Queer Fish

KAMONGO--Homer W. Smith--Viking ($2).

During the midnight hours while the S. S. Dumbea swelters through the tropic heat of the Suez Canal, two sweat-drenched passengers turn in their steamer-chairs, begin to talk. One is a U. S. scientist, Joel, the other an Anglican missionary priest. As befits the steaming trough, bordered by desert horizons, in which they find themselves, their talk treats of life's early beginnings, Man's ends and possible end.

Some 400 million years ago a fish dug its head into the mud, began to breathe with lungs, explains Joel. Next natural development would have been for it to be able to crawl out on land, but the lungfish never got that far. The only benefit it got from its lungs was the ability to live through periods of drought. Encysted in sun-baked mud it could live on air and its own tissues for months, even for years. From the papyrus roots of Lake Victoria Joel two years prior had collected specimens of the fish, called Kamongo by the blacks. Now he is taking more of them, packed in mud, back to America, to study further how their kidneys and other organs stand such a record-breaking strain.*

The evolutionary futility of the gradually disappearing lungfish looks to the Anglican priest like a crack in the Divine Plan. Joel does his best to widen the crack by comparing Man's brain to Kamongo's lung, both ingenious developments, neither leading anywhere much. Joel likens life to whirlpools in a stream of energy, likens the living matter of cells and bodies to inorganic rubbish whirlpool-caught. The gyroscopic adjustment of the whirlpool to obstacles in its course gives an illusion of intelligent purpose to the rubbish it holds together. Really, all the purpose animating the rubbish is to spin, to keep on spinning.

Against these arguments the priest advances only feeble opposition, does not use the dialectic resources of the Church. When Joel calls life "an eddy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics'' the priest does not draw attention to the Virgin Birth. But the scientist's ratiocinations leave him unconvinced. When the anchor-chain grates overboard at Port Said, Joel finds the out-argued priest sticking to his divine guns still. Joel cannot figure him out. Also he sweats less than Joel, does not seem to mind the stewing heat. He is a queer fish too. Kamongo is one of the two April choices of The Book-of-the-Month Club.

Sinful Wages

THREE LOVES--A. J. Cronin--Little, Brown ($2.50).

In the Caledonian economy of the Moral Law, Sin is paid wages, Death; but Virtue must be its own reward. Scotsman Cronin, in his story of the three-love-life of Lucy Moore, shows how Virtue, by seeking rewards other than itself, becomes a Sin, and gets the sinful wage.

Lucy Moore, whose self-satisfaction will not stay put, demands more rarefied satisfactions than her rather commonplace virtues can provide. Though she loves her husband well, she yearns to improve him so that she can love him even more. To teach him hospitality she invites Cousin Anna, against his protest, to their home. Anna's free-&-easy behavior soon makes Lucy forget her dreams of hospitality. She dreams of her husband's possible infidelity instead. Her perverse dread alienates him. When Lucy drives Anna from the house he goes with her. In the ensuing pursuit he is drowned.

Lucy takes another love, her son Peter. That he may become a doctor she works herself to the bone. She will accept no help, will not even marry, lest the purity of her motives be smirched. Her mother-love is not so pure as she thinks; when Peter marries, her life is ruined once again.

Disappointed in men, Lucy gives all her love to God. As an aged novice in a Belgian monastery she forces herself to put up with disciplinary mortifications for her new love's sake. But her already wearied body cannot stand the strain. Sick, she is sent back to England. When her son. through no fault of his own, fails to meet her train, she waits for him on the station platform until she falls. After a brief agony in a hospital, Death pays her wages in full. Beginning, as in Hatter's Castle, with a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, Author Cronin by slow degrees enfolds his unforgettable characters in a Scottish mist, made not only of Nature's weeping, but of men's.

Antiques & Decorations

SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES--Carl Van Vechten--Knopf ($3).

Author Van Vechten, when he was a child, used to collect birds' eggs, postage stamps, cigaret pictures, tobacco tags. Now he collects gaudy things of the mind, mostly reminiscences. Pieced together they make a kind of patchwork quilt, recalling. null strips of bright or sombre color, a bygone age. Neither very sacred nor very profane, they make good reading for belles-lettres' connoisseurs.

Most of the more sacred memories are engendered by reminiscences of a tin trunk that, on rainy days. Author Van Vechten's mother reached off a shelf for him to rummage in. Thinking now of that tin trunk, with its daguerrotypes and snippets of family hair, he remembers placidly that his maternal grandmother, who smoked a pipe, prophesied that he would die on the gallows. She had her reasons. Once, to compel his mother's attention, he snatched a kitchen knife from her by the blade so violently that he still bears the scar. "A similar perversity drove me to grasp potted plants by their stems and to dash them to the floor."

His maturer years were not without event. On one occasion, impressed with the success of Cecil Sharp and others in collecting folk songs and music in the fastnesses of Kentucky, the Carolinas and Tennessee, he set out in a buggy, equipped with music paper, a tuning fork and a phonographic recording machine, to collect the folk songs of his home State. Iowa. After a long ride he reached a farm where the daughter of the house consented to sing. He sat with the girl's mother on the piazza, waiting. The silence grew expectant. At last Aggie began to sing:

Oh--ev'ry evening hear him sing,

It's the attest little thing,

Got the cutest little swing,

Hitchy koo, hitchy koo, hitchy koo. . . .

After that Collector Van Vechten decided that Iowa's folk songs were the song of Iowa's birds, the rustling of her corn.

More sophisticated memories follow: anecdotes of George Moore; the predicament of a group of U. S. esthetes stranded in Europe at the outbreak of the War; a trip with his wife Fania Marinoff to the Bahamas, where he saw an orgiastic revival meeting of black Holy Jumpers. Sophisticate Van Vechten wondered what Huysmans would have thought of such goings-on. Black Priscilla, maid at his hotel, had no such complicated thoughts: "I'm a Baptist. ... I don't hold by those jumpers. The females jump, and the males jump after them."

The Author-- For 20 years a musical and dramatic critic droop-headed Sophisticate Van Vechten wrote his first novel, Peter Whiffle, at 42. Since then The Blind Bow-Boy, The Tattooed Countess, Nigger Heaven, Spider Boy, Parties have ripened his racy fame. Besides memories he collects autographs, postcards, pamphlets, book jackets, cats.

Hanging Suspended

ONE CAME OUT--Margaret Wilson-- Harper ($2).

Here and there in every countryside, no matter how green, stand groups of dark buildings inclosed by high stone walls. Within those walls there always lives a warden (in England they call him governor) ; within this warden there sometimes lives a tender heart. When inexorable Law demands that a prisoner be executed, such wardens may pay dear for their sensibilities.

On the day before the scheduled death of Prisoner Jones, Governor Andy Kent begins to feel himself cracking up. "If only the victim had been a less decent sort. If only he had cursed--or sworn-- or fought. . . . But how can you dig a grave for such a man--you enter his cell at midnight, to make sure the officers who keep him from suicide are not sleeping---you see him sobbing all over, like a child." When Governor Kent passes the open grave, sees the quicklime piled beside it, his conscience rises with his gorge; rather than carry out the Law he decides to resign his post. On the execution morning arrives His Majesty's Inspector of Prisons to oversee the hanging. Kent, in charge until his resignation has been accepted, refuses to proceed. Eight o'clock, the scheduled hour, ticks by. The Inspector telephones London for authority, tells the executioner to stand by. At 8:06 the House Office telephones Kent. Prisoner Jones has been reprieved.

*Four years ago Author Homer AY. Smith transported to the U. S., after a Guggenheim-sponsored year in Africa, 28 lungfish (Protoplecus acthiapicus Heckel). Twenty-seven of them died. Fortnight ago the 28th had completed three and one-half years of estivation in its mud-pie in a laboratory at New York University Medical College.

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