Grim Records

A DIARY WITHOUT DATES--Enid Bagnold--Morrow ($1.50). THE DIARY OF OUR OWN SAMUEL PEPYS--Franklin P. Adams--Simon & Schuster ($6). During the War Enid Bagnold ("National Velvet") worked in a hospital in a London suburb, kept a diary, fragments of which were published in 1919. An oblique, suggestive little volume, a mosaic of impressions, it created a small literary sensation, led to the dismissal of its 19-year-old author for "a breach of military discipline." While it is not a record of the horrors of War in a conventional sense, A Diary Without Dates is charged with a sense of pain, distress, hysteria, communicates the strain of War more poignantly than many a more pretentious volume. The world in which this girl matured was one where normal patterns had been broken, where men lay helpless and suffering and women carried on essential tasks, where dammed-up emotions exploded in queer bursts of affection or rage. The memorable passages include an incident when the author, in an agony of loneliness, heard lovers in a field at night, crept close to listen; a terrible glimpse of a man whose nose had been blown away, breathing through two red rubber tubes that gave him the appearance of an insect; a description of a nurse who, in a world of dying men, began to complain of an earache. The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys is a two-volume affair running to 1,271 pages, covering the period from June 7, 1911 to Dec. 31, 1934. Since it was written by Franklin Pierce Adams for his Always in Good Humor and Conning Tower columns in the New York Evening Mail, World and Herald Tribune, it contains only such incidents and opinions as are commonly expressed in public, possesses a modest historical importance for its reflection of current reactions to forgotten hits of the theatre, forgotten bestsellers among the novels, forgotten celebrities and scandals. Although brief readings of it give the impression that the author has richly enjoyed his tennis, his wide and indiscriminate reading, his association with the tight little group of egocentric characters who think they do New York's journalistic thinking, a more attentive study reveals such a monotony and superficiality of life as to give a cumulative effect of oppressive tedium. And a reader who followed the modern Pepys from 1911 to 1935 might be hard put to it to decide whether F. P. A.'s or Enid Bagnold's diary was the more grim.

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