Half-Baked Hero

THE EARTH IS OURS--Whelm Moberg --Simon & Schuster ($2.75).

Last week Swedish Novelist Vilhelm Moberg published a novel that was written with great earnestness, a restrained love of the Swedish countryside, an earthy knowledge of peasant types. In sheer acreage (687 pages) The Earth Is Ours outbulked Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil (406 pages). But Growth of the Soil told an ageless legend of a land-loving peasant's conquest of and by the soil. The Earth Is Ours tells the story of a book-loving peasant's efforts to reshape his native countryside along the lines of the more abundant life.

Knut Toring was a Swedish peasant boy who read so many books that his parents thought he must be a little crazy. As soon as he was big enough, Knut dashed off to Stockholm, made himself into an intellectual, eventually became editor of Leisure Hours, a Swedish Saturday Evening Post. But he insisted on giving his readers not what they wanted to read but what he thought they ought to want. Result: canceled subscriptions. This perversity among subscribers, trouble with his wife, and a revival of his feeling for the good earth finally split Editor Toring's personality three ways.

So one day Knut Toring chucked his job, left his wife and children, went back to live in his native village. With overalled Betty Eskilsson, who announced that she had renounced the old trinity for a new one--nitrogen, calcium and superphosphate--Knut formed the Young People's Society to keep peasant boys on the farm through cooperatives and communal culture. World War II was on the way before the Young People's Society got its community clubhouse started, but the book ends with them digging away -- a symbol of what Author Moberg thinks the post war world should look like.

Moberg's peasants, working always in the soil, thinking in terms of generations --of plants, of animals, of themselves -- feel that they are part of a never-ending process of creation, deriving from the past, foreshadowing the future. This feeling makes them crudely mystical, stolidly enduring, slow to change, suspicious of the nervous life and fidgety minds of cities. Knut Hamsun understood that being a peasant is not just a rural occupation, but a complete way of living and thinking, with which he sympathized. Moberg understands the peasant's life too, but does not sympathize. He has ideas for the country side of the future. But Moberg the writer is too strong for Moberg the ideologue. Compared with his mean but strong and realistic peasants, there is a sloganeering and strength-through-joy unreality about Knut Toring's Young People's Society and their cooperative commonwealth. Both have high humanitarian motives, but they spring from the same cause that makes Knut a half-baked hero -- as bookish boy, as self-righteous editor, as crusading cooperator, Knut is a good deal of a prig.

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