Strictly from Idaho

THE VALLEY OF VISION (426 pp.)--Vardis Fisher--Abelard ($3.50).

Vardis Fisher's latest volume, the sixth in his ficto-stenographic history of civilization, is less a novel than a pedantic, prurient diatribe against one of the best-publicized kings Israel ever had. Solomon (loth Century B.C.) is presented as a sort of Old Testament Sammy Click with chin whiskers, a tough little opportunist who elbows his way into the big money, marries a glamour girl (Khate, an Egyptian princess), and hires a frustrated poet to ghost his copy--even, it would seem, such copy as the Book of Proverbs.

Furthermore, says Fisher in effect, Solomon's wisdom was not even his own; it was just a lot of words put in his mouth by his ghostwriter and his Egyptian wife. The real Solomon, according to Fisher, was a phony liberal with a father complex and a massive sexual overcompensation; his quarrel with the prophet Ahijah* was an exchange of irrelevancies between a dilettante and a fanatic.

Author Fisher shows some sympathy for the hot-eyed Ahijah. It is almost as though there were some burning affinity between the old eater of stones and howler in the waste places and the seer of Hagerman, Idaho, crying his confused and passionate evangel of history in the wilderness of American letters.

* According to the Bible, an angry prophet of Shiloh, who foretold the division of the kingdom of Israel.

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