Fiction Tricks

WHEN NIGHT DESCENDS--Edgar Calmer--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

WHERE THE WEAK GROW STRONG-- Eugene Armfield--Covici, Friede ($2.50).

Experiments in fiction have a double-acting influence. When they succeed, as Joyce succeeded in Ulysses, in enabling the author to state truths that could not be expressed in a traditional form, they encourage a thousand writers to work in the same field. When they fail, as Wyndham Lewis failed in The Childermass, the unread wreckage serves to warn later writers away from that intellectual reef.

Within the last fortnight two ambitious fictional experiments by young U. S.

novelists seemed chiefly important because they promised to exert the purely negative influence of discouraging such experiments in the future.

In When Night Descends Edgar Calmer tells what happens when hard-drinking old Tom Dogan, at the end of a hot August day, comes home with $52.50 he has won on a raffle ticket. Since the Dogans have been living on $9.25 a month, this windfall all but tips them off the deep end.

Tom gives $5 to his son, $5 to his daughter, pays a bill and goes on a bat, winding up robbed by a street walker after knocking out a fellow drunk. His son wanders down Broadway; his daughter falls in love in Central Park. Author Calmer has broken up this Manhattan idyll with four long interludes that are made up of snapshots of city life: quarreling tenement dwellers, lovers lying on the roof in the heat, card players in a midtown hotel, a pair of middle-aged Lesbians quarreling, a sailor picking up a girl. Main trouble with When Night Descends is that the brief snapshots break up the central story, are usually more interesting and original than the one they interrupt.

Reading Eugene Armfield's Where the Weak Grow Strong is like trying to carry too many bundles at one time, dropping several whenever you pick up one. It begins on a July morning of 1912, when the northbound flyer whistles for Tuttle, N. C. (pop. 5,000), a dead town that contains a chair factory, a textile mill, an undue proportion of neurotic inhabitants. The whistle makes a baby cry, gives a little girl a nightmare, disturbs a dying man, awakens a bridegroom, arouses a bride. Thereafter for 395 pages, as exhaustively as a census taker, Author Armfield moves from household to household, picturing each in a few sentences, starting up a hundred promising stories that he does not follow. Nothing holds the characters together except that they all live in Tuttle, so that whenever readers grow interested in one individual he fades into the crowd, leaving an impression as confusing as glimpses of a rush hour as seen by a stranger in town.

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