Father Gary's Chickens

A HOUSE OF CHILDREN (276 pp.)--Joyce Gary--Harper ($3.50).

The love of Joyce Gary's life is life. Inevitably, bits and pieces of his own have cropped up in his joyous string of novels. Gulley Jimson, the rascally painter of The Horse's Mouth, bore the knowing brush strokes of Gary's three-year try at being an artist in turn-of-the-century Paris and Edinburgh. In Mr. Johnson, still the best novel written about modern Africa, Gary drew on his tours of duty as an officer in British West Africa during and after World War I. In A House of Children, written in 1941 and now published in the U.S. for the first time, Novelist Gary summons up memories of a rollickingly un-Victorian childhood in Ireland. Calling himself Evelyn Corner, Joyce Gary relives a child's world where every dawn is Christmas morning, with its stockingful of pranks and projects, all observed with passionate curiosity.

Evelyn is one of a dozen Corner cousins, ranging in age from just-walking to just-wedding, who spend summers together on the west coast of Ireland. Huck Finn himself would like the way the Corners grow. "We shrieked together in joyful terror . . . Black bilge water, floating dirt and oil and fish scales had spurted through the [boat's] gratings, and into this we slid." "Harry wore [an old cavalry] sabre, but not before I had nearly killed him with it by a blow which might have split his skull."

Numerous admirable characters visit Gary's House. There is Captain Scoop --such a hell of a dainty guy (by a boy's standards) that he refuses to sit on the kitchen table before he has put "a piece of clean drawer paper under him." There is a smart lad called Red Cheeks, who has been taught by experience that it is futile to drop snowballs down chimneys because they only "get stuck in the bend," whereas a bucketful of water meets with no such obstacle. There is Tutor Pinto Free man, who would have been a good educator had he not believed passionately that "all education is a fraud"; he is always uttering loud groans and hurrying "to the coat cupboard, where he kept a medicine bottle of whisky." And there is Mr. Mackee, a familiar figure in most people's childhood. "We despised him entirely and completely for . . . his kindness and good nature . . . Our great triumph [was] when we nearly drowned him." Says Gary: "We were little anti-Christs." Readers who insist on a well-made, plot-laden novel had better pass this one up, but those who relish reminiscences of childhood' will find that it goes down fine --with a healthy, natural swoosh, like water through a chimney.

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