Books: Prairie Giraffe

THE PRIMITIVE (460 pp.)—Feike Feikema—Doubleday ($3.50).

Feike Feikema fits the large scale. His publishers think it relevant that he is 6 ft. 9 in. tall and the eldest of six brothers, all over 6 ft. 4. He has already written several sprawling novels of his native Sioux country which stirred the hayseed in many a city heart and established him as a prose bard of the tall corn. Now he plans a triple-decker to be called World’s Wanderer, of which The Primitive is Part One.

The striking thing about Feikema’s hero Thurs Wraldson, a poor boy from an orphan farm, was his great size. As he began his studies at Christian College and Seminary in Michigan, “all human life, all its habits, its mores, was against him. The doors and the bathrooms and the beds and the clothes.” The petite coed of his choice turned him down; his grip was a menace to life & limb, and after one embrace of his “massive passion,” she had to call the doctor.

Wrestle the System. Otherwise, most of the young giant’s problems were of the sort to be solved by a firm of outfitters to large men. He became the star of the basketball team, progressed from near illiteracy to lead the college literary society; he had decided on a career as a writer when he discovered that his true genius was musical. For Thurs, it was a short step from hymns on the harmonica to composing a fugue for the piano. In short, he might have been voted most likely to succeed had not his wrestling the “Christian system” left him at the end of the book to face life with some unorthodox views.

The Primitive is written in that self-deceiving and deceptive style whose weakness will be mistaken by some for strength. It is clumsy and naive, but devotees of the unspoiled may call it simple and homespun and applaud when Feikema challenges (unsuccessfully) the tyranny of grammar. He has the sort of poetic gift that gets in the way of a good prose, and his recipe for flavoring his concoction is “salt-and-peppering the whole with many a dark adjective and adverb”—not to mention verbs. When Thurs wanted to get from one place to another, he “moosed,” “giraffed” or “cameled” around the campus. Some other Feikema verbs: to clumse, to gulk, to fladder.

Paraphrase the Weather. In The Primitive, the author is betrayed by his subject. Feikema wrote in his earlier books of the natural elements, and Nature was adequate to absorb his emotions and his song. He was always likable and often convincing when he described the earth and sky and the changing seasons or paraphrased the weather report out in Sioux-land. When he writes of the intellectual life of Christian College, he is seldom as likable and never convincing. At best, he doggedly describes freshman themes, the lectures and the changing curricula. At worst, he peevishly rehearses “the arid one-testicled theories” of the American humanists, or sports, with grim intent, through an embarrassing parody called The Love Song of J. Freddie Petticoat by B. S. Idiom.

It looks as if matters may well get worse as Author Feikema is more thoroughly cribbed and confined. At the end of The Primitive, Thurs headed East. Part Two will find him and Author Feikema in the toils of the city slickers, 700 miles farther from home.