FICTION

Flood Novel

BLUE VOYAGE--Conrad Aiken-- Scribners ($2.50). Whatever the "new" psychology may or may not have done for morals, it has certainly burst the literary levees that used to confine the novel to its streambed. Conrad Aiken, long an escapist poet, is now able to over-flow the way Poet James Joyce did in Ulysses, with a whirling deluge of internal experience flooding in the general direction of a narrative. Less turbulent than Poet Joyce, Poet Aiken produces a flood less bewildering than Ulysses but quite as impressive. The narrative of Blue Voyage is simply that William Demarest, young U. S. writer and moral coward, sails second class for England to see Cynthia Battiloro, whom he worships but thinks he loves. He is tempted on shipboard by Mrs. Faubion, a fellow-passenger in the second class, but resists her frankly sensual charms; when lo! stealing a walk on the first class promenade, he encounters Cynthia, who announces her engagement to someone else. Demarest slinks back to his own deck writes Cynthia a series of decreasingly abject letters, none of which he sends, and before docking has let Mrs. Faubion enter his stateroom. Flood novel technique not only permits but requires an immense quantity of flotsam and jetsam. The writer may, and must, sub merge himself and watch, like a submarine artist, for a phantasma goria of mental and emotional proceedings in his characters, distort ed by their depth into shapes of beauty or ugliness, magnified or diminished with varying degrees of intelligibility. Thus, through William Demarest's mind there float childhood memories, fragments of verse, scraps of conversation, encounters real and imaginary, idle and erotic, gay and sad; strings of words, chains of sentences, nets of associated ideas as tangled yet meaningful as the twisted ganglia of the human brain and body. Because Poet Aiken has a vivid sense of words, a mocking humor and much delicacy, these undercurrents are pleasantly fantastic, without the visceral insistence of Poet Joyce's spillings.

William Demarest's fellow passengers become embodiments of elements in his character, and in human nature generally. The book is lifted above mere introspection by the commingling of these others in relations of their own--a frustrate music merchant; a tropical trollop; a ripe Jew; a psychic; a chess-player; a man with a glass eye. Each person is treated as a universe unto himself, in the vaster but no more inscrutable universe of sea and sky now and then visible over the rail or through a porthole.

Captain of Cliche ZELDA MARSH--Charles G. Norris--Button ($2.50). Plowing through this novel by Mr. Norris, tireless student of damaged humanity, is as severe a test as could be devised for people who consider themselves "inveterate" novel readers. Mr. Norris is a captain of cliche, a sultan of stereotype. With heavy confidence he gives his heroine "an aureole of soft light" around her pretty head. She puts hand on hip when flirting and rebukes kisses by saying they will "cheapen" her. The hero is "the apple" of his mother's eye. The characters "decide to" do this or that, as in high school themes. When love comes, it is "young hearts beating together . . . throbbing . . . consuming . . . pulsing" etc. The heroine "knows it is madness," and yet. . . . None but readers capable of undergoing a 486-page bludgeoning from banality will enjoy the fall and rise of Zelda Marsh, from Bakersfield, Calif., to Broadway, good story though it is and exhaustively told.

Zelda's first and only love, Michael Kirk, lacks the drive to marry and save her when their "union" is discovered. His mother is a music teacher, affectionate but thin-lipped. Michael is more or less an artist. Zelda is a voluptuous adolescent, a year older. To escape her uncle's wrath she runs into the illicit arms of a middle-aged doctor who, like all the other characters and most real people, is neither good nor wicked. Later she marries an amiable but aimless vaudevillian, who commits suicide in alcoholic despair after many chapters of tawdry trouping. Michael Kirk is dying of tuberculosis. After nursing him to death, Zelda, now a successful actress, will presumably marry one Tom Harney, a playwright who perceives that all is not sin that suffers.