Notables

LIFE SIGNS by JOHANNA DAVIS

183 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

Mommy pops a Dexamyl and to her firstborn, whom she is diapering, explains that she must dash to keep an appointment with her psychiatrist, who is trying to determine why she is cuckoo.

"Goo-goo," says the baby. "No," mommy tells him, "goo-goo is how babies go. Mommies go cuckoo." This time the kid gets it right: "Mommy koo-koo." It is his first sentence, and mommy is charmed. "You smart thing," she says, "have a zwieback."

The reader may feel at this point that what he needs is not zwieback but a drink. There is no shortage of wry, clever novels by and about overwrought young mothers. And initially this unassuming first novel by Johanna Davis seems to be a fairly conventional example of obstetrical fiction. Its heroine, a likable, gifted young Manhattan woman named Camilla Ryder, is dismayed during her second pregnancy to discover that her mind has gone womby. She hears voices, sees things that aren't there, frightens her husband with screams in the night, gobbles uppers given to her by a dippy friend and downers prescribed by her disastrous psychiatrist. In the supermarket she takes half an hour to decide whether to buy milk by the quart or half-gallon. She scrubs her apartment a lot. In the end, she has the baby, dumps the pills and ditches the shrink; and at fadeout she seems prepared to live happily ever after.

Familiar, pleasant stuff. Yet what is remarkable is not that the thing is done, but that it is done so well. Writing from the viewpoint of an out-of-control character, Author Davis unobtrusively maintains order in her novel, limiting her scope sharply to Camilla's indrawn and pill-whacked consciousness.

Johanna Davis can be a very funny writer. The husband Alec, high on pot, is shown "examining his fingers as if they had just arrived in the mail, and did not fit the catalogue description." But the author usually has the steadiness to know when enough-already is enough. The only serious objection to her portrait is that she characterizes Camilla as an honors graduate in English, and then has the girl refer to "the passive tense." Tense is what psycho-maternity patients are, and voice is what passive is. A healthy, full-term first little novel anyway.

MALE CHAUVINISM! HOW IT WORKS

by MICHAEL KORDA 242 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Another glib, glossy book about women's subordination in the office. The kicker is supposed to be that the author is a man. (It takes one to tell one off?) And what a man! Editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, writer for fashion magazines, a subtle and sensitive fellow indeed.

Behind the Manhattan windows of brokerage houses, insurance firms, advertising agencies and publishing companies, Korda finds lesser men huddling. They suppress women, he says, not from arrogance but out of various forms of sexual fear.

In Korda's scenario, the sexes do meet. The "lowlevel satyromania" beneath the chill surface of office life engenders assorted love affairs. But because of the status scramble most liaisons are ersatz. When the colleagues of one executive discovered that contrary to the sly suggestions he liked to make, he was really not sleeping with his pretty secretary, the poor chap felt obliged to fire her and take another job himself. Here, as elsewhere, Korda often chooses an odd example, then proceeds on the assumption that it is some kind of norm. In real life, secretaries are often victimized. But how many have been fired--as happens to another Korda victim--because the boss's wife saw them driving away from work in an aunt's Rolls-Royce!

One Korda case involves a woman advertising executive whose superior followed her around to make sure that her clients did not mind her gender. And, of course, he knows a number of women whose promotions were shuffled so they got the work load without the title, the privileges, or the full salary.

Then there was Lee, a copywriter who flirted with her boss and stole his job by telling everyone else how she did all his work. The author pays lip service to women's fight for equal pay and equal opportunities for advancement, but Lee is his true heroine. She anticipated his advice to another young woman: "Be tactful, flatter, maneuver rather than attack." She was good at "playing the games which are instinctive to successful men, and which women are only just beginning to learn."

Quite apart from the sex war, a reader is appalled by the pinched, gray world of office work that the book describes. Korda makes any number of unwitting condescensions toward women. Perhaps the biggest is his final exhortation to men: "Ask women to join us."

THE LIFE TO COME and Other Stories

by E.M. FORSTER 240 pages. Norton. $7.95.

"I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more," E.M. Forster commented in his diary in 1964, "but sex has prevented the latter." During his 46-year silence as a fiction writer after the 1924 A Passage to India--one of the most tantalizing silences in modern literature--the theme that continued to fire his imagination was the unpublishable one of homosexuality.

Just as Forster had difficulty accepting his own homosexuality, he never seemed sure of the value of his "indecent" stories. Periodically he destroyed batches of them, not in "moral repentance" but out of "a craftsman's dissatisfaction."

Eight of the 14 stories in The Life to Come are the survivors of these purges. They deal with such things as the seduction of a provincial couple by two sailors, a brief homosexual idyl between a middle-aged businessman and a milkman, and an East-meets-West shipboard disaster involving a half-caste and a British officer that ends in murder and suicide. Forster being Forster, these goings on are handled better than anyone could hope for.

Even in such tales from the closet, collected by Oliver Stallybrass as part of a new and complete edition of the author's work, Forster charts the struggle between civilization and true civility. Against parsons, prigs and hardened hearts of every kind, he makes a plea for generosity, warmth, tolerance.

FOXFIRE 2

Edited by ELIOT WIGGINTON 410 pages. Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Hard-cover $10; paperback $4.50.

The Foxfire Book was an anthology creamed off from a magazine put out by country high school pupils in Rabun Gap, Ga. (TIME, March 27, 1972). It contained interviews and photos of the old people living back in the hills who can still explain the traditional ways, quilting patterns, country recipes or herbal remedies, demonstrate how to skin a raccoon, build a log cabin with hand tools or distill moonshine. With corn bread, white lightning and beautiful mountain folk originals, it was hard to beat. But the sequel, Foxfire 2, is stuffed with other irreplaceable lore--and irreplaceable people too. It will please anybody intrigued by the practical techniques of the past.

The only inauthentic part of Foxfire 2 is the introduction, which preaches a somewhat simplistic, life-against-dead-culture idea of education. But the Rabun Gap students know how to capture the essential details of speech and attitude, as well as technology. This time they have brought back beekeeping, a herbal of wild spring greens, midwives, granny women and burial customs; they show and tell how to carve a wooden water wheel and set up the millstones, how to make homespun--from sheep on the hoof to hand-loomed cloth--and explain the intricate, precise engineering of handmade wooden wagon wheels. Foxfire lives, as an audacious adventure in oral history and a graceful piety to ancient knowledge.

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