Saints

A CALENDAR OF SAINTS FOR UNBELIEVERS -- Glenway Wescott--Harper ($2.50).

One way to try to shake off the dust of Wisconsin is to write a book about saints. Glenway Wescott, self-exiled in France, has been dipping his Wisconsin-haunted nose in hagiography. This little (215 pp.) anthology of saints' lives, at least one for every day in the year, is "not a learned work" nor a book for the devout, but "a simple picture of a crowd . . . blessed degenerates, mere sportsmen of asceticism, man-sized infants, a demigod or two, politicians, fearful beauties, awful fools, and, of course, those for whom there simply would have had to be some such word as 'saint' even if Christianity had not come to pass."

Some of the more than 400 saints: Simeon Stylites, who lived 38 years on a pillar, at first 9 ft., at last 60 ft. high. Sebastian, who was shot full of arrows but (according to Author Wescott's account) recovered and was beaten to death. Gothard, absent-minded Alpine hermit, hung his coat on a sunbeam; the obliging beam waited till the coat was removed, then hurried after the setting sun. When Agnes of Monte Pulciano prayed, roses and lilies fell from heaven, "because she never did it mechanically." Philip Neri, disciple of Savonarola, said: "Despise the world; despise yourself; and despise being despised." A post-mortem showed that his heart had grown so great that it had displaced one of his ribs. Of Joan of Arc, Hagiographer Wescott says: "If she was not a witch, the church is guilty of having destroyed its rarest heroine as a political expedient: if she was, it is guilty of having canonized her for more amiable reasons of the same general sort." Of The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus: "One is inclined to think that almost all Christians now have taken them for patron-saints." Joseph of Cupertino used to fly like a bat; his fellow-Franciscans were afraid of him but the common people adored him, and he could tell "whether or not they were immoral by the way they smelled."

The Author. Though he is much younger (32) and better-looking than Sinclair Lewis (48), Glenway Wescott is almost as birthplace-ridden. In the beerless era, his public farewells to his native State helped keep the U. S. reading public Wisconsin-conscious. He has defined the Middle West as: "A place which has no fixed boundaries, no particular history; inhabited by no one race; always exhausted by its rich output of food, men, and manufactured articles: loyal to none of its many creeds, prohibitions, fads, hypocrisies; now letting itself be governed, now ungovernable." Sprig of an old U. S. family with traditions of public service, Wescott was pointed for the ministry, but at twelve he left home (Kewaskum, Wis.) for the more spacious academic atmosphere of West Bend and Waukesha, went on to the University of Chicago, where he headed the Poetry Club and took his literary vows. When he started writing reviews for Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, Margaret Anderson mistook him for an Englishman. Wescott explained that "he loved the English language and had trained himself to speak it beautifully."

After non-graduation from the University of Chicago and literary odd jobs in Chicago and Manhattan, Wescott went abroad to live and has been there off & on ever since, mostly in Villefranche or Paris. He is unmarried, slender, boyish-looking, with a long, smooth face, pointed, lobeless ears. He is fond of comic strips. Other books: The Apple of the Eye, Natives of the Rock, The Grandmothers, Goodbye Wisconsin, The Babe's Bed, Fear & Trembling (TIME, May 16, 1932).

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