Itches Without Scratches

FEAR & TREMBLING--Glenway Wescott --Harper ($3.50).

"In search of music, ... a certain warmth of welcome, and museums with clean pictures, in all of which France is poor," four intelligentsiacs last summer deserted Paris to tour central Europe in an automobile. Novelist Wescott was along and, like a good intelligentsiac, kept his head rambling with the car. As the landscape from Paris to Bamberg flits before his eyes, thoughts on literature, religion, mankind-in-general flit behind. These he sets down deferentially "in fear and trembling" at generalizing on such knotty themes.

Considering the modern scene Author Wescott, like the late Gospeler David Herbert Lawrence, finds little to say in favor of contemporary men or their pursuits. "We modern private persons have got out of the habit of being absorbed in what we are, . . . and for that matter in what we really want. We have to make an effort to feel ourselves and to know ourselves by envying and competing with others. We use our imaginations, [not] to penetrate what is real and there before our eyes . . . but to evolve fictive compensations for pseudo-desires in excess of our faculties ... by which to be disappointed, inevitably." Among men's fictive compensations Author Wescott considers most notorious Literature,whose contemporaneous practitioners contend to be social mouthpieces, rather than rulers and revealers as of old; old-fashioned ideas about sex ("Childlessness is a virtue now, though probably the humblest"); the idealist religion of "God-beside-the-point."

Beyond the veils of psychological difficulties, of men less seeking to satisfy desire than in search of desire to satisfy, Author Wescott catches glimpses of economic difficulties now & then. With so much trouble dead ahead, one looks for less complaint, more cure. But the only cure offered is the one proposed by Tolstoy's peasant, who, when Tolstoy interrupted his plowing to ask him what he would do if he knew that the world was next day coming to an end, scratched his head and answered, "I would plow.''

The Author. Though born of farmer stock (Kewaskum, Wis., 1901) Author Wescott's family "has aristocratic rather than middleclass prejudices; it does not hoard up its sons for the sake of the family fortune, but regards it as a duty to make gifts of them to 'the State.' "... Intended by them to be an ecclesiastical offering, though his own ambition was to be a musician, Glenway has turned out to be a Literary Gift. His books, The Apple of the Eye, The Grandmothers, Goodbye Wisconsin, The Babe's Bed, picture his native Middle West of which he says: "How much sweeter to come and go than to stay." He now lives mostly in France, where he is working on a two-volume novel, to which he feels he can return now that he has contributed Fear & Trembling to his fellow men.

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