Return of a Hero

MR. FRANK MERRIWELL--Gilbert Patten--Alliance ($2).

There has probably never been a literary reincarnation like this. To U.S. men of draft age, Frank Merriwell is a vague synonym for a ninth-inning home run or a last-minute touchdown. But to an older generation, he was as vividly real a person as Superman or Tarzan is to youngsters today. Gilbert Patten, under the pseudonym of "Burt L. Standish," wrote the first Merriwell book in 1896, kept on writing at the rate of 20,000 or more words a week for nearly 20 years. Insatiably, week after week, legions of boys gobbled him up between paper covers, price 5-c-. Their parents approved, for Frank was incarnate perfection ("frank and merry in nature, well in body and mind"). He was not only a superb athlete with no vices, but a protector of the bullied, a friend to the friendless. As a pitcher he could make his curve ball break either in or out.

After the Merriwell vein petered out, Gilbert Patten wrote pulp fiction, cinema scenarios, even tried publishing magazines of his own. He now lives in California, a hale, upstanding man of 74. He smokes cigarets (something Frank never did), reads Proust and Zola (of whom Frank never heard). Recently a publisher asked Author Patten to write a novel about Frank as a man of vigorous middle age, coping with the world of 1940. Result: Mr. Frank Merriwell, out this week.

The Frank Merriwell of 1940 is very well preserved. He is light on his feet, a fast man with his fists. He is afraid of nothing. As president of the Town Improvement Society, he cleans up the face of Elmsport. As a citizen of the world, he tries to rouse the U.S. from blind isolationism ("if England falls now, the raging monster, the murderous vampire beast of destruction won't stop there"); he founds a national organization called The Young Defenders of Liberty. He has been married for a long time now to Inza Burrage, the brunette for whom, in the old days, he once fought a mad dog. He has a nubile daughter who calls him "Daddy Frank"; his son is a war correspondent in Amsterdam. He is a liberal and a friend of labor, but no dastardly Red. He smokes now but his smoke is the manly pipe. He keeps up with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the sports pages.

First complication is the effort of a rapacious mill-owner to prevent Frank from establishing a manual arts school, for fear of rousing the underpaid workers from their torpor. From there on, the complications fly thick & fast. They include the unwedded pregnancy of Frank's daughter--but the boy is such a fine, manly boy, and they are going to get married anyway. The style of Mr. Frank Herriwell is fruity with all the old cliches --"Riches alone never bring happiness" . . . "Neither browbeating nor cheap mockery will get you very far, Judge Grimshaw" . . . "Deeply and long, they gazed into each other's eyes, a man and his wife who had found in wedded love a unity stronger than the finest steel." These venerable phrases are nostalgic rather than repulsive. Unfortunately, in Mr. Frank Merriwell they stand cheek by jowl with such items of the current vernacular as "scram," "screwball," "heel," "gaga," "nuts," "lousy," "dishing the dirt." That is disconcerting. It is rather like encountering your grandmother wearing lipstick, sucking a highball and smelling of Ce Soir ou Jamais.

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