Magna Cum Laude

I WENT TO PIT COLLEGE--Lauren Gilfillan--Viking ($2.50). Diminutive Lauren Gilfillan graduated from Smith College in 1931 and, like many of her generation, could find no job. So she decided to go to a Pennsylvania mining town, write a book about it. The result of her adventures is an absorbingly interesting record, written with such artful candor that it reads like a first-rate novel. I Went to Pit College will be an eye opener to anyone who supposes that a serious book about striking miners must be either a dreary factual study or hysterical propaganda. With no statistical tables. no sociological jargon, not even a photograph (except on the jacket), I Went to Pit College paints an authentic, unforgettable picture. To have taken a postgraduate course at "Pit College" is no mean feat in itself; on the strength of her masterly thesis Authoress Gilfillan has graduated magna cum laude. The mining town she picked, more or less at random, was a huddle of shacks she calls "Avelonia," about 35 miles from Pittsburgh. Under cover of darkness she arrived in a hired car, knocked at a house that looked less dilapidated than most and asked to be put up for the night. Next morning she donned a disguise of old clothes, made her face up to look peaked and hungry. Very soon she found she could dispense with such makeup. She joined the picket line of strikers, went with a delegation of the Young Communist League to Pittsburgh to beg for money, attended strike committee meetings at the relief station. In the first family she stayed with the men were scabs. One day, dressed in overalls, her hair cropped short under a cap, she went with one of them down the mine.

At first the miners were very hospitable. Family after family invited her to come visit them. She got used to sleeping two and three in a bed, but night alarms made her nerves jumpy. At the Gietradis house, where the whole family slept in one room, she was warned to look out for the old man, but what disturbed her rest was the epileptic lodger throwing a fit. On a visit to the disreputable nearby settlement of Seldom Seen, where the women were all prostitutes and the men mostly black, a half-crazy Negress attacked her in the middle of the night with a razor. Young Johnny, Slovakian miner out on strike, fell in love with her, confessed his literary ambitions and showed her the outline of a novel he was going to write. He had taken a correspondence course in finger printing, but had changed his mind about being a detective. Johnny paid her a heartfelt compliment, called her "a thorn rose, growin' along with the weeds. If it grows by the road, it gits kinda coal-dusty."

As it became known that she was a writer, Authoress Gilfillan's popularity waned. Communist organizers accused her of being a capitalist spy. Police thought she was a Communist. Old friends stopped speaking to her. One day at a mass meeting she was publicly ostracized. Only people who would talk to her were an old drunk and the faithful Johnny, who was expelled from the Young Communist League for being in cahoots with her. At the end she had to tell Johnny that he could not go with her. He took it like a man. " 'I get you.' A pause. 'I can take it.' " Sick, dirty, undernourished, but glad to be going, she left "Pit College."

The Author is tiny but Irish, with strong nerves and a sense of humor. She repeats the description a Communist girl organizer gave of her: "You have a baby face and pert manners. . . . You think you're an artist. . . . You're the kind of person I want to see killed!" Born 24 years ago in the slums of Washington, D. C., where her parents were social workers, Authoress Gilfillan has always had a "penchant for 'bums.' " By the time she was 14 she had run away from home twice to see the world. At 17, her parents not concurring, she got a job in a corset factory, was discharged for inefficiency at the end of a week. She thinks her visit to "Avelonia" "a pretty good adventure. But the most terrific experience I have ever been through was writing about it." Her first book, I Went to Pit College is the March choice of the Literary Guild.

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