Asian Friends

BARE FEET IN THE PALACE (370 pp.) --Agnes Newton Keith--Little, Brown ($5).

"I know just what your book will be," one sophisticated Filipino told Author (Land Below the Wind, Three Came Home) Keith. "You will write about your servants, your cook and lavandera, your houseboy and your driver. And you will be sweet and understanding about them." Mostly, he is right.

Author Keith's Philippines is still a place where buses are haunted by vengeful spirits of killed pedestrians and passengers delightedly applaud when a driver outraces a rival, where the press seriously reports the latest woman to give birth to miraculous twins, one a man-child and the other "the loveliest, dainty little four-legged roan mare that the neighbors have ever seen."

But Agnes Keith is a serious woman. The wife of a forestry expert working in the islands, she hopped perilously through the mountains by plane to talk to resettled Huk rebels, ventured into areas where two U.S. professors had recently been murdered because they inadvertently offended Ifuagao tribesmen, watched appalled the privileged Manila society where "ladies of distinction paid a thousand dollars per dress, per ball," while "a hundred thousand Filipinos had no floors to sleep on." What moved her most was the struggle of the proud, engaging Filipino people toward democracy, culminating in the stirring election of 1953--a "miracle" in which the people triumphed in the person of President Ramon Magsaysay. All election night long, the Manila radio rebroadcast calls from outlying areas pleading for protection from goons lurking near the polling places--and all night long Mrs. Keith listened to the pleas and sometimes to the sound of gunfire, as the aroused voters fought their way to the ballot boxes. Later she followed the bare foot, wondering peasants into the hitherto forbidden Malacanan Palace to sit admir ingly at the feet of their new President. Author Keith suffers from the conviction that every least thing that happens to her, her husband and their only son George is of overwhelming interest, and she records their conversation in some of the least plausible dialogue to appear outside Smilin' Jack. Her saving grace is an ability to see men of many colors not as quaint objects but as individual human beings, and a warm faith in Asian friends which is refreshingly free of condescension.

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