Table-Rapping Utopia

SEEK-NO-FURTHER -- Constance Robertson--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Conspicuous among the adolescent pimples of the U. S. were the Utopian socialisms which broke out sporadically in the 19th Century on the maps of New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio. There were Owenite communities in the 1820s, Fourier phalanges in the 1840s, spiritualist communes in the 1850s. As one Utopia failed, the Utopians, dogged, idealistic, excitable, looked round for new capital, moved to the next county, started another Utopia. Most Utopians came from the cities and were bad farmers. Most of them acquired too much land, which was foreclosed at the first slim crop. New Harmony, in Posey County, Ind., had seven successive constitutions, failed both under a dictatorship and when it split into ten separate communities. Some communities died out because they did not believe in having children. Others that believed in Free Love were smashed by vigilantes. Some broke up in quarrels about property, religion, women. Brook Farm, at West Roxbury, Mass., died of an excess of literary men.

Last week, in a novel called Seek-No-Further, Author Constance Robertson told the story of Temple Commune in Jericho Centre, N. Y. The Temple was a group of 65 farmers who worked hard all day and in the evening held canning bees and seances. Its women wore short tunics and ankle-length bloomers instead of world's clothes: hoop skirts and petticoats. Its men feared God and would do anything in the world for old Father Swann, once he got talking. The main building where the Templers slept had an elaborate lacy cornice and rounded corners to keep out evil spirits: Father Swann had built it according to the specifications of messengers from the Other Plane.

Father Swann's son Isaiah, brought up with the other children of the commune, came back from Yale with misgivings about the Other Plane. He wanted to marry Dinah, the pretty, credulous ward of the Temple. Father Swann told him he had better wait. Meanwhile, Father Swann rarely got spirit communications any more; the Temple's mediums were out of practice. When the Temple went through its first crisis, a diphtheria epidemic, Father Swann ignored the advice of the spirit doctor and the spectral Association of Healthfulizers and cast out the Sore-Throat Devil by the up-to-date, scientific treatment of cracked ice.

Then James Prince and his followers arrived. Prince was the Basil Rathbone type--tall, hypnotic, a devil with women. "His power,'' said his wife, "is more than half in the way he affects women. . . . He's handsome and he's got magnetism and a gift of words. And he's had lots of practice." He had started a commune on a parcel of land in Virginia which the Apostle Paul assured him was the site of the Garden of Eden. That broke up because of his predilection for young girls. During the diphtheria epidemic the Templers had not been able to harvest the crops. They had no way of getting through the winter. James Prince had $20,000. Despite the opposition of Isaiah, Father Swann took him in.

Gradually James Prince got control of the Temple. His followers, mosty women, wore the world's clothes, sat tatting when they should have been minding the children. The young people played croquet and practiced to be mediums. James Prince won all but Isaiah and the oldest Templers to his belief in Hunger-ology, Care-ology, Womb-ology. By the time he came to construct a Machine Messiah according to the directions of Benjamin Franklin and the Association of Electricizers, the children were quarreling and no one in the Temple was working. The Machine was a complicated tangle of magnets, coils and rods. "Good 'Lantic Ocean," ejaculated the neighbors, "what a contraption!" James Prince's notion was to have Dinah, the Temple's purest virgin, conceive immaculately a spiritual impulse to set the Machine working. After nine months of elaborate preparation Dinah, mesmerized on a bench beside the Machine, went through the agonies of birth.

Another of James Prince's notions was that the way to find your spiritual counterpart was to breathe deeply. To public opinion, that sounded like Free Love. The stories of how Dinah went every day to the laboratory to nurse the Machine made things worse. One day a mob arrived at the Temple, burned a few buildings, destroyed the Machine and sent James Prince packing. But Isaiah got Dinah and it looked as if the Temple would carry on.

The Author. Constance Robertson, who has written one other novel, Enchanted Avenue and a mystery, Five Fated Letters (under the pseudonym Dana Scott), was born in the house of her grandfather, John Humphrey Noyes, founder of famed Oneida Community (1842 to 1880), one of whose concerns was breeding the Superman; consequently it was kicked around by public opinion till it was changed to a corporation which now manufactures silverware. The Templers are as authentic as a composite photograph. Everything in Seek-No-Further but the happy ending actually happened in one of the two dozen or so 19th Century communities which tried table-rapping and socialism.

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