Stride

COMPANY PARADE--Storm Jameson-- Knopf ($2.50). Sooner or later most novelists worth their salt come to grips with a Big Subject. Fortnight ago Storm Jameson showed she has tackled hers. Like U. S. Author John Dos Passos (The 42nd Parallel, 1919), French Author Jules Remains (Men of Good Will), English Author Jameson has taken the contemporary scene as her model. Like theirs, her picture will be years in the making. Company Parade, which merely introduces the principal characters, is "the first of perhaps five, or six novels"; her finished magnum opus will be called The Mirror in Darkness. Readers of Storm Jameson's autobiography (No Time Like the Present; TIME, June 26) may note similarities between herself and her heroine, Hervey, may recognize other real people from Author Jameson's past. But Company Parade is no autobiographical novel, in the confession sense. Central figure is Hervey Russell, stubborn Yorkshire girl come to London after the War to seek her fortune, at the price of leaving her adored infant son at home, her weak husband to his own devices. Painfully she holds down a job in an advertising agency, lives scrimpingly in lodgings where her only friend is a blowsy adventuress. When her two pre-War pals are demobilized one of them plans to start an honest weekly; he dies of cancer before he can make a beginning. The other retires into scientific research. Hervey leaves her job, helps found the hopeless paper and serves it faithfully until it founders. Her husband becomes more & more of a problem. As this first volume ends, Hervey is beginning to find an answer to her difficulties by getting to be a moderately successful novelist. A chronicle-novel by a painfully honest contemporary chronicler, Company Parade will not appeal to readers romantically inclined. But critics, most of whom consider Author Jameson's feet in the right path, will acknowledge that she is making a long stride forward.

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