Low Ceiling

HE LOOKED FOR A CITY--A. S. M.

Hutchinson--Duell, Sloan and Pearce ($2.50).

SONS OF THE OTHERS--Philip Gibbs--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson and Sir Philip Gibbs are two prolific relics of World War I. Now each is doing, as best he can, his literary bit for Britain in World War II. In a literary sense, neither has a very high ceiling.

Under that low ceiling Author Hutchinson flies the higher of the two. He does a sort of subdued version of Noel Coward's noisy Cavalcade, conducting an English clerical family through the first three decades of the 20th Century. Always a ready hand with the Gentle Soul beset by the Stupid Community (notably in If Winter Comes), he plays it now in the Rev. Gordon Brecque, his patient service of his God, and his vicissitudes. The pre-war era is largely consumed by watered-Dickensi-an childhood episodes; during the post war years two children marry stodgily, and the younger daughter makes bad use of a roadhouse, is killed in an auto wreck. But the focus is on the war.

One of the sons does creditably in the Navy and both daughters do war work, but John, Gordon's eldest, is an uncompromising pacifist, and Minna, the maid, is German. On those counts and because his sermons are earnestly gentle rather than militant, Gordon suffers a good deal: cuts in the street, a dwindled congregation, anonymous letters, a stone through his study window. Minna commits suicide. John dies, of pneumonia, in prison.

Author Hutchinson takes care, in a note, to state that he has no sympathy with John's point of view. Minna is presented -- thereby comfortably erasing the possibility that any such good beings reside in Germany -- as no longer really a German, but "one of us." The essential gentleness portrayed throughout is so birth-strangled by genteelism as to be a little blue in the face. But Gordon Brecque does emerge, against all these handicaps, as a good priest, a sympathetic family man and a rather touching figure.

Sons of the Others might have been written for a boys-school literary magazine; certainly it would have been hooted down by college editors. It is a limp, sad affair in which Frenchmen supply atmosphere by calling each other My Old One; Old School Ties meet up in Northern France to drink bubbly, chaff each other about flirting with the French girls, and suffer, with their allies, the boredom of the long winter's "sitzkrieg."

Once the Nazis get steamrolling down the Lowlands, the narrative picks up; by the time Dunkirk is evacuated, history supplies its pity and terror. A Tolstoy, or even a Malraux. might illuminate such action; Author Gibbs can only impair it. Such enormous human convulsions have more reality in newspapers and newsreels than they can ever hope to get as a weakly painted backdrop for the stock characters of a second-rate romance.

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