Novel of a Midwest Town

KINGS Row -- Henry Bellamann --Simon & Schusfer ($2.75).

The small Midwest town of the buggy days has long awaited a novelist who could see it steadily and whole. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, for all its savor, its dusty truth, was only a bucketful of that subject. Authentic handfuls may be found in Booth Tarkington, Willa Gather, Edgar Lee Masters. Kings Row, an intelligent attempt to cover the whole ground, is worthy of respect and worth reading, but it is not the hoped-for article.

Author Bellamann knows his locale because he was born there--in Fulton, Mo. in 1882--and educated at the town's college. A musician and teacher of music, onetime dean of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, he writes with a composer's power of conception, a doctoral insipidity of style. In his long (674-page) chronicle he deals boldly, methodically with the social rigidities, dignities and horrors of life in the town of Kings Row at the turn of the century. The pattern is complete; the vision is undistinguished.

A boy named Parris Mitchell, brought up by his well-to-do French grandmother, senses the snobbery of Kings Row when he sees his schoolmates snub the birthday party of Cassandra Tower, whose strange, brilliant father remains aloof from the town. Later Parris goes to study medicine with Dr. Tower, carries on an affair with neurotic, beautiful Cassandra. The evil of the world smites Parris suddenly in one week when his beloved grandmother dies of cancer, his revered teacher Dr. Tower poisons Cassandra and kills himself. A notebook of Dr. Tower's intimates that he had been more than a father to his daughter. Parris goes off to study under the new psychologists in Vienna.

Around this central thread of narrative many characters appear: landowners who still practise the large courtesy of the frontier, a wise and cynical old lawyer, a rich and respected doctor whose sadism nobody quite suspects, a feeble-minded boy and a pack that picks on him, old farmers who still remember '49, a lonely Catholic priest, a stern old German music teacher.

The first of the real-estate sharks and boosters are on the scene when Parris Mitchell comes back to take a post at the State insane asylum. And in the last half of the novel the quickening optimism and pretense of the 20th Century are played off against the sterile meanness and tragedy unfolded to young Dr. Mitchell. If Author Bellamann's art were up to his understanding, the result would leave readers shaken. As it is, they may feel sick.

Whatever readers' reactions may be, they will presently be recorded with more accuracy than sales figures alone could provide. Dr. George ("Percentage") Gallup is sending out the book as subject for one of the Gallup polls. A selected cross section of readers will report to Dr. Gallup on such questions as what they like, dislike, and would recommend about Kings Row, how it compares in their esteem with such stemwinders as Gone With the Wind.

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