Soul Marching On

GOD'S ANGRY MAN--Leonard Ehrlich-- Simon & Schuster ($2.50). If anything could make you believe that old John Brown, hero-villain of Osawotamie and Harper's Ferry, was a great soul, God's Angry Man could. Author Leonard Ehrlich has stuck close to facts but insists his book is a novel, not biography or history. Its tone is sombre without relief. As the cumulative tragedy comes to its climax few readers will wish for any but the inevitable outcome. For a man who had lived the life of old John Brown, his end was best.

The story opens in Kansas--the "Bleeding Kansas" of 1856. Dour John Brown, scratching a bare living as a farmer in the Adirondacks, was a fanatical Abolitionist. He had sent some of his seven big sons out to help settle Kansas, keep her from becoming a slave state. Soon they needed help, sent word rifles would come in handier than bread. John Brown took the rifles out himself. When the Southerners burned Lawrence, John Brown took a bloody revenge. With a small party he went in the dead of night to enemy cabins, took men out of their beds and killed them in cold blood. After that he and his sons were outlaws, hiding, fighting, running for their lives. When government troops finally broke up Kansas' civil war, Brown's little army scattered. But Kansas had given him a bigger, more dangerous idea. He disappeared; sometimes not even his family knew where he was. He visited prominent Abolitionists in the East, begged money for his desperate scheme. About the gist of it he kept a close mouth. His sons feared him, distrusted his mysterious plans, tried to shake free of him; but when the day came most of them were with him.

The day was Oct. 16, 1859. That morning citizens of Harper's Ferry, Va. woke to sinister rumors. John Brown had captured the arsenal, cut the telegraph wires, proclaimed a slave insurrection. But no slaves came flocking in to him. Militia surrounded the engine house where Brown's tiny "army" made their last stand. U. S. Marines finished off the shambles the militia left. During his trial and in the days he waited for the scaffold, old John Brown was at his fanatical best. Few who saw him then thought him insane; even his jailer felt sympathy for him, admired him for the way he bore himself. To a Methodist preacher, a slavery-believer who came to see him, old John Brown said: "My dear sir, you know nothing about Christianity; you will have to learn its A, B and C. I respect you as a gentleman, of course, but as a heathen gentleman." The Virginians were reluctant but they had to hang John Brown. And when they hanged him they started a song that ended in war.

The Author, who lives in The Bronx and studied his English literature at the College of the City of New York, worked four hard years, writing with painful care, over God's Angry Man, his first novel. When he took the first two chapters and an outline of the rest to Publishers Simon & Schuster, able Editor Clifton Fadiman got excited, came to think it "by far the finest first novel that has been submitted to my house during my seven years of editorial experience." Readers will naturally compare it with Poet Stephen Vincent Benet's Pulitzer-prizewinning John Brown's Body, will find Ehrlich's book focused on the person and nature of old John Brown, whereas Benet in his big, historical mural used only Brown's spirit and sacrifice to recapture the mood of an era.

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