Sad-Glad Man

BLIND MAN'S YEAR--Warwick Deeping --Knopf ($2.50).

Tears mixed with ink often result in a sticky substance resembling treacle. Though the formula would not be recognized by a chemist, it is well known to some popular writers. And there is nothing so pleasing to some tastes as a good mouthful of treacle. Gene Stratton Porter was an expert at this mixture; so is A. S. M. Hutchinson. In Sorrel and Son Warwick Deeping had the formula just about right, but last week his latest novel showed that even specialists in sad-gladness cannot always hit the proper ratio, that too many sobs spoil the ink. Only a nursery word like ooky-gooky or perhaps icky-poo could justly describe Blind Man's Year.

Says Rosamund, the novelist who is the heroine of Deeping's story: "One must suffer in order to be able to say things, my dear." She is only talking to her faithful dog, being too shy to say it to anyone else, but she means it. Rosamund has suffered so much that she has been able to say a great deal, and has become a bestseller. Her shyness arises from the fact that she was born with a nevus (strawberry-mark) all over her left cheek, and at 35 she is a recluse. Except for her blemish she is much better looking and more intelligent than her two older sisters, who have both married, though they are nasty creatures. They hate Rosamund for her success, are always borrowing money from her. Except for them, she has almost no truck with the outside world.

Rosamund is not content. She has her friend, her work, her dog, her faithful retainers and a very nice place, as private as possible, overlooking the sea. But she sometimes considers throwing herself over the cliff. Then, one foggy day, a plane crashes in the woods above her house. Rosamund is the only one near; she runs for help, has the battered pilot carried to her house. The poor fellow is so badly smashed that at one point everybody but Rosamund and the reader give him up for dead. He comes around eventually, turns out to be 24, good-looking, extremely sensitive, an orphan, and a gentleman through and through. His name is Clive. After he and Rosamund have begun to fall in love, Clive is removed to a hospital. It devolves on Rosamund to tell him that he will always be blind.

But she also tells him that .she loves him. They are married, start facing life together. Clive learns Braille and type writing, fits himself to become her secretary. Rosamund, fired by his courage, buys a car, takes a house in London, shows herself in the world. In spite of the disparity in their ages, Clive's blind ness and Rosamund's birthmark, their marriage is a success. Author Deeping tactfully leaves them with the arrival of their first baby.

When Warwick Deeping is writing in his own person, he likes to use much stiff-legged literarities as "flavicomous, ecology, otiose," speaks of people "occluding" the doorway. But his wistful better nature comes to the fore in his characters' speeches, which are always from the heart. Says Rosamund: "One has such a horror of being either priggish or sentimental. They call me sentimental in my books, but I'm not really." Says Clive: "Me! Oh, I'm just a rather affectionate sort of ass." Author Deeping can be alarmingly severe with people he doesn't like, such as Norah, Rosamund's older sister: "Sallow and strenuous and masterful, given to sudden splurges of coarse laughter, and concealing beneath her thick white skin surges of strongly scented sex." But wistfulness predominates: "How few books were utterly inevitable, perhaps half a score in the course of a century. This business of living upon books ! There was something indecent and false and futile about it, unless some furious urge in you cried out to be expressed. How many authors were justified by that urge?"

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