Poet's Progress

MAGNUS MERRIMAN--Eric Linklater-Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

For seven months Farrar & Rinehart's Vice President John Chipman Farrar has worn a broad grin. For all that time Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse, Farrar-published, led U. S. fiction best-seller lists. Three weeks ago it dropped to second place, nosed out by Sinclair Lewis's much-boosted Work of Art. But Publisher Farrar's grin did not perceptibly lessen. In England, too, Anthony Adverse was running second, topped only by another alliterative title, Magnus Merriman. This week, by bringing out Magnus Merriman's U. S. edition, Publisher Farrar very nearly cornered the international best-seller market.

Author Linklater, already known in the U. S. by a satirical and a prehistoric novel (Juan in America, The Men of Ness; TIME, Mar. 4, 1931; Mar. 27) has written by far his best book in Magnus Merriman. A picaresque satire, it has little malice, much humor. Though it strikes many a shrewdly glancing blow at politics, literature, journalism, romance, it is definitely on the side of the conservative angels. Though its story wanders like its hero's volatile mind, it is well told, thickly peopled with engagingly human characters.

Magnus Merriman, son of a country schoolmaster in Orkney, got a taste for seeing the world during the War. He lost his job as teacher in a Bombay missionary college by writing scurrilous verses, but on his roundabout way back to England he got the material for a best-selling novel. In London he enjoyed himself for a while, but when an old friend urged him to come to Edinburgh and join the Scottish Nationalist movement he thought he might as well. Easily led astray by new enthusiasms, Magnus acquired in Edinburgh a passionate political creed, a new mistress, several severe hangovers. Persuaded to stand for Parliament, he campaigned fiercely, was ignominiously defeated, fleeced by his manager. Disgusted with politics and his mistress, who was becoming possessive, Magnus took refuge in Orkney, relapsed delightedly into the life of a farmer. A moonlit night and a pretty face got him in trouble again, and he went back to London, tried his hand at journalism. When a letter from the pretty Orkney lass informed him that she was going to have a baby, Magnus quixotically rushed back to marry her. She turned out to be a handsome termagant, but this time Magnus was caught. He settled down to be a literary farmer, a henpecked but occasionally drunken husband. His tireless hopes he transferred to his infant son.

Written with polysyllabic polish, Magnus Merriman occasionally threatens to become stylistically top-heavy, but usually Author Linklater's sly gusto keeps it right-side-up. He likes a neat phrase ("politics, that alluring perversion of patriotism") but usually makes glitter subservient to sense. His humor raises no sniggers but hearty snorts. When Magnus and his bride, having been up all night with the reveling wedding guests, set off in a car for their honeymoon, they passed one of the guests crawling on hands and knees along the road. Magnus stopped the car, asked the man if he was all right. ." Ts this the road to Birsay?' asked the crawler. 'Yes' said Magnus. 'But you've six miles to go.' 'It's early yet,' said the crawler, and plodded on."

The Author, like his hero, who he resolutely denies is made in his own image, is a native Orkneyman who has gone back to the Orkneys to live. At 12 he ran away from Aberdeen Grammar School to join the army, but was recaptured. When the War broke out he was more successful, enlisted as a private in the famed Black Watch, and was shipped home, seriously wounded, in 1918. After studying medicine and English at the University of Aberdeen, he took a job as assistant editor of the Bombay Times of India. When he got tired of that he went home by way of Persia, taught English at his alma mater. A Commonwealth Fellowship gave him two wandering years in America. Now he lives in Biscarth, Orkney, with his wife, except when he is finishing a book. Then he goes away, leaves instructions to have no mail forwarded. His bald pate, glasses and clipped mustache make him look older than his 35 years. Other books: Poet's Pub, A Dragon Laughed (verse), White Maa's Saga, Ben Johnson and King James, Mary, Queen of Scots.

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