Books: More & More Miraculous

SO LONG AS LOVE REMEMBERS (565 pp.)—Russell Janney—Hermitage House ($3.95).

When Harvard wins “an important athletic contest,” its undergraduates allow “youthful exuberance [to] overcome a natural scholastic reserve”—which is Russell Janney’s way of saying that, here and there, hell breaks loose. So when lovely Olga Halka, Ziegfeld chorus girl and heroine of Janney’s new novel, left the Boston Colonial Theater on such a victorious night, exuberant hearties closed in, dragged her off into the darkness. “Help!” screamed Olga. “Help!” Help came: a “huge figure” dressed in armor and wearing a golden cross. With stunning blows “from [his] mighty mailed fist” the apparition mowed down the Harvard line like a visitation from Yale. Olga scuttled to safety—and far away, “in the Early Gothic Room of the Cloisters in the northern tip of Manhattan,” a stone statue of the Madonna broke into “a slow smile that became almost laughter.”

These are but two of dozens of miracles that nestle in So Long as Love Remembers like no-hitters in The Official Baseball Guide. It was in 1946 that Yaleman (’06) Janney rang out his bestselling Miracle of the Bells (TIME, Sept. 16, 1946), and since 1951 he has been back in the old belfry composing a bigger and better supernatural peal. So Long as Love Remembers is the story of a young Viennese musician named “Tightpants” Halka, who emigrates to the U.S. under the protection of three guardian spirits: a Knight Templar (the one who saves Olga from Harvard), the Cloisters statue of the Madonna and an ex-captain of the S.S. Europa. In America, Tightpants marries Olga, who hails from Wilkes-Barre and is a living replica of the Madonna. She is also musically inclined and bats out a lyric entitled Bungalow on Broadway, which is all set to be the hit of a new Ziegfeld show. But Ziegfeld dies, Bungalow is shelved, and Olga develops cancer. While her life is ebbing, Tightpants has to keep his upper lip stiff and accompany two comedians “in a battle with lemon meringue pies.” Tears pour from the stone Madonna’s eyes, her breast turns red with grief. When Olga goes to Heaven the Madonna stops crying and turns “to purest white.”

Tightpants battles on alone, aided only by miracles. His Olga Song (“Olga—whose eyes were violets / Olga—whose tears were pearls . . .”) is a smash hit, partly because Olga comes “down” with a heavenly choir and sings it herself. His Olga Lasenka Symphony is hailed as “as great as Sibelius’ Finlandia.” But Tightpants is not present when it is performed in Carnegie Hall. Burned to death in a nightclub fire, he has joined Olga in the homelandia of a Wilkes-Barre grave.

The cemetery in which Olga and Tightpants lie is “a Catholic one, a Faith that still believes in miracles.”