Double Ascension

THE TRANSIENTS--Mark Van Doren-- Morrow ($2.50).

Mark Van Doren, of the literary Van Dorens (Sister-in-law Irita is editor of the Herald Tribune Books; Brother Carl is chief editor of the Literary Guild), is a poet. Though he is 40, The Transients is his first novel. In self-consciously dignified prose he tells a poetic parable.

John Bole was spending ten days in jail in a small, law-abiding town because he had solicited a passing car for a lift. But John Bole was no common hitchhiker. On the jailer and the jailer's wife he made a strongly mysterious impression; his effect on the jailer's daughter was even stronger. When his time was up she insisted on going with him, though he made it clear to her that he was only a visitor on earth, would be off to some other place on the first day of autumn. More, he was fleeing from a woman of his own kind, because she had tried to persuade him to embrace mortality. Meanwhile Margaret, the other immortal visitant, having lost her mate, took shelter with a college boy who had given her a lift on the road, and let him become her lover for a few days. When she began to worry about the shortening time she escaped, took up the search for John again. She found him, and the jailer's daughter was sent packing. The two immortals took refuge in an abandoned house in the woods, made the most of the days summer had left them. When the final midnight came, John disappeared as he had said he would. Margaret, unable to bear the world without him, followed in her own way.

Author Van Doren's sentences sometimes have immortal longings, oftener trip up on unfamiliar hard ground. But occasionally his earthly visitants speak in character, as in these comments on their human hosts: "Unable to know good without bad, they congratulate themselves upon being the only creatures for whom both exist. Unable to live long, they claim a special beauty for their limited lives. Unable to conceive eternity, they worship time. Unable to avoid suffering and disappointment, they pretend that these are nobler teachers than felicity and truth. Unable to achieve anything better than the sorriest confusion in their minds, they chatter about the unfathomable variety of the world."

The Author, Tightlipped, long-faced Mark Van Doren, like his three-year junior, Thornton Wilder (see col. 1), learned his songster's art in the gilded academic cage. But his trial flights have been less bold and less successful than Wilder's. Graduate of his native University of Illinois, a Columbia Ph. D., an assistant professor of English at Columbia, he has confined his extracurricular activities to the literary editorship of the Nation (1924-28). critical studies, books of poems.

Other books: Henry David Thoreau, The Poetry of John Dryden, Spring Thunder and other Poems, Now the Sky and other Poems, Jonathan Gentry.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.