Woman v. Man

THE THINKING REED--Rebecca West --Viking ($2.50).

Women bring a quality to writing that men would have to go to the moon to find. At their worst, they are poor imitations of he-hacks; at their best they are in a class by themselves. Among English women writers, Rebecca West (Cecily Fairfield Andrews) has ranked creditably. As a journalist of parts, she has written criticism and comment that was some-times brilliant, always flashy; often sensible but always dogmatic. Her third novel, Harriet Hume, was a clever tour de force whose artificiality distracted attention from its able workmanship. Last week she published a book that swept all critical hats off. The Thinking Reed, in spite of its tasteless title, immediately took its deserved place among the best novels in the short memory of modern man. Rebecca West had lost none of her brilliance. Yet the serious channel of her thought was plain to see. Her theme, Woman v. Man, was well-worn but full of unplumbed depths, strange eddies, many a pleasantly gurgling shallow. Masculine passengers at times hung on to their hats and gripped the gunwale, never felt easy enough to relax, but at the end gave a sigh of thanks for an instructive journey.

The Thinking Reed is a love story but few men will take it as a Valentine. The plot: Isabelle, half-U. S., half-French, is a very beautiful, quite rich widow at 26. She has come to France to get away from haunting memories of her aviator husband, recently killed in a crash. Thanks to her French connections she meets aristocratic, smoothly handsome Andre de Verviers, and because his physical attraction is extreme, takes him as a lover-antidote. At the time her story opens she has discovered that as a person she dislikes him intensely but cannot get rid of him. What Isabelle wants is to marry Laurence, an impeccable Virginia gentleman who has gone to Paris to ask her. Life with him, she is sure, would be peaceful, quiet and no trouble. Though she hates violence, she plans and carries out a violent scene at Andre de Venders' door which effectually frightens him out of the running. Unfortunately, Laurence is an unseen witness; she frightens him away too. To make the best of a bad bargain Isabelle marries Marc Salla-franque, an immensely rich but rather ridiculous industrialist.

Marc adores her like a dog; he is sensitive, goodhearted, naive. Before long Isabelle finds herself becoming very fond of him. But the crowd that buzzes around him, dedicated to "wealth, unchastity, and disobedience to all standards," she finds increasingly hard to bear. Marc has one vice, gambling. One bad evening at Le Touquet he gets drunk, starts to play. Because it is the only way to stop him Isabelle makes a ghastly scene which costs her a miscarriage. After a weary convalescence she decides to leave Marc and marry a young painter who is just her sort. But at the last minute she finds she cannot leave Marc after all.

Some women readers might object to Isabelle as an impossible she, but readers of both sexes will unite in delightedly applauding the stilettoed precision with which Author West pins her social butterflies and punctures her social elephants. Though her story ends in a neatly "happy" finale, it is really a temporary truce: "It struck [Isabelle] that the difference between men and women is the rock on which civilization will split before it can reach any goal that could justify its expenditure of effort."

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