Ferber Fundamentals

GREAT SON--Edna Ferber--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

If, as Edna Ferber once remarked, "writing a novel is like plodding along a dirt road ankle deep in mud," she is easily one of the world's most determined plodders. So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron, American Beauty, Come and Get It and Saratoga Trunk have established her as a writer who is apparently unable to produce either a disappointing or a startling book. Great Son, though less strongly plotted than its predecessors, is the dependable Ferber brand of slickly written, cinemadaptable Americana.

King & Matriarch. Author Ferber manipulates her old patterns with practiced ease. Vaughan Melendy, rich and rugged lumber-salmon king, is the spectacular Northwest, and vice versa. "Born into this gargantuan northwest region of giant forests, limitless waters, vast mountains, fertile valleys, he himself blended into the lavish picture and was one with it. . . . He digested it like the benevolent giant he was."

The matriarch of the pioneer Melendy family is Vaughan's mother, Madam Exact Melendy, a firm, perceptive, pipe-smoking, rye-drinking woman of 91. Since she was large and tired rather easily, Vaughan built her a miniature railway, running from her high-perched house to the street. Other characters include Vaughan's dull wife Emmy, who prided herself on being a daughter of one of "the Mercer girls" imported from New England by one Asa Mercer to mate with the lonely pioneers, and Vaughan's mistress Pansy Deleath, a pleasant, casual woman whom he met while she was singing in the Gold Strike Saloon in Alaska in '98.

The Younger Generation. The theme of Great Son seems to be that the old generation--Vaughan's--has been imperceptibly supplanted by a young and vastly different one. And there is nothing, the older generation decides, that can be done about it. The younger generation is represented by Mike Melendy, Vaughan's grandson. "Mother's mixed up," he says. "So's Dad. I'm demi-siecle."

So far as vigorous action is concerned, nothing much happens in Great Son. The story jumps back & forth between the spirited past and the uneasy, dubious present, and nobody gets hurt. At the end, Pearl Harbor resolves almost everybody's doubts.

The success of Great Son is assured. The Literary Guild alone is printing 450,000 copies, Cosmopolitan has serialized it, and Broadway Producer Mike Todd has reputedly paid $200,000 for the movie rights.

The Author. At 57, Edna Ferber is white-haired, handsome and still single. She attributes her fabulous success to the fact that "I write about fundamental things--love, marriage, hardship, vitality, country --the things writers used to spit at." Besides this, she explains, "I try to write in language people can understand. Not primer stuff, but simple language and thoughts everybody has." One of Author Ferber's prime annoyances (it has been bothering her for years) is the opprobrium which she feels is attached in the U.S. to the term "best-seller." "What's wrong with writing a book that lots of people buy?" she demands. "My God, there's no point in writing if you don't sell your stuff." Of current writers, she most admires Charles Jackson for The Lost Weekend.

During the war, Miss Ferber has been devoting much of her time to war work, the nature of which she refuses to disclose. She has closed her big Connecticut house and is living in a big Park Avenue duplex apartment. Sick to death at the moment, of novel-writing, she is feverishly working on a play. "Novels are a waste of time," she declares, "when there are plays to be written, real plays." She still cherishes an ambition to become an actress.

For the present younger generation (17 to 35), Author Ferber has high hopes --higher, she says, than she has had for anything in a long time. "They are so calm, so poised, so dignified," she says. "They're a little afraid, maybe--who isn't? --but not hysterical."

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