Books: On the Side of the Saints

To EVERY MAN A PENNY (345 pp.)—Bruce Marshall—Houghton Mifflin ($3).

If Tammany Hall could award the next Nobel Prize for literature, it might well choose Scotsman Bruce Marshall. Novelist Marshall (Father Malachy’s Miracle, Vespers in Vienna) cannily laces his fiction with all the flourishes of the practicing ward heeler. He is always for the little fellow, cries out loudly against the interests, roots piously for religion, winks broadly at the moral delinquencies of the unfortunate.

The hero of To Every Man a Penny is a determinedly kindly French cleric. Abbe Gaston’s trouble was that he took Christ’s teachings literally. In word, thought and deed he kept trying to walk in His steps, and kept getting his shins kicked for his pains. The reader meets him in his Paris parish in 1914 when he is 35 and hopeful, leaves him near-blind, buffeted but beatifically resigned just before Novelist Marshall lets his typewriter cool. In World War I he fights as an infantry soldier, becomes a wounded hero and learns the worldly lesson that glory lasts but a day. A little while later he learns that the lovely little girl he befriended has become a prostitute. Novelist Marshall never lets the abbe get too far away from a good-looker. During World War II, a beautiful Jewish refugee whom he tries to help is executed by the resistance. Many of his fellow priests are theological hypocrites who do him dirt at every turn, and when blindness threatens, his simple confidence in a miracle cure at Lourdes is disappointed.

Abbé Gaston is so clearly on the side of the angels that his worst enemy is none of those that Novelist Marshall sets up, but Novelist Marshall himself. In To Every Man a Penny, goodness becomes a cloying surfeit, and sentiment runs over into Parisian bathos.