Up from Penury

By Melvin Moddocks

SILAS SNOBDEN'S OFFICE BOY by HORATIO ALGER JR. 240 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Holy Horatio Alger! Of all the embarrassing national memories to bring up in 1973. This little prince of prissiness, this walking morality play on behalf of hanging tight and doing somebody else's thing. "Duty required me to do as I did." The cry, pure as the adolescent uttering it, sounds across the years--from 1889, to be exact--measuring by sheer alienation the distance of America present from America past.

Who is this young anachronism speaking for the Protestant ethic? Frank Manton happens to be a lately discovered Alger hero, previously presented in an 1889 magazine serial but never collected in hard-cover among the more than 100 novels of Alger-style success that have sold from 100 million to 400 million copies, depending on which literary historian you believe.

So the Age of Aquarius gets an extraordinary first edition, all about the trials of this manly little chap, just 16 years old, who supports his careworn mother and stands up to a stepfather of "intemperate habits," not to mention an assortment of other bullies. Young Frank finally rescues a rich man's child from kidnapers, thus earning himself the gratitude of that good old deus ex machina known as the Benefactor, without whom no Alger novel is complete. But before everybody rolls over in another fit of giggles at the naive old 19th century, certain facts should be noted.

Alger was not all that bad a writer.

He had a Harvard education behind him, including lots of Latin and Greek and a course or two under Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A lifelong bachelor, Alger was rather disastrously prone to the unintentional double-entendre --e.g., "Imogene laid herself out to entertain him." But he was also capable of modestly cynical repartee: "When a man gets to be 51, marriage is very hazardous." "It always is."

Alger was no Charles Dickens, but he shared Dickens' social indignation, if not his gift for expressing it. "Fair" and "just" are two of his favorite words, and genuine feeling enters his prose when he describes a skinflint like Snobden or a hypocrite like Gideon Chapin, his chief clerk-- Alger's American Murdstones and Uriah Heeps.

The son of a debt-ridden parson, Alger did not have to invent his scenes of poverty. His happy endings may smack blandly of fantasy, but his harsh beginnings have the bite of realism. Like all Alger heroes, Frank Manton is first and last a survivor in a tough world -- a world, Alger makes protestingly plain, of child labor, a world in which a wom an working as a seamstress might earn as little as 25-c- a day.

Like Dickens, Alger loved this world despite all the cruelty and cor ruption. His Wall Street district scenes give off a certain jolly hum. He describes a midtown brownstone as if his nose were pressed against the window. Writing of nickel rides on the el or six-course meals (wine included) for 75-c-, he exudes a kind of festivity.

Reading an Alger novel, Playwright S.N. Behrman once said, is like taking a shower in innocence. Alger could not hate even his villains. The kidnapers in Silas Snobden's Office Boy are half hearted scoundrels, outstandingly stupid rather than wicked.

From the modern point of view, Alger's supreme folly was to believe that a smart 16-year-old could cope with America's heavies-- to assume that virtue triumphs in the end. So we late 20th century sophisticates giggle, we connoisseurs of the antihero, knowing what we know. Which makes the joke on Horatio Alger, that ridiculous little five-foot fantasist of giant killers. Or does it?

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