Death and Transfiguration

HANNIBAL HOOKER--William Harlan Hale--Random House ($2.50).

The subtitle of William Harlan Hale's novel about Hannibal Hooker puts the tumbril before the horse: His Death and Adventures. This inversion is no accident.

Hannibal Hooker sets out from his Hoosier Quaker home to become a minister and to mend the world singlehanded. Before long he finds himself extolling Mammon in the pulpit of a brand-new stone temple and wishing he loved a brand-new, stone-cold wife for something besides her money. His mind cracks, and he disappears.

After this spiritual death, his adventures are carnal enough. He turns up on a southbound tramp steamer, becomes embroiled in an abortive Haitian rebellion, tries his hand at Washington politics. As the War begins he becomes a-foreign correspondent--on the German side. When the U. S. is on the brink of joining the Allies, he carries on underground anti-Ally propaganda to keep the U. S. out. Courting but never really espousing lost causes, living up to his ideals but not to his talents, he scorns worldly success, of course never gets it. At the end, all the rapscallion, intriguing, turncoat ne'er-do-wells on whom he has sprinkled his life join him in a rowdy, surrealistic, drunken brawl.

The author of this how-dy-do was one of the founders of the brash, short-lived Yale Harkness Hoot; at 21 wrote Challenge to Defeat, slapping the face of depression pessimists. In Hannibal Hooker, his first novel, he breezes past all moral and religious stop-signs. He is, in brief, a daring young man, and his agility on literary trapezes is breathtaking. But after his stunts are over, it is not quite clear what all the squirming and leaping were about.

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