Unworldly Wisdom

THE WISDOM OF LOVE -- Jakob Schaffner--Coward-McCann ($2.50).

In the U. S. only Theodore Dreiser writes long novels; in Germany the woods are full of them. This latest importation from the German forests is tall, wide-spreading, full of sap.

Emil Felgentreu, Berliner, is a man just pushing 40, lively, kindly, imaginative, a good sort altogether, although his enthusiasms are apt to run away with him at times, and he has a passion for generalizing at the slightest excuse. His wife and anchor, Meta, though still good-looking, is five years older. The third member of the household is Alma, Meta's niece, just 20. They have lived together happily for years, but suddenly, when the question of Alma's marriage comes up, Emil begins to notice her with more than fatherly interest. All of them know what is imminent, but they are powerless to stop it; Emil and Alma become lovers. Her engagement to Lippke, a young, serious-minded druggist with pale eyes and a pimple on his nose, is not so much broken off as abandoned. Alma runs away, discovers that she is pregnant. Emil finds her at last, and they set up an apartment together. When her time is getting near, she is suddenly frightened by a threatening visit from her ex-fiance's father crazy from misery and drink, who threatens to shoot her. She dies in premature childbirth. Emil sends the baby to Meta, with a note asking her to take care of him, and then shoots himself.

The last scene shows Meta with the little boy, a chip of the old block, who will not come when she calls him because he is fascinated in generalizing to himself about a ladybug he has found.

The Author. Though Author Jakob Schaffner writes about Germans and has sold 100,000 copies of this book in Germany, he is a native of Basel, Switzerland. Orphaned at eight, he was put in an orphan asylum, left to become a shoemaker's apprentice at 14. When he tired of cobbling he wandered up and down Europe for six years. Thinking to improve himself, he joined the Order of the Good Templars (fraternal society), made friends who encouraged him in his attempts at versifying. Then he sold a few stories, rented a little attic and a piano, wrote a novel, Wandering. With the money he made from this book he emerged into the world again. Said he: "I learned to be sure that other birds too existed and that I had by no means learned everything that there is to learn, but that I must begin learning all over again. . . . Life grew more serious. My nose grew longer and what had merely been playing now became work." Author Schaffner has worked. He is now 54, has written nine novels, two books of poems, short stories.

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