Ospreys and Semicolons

WINDSWEPT--Mary Ellen Chase--Macmlllan ($2.75).

Mary Ellen Chase is a well-beloved professor of English Literature at Smith College. One night, according to a campus story, when she was traveling in a lower berth, the man in the upper threw down a note reading "MADAM; Shall I come down?" Miss Chase, in describing the adventure, concluded: "Almost more than my terror at this moment was my horror at the monstrous use of the semicolon."

No such monstrosities, grammatical or otherwise, mar Windswept. It is an ideal book for the Christmas lists, a gift for mother and for young nieces who want to write. Its central subject is a house and a promontory on the savage Maine coast, a region which is Novelist Chase's Wessex. A family of thoughtful New Englanders share their love of this place with a Czech immigrant and a handful of local citizens. The plot is no more than their comings & goings, births & deaths, over 60 years. Behind this is Nature's overpowering background of sea, fog, wind; the pages burgeon with blueberries, cranberries, marsh grass, salt spray and ospreys.

Miss Chase has mastered almost too well the English fiction on which she lectures. She writes in the great genteel evasive tradition, clean as Jane Austen and rather sweeter. Windswept is a treasury of sound thoughts and syntax whose spiritual dimension is revealed in such passages as this:

"Here, even sadness must be sharpened and refined to understanding and acceptance; here, Earth was still the ancient life-giver, increasing joy. . . . Here . . . one could, if he would, catch something of that wisdom which life in most places and under most circumstances leaves unfinished, even undiscovered."

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