Reconstruction

BREATHE UPON THESE SLAIN--Evelyn Scott--Smith & Haas ($2.50).

Like a paleontologist who reconstructs what might have been a dinosaur from a fragment of its jawbone, Evelyn Scott has built a life-size novel from a few strangers' photographs. In her rented East Anglian cottage Author Scott found herself wondering about the people whose group pictures helped adorn the walls, soon was giving names, relationships, histories to their different faces. Though she does not claim infallibility for her method, she implies that a knowledge of contemporary types is all a novelist requires for such a reconstruction: "For the historian, the tombs of Egypt and his own contemporary mentality--for me, the contemporary mentality and a few photographs. . . ." Readers who were swept off their feet by The Wave (1929) will find it easy to keep their balance in the slow-curling eddies of Breathe Upon These Slain. But even when she is writing about dowdy English people Author Scott is incapable of turning out an undistinguished book.

Of the family that gradually emerged from Author Scott's scrutiny of these nameless photographs, none at first sight was either attractive or unusual. The father, upper middleclass, Boer War vintage, was spoiled, conservative, selfish, in trade (kippers) but with the pretensions of a gentleman. His wife's buxomness had hardened into armor plate. Tilly, who died young, became the family saint. Cora married a doctor, went to London. Meg simmered and soured into spinsterhood. Ethel, the best of the lot, rushed into marriage with a beef-eating young naval officer. Anemic Bertram got a job in India, toyed with mysticism and was homesick. As they grew into pre-War maturity they all became hopelessly more & more the same thing.

The War put the finishing touch to their careers. Bertram surprised them by enlisting at the first shot, shocked them by getting gloriously killed. Ethel's naval husband, having first embarrassed, then bored them both with his clandestine affairs, was torpedoed, sunk without trace. Meg conceived a passion for her elderly-married rector, finally did neither of them any good by writing to the Bishop about his imaginary advances. The father, weighed down by carking business cares and a German grandmother, hanged himself. Ethel's sons were left to carry on. Readers will admire Author Scott's ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike. Like H. M. Bateman's immortal "Boy who Breathed on the Glass at the British Museum," Author Scott has breathed indomitably but mostly in vain.

The Author, Big-eyed, big-mouthed Evelyn Scott, 41. was a Tennessee girl who grew up in New Orleans, where she was the youngest student ever admitted to Tulane University. At 20 she married Cyril Kay Scott, exiled herself with him in Brazil for three years. No homebody, she has lived in Bermuda, France, England, Portugal, Spain, Algeria, Canada. Divorced from Scott, six years ago she married John Metcalfe, English writer, now lives with him in England and the U. S. Author of 15 books of prose and poetry, one play (Love), she is seriously regarded by left-centre critics as one of the feminine white hopes of U. S. letters. The Wave, one of the best novels yet written on the Civil War, made many a critic point with pride who will now view with alarm her choice of transatlantic scene.

Other books: The Narrow House, Escapade, The Winter Alone, Eva Gay, A Calendar of Sin.

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