No Moss

PITY IS NOT ENOUGH -- Josephine Herbst--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

There are various ways of looking at the past: through rose-colored spectacles, through the wrong end of a telescope, or-- by an imaginative effort of which few are capable--face to face. Josephine Herbst's method is neither bespectacled nor telescopic, nor is it a personal, Proustian total-recall. Pity Is Not Enough is a medley of autobiographies, a family album of actually speaking likenesses. To read her story of the post-Civil War U. S. is like being there in a painfully realistic sense. Without depending very much on local color (letters, newspaper paragraphs), Authoress Herbst's story establishes its eyewitness character by almost continuous "indirect discourse," shifting its overheard speakers as the scene shifts but never losing its Nineteenth-Century tone of voice. Pity Is Not Enough is so achingly true to life that some readers may find it too drab for comfort; those who persevere to the end will admit that the title is well-chosen.

When Joe Trexler left his Pennsylvania Dutch home in Philadelphia in 1868, he headed South with other carpetbaggers. Joe was a green boy but his eyes were wide open, and he had taking ways. His hard-working mother, unpractical elder brother Aaron, his adoring sisters all hoped Joe would make a fortune. In Atlanta Joe got in with a smooth crowd who were making a very good thing out of a railroad company. He never quite gathered what it was all about, but he knew what to do while the sun was shining. When at last the clouds gathered and it began to rain investigations, Joe got soaked. He escaped to Canada (where he found the Governor of Georgia a fellow-refugee).

Joe's "trouble" in the South dogged him the rest of his life. For a while he came home, passed himself off as the hired man. When the sheriff came for him his loyal family helped him get away. Joe went West, joined the gold rush to the Black Hills. He had so many irons in the fire he was always hoping one would get hot, but it never did. Meanwhile his favorite sister Catherine died, Anne and Hortense married failures, Aaron got greyer and stingier. Joe's bitterest pill was to watch his youngest brother David, a hypocritical prig, become the only financial success in the family. Joe's letters home were optimistic to the last, but long before the end he found himself a settled failure, saddled with a virago wife, threatened more & more by the insanity that finally got him.

Authoress Herbst almost never intrudes her own viewpoint into this carefully watched story; when she does, it is arresting: "Contrary to superstition, the big mass are and have been for some time past more concerned with a way down than a way up."

The Author. Though agitated left-wing critics have made much pother about the rise of U. S. "proletarian literature," few respectable examples have so far come to light. To the sparse shelf that holds John Dos Passes' unfinished trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919) critics can now add the beginning of Josephine Herbst's. Her purpose is orthodox: to show the collapse of the "bourgeois" class. The second volume will bring her Trexler family up to the War; the third to 1933. Like Dos Passes, Authoress Herbst is not a member of the Communist Party, though her sympathies are even more rootedly proletarian than his. Mixture of Pennsylvania Dutch and Iowa stock, plain in face and nature. Josephine Herbst has spent 38 restless years. After college (at the Universities of Iowa and California) she went abroad, in Paris met and married radical Author John Herrmann, lifelong friend of Ernest Hemingway. They lived in Paris two years, then wandered to Germany, Italy, Seattle, San Francisco, Manhattan, bought a farm in Erwina, Pa., where they spend agricultural summers. In winter they like to go fishing in Florida with Friend Hemingway. Since last December they have been in Mexico, where Authoress Herbst is working on the next volume of her Decline & Fall.

Josephine Herbst has also written: Nothing Is Sacred, Money for Love.

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