Idaho Prometheus (Cont'd)

WE ARE BETRAYED--Vardis Fisher--Doubleday, Doran & Ca--0n ($2.50).

Painfully haltingly, but with slowly increasing assurance, Vardis Fisher is giving the lie to one of his old instructors, Professor-Novelist Robert Herrick. who once told him he would never "write a novel worth opening." Last week readers who had long since shut Herrick's old-fashioned novels were opening Vardis Fisher's latest book with mingled anticipation and dread. After reading the first two volumes of his U. S. tetralogy (In Tragic Life, Passions Spin the Plot), they knew they could expect a vicariously agonizing experience, reported with such rare and serious candor that it would give them a painfully interesting three hours. Author Fisher is trying to write an honest book. Readers of the first three installments will admit, some wryly and some with excitement, that so far he has succeeded.

We Are Betrayed carries the story of Vridar Hunter one more plodding step toward maturity. A poor Idaho farm boy, cursed with sensitivity and ambition, he has weathered a dismal childhood, a hellish adolescence, has married, halfway through his hard-won college career,a pretty slattern. Though he fiercely intends the marriage to be a success he knows the prospects are hopeless. We Are Betrayed is the story of its tragic failure.

Determined that Neloa's education should parallel his own, Vridar took her back with him to Salt Lake City, where he was in college, put her in high school there. But to his feverishly jealous eyes she continued to show more interest in men than in books. In an effort to make himself more presentable, Vridar joined a fraternity, went out for football, but he could not make himself a conformist. In the summer he and Xeloa hired themselves out on a ranch. In a way it was a relief to Vridar when he was drafted into the Army, a disappointment when the Armistice came before he was sent overseas. The War over, he got a job in a garage, slipped-gradually into bootlegging, rubbed shoulders with a seedy underworld. When one night he almost "killed his infant_son in a rage, the shock turned him again to his almost-forgotten purpose. He turned over a leaf, promised Neloa to be "a good citizen, strong and solid, like a pile of beef. I'll be going to church soon. I'll be rocking my child on my knee and saying dada and goo-goo and oo-ittle-wubbity-wart. Virtues will be sticking out of me like candles out of a birthday cake. Squeeze me and I'll break into prayer. Kick me and I'll recite the Sermon on the Mount. . . ."

But Neloa knew better. Though Vridar's crazy jealousy and torturing restlessness seldom slept, though he tried to trick her into deceiving him, left her for many women and any book, she was faithful to him in her fashion. Vridar went to the University of Chicago, worked his way by slaving as janitor of an apartment building, tried vainly to find the right answer to his life in books, in the queer characters he ran up against, in "platonic"' friendships with women students. Finally he sent for Neloa. But by now their marriage was too near the rocks. When he told Neloa that he loved another woman and intended to leave her, Neloa despairingly drank poison. Too late Vridar knew he loved her best.

The Author-Grim-faced Vardis Fisher's life, like his hero's, has been hard. Says he: "I try to portray life as I see and have seen it; and because I have seen so much that is brutal and ruthless, vulgar and unlessoned and because I believe that all aspects of human life belong in serious novels, my books are called brutal and ruthless. . . . The only good book, in my opinion, is an honest book, and no book, I am sure, can be honest and wholly bad."

Son and grandson of pioneers, Vardis Fisher was born in 1895 in Annis, Idaho, had the same kind of stony childhood and struggling education he writes about. After taking his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago (1925), he went back to the University of Utah as instructor in English, then to New York University. With his second wife, Margaret Trusler, whom he married in 1929, he now lives on his father's ranch, near Ririe, Idaho. The titles for the first three volumes of his tetralogy were taken from his admired George Meredith (Modern Love) :

. . . In Tragic, life, God wot,

No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:

We are betrayed by what is false within.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.