Sanctification

Like Henry James, the greatest of them, many U. S. expatriate writers have come to troubled old age, have shown uneasy consciences over their expatriation. But not Logan Pearsall Smith. Now 73, a lanky, aristocratic, pink-cheeked bachelor who has been called the most perfect living British mandarin, he has contentedly lived 50 years in France and England. His autobiography, Unforgotten Years (Little, Brown, $2.50), is witness that he finds in England a happiness as poised and honeyed as his perfected prose (in Trivia, Reperusals and Recollections, etc.).

Logan Pearsall Smith's autobiography, written aboard Edith Wharton's yacht, is eloquent, charming, but hardly exemplary. Descended from a family of fashionable Philadelphia Quakers, little Logan grew up in surroundings at once prosperous and zealously religious. His father was both an executive in the family glass factory, and a famed Quaker revivalist, as successful on manorial lawns in England (until he excited too much ecstasy in female converts) as in suburban camp meetings. His mother, an even more effective stirrer-upper, became known as "the Angel of the Churches."

Little Logan, "a gorilla for screaming," was converted in a bathroom by his six-year-old sister when he was four. (Embellishing this miracle, his father wrote a tract credited with converting thousands of wild Indians.) At seven, after a hard-fought spiritual struggle, he attained Grace. "Since I attained the state of Sanctification," Author Smith testifies, "I have never felt the slightest twinge of conscience, never experienced for one second the sense of sin."

He lost his religious faith a few years later, while foraging in a cherry tree, but found Grace again in the works of Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman (who often visited the Smiths) and Philosopher William James, also a friend of the family. At 23 Logan wangled a lump inheritance, went to Oxford. He never went back to the U. S., except for visits.

Like many an oldster, Logan Pearsall Smith is convinced that the younger generation (including practically everybody since Pater) is damned. Bad writers because of their "need for money, and plenty of it," they will never enter Author Smith's literary heaven. Their one hope of Grace, he pronounces, is to become expatriates too.

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