Snark-Hunter

MODERN MAN, HIS BELIEF AND BEHAVIOR -- Harvey Fergusson -- Knopf ($2.75). The world is still waiting for someone to capture a snark (humorous English symbol for Final Truth). Many a well-heeled tracker has announced himself hot on the trail, but either he or the spoor always fades away before the finish. One hopeful English philosopher thought he had caught the secret while under ether, decided to repeat the experiment and translate its results into waking terms. Just emerging from his self-imposed unconsciousness he seized pad & pencil, triumphantly wrote down the essential truth: "The entire universe is pervaded with a strong odor of turpentine." Snark-hunter Harvey Fergusson has gone at his priestlike task in cold sobriety. No ether-sniffer or believer in other forms of revelation, he has tried to snare his snark not with smiles, soap or thimbles but by giving it a long, logical look. His snark: what kind of a creature is modern man.

Seriously, says Fergusson, modern man is a mess. He still pretends to be guided by his forefathers' morality, though he knows his reverence for it is only superstition and has nothing to do with the current price of eggs. Because his actions are painfully at variance with his so-called beliefs he tries to balance his moral budget with cathartics, stimulants and sedatives. In almost every department of human activity he is a divided personality, and he suffers for it. Human nature and human morality, says Fergusson, have changed out of all knowledge and will continue to change; and until modern man's beliefs catch up with his behavior he will remain raw material for the prophet, the politician, the psychoanalyst, the police. An optimistic determinist, Fergusson believes progressive disillusionment is the daily bread for those with teeth and stomachs strong enough to take it.

Modern Man, His Belief and Behavior is a manful trespass by a tyro on professional property. Experts will find nothing very startling in it, but laymen might give it a lusty cheer. Unfortunately, Trespasser Fergusson has been so conscious of the professional sanctity of the forbidden ground that he has removed his everyday shoes and trips it awkwardly in borrowed slippers. He falls too readily into a jargon of abstractions often indistinguishable from the experts'. And for once, both experts and laymen will probably agree on one thing: Hunter Fergusson's snark remains to be caught.

The Author, now 46, started life as an outdoor boy in New Mexico, toted a gun at the age of 9, rode range with the cattlemen until he was 18. After college he turned newshawk. So that he could spend half the year in the Rocky Mountains, Fergusson free-lanced in his spare time, wrote seven fair-to-middling novels, most of them in praise of a sound mind in an outdoor body. Modern Man was written in California on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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