Out of the Furnace

Bread And Fire—Charles Rumford Walker -- Houghton, Mifflin ($2.50). "You know," she said, "the one thing people can never forgive in one is a betrayal of one's class." Harris Burnham, hearing his aunt thus condemn his excursion into socialistic journalism, replies by going to work with the hunkies in a copper mill. His is a hard-muscled method of thought. He refuses to betray himself by betraying humanity in order to remain loyal to an artificial class distinction. The, to many persons, pleasantly remote life of working people interests him like a bride. Feeling this alien devotion, the girl he loves says, "I don't love you because you've never allowed it."

Like author, like character. Author Walker does his best graphic writing when he talks about Poles, Hunyaks, "bohunks" in general. Again and again he stops his story to look at them, trying always to fit the horror and immensity of their tasks into some scheme. Shaking light from the furnaces illuminates the stupid, pitiful anger of their faces. Author Walker describes "the look of the woman's eyes whose husband fell into a steel ladle and was melted down a year later-- they didn't tell her, she found out afterwards -- into an ingot."

Soundly and sufficiently autobiographical, the story is told in the mills. Hard-muscled, Author Walker does not care. He offers an important enigma, not a smart conundrum with the solution on the last page. Instead, at the bottom of the last page: "Dirty Reed interrupted, 'New jobs,' he began, 'new bosses--' " first person. Avoiding the vanity of this approach, Author Walker uses his pronoun mainly as a lens for objective experiences. For reader as for Harris Burnham's fiancee, there is resentment against his preoccupation with factories and

Out of Yale into the A. E. F., out of the A. E. F. into steel mills and a brass factory, out of the fires to the Atlantic Monthly staff is the abrupt sequence of Author Walker's career. He wrote reminiscences under the title Steel. Then he became literary editor of the Independent and wrote this, his first novel.

That young Charles Rumford Walker would always want to write seemed likely when, aged 10, in Concord, N. H., he put his money, earned by raking leaves, into a hand printing press and began publishing a weekly newspaper in his attic. He was "romantically mechanical"; built a balloon that burned up on its first trip.

At Yale, he roomed with a sober-sided boy called Donald Ogden Stewart. Charles Walker's literary interests--the Lit, Archibald MacLeish's poetry, the Elizabethan Club--doubtless helped Funnyman Stewart's Parody Outline of History, Mr. & Mrs. Haddock, etc., to occur.