Books: After Escape

REPRISAL—Ethel Vance—Little, Brown

($2.50).

Reprisal is the first novel by the author of the Gestapo thriller, Escape, since the revelation that Novelist Ethel Vance is really Grace Zaring Stone cleared up the biggest U.S. literary mystery of the decade. For three years this mystery caused a stir in U.S. intellectual life equaled only by the agitation over the question: who should play Scarlett O’Hara in the movie version of Gone With the Wind? No doubt the publishers expect this furor will turn Reprisal into a bestseller. But Reprisal is no Escape. The book is a slow-moving study of French life under the Nazis, with drama, romance and coincidences burning sometimes as intensely but always as reluctantly as green oak logs.

In a small fishing village in German-occupied Brittany, German N.C.O. Hans Holle returned late at night from a visit to a French trull. Impudently he waved a black cotton stocking at Frenchmen he met on the dark roads. Next morning Gay Dog Hans was found dead, a bullet in his stomach.

Twenty French hostages were seized by the German authorities in reprisal. They would be shot in three days if Hans’s murderer were not discovered. When Françoise Galle, daughter of the village’s leading citizen, walked through the streets she met the sad, angry gaze of the hostages’ desperate relatives. Why, they asked, was Franchise’s father doing nothing to save their sons and brothers? Was he not a French Deputy and their “ambassador” to Gestapo headquarters in Paris? Had the Galles gone over to the Nazis?

The Dilemma. In his desperation, Deputy Galle called in the only Frenchman who could save the hostages—an Alsatian collaborator with the Nazis—Edouard Schneider. Edouard had no scruples. Once the employe of Andre Galle, he had become a rich newspaper proprietor. It amused sardonic Edouard to protect the family of his old Socialist employer from his Nazi friends.

But a peasant showed Edouard a sawed-off shotgun buried in the Galle barn, and Edouard soon began to wonder whether one of the family had not committed the murder. It could not be Andre; it could not be Daughter Franchise. But what about Son Blaise who insulted Edouard at every turn? Or his Communist buddy Maurice, who worked in the Galle house and had once murdered an enemy?

Edouard got no help from Franchise, who had once loved him. She knew that her brother Blaise and Maurice were planning an escape to England. Soon she learned, to her amazement, that with them was going her American lover, Simon, who, by an unusual coincidence, had joined the British Commandos and been left behind in Brittany after a commando raid. As more & more evidence appeared to incriminate the Galle household, Franchise was torn by conflicting desires: to save the hostages, to see her suspected brother and lover escape.

Authoress Vance saves Franchise from making a decision. It is Edouard who decides that it is in his interest to stop being sentimental and to turn the whole family over to the German authorities. And it is sullen, proletarian Maurice who pleads guilty, so that Blaise and Lover Simon may escape and the hostages go free.

. . .

When a copy of Ethel Vance’s melodramatic Escape arrived in France (1939), a kindly English lady carried it up the stairs of a hotel in her knitting bag, laid it before her ailing fellow-traveler—auburn-haired, blue-eyed Novelist Grace Zaring Stone (The Bitter Tea of General Yen). Mrs. Stone was convalescing after pneumonia, and the lady thought it would be nice to read Escape aloud to the invalid. “You can’t possibly have read it,” said the lady to protesting Patient Stone, “it’s only just come into the lending library.” Says Novelist Stone: “I couldn’t tell her I’d written the damned book. So I said to her: ‘It simply isn’t the kind of book I like to read!”

In the U.S., literary wiseacres were already guessing at the author’s identity. Nobody guessed right. Suspected authors of Escape soon could have formed a sizable club. Chief suspects: Rebecca West, Erika Mann, Dorothy Thompson, I.A.R. Wylie.

Not until the spring of 1942 did Mrs. Stone confess. She explained that she had used the pen name Ethel Vance (“It sounds like a name you were born with and can’t get rid of”) because: i) her daughter Eleanor (Baroness Perenyi) was then living in Czecho-Slovakia, 2) Husband Captain Ellis Stone was U.S. Naval Attache in Paris, and use of the Stone name might have been undiplomatic. But the new name had already become fashionable. A few weeks after Escape appeared, Mrs. Stone’s father hired a negro cook. “Name, please?” asked Father Zaring. “Ethel Vance” said cook.

A great-granddaughter of the Socialist reformer, Robert Dale Owen, Grace Zaring was born in Manhattan (1896), educated at Catholic convents in Manhattan and France. She studied music in Paris, worked for the British Red Cross in World War I. She has followed her Navy husband (now “somewhere at sea”) to stations in China, Europe, the West Indies, has traveled in Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Malaya, India.

Novelist Vance, who has “never lived in any one place longer than two years,” envies writers who write in “lovely quiet places in the woods with purling brooks.” She says: “I’ve had to do my writing on the edges of card tables, on trains, in boarding houses. I seem to be able to write best in places like China where the entire household wanders in and out and there’s a mob howling at the gates.”

Mob or no mob, Ethel Vance “sweats blood” when she writes (“I simply hate it”). She is sensible, too, about her abilities. “I don’t try to imitate genius,” she assured New York Times interviewer Robert van Gelder. “Why should I? I work terribly hard to tell a story effectively, and do a good, tight construction job, because I can do that much; I can be a craftsman.”