Exalted Alger

YOUNG AMES--Walter D. Edmonds --Atlantic--Little, Brown ($2.50).

This is the first novel since Chad Hanna by one of America's better historical novelists, Walter D. Edmonds. In it he puts that immortal American, the Horatio Alger hero, into period pants. The period: the 1830s, in Manhattan.

Heretofore Edmonds' novels have rambled through the past of his native upstate New York, chiefly along the towpaths of the Erie Canal. He put the canal and its folkways into Rome Haul, Erie Water, Chad Hanna. He deserted the ditch only long enough to write his most successful novel, Drums Along the Mohawk. New York State's No. 1 regional historical novelist, he has an ability to bathe his restorations in a bright, bucolic, pre-New York Central freshness.

The Book. When Young Ames reaches Manhattan one day in 1833, he is a smart, poker-faced, likeable runaway from an upstate farm, who quickly gets himself a job with one of the best wholesale houses in the city-Chevalier & Deming Post. Young Ames has freckles and unruly hair through which in moments of stress he rakes his rural fingers. He is wearing the same brown country-tweed jacket (an Edmonds property) that Dan'l Harrow wore in Rome Haul. He also has indefatigable industry, a bounding business precocity, and a talent, rather uncommon in country boys of 18, for slipping bribes where they will do the most good. "Do you remember my saying you were an unscrupulous rascal. Ames?" says realistic Mr. Chevalier, accepting the letter which Ames has purloined from a sea captain's safe.

By such intrepidity Young Ames makes his firm a million dollars. His salary is raised from $75 to $150 a year and he continues to sleep in the garret. He does not really mind because he knows that some day he is going to own a share in the firm and marry old Mr. Chevalier's niece. Before he succeeds, readers have been given a lively picture of U.S. business and municipal mores at their most ruggedly individualistic--against a backdrop of clipper ships, teeming wharves, swells, belles, fire fighting, and the Five Points gang wars.

At its worst Young Ames is exalted Alger. At its best it dramatizes with nostalgia and conviction an attitude toward life which used to be considered the heart of the democratic ideas. The attitude: that a man can make anything he wants of himself if he has the character to sacrifice present pleasures to future purposes; and if he does not have that character, nothing else he may have matters.

The Author. Says Walter Dumaux Edmonds of his novels from Rome Haul to Young Ames: "I'm a pretty good technician, sort of a fancy reporter who reports on the past instead of the present." Purpose of his fancy reporting: "To tell, through the daily lives of everyday people, the story of New York State and its key periods in history."

In summer Edmonds writes on the family farm at Boonville, N.Y. There he has built himself a cabin on a hilltop, can write in peace "because people won't take the trouble to walk up the hill." In the fall the whole Edmonds family moves to Cambridge, Mass., where they live in one of the reclusive streets around Harvard. There in his first-floor study Edmonds works according to an erratic method all his own. He never knows when he begins a novel how it is going to end. He never takes notes on his research. Having a very poor memory, he often has to do research over & over. He never makes carbon copies of his novels. "Something terrible is going to happen as a result," he says, "but I can't write if I've got to fiddle around with carbons in the midst of writing."

A few years ago Edmonds had to give up smoking because of incipient cancer. Now he drinks water copiously to alibi those constant work-stoppages that most writers find so necessary when facing a piece of blank paper. At such times Edmonds' three-year-old daughter often stands outside his forbidden door and sighs: "My daddy is working in there." With a pang of conscience he takes his feet off the desk, begins hammering his typewriter like Young Ames on the make.

By such methods Edmonds has secured a following of some 250,000 devoted readers ; a successful Marc Connelly dramatization of Rome Haul (The Farmer Takes a Wife, with Henry Fonda); three Henry Fonda movies (The Farmer Takes a Wife, Chad Hanna, Drums Along the Mohawk). Young Ames, too, looks as if he might some day find himself metamorphosed into Young Fonda. Author Edmonds hopes not. He is worried about the recurrence of Fonda in cinematizations of Edmonds books. "One more," says he, "might make him think he had written them."

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