Books: The Big Fox

THE BOLINVARS—Marguerite F. Bayliss —Holt ($3).

Marguerite Bayliss, editor of the Horse Show Blue Book and author of The Matriarchy of the American Turf, has written a period (1820s) first novel that outstrips even such feminine rivals in romantic fantasy as Forever Amber and Green Dolphin Street. The Bolinvars, a story of thoroughbred horses, hounds and men, was first published in 1937 in a limited edition, at $15 a copy. This year’s voracious appetite for romance brought its revival as a Ladies’ Home Journal serial, and in a trade edition with a $10,000 promotion campaign by Publisher Holt. It reads like a blend of Black Beauty, The Stockbreeder’s Manual and The Three Musketeers.

The Bolinvars has two heroes. One is wealthy Bois Hugo Bolinvar, last of the sporting, aristocratic Virginia Bolinvars. Hugo looked like a Greek god and glittered with “inner fires.” He owned a magnificent estate jampacked with foxhounds and liveried “darkies . . . with mirthful grins.” Hugo was loved by “the most beautiful girl in … all the South.” But he was afraid that he was a bastard. He could not ask his mother about it because his father had murdered her years ago. So Hugo was ashamed to marry.

Hugo’s cousin, Devereux Bolinvar. last of the sporting, aristocratic New Jersey Bolinvars, is the book’s second hero. “Dev” (6 ft. tall, “fit as a panther”) knew all about Cousin Hugo’s guilty worry. But Dev was too much of a gentleman to raise the question, and Hugo believed in letting sleeping dogs lie. So the cousins never spoke. But they spent all their time trying to outdo one another on horseback.

Neck & neck, but strictly speechless, the cousins hunted boars in Hungary, wolves in Russia, stags in Scotland, foxes in England. Soon all the fox hunters and debutantes in Europe and America were divided—half for New Jersey’s Bolinvar, half for Virginia’s.

One night Hugo was entertaining the Duke of Hoven in his Virginia mansion. A dreadful scream rang out. A Negro child had been devoured by a monstrous fox. Nothing remained but a few bones, a pigtail, a pathetic scrap of petticoat. Hugo, Dev and the Duke leapt into the saddle, galloped madly after the fleeing fox.

The fox swam the Potomac, the Susquehanna. The moon rose in “nocturnal majesty.” Still they galloped. “My British mind never properly grasped the dimensions of North America,” panted the Duke; “are we still in Pennsylvania?” “That was Baltimore,” said someone, as they flashed past a large town. “Egad, what a nest of ugly peasants!” snapped the Duke. In the “cold, caliginous predawn” the huntsmen forded the Delaware. By afternoon they were thundering through the heart of New Jersey. At nightfall Hugo’s mare grabbed the fox with her teeth, tossed it ten feet into the air. The world’s longest and screwiest fox hunt (200 miles in 45 hours) was over. So, it soon developed, were Hugo’s worries.