Museum Piece

LIFE WITH FATHER--Clarence Day-- Knopf ($2).

Three years ago Clarence Day amused readers with a slight, shrewd, sentimental collection of sketches called God and My Father, dealing with the many difficulties in the relationship of the elder Day to religion in general, his wife's religion in particular. Father was stubborn, spirited, redheaded, nothing if not practical. The God visioned by clergymen and his wife struck him as distinctly unrealistic, overemotional, inefficient and certainly not a good executive type. Father thought of Heaven in terms of a good club; he snorted with exasperation when he took his troubles to God, and sometimes shock his fist and roared, "I say have mercy, damn it!" Although God and My Father had value as a recapture of middle-class religious beliefs and customs in New York's 1890's, readers were more interested in the brief, incidental provocative glimpses of the Day household, the rou-tine domestic crises, the wifely art with which Mrs. Day controlled her thundering husband.

Last week Author Day's Life with Father, chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, gave readers a more detailed account of existence in a well-to-do broker's family in a settled and serene period of U. S. history. For young Clarence Day it was a great treat to visit his father's dusty Wall Street office on Saturday mornings, riding to work on the steam-driven Sixth Avenue Elevated, watching his father salute acquaintances by touching cane to ilk hat brim. He listened to bewhiskered brokers fuming about the proposal of the Knights of Labor for an eight-hour day, watched bookkeepers remove their detachable cuffs, carried messages through a financial district that rarely saw a woman visitor, never a female employe. Father lunched at Delmonico's, stopped for half an hour at his club on his way home from work, fussed regularly over wishy-washy editorials in morning papers, considered his wife's family damnably inconsiderate, registered automatic, unfailing, profane disapproval of whatever happened in Washington. It never occurred to him to try to fathom points of view other than his own, or respect practices and opinions which he thought unreasonable. When he decided his son should learn music, he bought him a violin and hired a teacher, would not listen when his wife, the teacher, neighbors and Clarence complained that the youngster produced only horrible, tuneless sounds, insisted they were not strict enough with the boy.

Not entirely devoted to tempests in the domestic teapot, Life with Father is most readable in its accounts of the rare moments when Father's self-confidence was shaken by his wife's distress, or when small bewilderments overwhelmed him. Father Day worried over money, fretted at Mrs. Day's inability to keep her household accounts straight, tried to force his boys to a discipline that would have floored most adults, rarely relaxed, regarded Clarence "like a humorous potter, pausing to consider--for the moment-- an odd bit of clay.'' Writing with affectionate good nature, Son Day neverthe-less makes it clear that Father was a trial. In college Clarence sowed his wild oats with a sense of Father's disapproval accompanying him on his revels, and when he got into debt his knowledge of what Father would say clung to him like a wet rag. Comparing his household with that of friends, he writes without humor but with strained family pride: "Our home life was stormy but spirited. It always had tang. When Father was unhappy, he said so. He poured out his grief with such vigor that it soon cleared the air."

Readers may not be amused by accounts of essentially painful situations written as if they were good jokes, but they are likely to remember Father, like a quaint museum piece, dusted off and displayed as the last of the oldfashioned, strongwilled, unself-conscious individualists of pre-War days.

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