Parachute

PARACHUTE -- Ramon Guthrie -- Harcourt Brace ($2).

The Story. On the shores of Lake Undega in New York State is Berkenmeer. Its Main Street has a gaudy haberdashery shop, but there are also ancient elm trees that once sheltered a tougher tribe of Yankees. Arthur Gordon, a descendant, is the grand vizier of Berkenmeer. With an air of detached gentility, he saw to it that "the hay was got in from the golf links before a thunder shower, dances were run off with no deficit, horses were not frightened "by steamrollers. . . ." An ebullient Rotary had begun to suspect him of not being a big enough booster. But such heresy was momentarily dispelled after the World War when he invited the U. S. Government to fill his family-memorial hospital with convalescing aviators, who were able to play golf and give the town girls a treat.

By a nasty trick of war, a "big Wop from Peoria," Tony Rickey, became the hero of this story. In boyhood, he was a bootblack. In youth, he founded the National Bug-Killer Co., which rented to thousands of farmers, by mail, a machine guaranteed to kill each & every insect or worm. The machine consisted of two blocks of wood--"you put the bug you wanted to kill on one block and squashed him with the other." Rental $2. Tony disappeared when the Postoffice got inquisitive, and left Deacon Miscombe holding the bag. In War, Aviator Tony annoyed a German sausage balloon and shot down a Fokker plane with the words: "Jeeze, what'd you want to pick on me for?"

Tony came to the Berkenmeer hospital with an injured arm which, it was tacitly understood among the golfing-aviators, would not prevent him from breaking anyone's jaw. But "Berkenmeer was meant for 'officers and gentlemen,' as the phrase ran"; so, acting on an inverse snobbism, Tony kept to himself. The only man with whom Tony had anything in common--they could both walk on their hands--was Harvey Sayles, an educated and war-shocked aviator, who thought out loud because he liked to hear himself think. He was the kind of a man who reads the Apocalypse and Alice in Wonderland in the same afternoon. Most people, including his family, thought him to be insane. But to Tony, he was a friendly, boundless genius.

Tony also encountered talent of another type--Natalie, the wife of Arthur Gortion. She was a Russian noblewoman of dark, warm beauty. Gortion had begun to look on her as an indiscretion of his youth; she locked her door at night and saw little of him or of the townsfolk. So it was natural that Natalie and Tony, both out of place in Berkenmeer society, should become illicit lovers. One day, Tony took her away. He obtained money from Berkenmeer boosters, hostile to Gortion, to form an aviation company. Natalie and he went barnstorming at county fairs, grabbing quick lunches, flying recklessly, with contempt for gaping yokels. Later, Sayles joined them, added wing-walking and parachute-jumping to their bill of feats. Sayles, lonely, asked an institutional woman named Adrienne to join the troupe as his wife; she told him that he was too insane to marry anyone. He brooded; committed suicide by the simple process of jumping from Tony's airplane without a parachute.

The shock of Sayles' death upset Tony so much that Natalie found him no longer pliant to her attractions. He took her back to Gortion in the face of a finger-pointing Berkenmeer, left the assets of the aviation company (which Gortion had purchased) at zero, hopped a freight for Peoria, saying: "Jeeze! . . . That society stuff was beginning to get on my nerves."

The Significance. This novel has long needed a writer. In Ramon Guthrie it found one of more than ordinary skill. His aviators are grease-smeared, swaggering, circus-like performers--and not papier-mache heroes. Also he does for Berkenmeer what Main Street did for Gopher Prairie. One needs both hands and most of one's toes to count the significant characters in Parachute. As the spokesman for the author, the shrewdly-mad Sayles makes the following deduction:

"I know why you all hate Tony. He's the only American in Berkenmeer. The rest of us are a bunch of decadent colonials clinging to a transplanted civilization as alien to America as cricket and crumpets. . . . Wheat, iron, coal, power--and we are still living in a world of maple-syrup and whale-oil! . . . Maybe they'll settle it by putting us on reservations like the Indians. They might set New England aside for us."

The Author, young, obscure, is a poet as well as a novelist, and has spent many years as a student in France. Sinclair Lewis was literary godfather to Parachute.