Good Will

SALSETTE DISCOVERS AMERICA-Jules Remains-Knopf ($2.50).

This book, by the tireless fabricator of Men of Good Will, is not one of the series; it is a graceful little vacation-piece on the old subject of The Visiting Foreigner. This time the foreigner is no charmer of women's clubs but a likable middle-aged Frenchman, the exiled professor Albert Salsette. He gets to Manhattan in the spring of 1941, and his old friend Jules Remains shows him around. They see little of that world outside Greater New York. But as far as they go, their sharp eyes, fresh minds and Gallic talent for analysis and for phrase contrive a keenly agreeable pair of new spectacles for the over-habituated native.

"You feel so unmistakably," Salsette remarks, "that nobody here is afraid. Yes, that's what it is! Immense power; and with it immense freedom. Isn't it perfectly astounding that the two should go together?"

But he is by no means myopic. He observes, in the gait of the women, "a kind of serenely confident ostentation"; he notes too that they are bold with their eyes in the streets, and the men shy, almost to a reversal of sex. To him the well-known myth about the dominant American female is incorrect; "it seems to me rather the cult of woman, a little in the spirit of the troubadours. ..." When Remains explains to him that American men, though you may talk with them freely about the French or Chinese or Tahitian, have "a curious-and in a way admirable and touching-sense of modesty about their own women," he exclaims: "But in that case they are a wonderful race, these men! They have other gods besides their money and their work."

M. Salsette's remarks about U.S. food & drink are courteous but not startlingly novel; he has some very nice things to say, however, for the complicated, charming toy, his kitchenette, and he manages to make the luxuries of a U.S. bathroom, for the first time, worthy of literature.

In a brilliant set piece, Romains leads him into the deafening shadows of Manhattan's Chatham Square, for an infernal glimpse of the U.S. "Middle Ages." Later, in "the hypnotic rhythm" of a Parkway drive to Jones Beach, they move on a road so magnificently designed that it makes a car "an instrument capable of making a landscape sing"; among many other cars in "an incredibly vast dance," as if some all-but-cosmic power had caught a whole race into planetary motion.

Salsette and his guide are kinder than natives might be, but they are honest. One realizes, in Salsette's summation, a deep genuineness, an almost embarrassing tribute. "This is what I call a materialistic civilization," he exclaims. "And I like it."

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