The House in Antigua

Farewell to Dynamite

THE HOUSE IN ANTIGUA--Louis Adamic--Harper ($3).

This time 33-year-old immigrant Author Adamic's subject, lacking the autobiographical ties which have stimulated him in writing his previous books, handicaps him. As with The Native's Return, his best-selling account of a revisit to his native Yugoslavia, Author Adamic wrote The House in Antigua as an accidental result of a pleasure trip to Guatemala in 1936. His original purpose was merely "to get away from it all." He picked Antigua, former capital of Guatemala, because friends rhapsodized over its ruins, and because he "had long been responsive to these lines in the second act of The Mikado:

There's a fascination frantic In a ruin that's romantic--"

Particularly he was told not to miss "the Popenoe place," called the Casa del Capuchino. This was a 300-year-old Spanish house, in ruins since the destruction of Antigua by earthquake in 1773, which had lately been restored by United Fruit Co.'s famed agronomist Dr. Wilson ("Pop") Popenoe and his wife. Guest of Dr. Popenoe for two weeks, Author Adamic decided the house warranted a book. A further incentive arose from his enthusiastic agreement with United Fruit Co.'s Managing Director Samuel Zemurray, who had said of the natives: "They've got something, those people down there; they've got something." Author Adamic's enthusiasm runs to 300 pages (illustrated), comprising a rather labored history of Antigua for the last 400 years, a mostly imaginary picture of the conquistadores who tenanted the Casa del Capuchino, a biography of the Popenoes, centring on capable Dorothy Popenoe, who supervised the main work of restoration until her death in 1932 from an attack of appendicitis, aggravated as a result of having eaten a tropical fruit (akee) being grown experimentally by her husband.

Only in the final paragraphs does the reader discover that Author Adamic intended to be more than picturesque. Here he reveals his real purpose: The Casa del Capuchino, says he, represents the world as "really a Ruin, a Mess, a Wreck." Its restoration represents "what could be done with the Ruin." Interesting for its contrast with Author Adamic's earlier thoughts on the best way to clear "the Ruin" (as set forth in his first book, Dynamite, a historical survey of labor violence in the U. S.) this one will impress some readers as no less naive. As a device for jarring the reader out of that slightly dreamy state induced by travel books, the theory, coming where it does in The House in Antigua, is indisputably effective.

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