Estrangements

CONVERSATION -- Conrad Aiken --Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

A MAN OF FORTY--Gerald Bullett--Knopf ($2.50).

Whether or not mankind will welcome two more novels about Marriage at the Crossroads, the two best of the season are probably these. Both are more honest by far than the Women's Magazine staple on the subject; both are written with a clarity and respect for fine distinctions that only gifted writers may be expected to display. Neither is first-rate because neither gets all the way home.

Conrad Aiken is one of the finest verbal musicians among U. S. poets. He is also a proseman whose Blue Voyage (1927) ranks still as the richest evocation of a transatlantic crossing in modern literature. Aiken's gift for suggesting mental atmosphere is devoted, in Conversation, to the situation of Tip Kane, a Boston painter, and his wife, Enid, who have taken a house for the winter on Cape Cod. Tip has been having an affair with a girl in Boston and is subconsciously about ready to end it.

Enid is consciously fed up for a number of reasons, uppermost being the appearance in their village of a friend of Tip's, one Jim Connor, whose interesting hobby it is to rob large department stores in order to support artistic riffraff from Greenwich Village. With the high-bred fright of a New Bedford snob, Enid insists that Tip "drop" gentle Jim and the menagerie of phonies he has collected in his house down the road. Tip does so, hates Enid, finally gets into a stormy quarrel with her which teaches him 1) that her haughtiness was not caused by Jim but by their unconfessed estrangement; 2) that they love each other still.

Sonata-like in its four-part structure and in the conversations between whimsical Tip, sulky Enid, breezy Buzzer (their seven-year-old daughter), the book is al most (not quite) too tenuous for its own charm. Aiken's fine-stroke writing is perfect in his descriptions of Cape scenes and weather, but it cannot stand the strain of sympathy with the supposedly "alive" bums at Jim's place, who are caricatures pure & simple. As for lovely Enid, the reader remains unloving to the end.

Gerald Bullett (The Quick and the Dead) is an English novelist of more undivided experience than Poet Aiken's, and the experience tells in A Man of Forty. This is the story of how young Adam Swinford, happily tight, forgets a week-end engagement in the country, and how in consequence his friend David Brome, waiting for Adam at Chiselbrook Station, gives a lift to beautiful Mary Wilton and falls in love with her. David is an outwardly comfortable, inwardly restive 40-year-old, retired on a Civil Service pension. Lydia, his nervous, brown wife for 15 years, has a knack for making him feel stupid.

One spring day in the country after weeks of hovering, David finally gets a kiss from Mary, confesses to Lydia (but cannot leave her), accepts his ordeal. Meanwhile in London smooth Adam Swin ford is carrying on his affair with a pick up named Lily Elvers. But Adam gets tired of Lily about the time Lily gets pregnant. And about the time, irresolute David begins to bore cool Mary, smart Adam meets Mary.

In working up these complications, Novelist Bullett is practically flawless. But what is notable in his book is not his well-paced plot, for which the ironies of human circumstance work overtime, but his lucid comprehension of his creatures: of the refinements of torture inflicted on David by Lydia, on Lydia by herself, on them both by what appears the human insolubility of their predicament. Bullett is expert enough to do a beautiful study of the suffocating effect of that predicament on their seven-year-old son. In devising a nifty murder mystery at the end, he confesses that he has provided no resolution for the reader but an escape "into that mood of garrulous exhilaration which the discovery of a corpse on the premises seems always to induce."

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