Tract

EFFICIENCY EXPERT -- Florence Converse--Day ($2.50). The blueprints on the office-wall, The graphs and the statistical Tables of averages, all Praised him mightily: , "Venite Exultemus." So Author Converse begins a poem on the Depression that might have turned out a satire if her Christian sympathy had not got the better of her partisan indignation. A 172-page narrative in various verses, Efficiency Expert is another indication that long poems are coming out of hiding, may once again come to be used effectively as satire, narrative or tract. Author Converse's poem is a tract in the form of a narrative. The story: an efficiency expert has just invented a machine which will displace 300 workers in his mill. He worries about it because he knows and likes most of the men who will have to go, is popular with them. On the way home after work he hears a loudspeaker broadcasting a dispassionate critique of the Russian experiment; in the park he has a religious discussion with the deaconess who runs the mission across the street from his factory. He falls asleep on a park bench, has a nightmare from which he is wakened by one of his workmen, with whom he goes home to supper. They discuss the labor situation. When the efficiency expert finally takes his leave, he has sworn to stick by the men somehow. Inference is that he will walk out with them when they are discharged; more, that he will perhaps become a working Christian.

Verse of a vigorous order that never pretends to be poetry. Efficiency Expert sometimes puts its matter in neat nutshells, as in this discussion of the Tsarist Russian debt to the U. S.:

And Congress balked at recognition

Of this illicit parturition,

And incidentally insisted

(Though critics called the deal closefisted)

That first, the infant Soviets

Should pay up their pre-natal debts.

Followers of Major Clifford Hugh Douglas' economic theories will be pleased at Author Converse's sympathetic reference to Social Credit. And even those whom James Joyce calls "gracekopers" might find food for meditation in this proletarian grace:

We have meat, others have none;

God bless the Revolution! Amen.

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