No. 22

Fannie Hurst's books are almost as numerous as Egyptian dynasties. Fortnight ago she published No. 22. But Fannie herself is a more absorbing character than any she ever created. Born in Hamil ton, Ohio, 54 years ago, she was taken in infancy to St. Louis, where her father owned a shoe factory. She began to write early, at 14 had submitted a masque in blank verse to the Saturday Evening Post.

She wrote short stories secretly through her college years at St. Louis' Washington University, got 21 rejection slips from one magazine. (When she became editor of her college paper she printed all 21 rejected stories.) In 1910, 20-year-old, buxom, self-confident Fannie left for Manhattan to do graduate work in Anglo-Saxon at Columbia University.

She worked as a waitress in Childs, in a sweatshop, as a nursemaid, a salesgirl, wardrobe mistress in a Minsky burlesque, and for 26 months "wrote, peddled, rewrote, repeddled, without so much as one word of encouragement." Then one day in 1912 she met Editor "Bob" Davis of Munsey's Magazine. " 'Fannie Hurst,' he said, after reading a story I came peddling, 'you can write!' " In the next 31 years she wrote 22 books.

An ardent feminist and a neutral at the beginning of World War I, she got into politics as Wilson's supporter, made Liberty Loan speeches, drilled with voice specialists, wrote the short stories and novels that made her fortune: Just Around the Corner, Every Soul Hath Its Song, Land of the Free, Gaslight Sonatas, Humoresque. Her 1915 marriage to Pianist Jacques Danielson was kept secret until 1920, then made a newspaper sensation when Author Hurst announced that she and her husband kept separate apartments. She traveled in Europe, made three visits to Russia, came back enthusiastic. Said she: "Pervading all the youth there is a superb arrogance. It is a country where the old people belong to yesterday."

Novelist Hurst does not smoke or drink, has a phobia about possessions. Says she: "Of course I own some things. But what I mean is, there are so many which I do not own. No houses in the country, no cars. I won't let myself be buried under bracelets and shields." In her West 67th Street (Manhattan) apartment of 14 rooms and six baths, with a 60-ft. living room, a writing room with wood paneling from a medieval French church, stained glass windows, Author Hurst gets up at 6 a.m., walks in Central Park until 7, then settles down to type out her stories, leaving no spaces between the words. She does her own research. Once when she and Rebecca West were watching a cook turn pancakes in a Childs restaurant window, a bystander said: "Don't disturb them. They're novelists collecting material."

Passionately pro-New Deal, Author Hurst's political and social activities provoked in newspaper reporters a censoriousness her books had not roused. Sample from one of her speeches:

"Woman must secure governmental control of the munitions industry so that the vicious conditions unearthed by the Nye Committee will not be repeated. But she is never going to do this by performing the fallacious errand of scuttling back to the kitchen to search for her soul."

The Book. Fannie's latest novel (Hallelujah; Harper; $2.50) is a rather abstruse triangle. Lily Browne, a widow, seemed "a startled-looking little girl, whose round hat with ribbons would be forever slipping backward on her head." Quiet, modest, gentle, nevertheless "in her underslip, the translucence of pale flesh shone on her arms and breast. An unexpected little quality of voluptuousness was revealed by Lily in undress. The thighs seemed wider and harp-shaped, the cups of the bust, tiny, separate and high." Oleander Watterson, Lily's maid, was an ex-convict, six feet tall, with a torchlight personality, headlight eyes, "neither Negro nor half-breed," possessing "a fierce magnificence of Indian-colored flesh, high cheekbones that had been heavily rouged and then powdered over, big, bold, red dened mouth." She wore a transparent dress around the house, knew all the scandal there was to know. She had known Lily's mother in jail. (More or less by chance, Lily's mother -- good, but hot-tempered -- had thrown a knife at a man, severed his jugular vein, been sentenced to 20 years in prison.) Oleander ordered Lily around, kept house for her, encouraged her love affairs, helped her marry, scandalized the neighbors, dwarfed her surroundings with her tawdry queenliness --in brief, a "burning pillar of a woman." Grant Sweetland, the ne'er-do-well son of a rich St. Louis family, a drunkard who in his childhood had tortured small ani mals, was "loosely groomed, indifferently tailored," with "a soft, rather overheated look ... a cowlick which dipped damp-looking across his brow," soft, womanish hands and a silhouette which, while not paunchy, "had a curve to it." Middle-Aged Quivers. One day Lily B. met an old schoolmate and he asked her and Oleander to be the hostesses on a stag party to the Kentucky Derby. To her own and the reader's surprise, Lily agreed. Said she, "I'd be a fish out of water trying to run a house party." She was.

When it was over, Lily was married to Sweetland, and Oleander had become the mistress of the editor of a St. Louis literary magazine. Lily settled down with her new husband in a five-room apartment on a St. Louis side street where the furnishings included an enormous bed of French Empire style, a William & Mary highboy, girandole mirrors, a sofa of beechwood, an upholstered rocker, and "a flock of odds and ends, worthless as antiques, but authentic relics of the ball-fringe, loveseat, blackwalnut, gilded-cattail era of curvature and upholstery. . . ." The strangest quality of Hallelujah is that without specific descriptions Fannie Hurst manages to make this superheated atmosphere quiver with a heavy, middle-aged eroticism. In the St. Louis, Mo. (pop. 816,000) that she describes, the commonplaces of existence -- setting the table, visiting the neighbors, coming home from work -- and the furniture of the rooms, the clothes of the women, petting the dog, playing the piano, take on a sultry, Sunday-supplement sexual significance. Her brief, artificial scenes are of sudden quarrels, abrupt endearments, pell-mell melodrama. But her emotional thunderstorms never clear the air after her emotional dog days.

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