Torrents of Ink

THE MARSHALL STORY (344 pp.]--Robert Payne--Prentice-Hall ($5).

Author Pierre Stephen Robert Payne started something in 1919 that he can't stop. He was only seven that year, but he had an attack of writer's itch, and with the same zest another boy his age might have used to dismember a grasshopper, Payne wrote The True Adventures of Princess Sylvia. His manuscript showed a youthful disdain for humdrum fact, e.g., he set Princess Sylvia to reign not only over Denmark, but over all of Asia as well. The main thing was that his writer's itch turned chronic. This week, at 40, he published his 43rd book, a biography of General George C. Marshall.

Even for Payne, 1951 was a pretty busy year; six full-length books, including two novels (Red Lion Inn, and, under the pseudonym Richard Cargoe, Maharajah), a book of short stories (The Blue Negro), and three nonfiction works (Red Storm over Asia, The Fathers of the Western Church, The Marshall Story). And Author Payne shows no signs of slowing up. He has eight more books in the works at the moment. One, a study of the tramp created by Charlie Chaplin, is finished and delivered to the publisher. Among the others are a life of Christ, a travel book about the U.S., a history of Western man, and a "study of France during several decades."

Factory Hazards. Author Payne, who now lives in Montevallo, Ala., was born in Cornwall, the son of a French mother and a British naval architect. He went to school in England and Africa, later studied whatever pleased him in Munich and at the Sorbonne. For a time he worked as a shipwright in England, then, in 1939, he got a job in the yards at Singapore. By that time his books were getting published (one under the pseudonym Valentin Tikhonov). In 1941 he went to China for the British Ministry of Information, wound up with successive jobs at Fuhtan and Lienta Universities, teaching literature and naval architecture.

From his eight years in the Far East came a whole shelf of books ranging from an anthology of Chinese poetry (The White Pony] to a biography, Mao Tse-tung: Ruler of Red China. At least one well-informed reviewer attacked the Mao book for its disdain of humdrum fact. Wrote scholarly Dr. Hu Shih, onetime Chinese Ambassador to the U.S.: "Empty padding . . . falsified history." Such adverse judgments are among the hazards a one-man writing factory runs. Payne works admittedly from what is at hand in public libraries, has an uncommon knack for converting a shelf of books on a given subject into a book of his own. He keeps four or five books going at once ("I get bored. I get excited about one book for a day and then I change over"). He is a professor of English at Alabama College for Women (enrollment 662). But by working regularly from midnight to 4 a.m., he grinds out about 20 pages of writing a day. Says Payne modestly: "I don't write phenomenally fast. It's just a matter of keeping at it steadily."

Fewer & Better. Payne's latest, The Marshall Story, was dredged chiefly from Manhattan's well-stocked 42nd Street library. Payne met Marshall once for a few minutes in China in 1946, but he has neither asked Marshall for information for his book nor has he spoken to anyone who has known Marshall. Says Payne: "I wanted to stay clear of the military mind." The result is that The Marshall Story also stays pretty clear of the inner Marshall, reads like what it is, a glib job of carpentry.

Perhaps Payne might write better books if he wrote fewer, but he is not in a mood to consider that. His publishers (he has nine at present) have begged him to slow down: his books are competing with each other in the bookstores. Payne's answer: "I intend to go on writing six or seven books a year."

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