Slow Death

WILDWOOD--Josephine W. Johnson--Harper ($2).

Josephine (Now in November) Johnson's first novel since 1937 is a study in passive, helpless anguish. Its subject: the cold fear, the ultimate spiritual paralysis, which lovelessness can create. Its victim: a shy, adopted child named Edith.

Edith's adoptive parents were Matthew Pierre, an ornithologist, and his wife Valerie, a horticulturist. Their home, "Wildwood," was a warbling, fragrant inferno of prize flowers and bird-feeding stations, surrounded by a rusty iron fence. Matthew was a cold-souled, pipe-fondling dispenser of gently eviscerating irony. Valerie's "pale unearthly face was . . . like some silky autumn pod." They were about as capable of love as a stuffed finch and a glass calla lily. Edith was twelve when she came to them, 21 when their death freed her. In all her years with them she had no enduring reason to believe that they felt affection or even pity for her.

But that she meant the world to them, in some obscure and sinister way, was always paralyzingly clear. Edith knew well enough, for instance, how intensely displeased they would be if she brought a friend home from school. Since she dreaded their displeasure like death itself, she ran away from the one schoolmate who ever invited herself. She was an intelligent child, but instinctively, the gentle morons of the school were drawn to her. On her 16th birthday the Pierres gave her a party. Only then did it occur to them that they had never allowed her to take dancing lessons.

When the Pierres have done their worst and, dying, leave Edith free, Novelist Johnson brings up her crudest artillery: a doctor with whom the girl is hopelessly in love and a healthy little girl whom she likes. Edith's short final scenes with them are sharp and painful enough to vindicate a good deal of maundering in the body of the book.

Wildwood is at once persuasive and exasperating. The agony is laid on deftly, sometimes almost impalpably. But the question persistently gnaws: is this a work of serious literature, as the author obviously desires it to be, or just a nice little melodrama spoiled by oversolemnity? A heroine so ready with tears, who walks among flowers "almost crushed with their perfection," is annoying as well as sympathetic, and is perhaps just not worth taking seriously enough to write a whole novel about.

Moreover, Miss Johnson is a loving--almost a lustful--stylist. Her fondness for soft focus, for words like flow and sift and soft and grey, makes reading her prose, for all its earnestness and frequent beauty, a little like swallowing feathers.

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