Dusty Answer

The Story, as the title* implies, is that of a wild goose-chase for happiness. Until she was 18 Judith Earle lived in a solitude broken only by the occasional comings and goings of the children next door. They have been her entire experience of life; of them she thinks or dreams; her thoughts are a tissue of memories,, remembrances of bright small faces, of intense childish devotions, of games of hide-and-seek, all woven together in a dark shining maze, blown and changing like the leaves on an autumn lawn. Then suddenly she hears that the children next door, grown up now, are coming back to live in the old house. Charlie, the most beautiful of them all, was killed in the War, but there will be Marietta, whom Charlie had astoundingly married, and the three boys, Martin & Roddy & Julian. Always these three crowded her mind, always she was held apart from them by the high wall between the bright gardens. They have for her at first the unreality, the incongruity, the strange definiteness of the people in her dreams and thoughts; they are close and unapproachable like strange voices overheard in a forest. Then the strangeness but not the glamor fades; she is bored by friendly, clumsy Martin; pities shy, remote, hedonistic Julian; loves Roddy, who is suave and erratic, quiet and incalculable. After that summer of reacquaintance she goes away to Cambridge.

In Cambridge, with the normal bisexuality of the emotionally unsophisticated, she loved the dazzling and enigmatic Jennifer Baird. Roddy she almost forgot, until once he came to see her and said, "It's no good trying to make me adequate. . . . I'm not worth saving. Nobody must ever take me seriously. . . ." This was a warning which Judith could not heed. When Jennifer left Cambridge, Judith stayed. For two summers she went abroad. Then when Judith went home she found Mariella and the three boys, living again in the house next door.

This time she had grown up to them. When Roddy said, "I love you," Judith forgot his warning. When he met her the next day he said, "I thought that was what you wanted: what you were asking for. . . . I'm sorry, I apologize. I . . . ." She said good-by to Roddy and let Martin think she would marry him. Then she broke her engagement and went to France, whither Julian followed her to ask her to be his mistress. This, too, was a dusty answer to what she desired. In England she went to meet Jennifer again, but Jennifer, always an unsure idol, failed the meeting. Then Judith was rid at last of the weakness, the futile obsession of dependence upon other people. She had nobody now except herself; and that was best. . . . She was a person whose past made one great circle, completed now and ready to be discarded. Soon she began to think: "What next . . .?"

The Significance. Not often does a first novel carry a weight of emotion that makes so fussy a critic as famed Alfred Noyes say: "It is the kind of novel that might have been written by Keats. . . ." The untruth of this statement is valuable as an indication of the flustered enthusiasm this book has caused, will cause in multitudes of unstable and sentimental readers. Yet it would be unfair to hint that the sentimentality of Dusty Answer is a false emotion. Though it may be an exaggerated one, its exaggeration is a sincere illusion, not a self-conscious parade of intensity. Moreover Author Lehmann writes with a sensitive and fine precision, she betrays in herself an exquisite perception of subtleties in her characters--most marked when she is writing about children. Readers may well suppose that Author Lehmann wisely creates out of her own experiences. Like Judith Earle she has come early to an artist's isolation, her past has already made the "one great circle." Then to the question "What next?" her book is the answer--dusty like an insect's wings with a curious bright bloom of sudden wisdom and golden wonder. The Author. Author Lehmann is the daughter of English R. C. Lehmann, famed oarsman, noted writer, member of the staff of Punch; she is a cousin of Owen Davis, famed U. S. playwright. Bred in Bourne End, England, she studied at Cambridge, published one poem in a magazine, then this book.

*DUSTY ANSWER--Rosamond Lehmann-Henry Holt ($2.50).