Abbe

MY NEW WORLD--Ernest Dimnet-- Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

One sunny June morning in 1919, an energetic, 52-year-old French abbe named Ernest Dimnet arrived in Manhattan to raise funds for the War-devastated Lille University. The abbe had had little formal preparation for his task. He had grown up in a provincial village in the north of France, studied at the University of Lille, written a religious volume that was placed on the Index, a biography of the Bronte sisters that won him a small but solid transatlantic reputation.

In Manhattan his fund-raising began with a series of staggering rebuffs. When he called on Cardinal Hayes, the man he got to see was young Monsignor Dineen, the Cardinal's secretary, who said impatiently, "This city is full of begging priests from all over the world ..." and walked away even after Abbe Dimnet proved his identity. Out in the street again, the abbe shook his head, laughed nervously, reminded himself that he was a man of letters of some standing, and walked to the Colony Club, where he was to appeal to a luncheon group of 20 ladies, "all Catholic and all Christian." But because he had an English accent and Irish sympathies were strong, he was suspected of being a British agent. Day after day Abbe Dimnet failed to get an audience with the Cardinal, although Monsignor Dineen became slowly "a little less rude, or a little more tired of being rude." Finally the abbe pulled up a chair, motioned Monsignor Dineen to another. "I never," he recalls, "gave anybody such a wigging." After that, he got to see the Cardinal.

For such glimpses of life in the ecclesiastical upper-world, readers of My New World, the second volume of his autobiography,* had to plow through 396 close-packed pages of memories, opinions, tributes to old friends, quotations from pious writers, fragments from, old diaries. But to balance these they could get 1) a good account of how The Art of Thinking, rejected by Harper, Harcourt Brace, Macmillan, Scribner, became a best-seller (total sales: more than 400,000 copies); 2) some shrewd observations on U. S. women, embedded in praise too fulsome to be called flattery; 3) an account of a heroic career as a lecturer that once carried the abbe through 39 lectures in less than 80 days; 4) a general picture of a benign, well-wishing, patriotic character who knows that in the war between good and evil, the thought of the "suffering endured at any minute by millions of men" is made bearable only by the thought of "the tremendous amount of kindness at work ... at that same minute."

*First: My Old World.

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