Egomaniacs

FORGIVE US OUR VIRTUES -- Vardis Fisher--Caxton ($2.50).

Vardis Fisher's candid, uneven, sometimes powerful tetralogy (In Tragic Life, Passions Spin the Plot, We Are Betrayed, No Villain Need Be) reminded critics of Rousseau, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Dreiser, D. H. Lawrence (but not, oddly enough, of Thomas Wolfe). This four-decker autobiographical chronicle told the tormented story of Vardis Fisher's fight to free himself from acute egomania and puritan repressions.

Forgive Us Our Virtues, a long novel of 150,000 words, follows the same theme, but on a larger scale, and with greater clinical candor. And this time Author Fisher tries to leave himself out of the story. At its best a brave study in modern neuroses, at its worst the book is only a variation on the case histories in Freudian source books. Again, as with the first volume of his tetralogy, publishers in the East refused to touch the book, leaving Idaho's Caxton Printers to take a moral risk somewhat akin to that taken by the publishers of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

A Midwest university furnishes Author Fisher's main clinical specimens. Mouthpiece is lanky, whimsical, brilliant Jim Jones, head of the psychology department, who psychologizes the theme of the book: that "both among persons and nations" over-or underdevelopment of the ego causes most contemporary maladjustment, with sex playing the decisive role.

Sex certainly plays the decisive role in Author Fisher's minor cases. A 200-pound English department head is a suppressed rakehell and sadist. Pompous little President Ledwidge launches a one-man anti-necking campaign by sneaking up on parked cars, yanking co-eds out of back seats. Brilliant, introvert Virgin Jerry Young is a beautiful woman whose career as a psychologist is wrecked when she is driven out of town by neurotic, wisecracking natives after a trumped-up arrest. Sorriest egotist of the lot is handsome John Smith, who marries with the belligerent vow always to tell his wife the truth. When he kisses his secretary, he tells his wife that the secretary sneaked up on him. He admits looking at other women's legs, but turns his confession into a diatribe on their immodesty. Souring under the strain, he declares the world is going to the dogs, picks fights with his wife, winds up in an asylum.

Vardis Fisher makes it plain that his small-town dwellers are as mixed up as any, that legends of uninhibited frontiers are just legends. One character among his many neurotics points the strait way to salvation. This is Ogden Greb, a former colleague of Psychologist Jim Jones. He goes out to the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho after Jerry turns him down. There he meets an uninhibited girl with a simple heart and a wise head. After an idyllic summer and winter with her (not as convincingly described as the mountain scenery) Greb sheds his introspections.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.