Nebraska Nonage

SPRING STORM--Alvin Johnson--Knopf ($2.50).

Last February onetime Professor George Santayana, 72, published his first novel (The Last Puritan--TIME, Feb. 3). Last week onetime Professor Alvin Johnson, 61, followed suit. But aside from their authors' profession, these two first novels had little in common. Spring Storm was not a novel of ideas but a simpleminded, affectionate tale of nonage in Nebraska. Though critics might well say the narrative creaked and that it was peopled by wooden marionettes out of Horatio Alger, they also found that its mixture of old-fashioned naivete and shrewdness had genuine charm.

When Julian Howard's father took his family to the 1,000-acre farm he had bought sight unseen, Julian hoped that their moving days were over. Mr. Howard was a bookish, improvident schoolteacher whose every move was to the Promised Land. Mrs. Howard was a philosopher with a weak heart. Julian, the only child, was a level-headed youngster who saw through his father's grown-up dignity to the helpless human being behind it. Mr. Howard, full of the intellectual's passion for the land, and a small pocketful of savings, was no match for the hard-headed natives. They sold him worthless stock and too-expensive machinery; he was soon the laughingstock of the countryside.

Meantime, however, Julian was learning fast. He learned by working for their neighbor, Henry, a dirty Pennsylvania Dutchman, but a good farmer, with a periodic weakness for the bottle. Thanks to Henry's precepts and sober example, Julian was able to save his father's farm from absolute ruin, but it was hard going.

Then his mother died, and his father was less use than ever. To narrow Julian's world still further, aging, piglike Henry got himself a wife, a pert young thing who had no use for Julian. He was reduced to the companionship of the squatters' colony down on the Bend. Though Julian and Henry's wife thought they disliked each other heartily, little by little they changed their minds. Almost before Julian knew it, he was her lover. He hated the deception, hated her caution that would not leave a comfortable respectability to run away with him. When Henry discovered their secret Julian found that he hated her and she him. Relieved to be getting away from the whole thing and off to college, he 'sternly decided to have nothing more to do with women.

The Author was born and bred on a Nebraska farm, could handle a team by the time he was 10. He still looks like a country boy. After farmwork, the University of Nebraska was like duck soup for him. He was well into the academic life when the Spanish War started, drew him into a dreary camp in Georgia. His sufferings there under army inefficiency started him thinking about politics, economics, sent him back to teaching with a thirst for modern facts. After posts at Bryn Mawr, Columbia. Nebraska. Chicago, Cornell, Stanford, journalism for the Unpopular Review and The New Republic, he was made Director of Manhattan's New School for Social Research in 1923, is there still.

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