Books: Love in Fine Paragraphs

MARIA (246 pp.)—Curb’s Bok—Knopf ($3.95).

The late Justice Curtis Bok of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was famed for the wit and sense of his legal writing; he remarked once, while discussing the unnecessary pother raised by bluenoses about sex in literature, that if a man were in the mood to be sensual, he would be aroused by reading the Mechanics’ Lien Acts. Justice Bok was also a novelist and a sailor. In the best sense of the rapidly blurring word amateur (one who does something, perhaps very well, solely for his own pleasure), the judge wrote two well-received novels about courtroom life and made two west-to-east crossings of the Atlantic as skipper of his own 42-ft. ketch.

The jurist’s last work of fiction combines these elegantly amateur loves. Maria is an unabashed romance full of fine sentiment, true love, literary talismans snipped from Catullus and Shakespeare, and aphorisms worn to a wonderful polish from having spent a lifetime in the author’s pocket.

Jahn is a European (nationality not specified) who has sailed his small ketch to what is presumably Nova Scotia or the Gaspe Peninsula, in order to spend a year testing some mining theories. Maria is the crippled daughter of the customs officer, a wise, learned man who has been paralyzed for 20 years. The young people cannot marry while Maria’s father is alive, nor can they let him know that his life is thus a burden. The action of the book be gins as Jahn and his small crew set sail again for Europe. Maria gives him a packet of letters that she has written during his stay and asks him to read one letter on each day of the voyage. He does, and their contents and his thoughts while reading them become the core of the book.

The structure is ancient but remarkably sturdy. Since the author’s book is a “tale” and not a novel, it is perfectly proper that his true lovers are slightly unreal in an old-fashioned way, rather than, as is now customary, slightly unreal in a modern way. Jahn and Maria speak to each other not in ping-pong dialogue but in fine, prosy paragraphs; they are oftener apart than together; they love honor more. And the reader, to his surprise, may find that he likes them this way.