Books: For Voids

So GREAT A MAN—David Pilgrim— Harpers ($3).

On the phenomenon of such elephantine best-sellers as Anthony Adverse and Gone With The Wind first-line critics have contributed little except a few quarantine signs’. Those signs, mostly ignored, warned generally against what Aldous Huxley calls “that doughy, woolly, anodyne writing [which] … we read because we suffer when we have time to spare and no printed matter with which to plug the void . . . because the-second nature of habituated readers abhors a vacuum. . . .” That readers continue to put their faith in publishers’ ads rather than critics’ warnings was well evidenced by the case of the fat historical romance, And So—Victoria, which since publication ten weeks ago has been filling reader “voids” at the rate of 14,000 per week.* Offered U. S. readers last week, So Great a Man was expected to do as well. U. S. booksellers, acting on advance tips that the book “will suck readers along from page to page as did Anthony Adverse or Gone With The Wind,” reported themselves well prepared to cope with the first inrush of readers. First-line critics, notoriously disquieted by suctions, headed for the hills.

Central character of the novel is Napoleon. Heroine is his Polish mistress, 20-year-old, blonde, serious-minded Marie Walewska. By rubberizing history, pseudonymous English Author Pilgrim contrives a cinematic tale based on the ten months which marked the height of Napoleon’s career, the beginning of his skid toward Waterloo as a result of his Spanish campaign.

Marie, delegated by her countrymen to play the golddigger for Polish freedom, responded to Napoleon’s assault courtship by really falling in love. First meetings however, found her at least as full of politics as passion, and for the story s sake, Marie’s political acumen matched her high-minded sex appeal. Cold-blooded ugly Minister of Police Fouche alternated between trying to frame her and suggesting she marry the Emperor. Aristocratic, wily Talleyrand gave her an even worse time. Josephine counted on Marie’s withdrawal when she discovered that ”one may have too much of Bonaparte and yet it may not be enough.” But Marie stayed on and Josephine joined the other plotters.

By inventing the character of a handsome young page who acts as Marie’s loyal escort, the author furnishes an eye-witness to scenes left out of histories. The page overhears the conversation in which Talleyrand double-crosses Napoleon with the emissaries of Russia and Austria. He and Marie uncover the plot to put Murat on the French throne; as courier to Napoleon in Spain, he sits in on long conversations between Napoleon and his intimates (partly taken from the Emperor’s speeches in the Russian campaign, three years after the story’s close).

At book’s end Napoleon explains to depressed Marie that in spite of the ugly jolt in Spain, he must now fight the Austrians and English, but would like very much to marry her first. Marie declines. His future, she says, looks black enough without complicating it further by waving a Polish Queen in the Tsar’s face. But she will be happy to continue as his mistress, will even stop talking politics.

*The all-time record-breaking sales of Gone With The Wind last fortnight reached 1,408 copies, an average of 3,000 a day since publication.