Sandoval*

Sandoval*

Mr. Beer Writes a Romance of Bad Manners

The Story. When the self-important little excursion boats used to go puffing up and down the Hudson, back in the '60s, the hawkers there on used to sell descriptive pamphlets containing the item that on the river bank at Dobbs Ferry stands "the ele gant and commodious residence of Charles O. Gaar-- the mansion sur rounded by 14 acres of beautifully decorated grounds and containing four bathrooms." As a result, during one battling week at boarding school, Gaar's 16-year -old son "Blacky" was "elegant" and " commodious," and a boy from Hartford made "a ribald sketch of him looped through four bathtubs." He fought it all; but the goading sense of his new-rich family's vulgarity, he, being made of finer stuff, could not quite down.

When the story opens, Blacky's brother Christian is engaged to pretty, fluffy, red-haired May Almy. Her mother, who has socially arrived (in contrast to Christian's mother who is still climbing, with the odds against her ever reaching the summit), is privately chagrined at the prospect of the match, though to be sure the family bank account is something of a palliative. Mr. Gaar had been secretary to her husband until the latter had mysteriously ad mitted him to partnership; and upon Mr. Almy's death Mr. Gaar, whilom Danish immigrant, had automatically become the head of the business.

Into the bosom of the Gaar family comes one Christian Coty de Sandoval, soft-spoken rascal from New Orleans, burbling about some huge amount of money owed by the de parted Banker Almy to his (Sandoval's) colleagues, erstwhile rebels in the captured city of New Orleans. They had, it would appear, hatched a plot to ship over to France certain financial inducements to some of the feminine harpies "with made-up titles," who surround Louis Napoleon, to persuade that calloused monarch to bestir himself in the cause of the Confederacy. They had collected some $250,000, much of it in honest English and French gold, had entrusted it to a shipping agent for transfer to France via the New York banks -- all cunningly concealed in a hollow statue of Hercules.

Sandoval had the bad judgment to imply that Messrs. Almy and Gaar had helped themselves to the shipment, and were now "dancing on the ruins." Two things were certain these six years after the war: the inducements had never reached the harpies, and Mrs. Gaar's garnet bracelets and the beginnings of the "elegant and commodious" mansion on the Hudson had come to light shortly after the money had disappeared there from.

Be that as it may, Sandoval and Christian had a quarrel about it. Christian aimed one at his jaw, Sandoval fell off the balcony and obligingly killed himself. He was drunk at the time, he was a scoundrel anyway, so it doubtless did not matter much.

The Significance. The plot is not the thing, in any event. It is the way of its telling that makes this novel unique. In oddly blurred, yet impossibly vivid, shimmering sentences, this rich ambling becomes an absorbing tale. In what its author calls "a romance of bad manners," he has sketched those nebulous days just after the Civil war, for our contemporary gaze.

The Author. Thomas Beer, born in 1889 at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and graduated from Yale College and Colum bia Law School, has been by turns lawyer's clerk, field-artilleryman, magazine contributor. Among his novels: The Fair Rewards, Stephen Crane.

* SANDOVAL -- Thomas Beer -- Knopf (12.00).