Mighty Installment

THE FOREST AND THE FORT--Hervey Allen-- Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Broad in scope, ambitious in conception, William Hervey Allen's second big work since Anthony Adverse (TIME, June 26, 1933)* began last week its first public appearance. The Forest and the Fort is Volume I of a huge projected novel about American life between the years 1700 and 1840. It will be followed by at least five more volumes, of which two, Bedford Vil lage and City in the Dawn, are already written. The completed work will later be reissued in two volumes (Sylvania, Richfield Springs), finally assembled into a single massive tome called The Disinherited.

Fictional explorations into the historic past have been a striking feature of U.S. writing in the last decade. Said Hervey Allen last week: "It's probably time to come out and say, without being egotistic, that Anthony Adverse started the mode for the modern historical novel." Added he: "If you will look back over a long period of time, you will see that what the public likes most is a rich, large package. I have never streamlined a book to suit an audience."

Space & Time. The Disinherited can not yet be judged as to exact length. But it will be far longer than Anthony Adverse. Unlike Anthony, it will remain within the confines of the U.S. On its huge canvas, readers will see the gradual steps of the opening up of America. The primeval forest will give place to the forts of the first settlers, the forts will grow into villages, the villages into cities and towns.

Within this framework, says Author Allen, will be action "deep in implication." Subthemes will concern the effects of revenge as a racial policy, "the sentimental tradition that we are a merciful and kindly people," the acts of savagery that may arise out of "infantile compulsions." But basic to all will be the idea that the first Americans were neither revolutionaries nor reorganizers. They were "disinherited," and "for the first time in memorized history man was free to act entirely on his own responsibility."

Boy & Man. Volume I of this huge work centers around mighty Salathiel Al-bine, offspring of a blacksmith frontiersman. One day the child Salathiel left his parents' cabin on the wild Pennsylvania frontier, went down to the spring for water. "A brown arm with a copper band around it came out of the bushes and grasped him by the hair." Little Salathiel knew "the Injuns had got him."

His captor was a Shawnee named Big Turtle. He carved a little turtle on Sala-thiel's breast, named him Little Turtle, made him his heir. In the Shawnee village were other white captives, and though Salathiel lived the life of an Indian for the most part, a captive white preacher taught him to read & write fluent English.

Salathiel grew into a huge young man, respected for his strength by the young Indian males, worrisome to the girls be cause of his white skin. Though he learned eagerly the lore of the Shawnees, Salathiel felt himself a square peg in a round hole. Fortunately Big Turtle, tiring of incessant bickering with white enemies, decided to turn over his white captives to the commander of the British stockade, Fort Pitt. With the captives went Salathiel.

En route to Fort Pitt, Salathiel met a white girl and, after passing the day alone with her in the forest, was hastily mar ried to her by a friendly preacher. Almost immediately they were separated, for en try into bristling Fort Pitt was not for everyone. Inside the fort, Salathiel met the commandant Captain Ecuyer, became his valet and bodyguard. From the Cap tain he learned discipline, borrowed such books as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Richard son's Clarissa Harlowe.

Love & Hate. With the colorful Captain, Salathiel went on a tour of British strongholds, observing the ways of white soldiers and the endless struggle between them and the independent, ambitious native settlers. Indian attacks taught him to hate all redskins. His country, the new America, he found to be a land that began west of the Alleghenies, "the seeds of it . . . scattered in lonely cabins," where liberty was not a dream but "a state of nature to be successfully lived in." Slowly, surely, the forest was giving way to the fort.

Intense vitality and an eager reaching for vivid incidents combine in Hervey Allen's rapid, narrative style. Less admirable is his tendency to concentrate long, if lovingly, on surfaces. Like his fellow historian in American fiction, Robert Graves, Allen is weakest in his departures into romantic interludes. Unlike Graves, he has a passion for extremes; the 6 ft. 4 in. Salathiel Albine with muscles "like fluid oak wood" and the movements of "a young male panther" sets the superscale that marks the whole work for good and bad. And in his eager use of sentimental aspects of the Scottish border novel, Allen is capable of sinking to turgid depths, of causing a betrayed girl to cry out passionately against her ducal seducer:

" 'I gave you one bonny bairn that's gone down in the deep. . . . Now this one is all we are left with, and you'll no acknowledge him. He's yours! He's your son, James! I've been true to you, and I gave you all. . . .' "

"His Grace wiped his eyes."

Writer and War Worker. Popular, friendly, publicity-shunning, William Hervey Allen is a man of many parts. Money in the bank is anathema to him, so proceeds from Anthony Adverse went into realizing Allen's feudal dream of a self-sustaining family unit. With his wife Ann and three children (Marcia, 13; Mary Ann, ii; Richard, 6) he built on Maryland's Eastern Shore "one of the most complete family plants in the world," making bread from his own wheat, wine from his own grapes. Cows, hens and the waters of an inlet from Chesapeake Bay supply the Aliens with milk, eggs, fish and crabs.

At 53, Hervey Allen has done, he says, "more writing than almost any American." Behind him are eight books of poems, five of prose. Toward the Flame is considered one of the best U.S. personal records of World War I (of which Allen is a wounded veteran). In biography his greatest claim to scholarly fame is Israfel (TIME, Dec. 24, 1934), a searching study of the life and times of Edgar Allan Poe.

Today, Hervey Allen is primarily a war worker, handling the post of Regional Information Representative for the War Manpower Commission's Seventh District (South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida). The job takes up ten to twelve grueling hours a day. He must find men & women for war plants and shipbuilding, hack away at red tape, publicize manpower needs.

*Anthony's successor: Action at Aquila (TIME, March 7, 1938).

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