Recent & Readable

THE SWAN OF USK--Helen Ashton--Macmlllan ($2.50). The life of Henry Vaughan, one of the valuable minor poets of Milton's time, made into a valuable minor novel. Vaughan's boyhood in the Welsh mountains, his life at Oxford and in noisome London, his service as a trooper-surgeon for King Charles in the savage Civil Wars and his later life as a country physician are reconstructed in a sober, ringing prose that suggests the rich style of the 17th Century. Scholar Ashton's battles and amputations make a plausible background for Vaughan's fine devotional poetry.

DILDO CAY--Nelson Hayes--Houghton Miff I in ($2.50). West Indies novel, by a 36-year-old, French-born, U. S.-educated Connecticut businessman. Laid on a tiny windswept island (composite of Turks & Caicos), the story twists around the romance between the scion of a hardbitten, salt-making family and a disillusioned blonde who arrives from Bermuda to keep books. Hemingwaywardness bristles on the story like barnacles. But it has one claim to originality: Author Hayes's ingenuity in getting Adrian and Carol alone together on the island. Adrian's father drowns; his mother dies of neurosis; his young wife departs to have a baby, decides to stay for good; Carol's ill-charactered father is killed by blacks, who then flee the island en masse.

BE THOU THE BRIDE--Christine Weston --Scribner ($2.50). A first novel, laid in Maine, plumb full of Balzacian characters: a violent-blooded patriarch, three bastards, two idiots, a miscellany of neurotics and misfits. In two generations their collective activities include a sex murder, several adulteries, a heap of frustrations and painful deaths, with only a gentle, all-forgiving girl named Fortune and leathery Grandmother Noakes to relieve the psychopathic shadows.

CITIZENS --Meyer Levin -- Viking ($2.75). This 650page hybrid--part fact, part fiction--tells the story of the South Chicago "riot" on Memorial Day 1937, in which police killed ten pickets at the Republic Steel mill. Mob-size, its cast includes nine dead pickets (who get individual background stories); a young Jewish doctor who rapidly develops from bystander to alarmed social critic; a welter of organizers, stool pigeons, scabs, Senators, professors, company executives, reporters, cops, lawyers. "By using only actual, attested events as materials," says Author Levin, "the writer reduces the possibility of arriving at false conclusions." Far less objective than this apologia suggests, Citizens is an ambitious technical experiment in the "proletarian" novel.

THE LABYRINTHINE WAYS -- Graham Greene -- Viking ($2.50). Novelist Greene writes out-of-the-ordinary adventure stories (others: The Man Within, The Name of Action, Brighton Rock, The Confidential Agent), combining tense narrative and limbo-like atmosphere. In The Labyrinthine Ways he finds an almost ideal character for his talents: the last fugitive priest in a hypothetical Red-ruled Mexico. Small, shabby, bad-toothed, alternately disguised as tramp or peon, he cunningly eludes a fanatic young police lieutenant, ditches a burrlike stool pigeon, at last walks deliberately into a trap when he is summoned to hear the confession of a dying gringo bandit.

THE TREES--Conrad Richter--Knopf ($2.50). The first 70 pages of The Trees, which tell of the Luckett family alone in the tremendous forest of the Northwest Territory, build a savage, hypnotic atmosphere of a nation's prenatal silence. Once the Lucketts begin meeting people, and once life begins its shift from the hunter's to the farmer's economy, the story relaxes towards more ordinary folk-stuff. But Conrad Richter can teach most U. S. folk-writers a trick or two in the right use of archaic language, and his pioneers, unlike most in fiction, never preen themselves before posterity.

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