Neurotic Imperialist

WHAT HATH A MAN?--Sarah Gertrude Millin--Harper ($2.50).

Says the introspective hero of this slyly anti-British novel: "Isn't pioneering always a running away from something? . . . It's more difficult to make your way among millions of your equals and betters than to shoot a few savages and animals and suffer some little inconveniences. The wild animals are less predatory too than the nicest people. Safer, for a person like me."

Not the first to link escapists and colonizers, Author Millin pounds out the link with an uncommonly honest and brilliant, if uneven, vigor; almost, as in her other eleven novels (God's Stepchildren, et al.), writes a first-rate book. Mainly she fails through too much haste. (Her biographies --Cecil Rhodes, General Smuts--took a whole year to write. Her novels get themselves written in a month or two.)

The two things that turn Henry Ormandy into a little imperialist Hamlet are religious neurosis and a lofty recruiting speech by Cecil Rhodes. The foils to Henry's neurosis are women, whom he professes to despise, and South African natives, whom he professes to like. Refusing to touch native women out of religious scruple, he (finally) admits (in torment) that he merely cringes at black skin. As regards white women, he claims to follow the footsteps of St. Paul. But when, on a holy pilgrimage to Rome, he is easily seduced by a sophisticated adventuress, he admits he is more pained by her sudden coldness than by his sin. Marrying a thin, homely servant girl, whose amiable vulgarity ever after disgusts him, he admits when she dies that his ego misses her.

For years, Henry defies official criticism of his Negrophilism. But when a favorite houseboy, bored by Henry's good treatment, suddenly leaves him, Henry is disillusioned about natives. During a Negro uprising, he wields as big an imperialist stick as any. Finally his hypochondria blots out natives, women, Africa, religion altogether.

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