Stubborn Saint

THE MOON is MAKING--Storm Jameson --Macmillan ($2.50).

Although the sentimental novels of J. B. Priestley have contradicted the stock picture of Yorkshiremen as the most stubborn, blunt-speaking cranky-wits going, the Yorkshire novels of Storm Jameson have usually fitted the picture very well. In The Moon is Making, a pre-War family chronicle, she shows as stubborn and crotchety a collection of Yorkshiremen as ever stumped. But also among them is one who comes near to being a stubborn Yorkshire saint.

In a community where queer behavior, tightfistedness, sadistic gossip and such were taken for granted, the Wikker family stood out. The scorching tongue of squat, black-eyed Widow Semiramis was matched by the stinginess of her frail, bullying sister Ann, who said when her husband died: 'Th' worst of it is I wasted a chicken on him yesterday." Rich Farmer Ezekiel Wikker was as mean as his sisters but added a manly lust and a thirst for hard liquor.

By ordinary Wikker standards, the other brother, Handel, was a freak. A onetime whaling captain turned vicar, Handel was expelled from the church when he got a farm girl in trouble. When she died in childbirth he settled down in the poorest section of his native village, became a sort of father confessor to the poor as well as a friendly enemy to the shipowner who ran the town. Until he was 60 Handel spent his days in a quiet round of preaching primitive Christianity, writing amateur science, philosophizing with his cronies, combatting the blackening meanness of his brother and sisters. When at last the shipowner decided that Handel's Christianity was interfering with business, he turned the police loose, and they finished the old idealist off with a broken head. His sister Semiramis said his martyrdom was only another brand of pigheadedness.

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