Books: Atlantic Wife

LAND BELOW THE WIND—Agnes Newton Keith—Little, Brown ($3).

For years one of the more appetizing types of reading, for devotees of the Atlantic Monthly, has been the account, by one gently bred, out-of-the-way wife after another, of what life is like in the centre of the Dust Bowl, on the borders of Manchuria and in any environment whose loneliness, distance or oddity few Atlantic readers were likely, in the flesh, to attain. It was therefore not surprising that the book to win, over 600-odd contenders, the Atlantic’s $5,000 non-fiction contest for 1939, should be an account of what-life-has-been-like for the long, lean, lemon-tongued, ladylike U. S. wife of British H. G. Keith, Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture of North Borneo.

Mrs. Keith married and went to Borneo in 1934, returned to the U. S. on her first leave this year. She writes cautiously little, suggestively well, of the social stringencies of the European colony, “as gently inflexible . . . as the design on a set of teacups,” devotes more specific attention to the weather, to servants and household pets, to guests, to a journey through the jungle.

Of the weather: “My shoes in the wardrobe are wet, my clothes on their hangers wilt, the cough drops melt in the corked bottle, and the envelopes in the desk all seal themselves.” Of servants there were five, among them a little native boy, one of whose chief duties was “to stand with his small bare feet apart and whistle fuzzily.” Of household pets there were swarms, domestic and wild.

Best-beloved of guests were Osa and the late Martin Johnson. Osa was utterly fearless not only of animals but of the fragilities of Government House protocol, stood in the middle of the G. H. drawing room in a “zebra-striped silk dress . . . and brayed like a zebra, and everybody liked it.”

On a long deep trip through the jungle Mrs. Keith, only woman along, had a grim time of it, sitting in boats with her buttocks continuously wet, trying not to lag in the slimy trudging, tattered by leeches and insects, dozing through the drowned nights squatted in bed in a safari tent beneath a blue cotton umbrella while her unconquerable husband slept like a log.

Besides her honest, very neatly told, never uninteresting story, Mrs. Keith presents the psychological spectacle of a likable, genteel lady who may crossruff but never cancel her ladyhood. Seen through that lens, her portrait of Borneo is seriously limited.