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POCAHONTAS, or The Nonpareil of Virginia--David Garnett--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Few tales of America's early history can rival the story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. Though every schoolchild knows it, present-day writers are beginning to realize that such heirloom images are fit for more than being children's playthings. English Author David Garnett has rescued Pocahontas from the textbook attic and put her in grown-up clothes. With strict fidelity to historical documents he has made a valiant try at turning a pseudo-fairy tale* into a work of art. From oblivion, a fate worse than death, Pocahontas saved one Englishman; now another, by restoring her to pristine, savage humanity, has paid the account.

Jamestown, first Virginia settlement, was like a mosquito bite that is scratched and scratched until it becomes a permanent feature. First & foremost a gambling venture, it naturally attracted gamblers rather than serious colonists. In the medley of ex-pirates, Spanish spies, gold-seekers and riff-raff that came to Virginia hoping to find it a way-station to Eldorado, Soldier of Fortune John Smith was one of the biggest troublemakers. A farmer's son who had won his spurs fighting against the Turks, he was hot-tempered, stocky, boastful and brave. When Chief Powhatan's warriors captured him he knew death came next, was ready to take it with a stiff upper lip. But just as his head was dragged back against the execution stone, as the tomahawks were raised, young Pocahontas, Powhatan's daughter, dashed forward and flung herself upon him; he was reprieved, adopted into the tribe. He and Powhatan never trusted each other; with Smith back in Jamestown they kept swearing friendship and feinting for an opening. Again & again Pocahontas' warnings saved the settlement. When an accidental explosion wounded Smith he was sent to England more dead than alive; Pocahontas thought he had died.

Out to Virginia came one John Rolfe, ambitious for gold but willing to work for it. He lost his young wife in child-birth but kept his faith in tobacco-planting. He and Pocahontas (now a semi-prisoner in Jamestown) fell in love and were allowed to marry, since that would give the settlement a permanent hostage against Powhatan. After several backbreaking, productive years, Rolfe had made enough profit to go to England for a vacation. There at last Pocahontas saw the wondrous sights John Smith had told her of; and there she saw again John Smith, a middleaged, broken failure. Spoiled for her native life, she dreaded going back to Virginia. But civilization and London fogs had given her a cough that saved her: as the ship moved slowly down the Thames she died.

Author Garnett, like everyone else, calls his heroine Pocahontas ("bright stream between two hills"), does not give her traditional real name Matoax ("snow feather"), occasionally uses her baptismal name, Rebecca.

The Author's father, Critic Edward Garnett, advised him: "Never try to write, but above all never have anything to do with publishing or the book trade." Mother Constance, famed translator of Chekhov, said the same thing. So he tried to become a botanist, by the time the War came had discovered a new species of mushroom. After the War he started a bookshop with his friend, Francis Birrell, wrote in the evenings. To make his disobedience complete he became a partner in Francis Meynell's Nonesuch Press. His first two little books (Lady Into Fox, A Man in the Zoo) gave him a quiet reputation which has spread on both sides of the Atlantic. Other books: The Sailor's Return, Go She Must!, No Love, The Grasshoppers Come.

Fascist Fantasy

GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE--Anonymous--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

It is 1940. The Depression, fed by crashing businesses, soaring unemployment, grinding taxation, has become a roaring Moloch devouring the U. S. Municipal corruption is countrywide; gangsters run wild; in city parks, huge camps of unemployed have squatted to stay; cynicism, crime and poverty are everywhere. President of the U. S. is Major Judson Gumming Hammond, a smart, six-foot, 200-lb. gladhander, apotheosis of the Elk. A wealthy Wisconsin widower who served in the Senate, he was a convention compromise. Booming platitudes that fool the people but never himself, he is a popular, charming, easy-going politician, conservative to the core, except in driving his own car. He goes too fast. On a slippery winter road near Baltimore he skids into a cement-mixer, suffers concussion of the brain.

In the seclusion of his private Washington house, he slowly recovers, refuses to see anyone, sends his secretary for masses of reading matter--not his usual detective stories but economics, state papers, radical literature. The secret spreads that he is greatly changed: emaciated, forbidding, he studies, studies, freezes old cronies with an impersonal stare. Meantime the country mutters: Congress is at a standstill, the unemployed grow louder, business is panicky. When Chicago racketeers stage a wholesale massacre of poverty-stricken squatters, the U. S. holds its breath. Suddenly the President returns to the White House, takes full command of a tottering nation.

With the light of battle in his eye, an undivulged dictatorial plan in his battered head and his right ear tilted up as if listening to the guiding voice of the Angel Gabriel, he calls his Cabinet, starts weeding out unwilling tools. Unlike other dictators he resolutely refuses to use Federal troops for civil duty, to choke off a press which unanimously howls against him. When an ousted Secretary of War leagues with a third-rate Vice President to have him committed to an insane asylum, he explodes the conspiracy by broadcasting its details. Secretly he sponsors an incendiary cinema, propaganda picturing the Chicago massacre, deliberately designed to bring countrywide discontent to a head, start a march of the unemployed on Washington. It works. At his instigation the jobless dog the steps of every Senator and Representative until Congress, reduced to a state of nervous exhaustion, gladly declares a national emergency, puts Hammond in charge, goes home for an indefinite rest. The President makes over his Cabinet with non-political experts, orders currency inflation, goes direct to the people in weekly television talks, cunningly simplified, studiously rehearsed. Plain citizens everywhere throw their hats in the air for Dictator-President Hammond.

For the armies of unemployed encamped in Potomac Park, the President is ready. Under a careful scheme and picked leaders he organizes them into a National Reconstruction Corps, on the Federal payroll. As labor battalions on public works they reclaim land in the West, construct power dams in the Midwest, build highways in the East. Army discipline jacks up the workers' morale. Family allowances deducted from their wages care for their wives and children. So successful is N. R. C. that its principles eventually alter the whole character of U. S. organized labor.

To stifle the bootlegger the President takes over the liquor trade as a Federal monopoly, packs the Supreme Court with his supporters to forestall legal hitches. When the President's pretty young secretary, inadvertently visiting relatives in Jersey City, is horribly wounded by gunmen, he adroitly capitalizes the red-hot indignation of her fiance by making him chief of a federalized police force to root out crime and racketeering. Chicago becomes the scene of siege operations as the Federal "Green Jackets" bomb under-worldlings out of their fortified lairs. Meanwhile Washington has superseded State authority by its power of the purse, and cities are governed by Federal appointees.

Japan again attacks Shanghai; a world war is precipitated. President Hammond takes charge, persuades France and Britain into a quick-striking alliance, crushes the Japanese fleet from the air. Then, the iron hot, he calls a world conference in London, flies the Atlantic, bullies the nations into actual disarmament by broadcasting the most secret negotiations from the Cabinet room at No. 10 Downing Street. At his order an omnipotent Central Bank is set up at a World City in Northern Ireland to regulate a gold-based world currency. Home again, a bigger hero than Wilson after Versailles, he calls in legal experts, has them draw up 16 new constitutional amendments. Some of them: all city police to be Federalized; Congress to sit only at the call of the President; Cabinet members to have access to its floors (but no votes); the President to serve a single term of six years; proportional representation.

Hailed by the vast majority as a world-savior, Hammond, like any dictator, stirs up enemies. One of them, a racketeer who has escaped execution at Ellis Island, shoots him down on the steps of the British Embassy. The shock brings him back to his predictatorial sanity. About to run for re-election he remembers nothing of the past four years, is horrified to learn of his Constitution-thwarting actions. In spite of his advisers he determines to make a public recantation over the television-radio which would wreck the republic and his reputation. Luckily for the U. S., Hammond's bad heart fails him just in time.

Publisher Farrar makes a great mystery of the identity of the author but hints it is someone who knows his Downing Street. The story has been vigorously re-edited by someone who well knows Washington and the White House and has convincingly handled the technical stage machinery of U. S. politics. Fast-written, fast-reading melodrama, it is not a first-rate novel but timely journalism, skating so quickly over the thin ice of probability that it never quite cracks through. Last week Publisher Farrar sent a specially-bound copy of Gabriel Over the White House to President Hoover, another to President-elect Roosevelt. Reactions of these readers will doubtless differ. Herbert Hoover, his job nearly done, can read it with sardonic amusement; Franklin Roosevelt, facing a situation grimly parallel to "President Hammond's," might wonder what heavenly messenger, Fascist or otherwise, will hover over his executive mansion.

Sea Witch

THE SEA WITCH--Alexander Laing--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

In the 1840's, Manhattan--strange as it may seem--was speed-crazy. One world's record made then has never since been broken: the Sea Witch's time of 75 days from Canton, China to Manhattan, around the Cape of Good Hope. When good tea brought a cent a pound above market price for every day saved from 100 on the China run, it paid skippers to drive their ships, paid shipwrights to experiment with faster designs. Not so famed among laymen today as the bigger, later Flying Cloud, the Sea Witch was the wonder of her brief day. Against the background of her authentic history Author Laing has written a tale that should make landlubbers gape, old salts' mouths water.

When the Sea Witch was launched in 1846, she was the last word in sharp-bowed clipper design; wiseacres shook their heads, prophesied that any such ship would drive herself under in the first real blow. But old Tea Tycoon Prescott believed in her. He gave her to his crack master, Roger Murray, hoping for many a broken record. On shore a cold dandy, on his quarterdeck Roger was a genius. Though he took chances against all the rules, he had never lost a spar. With him shipped his brother Will as first mate; also his youngest brother Hugh, shanghaied by mistake. Roger and Hugh were both in love with Mary de Peyster, but bashful Hugh had done nothing about it beyond carving the Sea Witch's figurehead into a portrait of her. Roger had popped the question, got the answer. Hugh's brothers saved his life on the outward voyage but were not able to help him otherwise; somehow he survived, became a good ship's carpenter.

Of the three brothers only Hugh stayed with the Sea Witch till the end. Will was lost in a storm off the Horn; Roger, after as many farewell performances as an opera star or matador, was finally forced into retirement when a California mob tried to burn him at the stake, crippled him for life. Hugh, once in love with Mary, then with his figurehead, finally with the ship herself, stuck by her even after she was sold into the guano trade, saw the last of her as she sank, burning, into the Pacific. In ten crowded years she had outlived her glory.

In a foreword which comes last, Author Laing tells how near he has kept to the facts he dug out of almost a thousand books; tells readers where they may see a scale model of the Sea Witch (at the Museum of the City of New York), warns them they will find her figurehead no likeness of beautiful Mary Murray, but a gilded dragon.

Books of the Week

MOTHER SEA--Felix Riesenberg--Kendall ($2.50). Tale of a sea-captain in the late 1890's. Not to be confused or compared with The Sea Witch.

MASK OF SILENUS--Babette Deutsch--Simon & Schuster ($2). Short novel about Socrates, humanizing Xantippe.

SPANGLED UNICORN--Noel Coward --Doubleday, Doran ($1.50). Ten parodies of pseudonymous literary figures, more malicious than funny.

MRS. VAN KLEEK--Elinor Mordaunt--Day ($2.50). Story of a South Sea "madam," by the author of Gin & Bitters.

ERIE WATER--Walter D. Edmonds--Little, Brown ($2.50). Solid novel of the building of the Erie Canal, by the solid young author of Rome Haul and The Big Barn.

PRESIDENT LINCOLN--William E. Barton--Bobbs-Merrill (two vols. $7.50). Last work of a foremost Lincoln authority.

PAGEANT--G. B. Lancaster--Century ($2.50). 19th Century family life in Tasmania. Literary Guild choice for February.

SAUNDERS OAK--Robert Raynolds --Harper ($2.50). Romance in New England, by the author of Harper Prize Novel Brothers in the West.

* Discounted by historians is Captain Smith's Generall Historic of Virginia, source of the rescue tale.

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