Proud Soul v. Humble Soul

ADVENTURES IN TWO WORLDS (331 pp.) --A. J. Cronin--McGraw-Hill ($4).

Archibald Joseph Cronin (Hatter's Castle, The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom) is a zealous Scots Catholic who is never happier than when he is drawing moral conclusions from immoral behavior. But until he was 34, Cronin suppressed his urge to self-expression and buried himself in the "sensible . . . safe and practical" pursuit of medicine. The result was just the opposite of what Dr. Cronin had hoped it would be: the more patients he attended, the more he "kept thinking . . . what stories I could make of them."

Adventures in Two Worlds is a selection of such stories. All of them are true, most are charged with a strong dose of moral philosophy, and most read as easily as Author Cronin's best fiction. They also constitute the autobiographical confessions of a man who, like a true Scot, has always combined a passion for material success with a deep distrust of the pride of spirit that often comes with it.

"What Money Can't Buy." Cronin was bone poor when he attended the University of Glasgow Medical School after World War I (in which he served with a destroyer patrol). But he was all set to "work, work, work . . . live on air, sleep in the park, sing in the streets, do anything ... to enable me to take my doctor's degree." Proud of "my critical faculties," adept in finding "objections to the immortality of the individual soul," Cronin was nonetheless "too much of a coward" to be an avowed atheist, too much of a fighter to settle into the rut of tame agnosticism. So he did his best to keep faith and skepticism in separate compartments.

Right from the start, Cronin formed the two-sided habit of proudly sticking out his neck and humbly accepting the spiritual chastisement that invariably followed. His pride took a sharp beating in his very first job, in the clinic of a lunatic asylum: he was nearly strangled to death by a patient whom he had urged the superintendent to release as "such a decent chap." It took another beating at the hands of the crusty old general practitioner who took him on as an assistant and harnessed him mercilessly to the back-breaking round of rural practice.

Cronin recognized the value of this arduous work, but when a shrewd Scotsman from whose throat he had neatly extracted a herring bone gave him a stock-market tip, he was dazzled by the chance to get rich quick. Planking down his hard-earned savings of -L-100, he saw them swell miraculously to -L-1,000 in a few days. But he was out on the moors, delivering a baby, when his stock crashed, leaving him -L-7. Cronin decided that he had learned another priceless lesson; he dug into his pocket to buy the newborn baby a silver mug, inscribed with the youngster's name and the words, "What money can't buy."

"A Great Rogue." For some years he struggled to make both ends meet, practicing with small profit first in Welsh mining towns, then in a shabby London street. But almost overnight, his luck turned. He was called in, purely for emergency reasons, to attend a wealthy patient, and in her wake came an avalanche of Mayfair clients who filled his purse with a "golden stream." Unlike his Scottish and Welsh patients, many of these newcomers were merely "idle, spoiled and neurotic," but young Dr. Cronin was too thrilled by success to care much about that "("I was, I assure you, a great rogue at this period"). For these new patients he invented an ailment named "asthenia" ("which means no more than weakness or general debility"), and soon his anti-asthenia injections were the toast of the town. "Again and yet again my sharp and shining needle sank into fashionable buttocks, bared upon the finest linen sheets. I became expert, indeed superlative, in the art of penetrating the worst end of the best society."

But it was not long before Cronin's Scottish conscience began to ride him horribly. Against his swollen bankbook he could posit nothing, on the moral side, except occasional free work and the persuading of "two errant wives to return to their long-suffering husbands." Along with the plaguey conscience came an equally debilitating ulcer. Cronin decided it was time for him to clean house. He sold his rich practice, rented a lonely farmhouse in Scotland, and settled down to write a heartfelt novel about "the tragic record of a man's egotism and bitter pride."

Bomb of Love. The novel was Hatter's Castle. It was the first time Dr. Cronin had ever written anything except "prescriptions and scientific papers," and he thumped it out in the same mood of mingled desperation and "sheer willpower" that he had felt as a struggling medical student. Hatter's Castle was a labor of love and spiritual rejuvenation--and it hit the bestseller lists like a bomb. In no time, Author Cronin found himself richer and more fashionable than he had been at the height of his asthenic heyday. And the more he wrote, the more the money poured in, filling his proud soul with joy, his humble soul with horror.

The climax came when he found himself the star guest at the Lord Mayor of London's Guildhall banquet, pumping out, to roars of well-fed applause, an oration on "the virtues of patriotism, religion, and motherhood." "I knew ... I was behaving like a mountebank ... I saw myself as completely insincere . . . And more, I began dimly to discern how much attention I had paid to the wrong things in life, and how little to the right."

Today, at 55, Author Cronin (who now lives in Connecticut) is at peace with himself. His experiences as a physician, and the habit of reflection, have helped him to settle the conflict that existed in separate compartments of his youthful mind: "No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves in restless seeking, we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God." Author Cronin's publishers, probably estimating correctly the appeal that these autobiographical tales will have, ordered a huge first-publication pressrun of 75,000 copies.

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