Beyond the Next Bend

THE ROAD (276 pp.)--Harry Martinson--Reynal ($3.50).

"Touch us not. Leave us in peace. We own that which is astray. The lost is our property. It is a large and remarkable property. It faces the stars, the woods and the seas, the roaming waves and the wind-sown flowers."

Thus the tramps who trudge through The Road, a meandering, queerly poetic, semi-autobiographical novel which is the first book of Swedish Author Harry Martinson to be published in the U.S. The son of a sailor turned shopkeeper who died when the boy was only six, Author Martinson was left behind when his mother emigrated to the U.S., spent much of his boyhood and early youth tramping the world's roads and sailing the world's seas as sailor, cook, mechanic, abattoir worker and soldier of fortune.

A prolific writer whose works range from poetry to nature studies and radio plays, Martinson spent ten years writing The Road. The book is a patchwork of brief, often vivid, sometimes homely episodes of tramps' lives as they knock on the doors and consciences of the respectable and industrious, or sleep among Sweden's lovely hills and forests.

It is early in the present century, and Martinson's tramps are already in rebellion against the demon of industry and the evils of an over-organized world. "Nowadays, there is an element of sadism in the very requirement that a man shall work. 'Now you shall feel it,' they say. 'Now you shall know what it feels like to break stones and trim flags.' " Each is lucidly articulate about his views. Old Road-Dust insists: "Everything is always what it is able to be and never otherwise . . . He who knows the world takes it as it is when it is at its blindest, not as it is when it is seeing most clearly." Sandemar, a world-roaming aristocrat among tramps, carries a slate on which he writes and then wipes out his thoughts. Why? "I'll tell you--because we have found nothing. We merely find that it is possible to say almost anything. But afterward we strike out by degrees everything that can be said."

Everywhere the tramps go, they encounter the fear of "community" people, and learn to dread and despise that fear. Muses Bolle. once a skilled cigarmaker, now with "the homeless hands of the displaced craftsman: "If all people had lived in accordance with their collective fears, everyone would have become stationary, like a tree. In their heart of hearts, perhaps, most people would like to be plants, to be tall trees with eyes that could survey their surroundings and always be able to see and convince themselves that no one was coming, no one was going, no one could move; that all were lookout towers guarding the greatest security--that of absolute immobility." Martinson's tramps are mobile enough, and often provocative, and their wanderings, as recorded by Martinson, won the author election to the Swedish Academy after the book's publication in 1948. But as a novel, Martinson's Road has no crossroads of crisis and. like his tramps, no destination--except perhaps the insidious lure of what lies beyond the next bend.

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