What can the Mattergy?

THE EXPLORATIONS OF GEORGE BURTON (294 pp.)--John F. Wharton--Simon & Schuster ($3).

"Yesterday, on my [60th] birthday,' wrote Britain's sardonic Economist George Schwartz recently in his London Sunday Times column, "I came to a great resolve. I have resigned from the intelligentsia ... I have had enough of it. I have decided to line up with the damfool section of the population, the 95%, meaning you ... As a ci-devant intellectual I was one of the elect. I knew what it was all about, whereas the supreme characteristic of you, my new associates, is that you don't know what it is all about . Where do you fit in? How do you fit in? What is there to fit into? You don't know. You haven't the macroscopic approach, and the fact that you have to look up that word places you at once."

Many who follow the macroscopic Explorations of George Burton are likely in the end to go scudding off with Economist Schwartz to the snugger valleys of the damfool wilderness. For Author John F. Wharton, Manhattan lawyer who made a name for himself with The Theory and Practice of Earning a Living, has now taken on a far more staggering job: a sum-up of modern physics and psychology, and an answer to modern man's anguished cry: "Where do I fit in? What is there to fit into?"

Come, Sweet Death. Author Wharton tries to make the maze of modern experimentation seem simple and straightforward by using the Philip Wylie technique of creating a few plain-talking "characters" and letting them unburden themselves to Whartonesque psychiatrists and sages--thus giving a coat of fictional jam to his strictly nonfictional pills. Chief of these characters is successful, middle-aged Businessman George Burton; chief of George's problems is simply that "for months he had been sinking into deeper and deeper depression . . . was alternately bored and afraid . . . Hardly a day passed that the thought did not cross his mind . . . that he wished he were dead."

"[It is] pretty clear," says the psychiatrist to whom George betakes himself, "that a deep unconscious conflict in you [has] been working its way to the surface for a long time." This is more than poor George is given a chance to do himself, as the analyst gallops him down into the Freudian underworld and introduces him to such alarming spooks as his own ego, superego and lusty id. "Do you mean that I have three personalities, but am only conscious of one?" howls poor George.

Come, Creation Current. Freud is merely Wharton's departure point. Before George is through with his intellectual face-lift he has rubbed shoulders with Newton, Einstein, Wilhelm (The Function of the Orgasm) Reich, Posture-Pundit F. Matthias Alexander. He has Browsed about among brain waves, cellular division, extrasensory perception, precognition. He has seen God as Whitehead and Jeans imagined him, and he can swallow without a qualm such strange phrases as "psychic penicillin" and "mattergy" (Wharton's word for interchangeable matter and energy).

By the end, George has built himself a faith that he can fit into--one in which "mattergy" more or less subs for the Holy Ghost, the New Testament teachings electrically re-emerge as "the love-and-creation current," and Satan is back in his old doghouse with a new name on the door ("death-and-destruction current"). This may not prove much of a cure for mental depression, but Explorations will at least give readers: 1) a rough reflection of the problems that torment the average man, and 2) a ski-run down the labyrinthine ways that modern pioneers are exploring in search of new answers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.