Young Man's Story

Young Man's Story

DAWN BREAKS THE HEART--William Davey--Howell, Soskin ($2.75).

The publishers of this first novel liken its discovery to the discovery of Thomas Wolfe. In both cases the so-called "discoverer" (literary agent) was Madeleine Boyd, the manuscript was some 800,000 words long, and the original was ruthlessly cut. Like Wolfe's, Davey's novel is also utterly autobiographical.

Davey's hero is Philip Bentham, an upper-class young man whose life he records from childhood through marriage. The book repeats the inevitable pattern of all such novels: parentage, early memories, school, pangs of puberty, the awakening of the mind. This part of Davey's book has been done much better, and too often, before. Bentham marries at 21, and the book then becomes an original account of a young, sexually violent, emotionally tortured marriage, and of its breakup. The principals are sensitive, intelligent and real, and Davey handles them the same way.

Davey is the son of U. S. Artist Randall Davey, was genteelly educated at Lawrenceville and Princeton, spent some five years writing his novel. Good as it is, the story lacks that final intensity that would make it really comparable with Wolfe. William Davey seems the victim of an environment in which intensity does not flourish. Sophistication, a sort of post-collegiate good taste, reduce his work. Or perhaps the publishers cut too much of it away.

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