Old time Religion

SUSAN SPRAY--Sheila Kaye-Smith-- Harper ($2.50).-- Sheila Kaye-Smith likes Sussex, continues to write about its broad, quiet fields, its broad, quiet people. If by some unlikely chance you have never read one of her books, Susan Spray is a good one to begin on. If you fear being bored to extinction by heavy dialect and heavy characters clodhopping to a country tragedy, take heart: there is enough irony, humanity, sly humor to leaven a much heavier lump.

Susan was the eldest daughter of a farm laborer whose lot had fallen on evil times. In England of the early igth Century, before the repeal of the Corn Laws, labor was cheap, food dear; the poor got poorer steadily. Susan's parents read the Bible but had never heard of birth control: their steadily increasing family were just so many Acts of God. Susan's mother died in childbed, her father came to a bad end in a wayside ditch. Susan and the rest of them went on the parish, but she and her sister Tamar soon got jobs on a good farm, had three square meals a day for the first time in their lives.

Susan was religious. She had a visionary imagination, a lively sense of an egocentric cosmos. Once she was called on to testify at a Sabbath meeting of the Colgate Brethren. She succeeded so well she became a frequent preacher. As her fame spread, her ambition grew. Then she fell in love, married a good workman, but kept on preaching. When her husband was killed in an accident, she even preached at the funeral. Susan and her religion both came a cropper when she met young Clarabut, a penniless wastrel who admired her but would not take her Message seriously. Clarabut got in Susan's blood. She dropped everything for him, went to live with him in London. Their marriage was passionate, bitter, quarrelsome, brief. When Susan finally left him she had no money and nowhere to go. Chance led her to a flashy, disreputable pub where her sister Tamar was mistress. Tamar had long ago gone to the bad. was now comfortably married, well-off, happy. Susan swallowed her pride, rested and revived her soul. Her ambition stirred again when rich, pious David Pell fell in love with her. She persuaded him to start a new sect, to found a religious community in the country with herself as head priestess. When her husband Clarabut's death was reported in the newspaper Susan's faith was once more made firm. It was a shock when just before her wedding to Pell she discovered Clarabut was alive after all. But Susan decided not to let her Career founder on such a little rock, went ahead with it.

The Author. Sheila Kaye-Smith published her first book, The Tramping Methodist, when she was 20 (she is now 43). Industrious, she has written 22 books, has eschewed London literary society. Shingle-headed, thin, quiet, with deep-set eyes, she is serious-minded but human. Seven years ago she married Rev. Theodore Penrose Fry, parson of the local parish. Five years later both were converted to Roman Catholicism; her husband gave up the ministry. They now live in a Sussex oast-house (hop-drying kiln). Other-books: Sussex Gorse, Green Apple Harvest, Joanna Godden, Joanna Godden Married, The Village Doctor, Shepherds in Sackcloth.

Susan Spray is one of the two September choices of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The other: S. S. San Pedro (TIME, Aug. 31).

Maybe Men . . .

PERHAPS WOMEN--Sherwood Anderson --Liveright ($2).

The way of the simplifier is hard. Simplicist Sherwood Anderson has been puzzling his head for years over the U. S. scene. In short stories, novels and autobiography he has struggled to focus what he sees into genuine art; occasionally he has succeeded. Lately he has taken to visiting factories, watching with his trou bled stare the unselfconscious machines, the unquestioning workers. Perhaps Women, a fragmentary notebook, is the result of these brooding visitations. Not the arguable art of economics but human beings, their daft ways, their queer needs, are what fascinate Sherwood Ander son. What Anderson thinks is wrong with U. S. men (he has said it before) is im potence. To watch a Barker-Coleman spooler warper in a cotton mill, says he, is enough to make any artist feel it in himself. "Man has already accepted the power given him by the machine, this vicarious power that moves mountains, that flies beneath the sea and through the air, that transports him so swiftly from place to place, as real power. He has ac cepted it as his own power. ... To at tain real power, of the mind, of the spirit, is a long slow process. Why should man go to all this trouble when he can so easily attain this vicarious power?" "It is a factual age, and in a factual age women will always rule. In the world of fact every woman has the advantage of me because she has something I cannot have . . . but let her come over into my male world, the world of fancy, and surely I will lose her there. I will go sure-footed through dim, far reaches of the fancy where she must always stumble blindly. . . . We are in a stalemate. Everyone feels it. Shall we have to turn the American world over to women? I think we shall." Maybe men have failed; then perhaps women. . . .

The Author. Sherwood Anderson, self-made writer, might have been a self-made tycoon. From handicapped beginnings as a poor boy in Camden, Ohio he rose through little schooling and many jobs to be manager of a paint factory. But the problems of industrialism preyed on his mind. One day, halfway through dictating a letter, he blurted out .to his stenographer: "I am walking in the bed of a river," clapped on his hat and walked out. never to return. Through his artist brother, Karl, he met the "Chicago group" of writers (Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg et al.) and began to write in earnest. Highbrow critics liked his work, praised it from the start.

His groping sincerity, combined with his lack of facility in expressing what he has to say, makes him at times almost incoherent, at times downright silly. But he is respected if not read by the U. S. at large, which has been taught to regard him as one of its few genuine home-grown authors. Three years ago Anderson settled -in Marion, Va., bought two country papers, one Democratic, one Republican, edits them impartially, contentedly. Thrice married, he has three children. Other books: Windy McPherson's Son, Winesburg, Ohio, Poor White, Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men, A Story Teller's Story, Tar.

Murder!

SUSPICIOUS CHARACTERS--Dorothy L. Savers--Brewer, Warren & Putnam ($2).

If you consider yourself intelligent and yet are a little ashamed of reading detective-stories, you may take courage from reflecting on the case of Authoress Dorothy Savers. One of the first women to take an Oxford degree (first-class honors in Medieval Literature), she was considered one of the most brilliant scholars of her year. Now a noted detective-story author & editor (The Omnibus of Crime), her favorite recreation is reading other people's detective stories. Withal, she is married (to Capt. Atherton Fleming), has shingled hair, a merry countenance.

Her latest thriller about her standing hero Lord Peter Wimsey is quite up to snuff, and lengthy enough to last out the most sleepless night. In a little fishing-&-painting community on the Scottish coast everybody knew quarrelsome Campbell and few liked him. When he was found dead near a half-finished painting it looked like an accident, but Lord Peter sniffed blood, proved to the police the picture had been painted after Campbell was dead. Six artists immediately fell under suspicion, but ultimately only one of them got it in the neck, and Authoress Sayers intimates that he was not born to be hanged.

-- Published Aug. 31.

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