Summer Reading

IT is curious to find in three new books, widely divergent in story and in style, an identical human desire. In each one of them is the hunger for land, for the permanency of personally tended earth, trees, and flowers. Though one is the saga of Dakota homesteaders, one the chronicle of a London grocer’s family, and one the recital of the gropings for reality of a young intellectual from the ranks of Harvard’s teaching staff, the hero of each story is struggling for rooted independence outside the established machine. This common theme makes the three books fall happily into the mood of summer days.

The If Wayward Pilgrims (Putnam, $2.50) is the most freshly interesting of the three. It is the sort of tale that Christopher Morley used to spin twenty years ago. The mind, not the body, provides the action. And it runs the shadowy danger of being faintly academic. To remark on this may seem captious, but Gerald Warner Brace has talent, a quick eye, and rich promise of more books, so he should look out for too glib an epigrammatic facility, and disturb himself on the question of just where anecdote and speculation leave off and mere quaintness and smartness begin. The book deals with a few weeks in the life of Lawrence Minot, winner of a small cash fellowship, who sets out for Vermont, theoretically to report on the native vernacular, actually to shake off the cobwebs of life as a Harvard tutor. The Vermont winds blow away the classroom dust, and the adventure is Margot.

Meeting in a country station, the two walk off together to the hills, seeing with beautiful clarity the lovely land, exploring, sometimes with quotable brilliance, the whys of man’s unhappiness. Some of the people they meet are drawn with the most admirably economical clarity, and with tenderness beyond the event. Some moments in their own short relationship are haunting romance. The book is uneven, and without humor, but the good pages more than make up for the unfortunately literary bad ones. As one Vermont farmer says, ‘There’s good in it, enough good.’

And Minot voices that longing for ‘the forest that never ends, that goes on . . . no pretense, no fake, no highway round the corner, just pure wild. ’

This is the thing, in Free Land (Longmans, Green, $2.50), that pushed young David Beaton and his wife Mary out to the Dakota grasslands in 1879. We have several competent, vigorous historians of the American pioneers, and Rose Wilder Lane is one of the best. She has real wit, and a warm and understanding admiration for her lusty forbears which enables her to re-create them in fleshly reality. In that time and country a blizzard was a more fearful enemy than the Indians themselves, and families herded their halffrozen stock into their one-room sod houses, desperately embattled against the land they stubbornly intended to subdue. These people had the daily consciousness of life which the ‘Wayward Pilgrims’ were looking for, having lost it in the towns the Beatons built. Everything came in giant’s portions, and the rims of the wagon wheels churned thickly through prairie chickens’ eggs in the very same year which saw children dying of hunger and honest David Beaton stealing planks to floor his house, wood being rarer than cattle barons’ diamonds.

‘The frontier, the untrammeled,’ Mr. Brace says; ‘I’ve often wondered how people in England, for example, get along - - everything has a hedge on the other side of it.'

Bill Warren, the English hero of The Lenient God (Macmillan, $2.50), does n’t so much mind the hedges. He minds the class restrictions, the city pavements, the fences that lack of money and an uncompleted education have set around him. And he wants a snug suburban garden as passionately as the Americans want their great sweep of virgin sky. Naomi Jacobs is already the author of twenty highly readable novels, so Bill’s progress toward his garden (and his long-lost love) makes entertaining reading. The book is crowded with people, with emotion, with recognizable ‘characters’ in the best English style. It has a dozen separate stories in it, and none of them are dull. Fat with incident, it is built to entertain, and it does.

Summer reading — it is a little hard to understand why that phrase seems to connote triviality. These three books may not be as profound as the works of Kant, but they are not marshmallowfilled, either, and seem to me exactly tuned for reading now.