In Bed We Snore

I LOVE MISS TILLI BEAN--Ilka Chase--Doubleday ($2.50).

To a year when mayhem, murder, dipsomania, drug addiction, perversion and incest are much commoner in U.S. novels than in U.S. life, Ilka (In Bed We Cry) Chase has contributed a novel whose muted prurience is almost prim. The story concerns the adventures of two U.S. Quakeresses* named Bean. They are natives of Lanesboro, Pa., where the Widow Bean's father keeps a general store. There, after a week of whirlwind courtship, an itinerant spaghetti salesman named Rechetti marries the widow and whisks her and her daughter, Tilli, off to Italy. He has neglected to tell his U.S. wife that he has an Italian wife still living. But the singular Quakeress and the bigamist decide that this really does not matter.

Later the two Beans get jobs in a Paris dressmaking establishment. In no time at all Tilli is a famed dress designer, the toast of Paris and her boss's fiancee. But his rather arm's-length love-making is explained when he tells Tilli that he is incurably impotent. On the eve of their wedding he kills himself.

Even more shocking to the Bean-Rechettis is Tilli's next love, a U.S. singer who brags that he is virginal. Once that disorder is cleared up, Tilli marries him. She soon leaves him for dressmaking with Mother in Manhattan. Tilli (now divorced) is about to marry a dull but rich fiance when the dipso-and-nymphomaniac wife of the artist whom Tilli really loves dies in the nick of time. So she marries the artist.

But Tilli's unmarried daughter, Sandal, who has been curiously queasy in the mornings, carries on the Bean extra-marital tradition. Says Grandma Bean-Rechetti: "Sandal, I've told thy Mother I think thee's pregnant. Am I right?" Says Sandal: "Yes, Grandma, thee's right."

Much of the book is dull. Most of it is silly. And the publishers, having blurbed it "a Quaker Constant Nymph," hope that most readers will swarm to it like crabs to gamy bait.

* Novelist Chase is a descendant of John Woolman, who, thanks to his Journal, is probably the best known U.S. Quaker.

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