Mormon Wife

THE GIANT JOSHUA--Maurine Whip-pie--Houghton, Mifflin ($2.75).

A first book, The Giant Joshua is the 633-page story of a Mormon wife and of the pioneer community in which she lived out her marriage. Exhaustively detailed and rather well-told, it is not merely a good fictional history of a special group and period; it is also a good novel about human beings in general.

The wife's name was Clorinda MacIntyre. The community was Dixie Mission, which she helped build out of the harsh, savagely colored wilderness 300 miles south of the Great Salt Lake Valley.

When she was 17, Clorinda had just become one of the three wives of bearded, Scotch-burred Abijah N. Maclntyre. She was pretty, sensuous, rebellious and gay.

By the time she was done, in her early 405, she had lost everything she had ever hoped for and everything she had accepted in its place.

Polygamy was an institution Mormons would and did die to defend, and Author Whipple makes out a touching and levelheaded case for it; but it was no laughing or lascivious matter. It was like the most respectable Christian marriage, only a great deal more so. None of the women bore it contentedly; and Abijah, on his first night back from a journey, confided to his diary: "I return like the sow to the wallow."

His patient, simple-minded Wife Willie was always kind to Clorinda, but aging, jealous Wife Bathsheba was never. Abijah himself was a good man, but excessively sober. Because he bitterly resented Clorin-da's power to excite him, he was determined to discipline her. His son Freeborn was about Glory's age. They fell in love, but nothing happened except that they suffered. The birth of her first child eased Clory, but not Freeborn. When he was brought in killed by Indians, Clorinda miscarried her second child. The two deaths subdued and matured her.

When Abijah got a Call to do missionary work in Scotland the three wives had to fend for themselves. They made glue.

It was a stale, starved life, and it was not improved for Clory when she lost her son and daughter in an epidemic. By the time Abijah got back she was worn and grieved enough to come pretty close to what he wanted in a wife, and to think better of him than she had. But she never quite gave up the idea of getting to less cruel country, or of leaving him altogether.

Her hopes stirred when Abijah was called to one of the cool green valleys in the north. Because polygamy was in process of being destroyed, he could take only one wife, and Clory was sure she would be his choice. Willie was dead; 'Sheba was past childbearing. But Clorinda herself, broken by miscarriages, was no prospect as a mother, and Abijah took a new wife, a pitiless slut who had youth if nothing else. Clorinda realized then what 'Sheba had suffered from her. She bore her last child, dead, and slowly died herself.

If that were all Clorinda had had to live for, the picture would be dismal indeed.

Actually, there was a great deal besides: the profound routines of motherhood and child raising (which Author Whipple does hardly better than average), her friend ship with mousy-haired Willie (which she does excellently), her whole life as a member of a Mormon community during its first intense decades.

The Mormons were neither solemn nor eccentric: they were thoroughly normal, low-born Americans and immigrants whose appetite for living was sharpened by faith, work, poverty, disaster and gaiety. Their faith was immense. Their work was strenuous and disinterested. Even the more provident of them were poor. But they endured with courage the disasters of the frontier and the depredations of their fellow men.

Brigham Young was one of those hard-brained, extroverted, natural saints who can make any number of people do anything and like it. As Maurine Whipple presents him, a man of astonishing force, simplicity and eloquence, he is easily the most living figure in the book.

Any truly adequate account of such a life as Clorinda's, of such a community as Dixie Mission, would perforce be a great novel. But adequacy, on that scale, is no small word. Maurine Whipple gets a great deal onto paper, both of the weight and progression of a life and of the interlock-ings of a community, but it is only in her last 30 pages that she approaches adequacy: a strong groundswell almost to the edge of "grandeur. As for the rest, it is at best an infinitude of competent but never quite excellent stitching.

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