Books: Inward

THE JOURNEY INWARD—Kurt Heuser— Viking.

Some storytellers, without apparently holding anything back, tell their tales in such a knowing way that they seem edged with creepy implications, shadowed by eery suggestions impossible to lay a finger on, equally impossible not to feel. It is also said that every German has a misty metaphysical centre to his hard, square head. Very much of a German, very much such a story-teller is young Author Kurt Heuser, new to the U. S. Unlike some of his compatriots who love to send their sometimes undirigible imaginations nosing through the clouds, Heuser’s story winds along close to the steaming African earth, seems to penetrate at times to an Africa of the mind.

Jeronimo, young European of mixed blood, has fled to African fevers as an antidote for the fever of Europe. His troubles had come to a figurehead in a famous actress, but there was more to it than that: he was suffering from “the curse which every Occidental must bear.” The province of East Africa to which he goes is,the property of a company which exploits, in true conquistador style, the huge, rich, deadly land and its enslaved natives. The few European settlers stick close to the seacoast, to the unthriving port of Esperanca, cyclone-destroyed every seven years. Or they work and drink themselves deathward on scattered plantations. In the unmapped interior roam man-eating lions, hostile natives, rumors of an unkillable rebel chief. The Governor, aptly nicknamed the Scorpion, is a polished gentleman grown old in disease and expedient wickedness. He welcomes Jeronimo, gives him the job of mapping the unknown interior. But he distrusts him, sends after him to have him arrested as a spy.

As Jeronimo journeyed on into the interior “it seemed as though everything here was ambiguous, merely a substitute for something else, but only in the sense in which things are substitutes for their souls, events for their meaning. . . .” Berna, fey-wise daughter of a drunken planter, half fell in love with him, but he was looking for something else. At Riquem’s plantation Jeronimo spent a tense evening: his host’s white wife, who had run off into the bush with a native, had just been recaptured, but nothing was said about it. In the next room she waited her punishment while he and Riquem argued abstractions. Next morning, on the Governor’s orders, Riquem arrested him. Torpido, right handy man to the Governor, followed Jeronimo to the outpost where he was imprisoned. Torpido thought it would be a good idea to have him killed. But the Governor, who normally would have agreed with Torpido, had changed his mind. Virginia, daughter of the woman who had once hardened his heart by betraying him, came searching for the secret of her mother. The Governor countermanded the order for Jeronimo’s arrest, but it was Virginia who came to rescue him. Too late: he had been thrown into the crocodile-infested river, had swum miraculously across, vanished into the jungle where no man had been.

The Author. Like his hero, Kurt Heuser is young (27). He suffered from Europe’s mental depression and took his gloomy thoughts to Africa. While he and a friend struggled with a cotton plantation in Portuguese East Africa, Heuser filled his spare time writing, sent the result apologetically to German editors. When cotton’s market price sank below cost, Heuser abandoned his plantation, went home to Germany to be an author, found himself taken as a lion out of Africa.

in Lavransdatter.