A Game of Marbles

DEBBY (304 pp.)--Max Steele--Harper ($3).

One of the juiciest plums a young writer can pluck is the $10,000 that Harper & Bros, gives away every two years to the winner of its novel contest. For 1950 the lucky man is a 27-year-old South Carolinian, Max Steele, whose Debby was chosen by a jury of knowing hands: Short Story Writer Katherine Anne Porter, Novelist Glenway Wescott, and San Francisco Chronicle Critic Joseph Henry Jackson. A few of the Harper prizewinners (Wescott's The Grandmothers and Paul Horgan's The Fault of Angels) were widely and deservedly cheered, but the 1950 winner is not in their class.

Debby is the sentimental odyssey of a halfwit. After her husband is killed in the first World War, 35-year-old Debby cannot understand that he is dead because there has been no sitting-up, and no funeral and there is no grave on which to put flowers. After being stuck away in an institution for delinquent women for a while, she is taken into the home of the warmhearted Merrills.

The Years Go. At first, poor little Debby is nearly frightened to death: she cries for a whole week and wears her big, cape-collared coat to breakfast. But gradually her bruised heart is caressed and warmed by the Merrills, and she begins to feel that at last she has a home. As the years go by, Debby completely identifies herself with the family, listens to young Britt Merrill contemplating suicide because he has failed in school, puts up with the antics of Tomboy Betty, who likes to do anything provided it is mean enough, learns how to get along with high-strung Mrs. Merrill, and gladly forgoes her wages when Mr. Merrill is hit by the Depression. The high point of Debby's pathetic little life comes when she gets a chance to straighten Rebecca Merrill's veil just before her wedding, and happily follows the bride all the way to the altar.

Together with the routine hoopla of life with Papa and Mama Merrill and their five noisy but insistently wholesome children. Author Steele has Debby engage in some of the most ingenuous mental operations ever recorded outside clinical notebooks. Theoretically, there is nothing to prevent somebody from writing a fine, compassionate novel about such a mental cripple; the trap in such an exercise is bathos, and it yawns for Author Steele.

"Let Me Go." Too often, Debby comes through as a cute curiosity instead of a character. She wonders what people do with the breath they save, worries in the morning whether she is the same Debby as the night before, frequently touches herself to be sure that her navel is still in front of her, and is always ready for a good fast game of marbles with the Merrill kids.

The story ends with a tear-soaked scene in which the youngest Merrill boy holds Debby in his arms while she dies with the plea, "Let me go. I know a hiding place. Let me go. I got to hide." Debby will tug a few soft hearts among veteran circulating-library customers, but such experienced judges as Authors Porter, Wescott and Critic Jackson, who are supposed to use their heads as well as their hearts, still have some explaining to do.

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