More "Smithness"

GRAY SHEEP--Dillwyn Parrish-- Harper ($2). Dillwyn Parrish, brother of Anne Parrish, the Perennial Bachelor lady, last year came forward as another sharp-eyed anatomist of life's nobodies. Repugnantly dear to him is the tragicomedy of middling people--middling honest, middling happy, middling alive. He called his first novel Smith Everlasting. The Rev. Fred Rain of Gray Sheep is another victim of everlasting Smithness in body, mind and spirit--a figure at once lovable, pitiful and contemptible from the equivocal nature of Smithness, for which another name is stagnation.

The Rev. Rain is Elmer Gantry described by a neighbor whose generosity and politeness, guarded by a sense of humor, have not been assassinated by anger or malice. No bit of raucous mimicry by Sinclair Lewis surpasses Dillwyn Parrish's subtly corrosive pictures of fleshy Fred Rain painting his bathroom while trying not to marry; fouling his straight young son's mind with a circumlocution on sex in flowers; preparing stuffy sermons in his smug study. Not "Old Jud" himself, the muscular college revivalist of Elmer Gantry, is more offensive than Fay Johnson, the Y.M.C.A. hearty of this book.

The Story, told episodically, is perhaps more woeful than necessary. John Rain, the son, after a gassing in France, goes away with the married daughter of his father's one scarlet woman, Tannis. On their westbound train it is revealed that John will probably die soon of tuberculosis. Rain Sr., discovers the flatulence of his faith, but, lacking courage to start afresh, keeps his job and remains, like his congregation, sheepish and grey of soul.

But it is constitutionally impossible for a Parrish to be really lugubrious. Innumerable small pranks and whimsies set off the pall of Gray Sheep, softening the glare of its irony, warming it with humanity. The morning of Helen (Mrs.) Rain's funeral, the eaves sparrows quarrel as usual. (She would have liked that.) At John Rain's embarkation, the tugs whisper fuchsia, fuchsia, fuchsia; then cough cocoa, cocoa, cocoa as they push the ship to midstream. During a prayer at sewing circle, Helen Rain peeps covertly at the Women's varying technique--pinching bridge of nose; clasping stomach; kneeling thoroughly with head on chair-seat to present, Mrs. Rain thought, "a most remarkable God's-eye view."

The Author. Short, slim, quiet, Dillwyn Parrish lives in Claymont, Del., the young bachelor master of an old homestead, exchanging visits often with the sister whose bookishness revived his interest in life after a bad time in the War.

Before the Wind

TALL MEN--James Stuart Mont-gomery--Greenberg ($2). As an offering by the earnest Literary Guild of America, this romance of Civil War privateering is a rather uneventful publication. As just another novel for the general public it sails along very nicely before the trade wind of a well known popular taste. A paunchy London barrister is supposed to tell the story. In 1862, while a boy at Balliol, he happened aboard the rakish S. S. Venture, got drunk and awoke at sea bound for America. The mariners he thus fell in with, and the married Southern girl who fell in love with their captain, were "tall" people, emotionally speaking. The paunchy barrister considers his life was worth while simply because he knew them.

The barrister's writing is seaworthy and the background of British activity between Bull Run and Appomattox is one that has seldom been worked up. But literary guilds will soon die out if their "special representatives in the arts and sciences, here and in Europe" can find manuscripts no more "important, distinguished, outstanding," than Tall Men.

"Rootin', Tootin' " WOLF SONG--Harvey Fergusson-- Knopf ($2.50). Sam Lash rode hard in the hard-bitten West. He ate "scarlet mutton." His mouth was "burning but indomitable." He wore a purple calico shirt and liked women in all colors. But Lola, the Spanish gal, made him come back to her from the mountains and rear their kids, join the church. She was "nobody's business," this Lola, and Cowboy-Reporter Fergusson can write about her and Hell-bent young Sam Lash in a way to remind Red Book readers, where the story has been running serially of that . . Rootin', tootin', hifalutin' Son-of-a-gun from Arizona" Ragtime Cowboy Joe.

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