Personal Publisher

Varicose Veins, McCarthy and His Enemies and Patristic Homilies on the Gospels have one thing in common: they are published by Henry Regnery Co.. a young Chicago publishing house that operates in the old tradition of the personal publisher. Regnery's personal publisher is its 43-year-old president, Henry Regnery, a slight, intense man, whose interests and whims in religion, philosophy, education, poetry and politics have produced a varied, provocative, often infuriating and rarely dull catalogue of Regnery books.

Henry Regnery has published a spate of works by such right-wing authors as William F. Buckley Jr., Chesly Manly, Louis Budenz, William Henry Chamberlain and Freda Utley. He seems to act as a magnet for those who hate Roosevelt, champion Joe McCarthy, attack unlimited academic freedom and take a dim view of the U.N. On the whole, he finds himself aligned with his authors' opinions, but he rarely hobnobs with right-wing VIPs. He sees himself as the champion of outcast authors, charges other publishers with deliberately ignoring books that express a far-right point of view. "It wouldn't be any service for me to publish the liberal authors." he says. "They have plenty of publishers who are only too happy to have them."

Sweaters & Philosophy. It was his concern about the lack of a sounding board for many "worthwhile ideas" that brought him into publishing. His father, the Wisconsin-born son of an Alsatian immigrant, built up a fortune in textiles and banking in Chicago, helped found and support the isolationist America First Committee. Young Henry studied at M.I.T., the University of Bonn and Harvard graduate school in preparation for a career in the family textile business. Later, he founded a successful sweater factory, and married the daughter of Philadelphia Banker Alfred Scattergood, a well-known Quaker.

Henry had developed into something of an egghead while at school, and his chief interests were the German and Communist problems. At war's end he was approached by friends who could not find a publisher for a book criticizing Henry Morgenthau's plan to reduce Germany to a pastoral state. Henry forgot about textiles and banks. Eight years ago he formed his publishing firm. Millionaire Regnery likes to say that it cost him $100,000 to learn the publishing business. but today the company is in the black.

Regnery's catalogue is weak on sex and popular novels, includes textbooks, classics reprints, and such unexpected offerings as The Natural History of a Yard and How to Free Yourself from Nervous Tension. Regnery risks his money on such deserving but esoteric authors as England's Wyndham Lewis and Swiss Philosopher Max Picard. A fat list of steadily selling Roman Catholic books helps him take losses on less popular works.

Ehrenburg & Franco. When Lawrence of Arabia, Richard Aldington's deflation of the legendary T.E. Lawrence, raised a storm in Britain. Regnery latched onto the book for publication in the U.S. Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind, Academic Freedom) is one of his proudest discoveries. One of the stranger Regnery books was Soviet Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg's The Thaw (TIME, Oct. 10), which anti-Communist Regnery published as an example of the workings of the Soviet mind.

This week Publisher Regnery announced that he will publish another book that is sure to be as controversial as any to date: the memoirs of General Franco, which will give the dictator's view of the Spanish Civil War. "I came to the conclusion that Franco was entitled to a book," says Regnery. "No one else had suggested it. I'm afraid other publishers were afraid they would be called Fascists." Regnery, who is used to being called worse, approached Franco through officials, persuaded him to do the book. U.S. publication date: 1957. Regnery had a chance to meet Franco, but he passed it up in typical fashion. Said he: "I'm not at all interested in Franco."

A Garden of Her Own

AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS (247 pp.)-- Rumer Godden--Viking ($3.50).

Catford Street, London, is not Tobacco Road or Cannery Row, but Slum Alley, universal home of the urban poor. Its children are grimy urchins, and the world scuffs them underfoot like dirty snow. But a Catford Street child may still skip to a dream of beauty between the slabs of concrete. This is the story of Lovejoy Mason, a ten-year-old asphalt sparrow, and her dream. A co-selection of the Book- of-the-Month Club for December, An Episode of Sparrows may well prove the book of the year for those who are not ashamed to weep over the printed page. Far from the Indian scenes on which she founded her literary fame (Black Narcissus, The River), Author Godden here tries her deft writing hand at landscaping a child's heart, letting the teardrops fall where they may.

"Wanting is the beginning of getting," a grownup tells Lovejoy. "Then why don't people get things?'' the girl asks. "Because they don't want hard enough," answers the grownup. What Lovejoy wants more than anything in the world is a garden of her own, as rare in Catford Street as a tree in Brooklyn. By hook and by crook she starts one, but a gang of the neighborhood's teen-age toughs stomps it out. The leader of the gang, a rough-hewn Irish Tom Sawyer by the name of Tip Malone, makes his private peace with Lovejoy, and pretty soon she is his Becky Thatcher. The children start a new garden by carting away 13 buckets of earth from the off-limits garden of the toffs who live on the nearby square. All goes well until the night the toffs' gardener blows the whistle on the little sparrows. The ending is guaranteed to move any adult who ever clutched his hopes for a gentler, sweeter world as fiercely as he once held his Teddy bear.

Mademoiselle Butterfly

THE HONORABLE PICNIC (319 pp.)-- Thomas Raucat--Viking ($3.50).

This famously funny novel, out of print for the last dozen years, is the work of one Roger Poidatz. who as a young French cartographer in 1922 ended a two-year mission with the Japanese government and crammed his impressions of the country and the culture into his one and only book. Poidatz took his pen name Thomas Raucat from the Japanese tomaro ka, meaning "Will you stay the night here?", which when asked by a hotelkeeper takes on a double meaning. Though it has hints of a French boudoir farce scored for samisen, the novel's double meanings are mainly of another sort -- that of a Westerner looking at the Japanese looking at themselves.

The hero is a Swiss League of Nations observer bent on having one long extra-marital fling. The nameless heroine is a petite Japanese Mademoiselle Butterfly, who he hopes will prove a piece-de-non- resistance. But a series of Japanese throw themselves in his way, not to save her virtue, but his dignity, and above all Japan's face. There is a hotel proprietress who uncomprehendingly scalds him in the bath ("Honorable tepid bath . . . could not have been more than 113DEG''). There is a geisha who saves the hotel's honor by sacrificing her own ("I whispered only these words: seventy-eight yen fifty . . . It was the price of Kodak No. 3A. anastigmatic lens, shutter for both time and instantaneous exposures"). Time has retouched Author Raucat's Japan without cropping any essentials in his cultural snapshots. Few writers have probed more skillfully behind the deep bow and the polite smile for that web of obligations which keep the Japanese in a fine sweat between one-upmanship and one-downmanship. Fewer still have captured the pratfalls of Western emulation.

Admiral of the Sargasso

How COMMUNISTS NEGOTIATE ( 178 pp.) -- Admiral C. Turner Joy, U.S.N. (Ret.) -- Mocmillan ($3.50).

Communism is a philosophy of power, even when it lacks power; the West is committed to the pursuit of truth, even when it cannot be reached. When these facts are put together in a debate (which demands respect for truth) over an issue of war (which demands respect for power), the result is likely to be a Sargasso Sea of lies, confusion and boredom.

At Kaesong and Panmunjom that is just what happened. It fell to Admiral C. Turner Joy, U.S.N. , as chief of the United Nations Command Delegation to the Korean Armistice Conference, to navigate this viscid ocean of incomprehension.

Admiral Joy was commander of U.S. Naval Forces in the Far East when he was detached from the happy duty of battering the enemy to the job of armistice negotiator. At the start, he still held the old-fashioned notion that a line might well be drawn at the points where the belligerents faced each other when one of them cried quits. The Reds said it should be the 38th parallel, which would have given them territory for which the Allies had paid in blood. And thus, a man who had nothing but an Annapolis education, the habit of command, and all the power of the United Nations, confronted men who had nothing but a million defeated men and Marxism.

But the Reds had several advantages. They had lost some 138,000 prisoners and did not care a damn about them. The U.N had lost 100,000 (only 7,000 Americans), and cared desperately to keep faith with them. Given these facts, together with a Communist's contempt for the ancient rules of human intercourse, the enemy negotiators in Korea turned a Red debacle into a near victory.

In this chronicle, few facts are recorded to U.S. advantage. One was an accident, another deep in the nature of man and Communism. When the U.N. delegates first went to the Kaesong teahouse where the armistice negotiations took place, they casually took the north side of the table (unaware of the Oriental convention that the victor faces south), and so dismayed the face-conscious enemy that "the Communist liaison officer actually stuttered." Thereafter the U.N. faced north. Another fact was the simple proposition that almost half of the Red prisoners did not want to go home. Eighteen months were consumed in negotiations during which the Reds attempted to digest this fact, or disguise it by allegations ("torture, massacre"), and to produce, by the very tactics they charged against the U.S., a handful of brainwashed Americans who opted for Communism.

Joy chronicles the ups and downs of the negotiations, the walkouts and comebacks, in dry language but with the cold anger always showing through.

The book is a notable document of the only war the U.S. ever ended at a disadvantage. Readers may conclude that Admiral Joy deserves 1) gratitude for helping to bring the U.S. out of the negotiations as well as he did, and 2) an additional award for having endured boredom above and beyond the call of duty.

Bostonian on Ice

HENRY ADAMS (425 pp.)--Elizabeth Stevenson--Macmillan ($6).

A friend of Henry Adams once twitted him on the Boston climate: "Boston was 1,387,453 years under the ice; and then the Adamses came." If the Adamses were both chilly and superior, they had a great deal to be superior about. Henry's great-grandfather John and his grandfather John Quincy were U.S. Presidents. His father Charles Francis was Minister to the Court of St. James's (1861-68). Though he wrote two masterpieces (Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry Adams), Henry Adams mocked himself as a lifelong failure, perhaps because he clung to the Confucian standard that the truly superior man demands more of himself than of others.

How successful a failure he was is indicated afresh in this first full-dress biography in more than two decades.

How She Would Lash Me. As Georgia Scholar Elizabeth Stevenson tells it in her sound and sensible study, the young Adams began with precise, if not precisely great, expectations. Out of Harvard in 1858, he outlined his plan of life: "Two years in Europe, two years studying law in Boston, and then I propose to emigrate and practice at St. Louis." He came home from Europe to cast his first ballot for Abraham Lincoln and emigrate to London instead, as his father's secretary in Charles Francis Adams' ministry. Back home, in articles for the North American Review and the British press. Adams unlimbered his moral slingshot at corrupt politicians and robber barons with exposes of their gold manipulations and business chicaneries. He impressed President Charles Eliot of Harvard, who wanted just such an unorthodox young man to teach history.

It was at Harvard that Adams began courting a proper Bostonian named Marian Hooper. Before their marriage, Henry wrote one of the more ungallant letters in the annals of love. "The young woman . . . is certainly not handsome; nor would she be quite called plain, I think . . . She knows her own mind uncommon well . . . She is very open to instruction . . . We shall improve her. She dresses badly . . . She rules me as only American women rule men, and I cower before her. Lord! how she would lash me if she read the above description of her!"

Washington Merry-Go-Round. Adams left his Harvard post in 1877 to live in Washington and write history. He varied his heavy work with a satirical novel called Democracy (the Washington Merry-Go-Round of its day). The Adamses were on a merry-go-round themselves, furiously entertaining a charmed circle of friends, and the high-strung Marian frayed herself down to her nerve ends. Both Adamses were apparently agnostics, and their love for each other was what they had in place of God. When Marian's father sickened and died, that substitute proved not to be enough. Henry could not rally her from her brooding melancholy, and on Dec. 6, 1885 he went to her room to find her dead of poison.

For five years he was numb ("I have become as indifferent as the Egyptian Sphinx"). Then he and his painter friend John La Farge whirled off to the South Pacific, and Adams' senses stirred. During a Samoan dance Adams had the illusion that "the girls, with . . . their glistening breasts and arms, had actually come out of the sea." And "when the handsomest one peels sugar cane with her teeth and feeds me with chunks of it, I have nothing more to ask."

The Virgin & the Dynamo. After such innocence, Adams could find small forgiveness for complicated civilizations. Casting back for an oasis of health and simplicity in Western experience, Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres--a hymn to medieval unity and the power of the Virgin. But for all its passion, it sounded a bleak note, with the Virgin "looking down from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith."

Searching out a symbol for the faith of the 20th century, he found it in the dynamos at the Paris Exposition of 1900: "It is a new century [and] electricity is its God . . . Gee-whacky! How it is going! It will break its damned neck. [I] sit by the hour over the great dynamos, asking them--with infinite courtesy --where in Hell they are going."

Adams was an exemplar of a familiar but vanishing American type--the gentleman writer. Fine works have been produced by men to whom writing is not a grubby living but rather a well-bred accomplishment, like bird watching. But being independent of royalties, they are also often independent of realities; there is apt to be about them a certain detachment bordering on boredom. Yet at his best Adams fitted into the narrow but trenchant tradition of American pessimism which includes such uneven literary lights as Melville, Poe, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. Adams decided that not only the U.S. but the whole universe was going incredibly to pot. If Adams the stylist gave this bleak view a kind of sensuous grace, it was because he was a Puritan rebel guiltily frozen in the act of reaching for the rosy apples of life. Not without logic did T. S. Eliot, that kindred soul of lyric despair, use Adams' description of hothouse Washington in the spring as a source for his line, "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas."

Adams' Cassandran foresights stand up well today. He predicted: 1) that science would soon be able to "blow up the world," 2) that Russia and the U.S. would fill the power vacuum left by a weakening England and West Europe. For years Adams went on sputtering his forebodings ("After us the deluge--or even before"). But his listeners were dropping away ("Poor Mrs. Hay has actually gone and died, which is to carry the joke too far"). He found his own name in the papers as "the late Mr. Adams." On March 27, 1918, in the second month of his 81st year, it was true.

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