Winter's Child

THE BOOK OF SIMON--A. S. M. Hutch- inson--Little, Brown ($2).*

Writers are often human, often have children; but not often have they immortalized their own children by writing about them. Two glistering exceptions are Alan Alexander Milne and Arthur Stuart Menteth (If Winter Comes) Hutchinson. Everyone knows Christopher Robin. Soon a lot of people will know Simon. For in The Book of Simon Author Hutchinson tells you all there is to know about his son, from the age of 17 months to nearly three years. It is an affectionate account, not totally bereft of humor. "He crawls excitedly under the table for something and then, having secured it, gleefully stands upright. Bang! The table has rushed down upon him and crashed his head for him. He desires a piece of coal from the coal-box and to stoop for it he puts his hands on the fender to balance himself. Yell ! The fender is hot and has jumped at him and blistered him. . . . What a life!"

But sentiment in the long run gets the better of humor. "Imagine at nearly three that mind of his ! I imagine it, you know, as a little house, a little honeycomb, made up of pearly white cells -- glistening, dewy, lustrous, semitransparent, pearly pearly white cells: untrodden, untouched, and pure, oh pure beyond all conception of purity. Imagine by contrast with it the honeycomb house of a long-used mind, the mind of one past middle-age, and you will realize how pure and white and glistening and untouched it is. Imagine the trodden, trampled, often miry footpaths, (no, thought-paths) of a long-used mind, pitted with grievances, scarred with ugliness, cumbered with useless lumber, strewn with outworn hopes, clouded with disappointments and with sorrows, rusty with neglected opportunities, creaking with dismal hopeless habits. And then imagine the little lustrous honeycomb of cells of pearly pearly white that my son Simon's is!"

The book is written for grownups, but it may embarrass parents as well as bachelors. Many a father may feel as tenderly toward his children as Father Hutchinson writes of Simon, but few would attempt to expose such a feeling in print. Some may even resent Parent Hutchinson's performance. Rebecca West, writing last fortnight in the Outlook & Independent, grew caustic at The Book of Simon's expense, said she was staggered at "the increasing disposition of Englishmen to become mothers." Said she, what will Simon do when he grows up and sees what his father wrote about him? "There will be nothing for the lad to do except embark on deed after deed of violence, rising to a climax of unimaginable crime. . . . In fact I can imagine that in 1950 the names Christopher Robin and Simon may not mean at all what they do to the belletrist public of today. They may mean something not very different from what Bugs Moran and Al Capone mean today. And who will blame them!"

The Author. Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson made many a reader weep with his bestseller, If Winter Comes. Four years ago he married Una Rosamond Bristow-Gapper, who wrote to him admiringly on a postcard. Simon is their only child. Other books: This Freedom, One Increasing Purpose, The Uncertain Trumpet, The Clean Heart, The Happy Warrior.

*Published Nov. 21.

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