Books: Meandering Manners

ALL SUMMER LONG — Wilder Hobson —Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

“You’ll be happy working for me. I really am a man of parts, you know,” said suave, gentlemanly J. (for Jack) Bates Upham, looking into the gold-digging depths of Estelle’s grey eyes. Then he drove her to his old brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, and showed her the roulette table prettily concealed behind the Victorian knickknacks. Estelle, “wearing a décolletage which . . . did a good deal for a roulette player’s perspective,” shortly became the principal attraction of debonair J. Bates Upham’s fashionable gambling joint.

Scion of “a long line of New Jersey Methodists,” J. Bates Upham had emerged from the Spanish-American war as the nation’s most dexterous poker player. He had learned to dance like an angel while “working” the Cunarders on the Atlantic run, and had finally emerged from Sing Sing revered as a forger and a gentleman. “I seem naturally,” he told Estelle, “to prefer enterprises where a little extra risk may bring a little extra reward.” Then he slipped his arm hopefully around her slim waist.

Others shared his urge. Harvard’s “Boaty” Sturgis, who wore a pink tie and reminded people of “a wild night in a florist’s shop,” trailed Estelle like a mooning spaniel. Wolfish Hugo Zachias, who had made a mint of money selling scrap iron to Japan, talked her into a weekend at his Spanish villa on Long Island. There were also jaded Bill Priest, who wrote scintillating advertisements for jewelers (“Evenings of wonder, these evenings of betrothal time”), and Croupier Joe Heeney, who had learned to hate race horses (“he had long since passed the point where he called a horse a goat; he had even passed beetle ; he was now referring to the animal as a roach”).

Readers who like their novels to have plot and purpose will not find much of either in All Summer Long, which is essentially a roving comedy of manners. FORTUNE Editor Wilder Hobson, onetime chairman of the Yale Literary Magazine and an authority on jazz (American Jazz Music), is mainly interested in prodding his people into disjointed remarks on music, clothes, Marx, alcohol, horses and the female figure. His deliberately meandering story is often witty, and stylishly tailored to a cast of characters who are unable to grasp anything more complicated than a highball.