A Pot in Every Chicken

THE TIME IS NOON (561 pp.)--Hiram Haydn--Crown ($3.50).

PILGRIM'S INN (346 pp.) -- Elizabeth Goudge--Coward-McConn ($3).

Wander this week to the coops of Publishers Row, from whose incubators comes the literary provender of a mighty nation. That lively clucking and scrabbling in the feedboxes is the fanfare which announces that two plump bestsellers have just been hatched. Soon, very soon, both fledglings will spread their contracts, and, obeying some profound migratory instinct, fly away to Hollywood. Meanwhile, their present owners will help these chicks to take their first, stumbling steps toward the jackpot.

Crown Publishers' chick (first printing: 30,000) has been promised front-page cockalorums in the Sunday review sections of the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hiram Haydn, the proud father, who edits the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly, The American Scholar, is going to throw an "autograph-party" for his chick in his home town (Cleveland) and will speak in its defense on a radio program named Books on Trial. Coward-McCann's bird has already been taken under the hot wing of the Literary Guild, thus assuring Britain's Old Mother Goudge (who wrote the best-selling Green Dolphin Street) a minimum first printing of 615,000 copies.

Pass Me That Gin, Son. What is there about these two birds that makes them so much more precious than the average broiler? Well, Father Haydn's chick is absolutely enormous and interminably long--and the public loves to get good poundage for its money. It is primarily what is called a think-chick, and its little crop is crammed with quotations from Walter Pater, W. H. Auden, Machiavelli, Engels, and even Max Lerner.

It gives a bird's-eye view of American life in the boom year of 1929, complete with stockmarket quotations. It graphically describes the rotten, disgusting (but pretty juicy) goings-on--how every bathtub brimmed with forbidden gin; how the men, half-crazed with lust and easy money, rushed at the women and seduced them incessantly, on the hills, in the streets, in the valleys, and particularly on the beaches; how the women didn't care a fig, and responded to the assaults in the grossest way. But under their rumpled beds lurked such killjoys as the Gastonia strike, antiSemitism, neurosis, a punch-drunk stockmarket and other cultural menaces. And so, at long last, a strong moral message ("Destructive violence must be fought--with constructive aggressiveness") soars across Father Haydn's sky like a flaming cliche.

Old Sweet Song. The golden egg hatched by sage Mother Goudge is different and much more endearing. Here, the lecherous and predatory decadence of the New World is forgotten in the leafy byways of the Old Country; here, quotations are culled only from the sunny hedgerows of George Meredith, Shakespeare, The Wind in the Willows. World War II--the one which was caused by all the irresponsible behavior described by ardent Father Haydn--is over at last, and Britons are exhausted.

But do they get tipsy? Do they dash around seducing one another, or go out on strike? Not they! Heroine Sally Adair is made of better stuff, even though, "to her shame," she wears "an eight-&-a-half shoe." Not only does she "always [wake] up happy, because she had been born happy and didn't seem able to help it," but the gin shortage has taught her to use a bathtub the way it should be used--and so, abandoning herself "to joy like a bird to the wind (and leaping out of bed) her tall body in its yellow pajamas like a sword of gold in the sun . . . [Sally] stripped, sprang into the bath, turned on the shower, and broke into loud uproarious song." Then, shaking her "glorious mop of unruly red-brown curls," she tugged on her old eight-&-a-halves and pranced out into the street.

Sally soon meets up with a whole family of adorable people. They all pull out of grimy London and squeeze themselves into a fascinating old inn, where Sally soon gets hitched to "one of the most famous actors of their generation," and everybody lives happily ever after, from Granny down to the baby twins. "I know," Mother Goudge confesses, "that happy endings are sometimes inartistic . . . but I can't write any other kind." Hollywood thinks she's just fine, the way she is.

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