Sensitive Youth

Sensitive Youth SUMMER'S LEASE--E. Arnot Robertson --Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

On its surface Summer's Lease is a well-told story of a well-worn character: the sensitive young man. As such it is distinguished by good wit and by still better observation. But it is also a study of family life, early 20th Century vintage, almost as cruelly incisive as The Way of All Flesh, and more compassionate. Its essential theme: a human being's gradual discovery of the universality of pain, and of the fortitude with which it is sometimes met.

Douglas Caise's parents were both brilliant students at Oxford, but marriage, children, their own horror of life soon relegated them to a small town in Cornwall, where Mr. Caise ran the museum. Earnest, atrophied, intellectually snobbish, they did the best they knew how for their children. For Douglas, it was a poor best.

The sound of his father's humiliated laughter, in fear for his job, robbed the child of confidence. His feminist mother, in her efforts not to be possessive, involved herself in local education and professional good works; he soon realized she was unfit to be trusted. He continued to worship his father for years: but all his father perceived in his diffidence was aversion and stupidity about which, in his son's hearing, he ruefully made jokes. Pathetic Cousin Ella so blackmailed him for pity that it was impossible to pity her. Full-blooded Uncle Ernest, by horning in on his private enthusiasms, ended forever his interest in science. At the school they sent him to he underwent a "gradual blunting of intellectual curiosity, by unimportant information uninterestingly given."

He had weak eyes, and thanks to "the subtle pressure of what was expected of him," forced them to a point of virtual blindness, the end of any academic hopes. Douglas wanted to be an architect; and after a good deal of trouble he shamed his Uncle Ernest into financing his studies. He fell in love with a girl who, as a child, had found it expedient to call her artist father Painter-Man, her mother The House-Mouse. He and the girl had much to hate in common. He was so far cut loose from his family that while his mother died in the next room he sat reading The Way of All Flesh without either emotion or regret for its lack. But the patterns of pain, fear and insecurity were laid deeper than he knew: at a moment when his life was taking its full shape, his father's disastrous laughter sounded in his memory and cheated him into cowardice.

In its quiet way, an ambitious novel, Summer's Lease is disappointing, not in its needle-sharp detail but in its diffuseness. The writing, generally deft, hovers too often between good prose and bad poetry. But as the record of an inquisitive intelligence set down with humor and clarity, the diffuseness is of minor importance, and the sharp observation counts. Summer's Lease is an unusually rich and readable second-grade book.

The Author. Eileen Arbuthnot Robertson (Mrs. Henry Ernest Turner), 36, tall, redheaded, lefthanded, says she writes because sailing is physically unsuitable and marriage mentally inadequate as full-time occupations for any intelligent woman. Of her novels, Four Frightened People (1931) is the most popular, was cinematized in 1934. Summer's Lease is her sixth book. She took five years writing it, told tedious questioners she was writing a handbook called Pornography for Beginners. Her publishers still get inquiries for it, from beginners.

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