Poletarian Poignancy

PETER DOMANIG -- Victor White -- Bobbs-Merrill ($3).

THE DAY Is COMING -- William Cameron -- Macmillan ($3).

These two massive novels were launched with a publicity salute of all but invasion intensity. William Cameron's The Day is Coming (573 pages about working-class life in England from 1887 to 1939) was blurbed as "the sort of novel Dickens might have written." Victor White's Peter Domanig (704 pages about working-class life in Vienna from 1905 to 1920) was called "one of the classics of aoth Century literature." All such extravagances aside, one fact was plain: both novels were solidly based on the bitter, intense, personal histories of their respective authors.

Vienna-born (1902) Victor White is the son of an Austrian mother and a British engineer. When his father died, little Victor's mother remarried, moved to the U.S. leaving Victor behind. He was brought up by relatives in Vienna and Switzerland, later came to the U.S.

Dirt and Dreams. Author White's hero, Peter Domanig, was also raised by Austrian foster parents in Vienna. His birth certificate read: "FATHER: Information refused . . . STATUS: Illegitimate." Barked his foster mother: "[We] found you . . . crawling around in the dirt. . . ." Sometimes his real mother wrote little Peter from the U.S., whither she had decamped after he was born. He did not know who his father was.

In his teens Peter slaved in a steelworks. When World War I started he tried to get into a swank cadet school, was rejected when his father turned out to be an enemy alien (British). Embittered Peter set himself to learn the tricks of wartime Vienna's black market. By war's end he was leading a flourishing double life--as a respectable clerk in the steelworks anda gambler in foreign-currency exchange. The world, he reflects as the story ends, had challenged him to survive--and he had.

Conjuror and Scene Painter. British Author Cameron was born (1898) in London's dingy East End, slept with his unemployed parents in the workhouse. Later he worked as street-hawker, odd-job boy in a tin-plate factory, at a lumberyard, as a dispatcher, bartender, conjuror. He also painted scenery for Cavalcade, Victoria Regina, The Miracle and "practically all the best-known English and American shows between 1930 and 1939." Now he is lecturing in Upsala, Sweden.

Most of The Day Is Coming takes place in the East End, whose slums have long been a happy hunting ground for reformers and revolutionaries. Among the hunters: George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor ("Tussy") Marx Aveling, Russian Anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, Socialist Poet and Craftsman William Morris--all of whom appear in Author Cameron's novel. The hero is a young proletarian named Arthur Cullen. When young Cullen heard that William Morris planned to mitigate the horrors of industrial progress by reviving medieval handicrafts, he became the great man's ardent disciple.

Patiently he served a seven-year apprenticeship in Morris' Guild of English Craftsmen. When one of Morris' disciples set up a model community for artisans in an ancient English village, Arthur moved there with his family.

But commercial manufacturers expropriated the designs of the Guild's hand-tooled products, mass-produced them cheaply. William Morris and the older Guildsmen died; the younger ones lost heart. Soon the model community died too. Arthur Cullen slunk back to the East End. World War I and the Depression did the rest.

Some readers may be overwhelmed by the ponderous length of these earnest novels. Others may be stirred by their poignancy as detailed chronicles of city life at first & worst hand.

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