Two for the Show

WILD Is THE RIVER--Louis Bromfield --Harper ($2.50).

SARATOGA TRUNK -- Edna Ferber--. Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

These new novels by Edna Ferber (who writes-just-like-a-man) and Louis Bromfield (who writes almost like one) have three things in common: both use New Orleans, both will sell well, and both are so predigested for celluloid that they hardly sit still on the page. But one of them is pretty good, and the other pretty bad.

Wild Is the River, which has the largest advance sale of any Harper novel in ten years, tells of Civil War New Orleans under Yankee occupation. It is the result, according to its author, "of years of reading and study." They were wasted. Yankee Tom Bedloe is one of those curly-headed hommes fatals who, safe between the covers of a book, offer sure-fire fascination to literate housewives. There are three women in his life, all at once. One is his Bostonian fiancee Agnes, niece of General Wicks, who has charge of New Orleans. Another is a ruddy whoremistress who uses imitation gold dust in her hair and looks like a lioness. The third is a depraved Irish-French Baroness whose very touch, one is led to believe, can drive a man out of his right mind (she dabbles in sorcery to boot).

"The kiss she gave him was the kiss of a passionate woman of experience, a kiss that would have terrified a weaker man by its implications." From then on she and the hero spend much of their time "on some plane high above all other people in the world in a kind of sulphurous glory, the devastating bond between two purely sensual people who had no sense of sin and knew no shame."

Wild Is the River should be better as a movie.

Edna Ferber is more adroit. Her Creole heroine, Clio Dulaine, is not only beautiful, but hard, in the manner of Scarlett O'Hara and other cut-rate Becky Sharps. Clio takes up with Gambler Clint Maroon: "He was magnificent, he was vast, he was beautiful, he was crude, he was rough, he was untamed, he was Texas." He was also a gambler, but Clio soon seduced him into larger ambitions.

After Miss Ferber has warmed the pair up around New Orleans of the early '80s, she takes them North to Saratoga's United States Hotel. There, as the Comtesse de Trenaunay de Chanfret (incognito), Clio sets the town by its ears. She breakfasts at six in the stables, eats potato chips outdoors, sets other new styles. She also sets her cap and her talons for railroad multimillionaire Bart Van Steed, the most eligible bachelor in the Western Hemisphere.

Maroon, meanwhile, has Gary-Coopered his way in & out of Clio's boudoir, various gambling halls, and the offices of J. P. Morgan in New York. He runs a first-class Western-style fight against railroad pirates, during which two locomotives collide in a tunnel. He gets back to Saratoga in time to claim his lady at an effectively staged costume ball, and to promise her that he'll make more money than Van Steed ever dreamed of.

Miss Ferber's noisy, flashing manner never really gives you a period, but always makes you enjoy the fraud. Saratoga Trunk is so neatly made that the scenarists need only bracket the non-dialogue as stage direction, and call it a half-day's work.

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