Books: Potato People

THE WEST WIND (256 pp.)—Faith Baldwin—Holt, Rinehart & Winston ($3.95).

Their names, if they were married, were Peg and Tom, Jane and Bill, Jeremy and Jennifer. Single men were always called Brick or Brock or Bruce. Unmarried girls needed a gallant name; it was usually Helen. They lived in a smallish, unidentified city in an immemorial Indiana. The men spoke to each other in a language called kidding (“You old son of a gun”), and the women talked somberly about “our marriage” as if marriage were a large, fragile china object one kept in the front hall. They led decent, busy lives, and the worst sinners among them were those men (never women) who admitted, grinning roguishly, that they went to church only three times a year.

They were, of course, the characters whose happy problems and placid turmoil filled six-part serials during the great days of the women’s, magazines. Their most important characteristic was, as the millions of matron readers knew, and as the writers and editors knew they knew, that the problems and turmoil did not really matter. If you cut into a Brick or a Jeremy (and there was constant cutting; men and children in the serials were fatally susceptible to plot-advancing ailments), you found only a dense, featureless white substance, like the inside of a potato. Spinal meningitis did not really hurt the potato husbands who incurred it, but it gave the overworked young potato doctor (generally called Hank, sometimes Mike) a chance to say, wearily, brushing a shock of coal-black hair from his eyes, that he was sorry, he had done all he could do.

Trouble Ahead. Bound in hard covers, the potato serials formed a vast sub-literature whose authors typed fast, grew rich, and pretended to be wistful about critical neglect. Among the fastest and richest was Faith Baldwin, whose income reached six figures a year during the ’30s and ’40s, and who has written, under her own name and pseudonyms, at least 100 books Edmund Wilson has never heard of. Editors loved her because she was dependable and fast. Once, with no perceptible quickening in pace, she clicked off a 12,000-word novella during a four-day coast-to-coast train ride. ”Sometimes,” she admits, “the stories didn’t come out very dimensional.”

But two dimensions were enough, and for Author Baldwin’s aging but still faithful audience, they still are. Now, a wispy woman of 68 with a warm, friendly, electrically operated glint to her eye, she limits herself to 6,000 to 8,000 words a day. She does a monthly “inspirational” column for Woman’s Day and one book a year. The women’s magazines are declining, and the days of fat prices for serials are over, but the Baldwin prose still reads the same. The married pair in The West Wind are pretty Meg and darkly attractive Davy. He is a successful, 38-year-old sales manager with a fine dog and unfailing friends, but he and Meg have no children—an unvarying sign that trouble is ahead.

Weather from the West. The trouble comes; Davy, fallible though darkly attractive male that he is, commits casual adultery. His conscience is lacerated, and his minister advises him to tell all: “Your wife will be deeply hurt, and this you must face. But you will have shared.”

Pretty Meg, as it turns out, forgives but does not understand. Davy understands her forgiving but cannot forgive her not understanding. The dog senses the rift between them, and for a while things look black indeed. But at the last possible moment, there is a meteorological bulletin: “The wind had changed; cool and freshening, it was blowing from the West.” This is an unvarying sign that trouble is behind. So are another 60,000 words. “Come back to bed, darling,” says Davy kindly (and with just the hint of spice that potato readers like). “You must get some sleep.”