Grand Passion

CHANCE HAS A WHIP--Raymond Hoiden--Scribner ($2.50). In a literary scene dominated by tales of the barbarism of war and the hopelessness of peace a novel of oldfashioned, happy, romantic love stands out as conspicuously as a shy and innocent girl surrounded by disillusioned dames who have lost more than their youth. As a result Raymond Holden's Chance Has A Whip emerges as particularly refreshing, with at least one extended section that is calculated to remain long in readers' memories. The grand passion in Hendrick Fillmore's life is his love for beautiful, dark-eyed Leda Putnam, daughter of the founder of the Buffalo steel company of which Hendrick is secretary. With two children of his own, and a sharp-tongued wife, Hendrick is in no position cheerfully to surrender himself to his passion. In addition to these barriers, Leda runs away from him when she sees how the weak flame of interest has suddenly become a conflagration of desire.

The discovery that his wife is deceiving him enables Hendrick to escape from her without ending his sense of responsibility toward his children. He worries over business, sees a strike in the factory, feels himself going to pieces when he finds Leda again. Learning that she loves him, he finds happiness for the first time in his introspective life. During their Manhattan idyl, Hendrick's wife sets detectives after them as Leda is recovering from an abortion. They flee to Europe, are appalled to discover that Hendrick's 10-year-old daughter, Margot, is traveling on the same boat, superintended by a mean friend of his wife.

High point of Chance Has A Whip, describing the delicate relationship of father, mistress and daughter, has a muffled, tragic quality that recalls the best writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The disapproving lady who has charge of Margot frowns upon her intimacy with Leda and her father. When Hendrick, apologizing for the trouble his daughter causes his mistress, casually remarks that she is not a very attractive child, Margot overhears him. When, to make up for that cruelty, they become more attentive and tender with her, their days are darkened by a terrible conviction that she has surprised them together. When they try to make friends with her, the temporary guardian accuses them of plotting. Pushed violently back & forth, her nerves snapped, carrying too heavy a burden of adult concerns and a fixed belief that nobody wants her, Margot is found drowned in France. Hendrick believes he has killed her. The sense of guilt stays with him after his divorce, after his marriage to Leda, after his return to the steel company.

The Author. Born in New York City in 1894, short, dark Raymond Holden graduated from Princeton in 1915, served on the Mexican border with the National Guard and in the Army during the War. Afterwards he worked in a publishing office, on the staff of Travel Magazine, was an executive editor of The New Yorker, a member of the staff of FORTUNE, now does free-lance writing. A respected poet in his own right, he married Poetess Louise Bogan in 1925, is the author of a biography of Lincoln and of two detective stories which were published under a carefully-guarded pseudonym.

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