Leaky Ark

ALL ABOARD FOR ARARAT--H. G.

Wells--Alliance ($1.75).

The first chapter in Mr. Wells's new fable is 40 pages long; the last is five; and the whole is one quick petering-out. It is all rather as if, with boundless elan, a man started telling a dirty story to a nice old lady, realized his error in midstream, and tried in the same breath to finish it and to back out of it, winding up in a hopeless cachinnation of "uhs," "I-mean-to-says," and tongue-swallowings.

In Chapter I, at the moment that Mr.

Noah Lammock (H. G. Wells) recognizes that mankind is on the ragged edge of annihilation, a puzzled, powerful old liberal turns up who says he is God Almighty. He is. He and Noah proceed to an entertaining exegesis of the Old Testament, the problem of evil, the possibilities of redemption, all of which is as fresh and stimulating as Captain Storm field's Visit to Heaven. Together they begin to plan an Ark in which all that is propitious for a new world may be saved. God will be allowed aboard, but there is no guarantee that He will last out the voyage.

In Chapter II, Mr. Lammock begins to blueprint the Ark and the New World.

So long as he is merely critical of the old, he rips along as delightfully as in Chapter I. But the planning itself begins dubiously and ends with the grim words, "a diversity about fundamentals is intolerable." With this destruction of individualism, Noah Wells makes clear the fact that Noah Lammock has become "an overwhelming menace." The rest is almost unmitigated breakdown. God plays the harmonium, Lammock preaches, underfed rhinoceroses lie about "like huge unpacked leather bags," the whole voyage disintegrates into weak comic strip. At length God identifies the Jonah, the unstrainable fly in the human ointment. He is "the essential treacherous cunning in man, the 'save a bit out of it' soul, the dodger of obligations, the profiteering partner, the undying Ananias, the sweater of opportunity, the area sneak, the bounder on the make, the official who is in with powerful friends, the player who never plays the game but studies the rules to claim an advantage. ..." Space is left for the reader to fill with "names of local personages and special acquaintances." Noah and God are both baffled and discouraged.

The book puts on record the splendid launching and the final foundering of one of the most vigorous and admirable of living minds; and the discouragement of a man who can make such a record public must be profound indeed.

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