Mother Danforth's Story

THE CHRISTMAS TREE (212 pp.]--Isabel Bolton--Scribner ($2.75).

At 62, Mary Britton Miller took stock. She had written five volumes of poems and a rather good novel, In the Days of Thy Youth, a story of a deep attachment between twins. Yet Mary Miller had never produced a sound critical success, had never come close to authoring a bestseller. Was she, after all, just another New England spinster with literary inclinations?

Novelist Miller thought that the trouble might be her placid style. She decided to take a completely new course. She picked herself the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton and, in 1946, published a novel in a new, free style, Do I Wake or Sleep. It consisted pretty much of the interior monologues of a woman of intuitions, like Isabel Bolton. This time, the critics were watching. The New Yorker's Edmund Wilson found the Bolton style "exquisitely perfect in accent"; some of it he compared to The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises. Said the Nation's Diana Trilling: "The most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years." All the critics did not go overboard in this headlong fashion, but many agreed that here was a new talent.

Beetle on the Blade. In her latest novel, Author Bolton tries to fill a larger frame. The Christmas Tree is the story of a possessive mother and a mother-possessed son, of how she got that way through a thwarted childhood and a loveless marriage, and of how her son became a homosexual and finally a murderer.

In the first half of the novel, Mother Danforth's mind wanders wayward through the past, remembering all that a reader must know to understand what is to come, but also remembering such things as a day when she was a little girl, lying in the grass: "The heat waved over tier hands and face and the air rippled all around her in little rings and circulations of summer tunes. She put out a finger to deflect an emerald beetle climbing a blade of grass and watched it spread its pretty double wings and fly away; there was a long procession of ants running toward an anthill; spiders spun webs; a butterfly opened and closed its wings; the clover, the daisies, the devil's-paint-brush, the sorrel and timothy nodded above her and gave her a peculiar sense of being, herself, a meadow full of grass and flowers and little flying, crawling, humming creatures."

Murder Around the Tree. Most of the second half is a good deal less feminine and less successful. When Writer Bolton switches from memory to action, and from past to present, her pen seems to catch a bit of fuzz, her prose blurs a little, and the feelings of the son, his ex-wife and her new husband fog up. And her last-minute attempt to knit the son's tragedy to the world situation is a piece of synthetic, Freudian chop-logic as far-fetched as saying that a tug on an umbilical cord will ultimately release an atom bomb.

The action of the climactic murder scene, with Mother Danforth's family gathered around the Christmas tree, is powerfully done, without a trace of fuzz on the pen or fog in the eye. Yet Miss Bolton's is a lyric, not a dramatic talent. Whenever she tries to speak through a character who is not her own kind and her own sex, she loses her firm tone of voice. But, speaking for herself, Author Bolton has much to say. She says it in a style which Mary Britton Miller should have tried sooner.

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