relatives, including his spinster aunts, querulous mother, prolific wife and lusty offspring, he begins talking wildly of "seeing through" the eternal moil of creatures struggling to exist, acquire, mate and reproduce. He "sees through" to the essential, motile miracle of living--or something like that; neither he nor Miss Gale can quite express it. His wife sends for an alienist. He rushes off to Alia Locksley, the waiting one, hoping she will understand his prodigious discovery. But she is only sex-hungry. She sends for the same alienist. So Bernard Mead returns to Pauquette, grimly reflecting that he has a few years left in which to study out his new transcendental existence alone.

All of which might make a stirring novel, instead of a deadly dull, if the characters were convincing. Miss Gale's are incredibly and painfully fictitious. Her style, suffering since Miss Lulu Bett from chronic realism and acute poetic indigestion, is scarcely to be recommended as a model of lucidity to students at the University of Wisconsin, of which she is a Regent. An explanation of her elusive theme may be that Miss Gale has lately been concerned more with spiritualism than with literature.

Perennial Husband

THE ROMANTIC COMEDIANS--Ellen Glasgow--Doubleday, Page ($2.50). Judge Gamaliel Bland Honeywell--note his middle name-- was jilted in the heat of his Southern-Victorian youth by queenly Amanda Lightfoot. On the rebound he married a dovelike Cordelia whose solicitude for his digestion during their 36 years together far surpassed her sublimation of his romantic tendencies--or, dare we say, his passions. They had no children. She modestly discouraged his tenderest husbanding. Hence it was not surprising that Gamaliel, at chivalric 65, caught himself thinking, as he laid his fifty-second weekly wreath on Cordelia's grave, of other women--of "Amanda the faithful, "so noble that she creaks," who had repented for her pride and never married; of nymphs and dryads on spring breezes and in dreams; even of a mulatto making a bed. Nor was it surprising that he progressed from elderly solicitude to queasy warmth for Annabel Upchurch, Cordelia's impecunious niece, aged 23. Annabel had no moral sense but a heart. The heart had been cracked by her first lover. She had winged eyebrows, cherubic curves and, like the Blonde that Gentlemen Preferred, she loved presents. So they were married and a romantic comedy was wound up when she ran off with the next passing youth and Gamaliel caught a chill running after her.

The portraiture has icy precision. Epigrams rattle like hail. Southern stuffiness--the scene is Queen-borough, Va.--is snowed under by pretty drifts of poetic irony. It is engaging reading--but the wrong person wrote the book, overwrote it, if these generation-comparisons are to be taken seriously. Miss Glasgow is too merciless to make her Judge bearable; too doctrinaire to know what she means by Annabel. The best character is Gamaliel's twin sister, Edmonia, who lost her virtue young, married four times and loves to tell about it all.

Daddy Kyne

THE UNDERSTANDING HEART-- Peter B. Kyne--Cosmopolitan ($2)* In that magazine-story paradise, the California redwood forests, where the sheriffs have hearts of gold, the women shoot like the late Annie Oakley and the manly forest rangers croon Kipling, Author Kyne sets another of his soul-satisfying yarns.

The probity of open-space fiction today is truly magnificent. Author Kyne clearly states that this book's supply of moonshine, necessary for comic relief and to resuscitate the nobler characters after arduous adventures in the forest primeval, was laid down before Prohibition. Proud, independent and flirtatious though she is, Heroine Monica Dale, wilderness virgin, is made to explain in pretty confusion that the hero, after helping her to her lonely mountain-top cabin in a deluge, must go out and sleep in the barn. Otherwise she would be--er --compromised.

The handsome fugitive convict whom Monica "understands" is, of course, proved innocent. Nor does she more than "understand" him, and he her, though other possibilities, and a deep-dyed hydraulic. company villain, stalking various tracts of real estate, suffice to complicate the prospects of Hero Anthony Garland, cultivated consumptive, until the last paragraph, where man and woman throb together on a mountain beholding the usual "promise of another day."

NON-FICTION

Peasant of the World

The Story.* A blocky little figure whose slightly protruding eyes and lower lip are redeemed from plainness by an ample brow and roguish smile, born in 1706, becomes sentient about 1718. He is the young- est of a Massachusetts chandler's 17 children; cheerful, robust, precocious. He dares let himself be towed across a pond by his kite. He reads Locke, Defoe and the Spectator--authors of the Age .of Reason --besides Pilgrim's Progress and Plutarch. His publisher-brother is jailed for sensational articles in the New England Courant. Aged 17, the apprentice printer and anonymous author of the articles runs the Courant's circulation up to a dizzy 40, sorely vexing the Rev. Cotton Mather. His brother, out of jail, jealous, beats him. He quits long-nosed Boston for freer, easier Philadelphia, where his articles have excited sympathetic comment.

His books and conversation impress sloop captains, who mention him to Governors, one of whom, the windbag of Pennsylvania, starts him off to England but fails to provide promised letters. The pushful youth suffers penury, for the sake of seeing Dr. Johnson's London, for 18 months. He returns to Philadelphia saddened by bad friends, broadened and a complete "extrovert," determined to get on.

He not only improves but advertises his thrift, by trundling paper to his press himself and working late into the night. He does not found the Saturday Evening Post itself but publishes its ancestor and also an almanac wherein the homilies of "Poor Richard" are shrewdly gauged to please Quakers. Ever sly and fond of hoaxes, he soberly discusses the fictitious death of a rival almanac-maker. Ever gregarious, he forms the Junto, a discussion club which soon proves an advertising medium and political instrument. Ever inventive, he perfects a stove, dabbles in electricity. Ever desirous of doing good, he helps apprentices get started as his printing partners in other cities. Ever speculative, he invents his own polytheism, religious creed and liturgy. Ever amorous, he has a natural son. Ever candid, kindly, imperturbable, he owns the son and rears him to honor (and his son's natural son as well). Ever earthy, he writes burlesque letters of which one, to the Royal Academy of Brussels, "On Perfumes," is too Rabelaisian for his latest biographer, even in this era of literary latitude, to reproduce. . . .

The Significance. Previous biographers and the Autobiography have left few facts unstated about Benjamin Franklin. Legend, history and his own writings have preserved his fame intact. Fresh Frankliniana unearthed in England, and the spirit of the day, do, however, make possible fresh interpretations and emphases. Notably:

That Franklin's famed thrift was calculated, acquired and intermittent.

That his character and plan of life were largely determined by his early admiration for Addison and Steele's "Sir Roger de Coverley," --homely, clubby, beneficient.

That, though he enjoyed vexing the Rev, Cotton Mather with the Courant, he nevertheless acquired from that superstitious divine his desire to do good. Also, a lesson in discretion: When the young Ben first returned to Boston, after seven months in Philadelphia, with money, a watch and the acquaintance of Governors, Dr. Mather received him kindly. Showing his caller out through a low passage with a projecting beam, Dr. Mather cried, "Stoop! Stoop! Stoop occasionally as you go through the world, my boy, and you will miss many hard bumps." Ben Franklin occasionally stooped.

That his fondness for the opposite sex was equaled only by his attraction for it. He perpetually had a bevy of females, mostly young, spirited and quick-witted, about him or corresponding with him. They regarded him--even the French ones--as a fatherly savant to be adored rather than embraced. He, "half peasant, half man-of-the-world," was forever pressing his advances beyond paternal bounds, partly because he roundly relished the flesh, partly because it seemed the modish thing to do.

That, his being a day full of sharp wits, his pre-eminent popularity and influence among men was due less to his brains than to his personality, ingratiating but never obsequious, sharp but gentle, of which the prime quality, after he was affluent, was benevolence. "It is hard," he most characteristically wrote, "for an empty sack to stand upright." His own empty years, on the other hand, prepared him perfectly to negotiate the loans that won the Revolution, 25,000,000 francs in all, plus 6,000,000 from Louis XVI as a free gift.

That his mind was too versatile to be long occupied with one subject. After his historic afternoon in the cowshed (at Fourth and Vine Streets, Philadelphia) with the silk ribbon, door key (for a circuit-breaker), length of twine and silk-handkerchief kite, he laid aside lightning and "thunder-gusts" to proceed with his plans for an academy (now the University of Pennsylvania); for a Philadelphia hospital; for encouraging farmers to fertilize with lime (he printed in greenest grass on some of his own land, by liming huge letters, "THIS FIELD HAS BEEN PLASTERED"). Returning, idolized,* from Paris, he shut himself in his cabin to write. The script is not memoirs of his nine years in a brilliant city, nor of 79 years in a various world. It is on "The Cause and Cure of Smoky Chimneys."

* Examined at the request of a subscriber.

*BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: The first civilized American--Phillips Russell--Brentano's ($5).

*Last week the citizens of Auray, on the French Atlantic coast, having lately learned that it was there that Franklin first set foot on French soil 150 years ago, turned out en masse behind their mayor and prefect, sang national anthems and named a quay "Quai Benjamin Franklin," fixing a plaque on a nearby house. All this despite a driving rain and a demonstration by French soldiers against payment of France's War debt to the U. S.