Poor Old John

THE QUESTION OF GREGORY (309 pp.) --Elizabeth Janeway -- Doubleday ($3).

To get right down to it, the thing that broke up the Gregory marriage was the death of F.D.R. John Gregory, for ten years a devoted New Deal bureaucrat, felt "as if this death were a sword that he must take to his bosom, slowly, inch by inch." John's neglected wife Ellen suffered no such heroic tortures. A rich woman who had married John when he was a poor college instructor, she called Roosevelt "That Man." Her grief was of another kind. The Gregorys' son Timmy had been killed in the war and for that tragedy she split the blame between the President and her husband, who had refused to use his influence to keep Timmy out of the draft.

While John was intoning that F.D.R. "was like a father to me. I loved him . . ." Ellen let him have both barrels of her repressed contempt: "I hate him, and I hate you--part of you . . . That man--this place--they've eaten you up, between them. Eaten up everything that was alive and honest and decent, everything I respected. You're not a man any more . . . You're a piece of--of protoplasm . . ."

In The Question of Gregory, Author Elizabeth Janeway (The Walsh Girls, Daisy Kenyan) tries hard but unconvincingly to show just what her protoplasmic hero would do after that. First John got suddenly drunk in his office. When he sobered up, he withdrew what money he had from the bank and ran out on his wife and on his job in the Department of Public Information. Apparently, all Gregory needed was a chance to stand on his own feet for a while. Jobs as a mechanic in Vermont and Detroit and a brief love affair with his ex-secretary in Washington soon had him chinning himself on his own self-confidence. He would get a job as a teacher and he and Ellen would enter middle age with their human dignity and refurbished love intact. But meanwhile Ellen was going quietly insane. When he came to take her from her ancestral home and the in-laws he despised, she tried to choke him to death. Gregory went away "waiting for a direction, for the blasting and blinding miracle which could teach him how to love."

Author Janeway showed a mildly original talent for characterization in a first novel (The Walsh Girls, TIME, Nov. 29, 1943). Her second (Daisy Kenyan, TIME, Nov. 19, 1945) was as confused as the neurotics she wrote about. The Question of Gregory shows no particular improvement and raises the question why writers are encouraged to churn out novels whose people are as unbelievable and basically as uninteresting as poor old John Gregory.

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