Seven Against the Continent

BEDFORD VILLAGE--Hervey Allen--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

This novel is Volume II of a massive work, The Disinherited, in which the author of Anthony Adverse is reconstructing a fictional history of the early U.S. in a series of six books roughly corresponding to the stages in which the colonial frontier jumped from the Atlantic Seaboard across the Appalachian Mountains.

Volume I, The Forest and the Fort (TIME, April 5, 1943), was laid in Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley country. In Volume II the frontier has advanced to the Juniata. The Forest and the Fort chiefly concerned the adventures of Salathiel Al-bine, who was kidnapped and brought up by the Indians, grew into a 6 ft. 4 in. paleface with muscles like "fluid oak wood." Salathiel reappears in Bedford Village as one of seven frontiersmen who help Captain Jack Fenwick carry out his vow to exterminate the Indians.

The Fenwick family carries out the theme of Novelist Allen's title: that the U.S. was founded neither by revolution aries nor social reorganizers, but by "the disinherited" in a continent where "for the first time in memorized history man was free to act entirely on his own responsibility."

Always Vengeful, Sometimes Crazy. For the Fenwicks were "physically alive in a world in which they did not legally exist." One of their ancestors lost his head to King William for the political crime of losing his heart to King James. Parliament outlawed the rest of the clan. So disinherited Captain Jack Fenwick prowled the Pennsylvania frontier in 1764, soon became a legend. Tall, springy, savage, he became one of those Indian fighters who were as necessary to the colonists as corn. Captain Jack was always vengeful and sometimes a little crazy. For he remembered the night when, in his absence, a party of drunken Hurons and five half-breed Frenchmen burned his house, tortured his wife and two children to death. Captain Jack's is the best of the four main stories in Bedford Village which Novelist Allen ties together like a garrulous storekeeper wrapping up packages.

Bedford Village was the last outpost of the frontier. Two thousand settlers crowded under the walls of its fort. Around the village in every direction "stretched the illimitable forest," murder-haunted and mysterious, and green as shoal water, through which the Indians glided like sharks through reefs. Most of the action in the novel results from Indian troubles intensified by the French-British wars in Europe, the fact that the Bedford garrison was mutinous, and that the Quaker legislature in Philadelphia would not appropriate funds to fight the redskins.

So Captain Jack undertook to save Bedford Village and the Pennsylvania frontier. His forces: seven men. His strategy: to attack, surprise, ambush the Indian war parties over as great a territory as possible to give the impression his seven men were a battalion. As savage as the savages, the seven almost succeeded.

The strength of Hervey Allen's fiction is in its pageantry, the broad sweep of forest, river and mountains, with details piled on in careless abundance, and with sudden spirited scenes of violence lighting up in dividual characters with a brief intense flash. Often the situations are operatic, with the posturings and awkwardnesses of opera. But at moments they give way to a clarity of scene and character vivid as one of the Indian villages Captain Jack's paleface braves come upon suddenly in the woods. The total effect is epic and dis orderly. But so was the frontier.

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