Books: Still Pending

PENDING HEAVEN—William Gerhardi—Harper ($2.50).

Max, the hero of Author Gerhardi’s latest book, is a writer by profession, but women are his trouble. He has a wife, whom he has left in the background and who remains there. His friend Victor, a writer of similar tastes if slightly more stable temperament, acts first as a sympathetic audience for Max’s troubles, then as an increasingly unwilling provider of Max’s women. Victor’s secretary, Phyllis, is the first to go. For a while the three of them try living together in an idyllic but badly managed flat; then comes the inevitable ruction, and Victor is left with a disgruntled, slightly shocked cook and Phyllis’s two children.

Max takes Phyllis to Victor’s villa on the Riviera (the “new” and most undesirable part); when she begins to bore him, he returns to London and gathers in his old love Sheila, the ward of a retired confidence man. Presently the harem is augmented by Helen, who plays the harp, laughs adoringly at herself, and is a little too coy for her age and looks. The women, naturally, do not get along at all well with each other; Max is first bored, then driven to despair. The weather is depressing; their landlord-neighbor turns out to fee a terrible fellow; Max is deplorably cheated in a horse-trade whose postmortems drag on for months. Finally he moves them all to Algeria, where he has foolishly taken a three-year lease on a house in an isolated oasis. He thinks his troubles are over when a beautiful American girl, an admirer of his books, writes and asks him to marry her; but when she arrives she is rather taken aback, first by his unexpected girth and then by his menage. The last scene shows a sick, world-weary Max, having run away for the last time, being caught up to heaven in a nightmare finale.

The Author. William Gerhardi was born in St. Petersburg in 1895, the son of an English cotton-spinning manufacturer settled there. He was educated in St. Petersburg schools and at Worcester College, Oxford; served in the World War in the 5th Reserve Cavalry, with the Military Attache of the British Embassy at Petrograd, with the British Military Mission to Siberia. He was decorated with the Czechoslovak Croix de Guerre, the Rus-sian Order of St. Stanislav. Though he was a friend of Katherine Mansfield and corresponded with her for years, he never met her. Other books: Futility, Anton Chekhov, The Polyglots, A Bad End, Eva’s Apples, The Vanity Bag, Perfectly Scandalous (a play).