Blurred Life

FREMONT--Allan Nevins--Appleton-Century ($5).

"If the world's a stage," says Elizabeth Bowen, "there must be some wonderful parts." The tragedy of John Charles Fremont was not that he could not fill the roles, or that he did not enjoy them; he had all the equipment of a leading actor, better sets and a better leading lady than most. But he invariably missed his cues. He was born too early and died too late, married too young and learned too easily, succeeded too soon and then waited too long. Fremont, as he appears in Allan Nevins' biography, had no sense of timing.

As a politician, he was Republican candidate for President four years too soon. As a general, he prematurely emancipated the slaves in his district. As an explorer, he became such a popular favorite at 29 after his first Western trip, that later and harder journeys were anticlimactic. He raised the U. S. flag in California before the Mexican War broke out. He was born out of wedlock and married in haste. He fell in love with smart, ambitious Jessie Benton, daughter of Missouri's great Senator, but she was only fifteen; he married her secretly two years later, before he had her father's consent.

But Fremont's life has a freshness and enthusiasm rare in the records of U. S. public men. He was a galloping, theatrical character--when his first daughter was born, he spread a ragged, wind-whipped flag over Jessie's bed, saying, "This flag was raised over the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains. . . ." Even his calculations were naive and almost innocent, as when he stealthily evaded the War Department when he took a howitzer (for which he had no use) on his third expedition to the West. Courageous, spirited, good-humored and humorless, he seems in Allan Nevins' big (649-page), definitive biography to have been somehow distracted--like an actor who pulls the trigger but the pistol does not go off, or like a leading man who launches his great scene before the curtain rises.

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