Books: Adventures in Nazilcmd

ESCAPE—Ethel Vance—Little, Brown ($2.50).

“Ethel Vance” is a pseudonym for someone whom the publishers say they have good reason not to name. The book might be the product of an impossible collaboration by Kay Boyle, Christopher Isherwood, Dorothy Sayers, Franz Kafka and Alfred Hitchcock. Its atmospheric detail and steadily elaborated suspense are better than most Hitchcock. Book-of-the-Month Clubbers, who get Escape for October, will not willingly lay it down.

It is early spring in the mountains, and high, snow-cowled hotels are full of happy skiers. In her big chalet the American-born Countess, swanlike, impoverished and tired, presides over her porcelain shepherdesses and her American, English and French girl boarders. In the evening the handsome, resolutely corseted General will come to dazzle the girls at dinner and spend the night secretly with the Countess.

On an iron cot in a concentration camp not far away lies the once-famous, still beautiful actress Emmy Ritter, convalescent and condemned to death. There is little chance that any friend knows she is there. After her trial she managed to scribble a note for Mark, her son, and give it to Fritz, the surly old servant of the Ritters who had been brought to testify. But Mark is in New York, and Fritz may not have dared or cared to mail it to him. Emmy no longer has influential friends; she has lived for 23 years in America. There is only Anna Hoffman and young Dr. Bitten.

Anna is in a cot beside her, humbly dying of tuberculosis. Dr. Ditten performed the operation that saved Emmy’s life for the scaffold—she had heard him ask permission to operate, just to keep his hand in. Emmy does not know that when the doctor was a boy he had treasured a photograph of her. When he tells her this, in his cold way, she has a moment of wild hope that he may save her, soon feels like a romantic fool as he goes on to give her a political lecture.

On the same day Mark, having located the town by the postmark on his mother’s frightened note, goes to interview the Commissioner of Secret Police. The Commissioner, soft, dreamy, epicene, watches Mark’s pleading as if it were a boring play, tells him to come back Wednesday for information about his mother. Mark does not know that Emmy is to be executed Wednesday morning. But then Mark meets the Countess and his real excitement begins. . . .

One of the virtues of this fairly improbable tale is its suggestion of the beauty of southern Germany and Austria, at a time when these have become areas on a map which is often thoroughly and pointedly blacked. “Ethel Vance” knows her mountains and her Maximilianplatz. In the characters of the Countess and the General she has provided, furthermore, symbols of the old Germany accommodating itself with desperation to the new. In Dr. Ditten’s stiff, selfless intellectuality the philosophy of the totalitarian State gets its most precise expression. But the conflict in the mind of this authentic, unhappy young German is the major conflict of the book.