"Pretty Crazy"

THE GREAT AMERICAN ASS--Anonymous--Brentano's ($3.50) Of all autobiographies, anonymous ones arouse the highest expecta tions. These, one feels, can afford to let themselves go. On this score none will be disappointed with "Roy Bradley's" freakish self-history. He is a man on the borderline of genius and insanity, not far (though far enough) removed from that type of creature that plagues editors and other public people with "nut" letters. He has passionate grievances, Tom o' Bedlam's honesty and a spilling store of acrid Americana to relate. Son of Puritans, he was raised among "that prairie tribe, conglomerate of Dutchman, Bohunk, Railroad Irish and Indiana Yankee" in Nebraska and Kansas.

In spasmodic spurts he tells the intimate story of a sensitive boy struggling to become a writer in the face of physical frailty and parental distrust, in mean towns built beside buffalo wallows. Beneath the burden runs a hysterically bitter ground-bass--a dirge for everything Puritan--and snarling discords to the effect that constipation was the pioneers' curse; that their children were rickety, their politics poltroonish, their women spavined, their teeth acid, their minds (including the author's) stunted and deranged, all because they failed to raise cabbages and take lime into their systems.

Out of the welter flash raucous snatches of prairie humor, vivid actions, scatterbrained flights of self-pitying, self-despising, pagan philosophy. The father looms as a monument of malicious, brooding egotism. Brother Tom is a semi-imbecile with a bulbous head, liquid eyes and great sensitivity; he married a Danish farm wench and went to Mexico City to found a socialist commonwealth.

"Roy Bradley" himself, despite a certain lack of ingenuousness that inevitably marks confessions in the Occident, remains a frenzied, consumptive paranoiac, self-immolated for revenge upon Barbarism, babbling as he waits for death that the grey bones of New England babies became fertilizer for the prairie soil; that the Puritans, nurtured on illusion, are wild asses run amuck when illusion has withered. Whoever he is, he once wrote (44) a novel and sent it to the late Walter Hines Page, who returnee it with the gentle words: "Either I am pretty crazy or you are."