Books: Novelette Finalists

REMEMBERING LAUGHTER—Wallace Stegner A CARGO OF PARROTS— R. Hernekin Baptist LOVING MEMORY—James Hill THIS MAN, JOE MURRAY

—William Corcoran NIGHT AT HOGWALLOW— Theodore Strauss One of the scarcest forms of U. S. literature, the novelette until recently has been catalogued by U. S. publishers as a fiction, freak. To support this view, publishers could name on the fingers of one hand such lonely little albinos as Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frame, Willa Gather’s A Lost Lady, Christopher Morley’s Where the Blue Begins. But since the appearance of such big white-headed boys as Anthony Adverse and Gone With The Wind, short novels have also climbed aboard best-seller lists (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Of Mice and Men), have become standard magazine features.’ Most impressive official blessing on the novelette was pronounced last week when Publishers Little, Brown offered the winner and four runners-up, culled from 1,340 contestants, in their $2,500 Novelette Contest. Although readers found no second Goodbye, Mr. Chips among them, most agreed that the venture paid reading dividends.

To 25-year-old Prizewinner Wallace Stegner, top place was well awarded for a finished performance. Remembering Laughter has a horse-&-buggy era, Iowa setting. Inhibited by his beautiful, strait-laced wife, spirited Farmer McLeod discovers in her equally beautiful but more lifelike younger sister a long-lacked audience and companion. A haymow discovery plus Calvinism plus an illegitimate child turn the McLeod household into one of the least cheerful places in the Middle West. Most exotic of the five novelettes is the somewhat scrambled A Cargo of Parrots, by a pseudonymous English writer 25 years resident in Africa. Central character of the book is a remarkable native servant named Ramazini, whose dying German bwana (master) instructs him to deliver a collection of parrots to London. Against the sadistic treatment of a tramp steamer’s first officer, Ramazini opposes first his extraordinary dignity, finally a lethal iron bar. Loving Memory, most ambitious, least successful of the five, is the story of a London newspaperman who discovers in his dead wife’s diary after ten years of ostensibly happy marriage, a clashing, paranoiac manifesto of what she really thought of him.

Representing the contemporary U. S. scene are William Corcoran’s This Man, Joe Murray and Theodore Strauss’s Night at Hogwallow. Both books and authors have working-class backgrounds. Tough, popular, sentimental hero of This Man, Joe Murray falls hard for a beautiful, chaste Polish girl, blames himself when she is run over by a train. Marrying without love, he exorcises the dead girl’s memory, realizes his wife’s worth only after a too jauntily told, bitter period of Unemployment and bumming. Night at Hogwallow is a bloodcurdling first work ‘aid in the deep South, its lynch-life melodrama ending in a fierce finale.