Victoria Advocate from Victoria, Texas • 24

12 The Victoria Advocate, Sunday, TToy. 2, ANATOMY OF ME Fannie Hurst Tells Worst BOOKS And Things James TV Carter fc ANATOMY OF ME. By Fannie Hurst. Doubleday Iae. Nt Carden City, New York.

In our present-day literary world, we have many writers who plumb the depths and ascend the heights of the human soul. Others write beautifully of many things, building an exquisite edifice of words, with excellent grammar as the mortar. Still others find the mystic or the obscure their metier, and delight us with skill, while they puzzle us with their meaning. Miss Hurst ht none-of these. 4 Still, there is a definite place for a surface writer in the scheme of things.

Fannie Hurst is not a great writer, but she is i one who writes with enthusiasm. Her words push out In a great torrent, and she tries desperately to communicate to the reader just exactly how the whole thing happened. i Her latest opus is an autobiog-' raphy, divided into four main sec- ttons. The first section contains some highlights of her childhood, a childhood calculated to strangle any budding writer. speaks well for the Hurst determination that Fannie kept at it until she became a success in that very tough game.

It is also quite evi-, dent that though Miss Hurst de-aies it vehemently, she feels guilty about her escape into a wider world, and attributes heart- lessness to herself for her mild efforts at self-expression. Her colorful mother and sedate, sub-fdued father are well-characterized and much idolized throughout the book. Her fatness is also an obsession her life, she met the man who was later to become her adored husband. Her first serious suitor, and some quarrelsome travels with her father, mark this era also. In Book Three," Fannie Hurst finally living on her own in New York, which city causes her to break out in a perfect rash of exclamation points.

From here on out, things become disjointedly joyful, and she marries her pianist at last, to be happy with him until he "passes away" in Book Four. Miss Hurst's strong point has always been her fascination with people, and, much to her credit, she realizes this. "People. I love them because I am so separate from them and yet so a part of them. I love the loneliness they ate inflicting upon me as well aa their nearness and their clearness.

I love mem for i weakness and their strength and the strength they bring to my weakness." They are definitely her strength and her weakness. Where she shines brightest is in her writing about the people, and also, there is where she sometimes stumbles and become trite. However, Fannie Hurst has two things which many a greater writer does not have humility and sincerity. These two qualities come through the pages of her rambling autobiography. She speaks for herself quite well: "I wish I could say with Saroyan: 'I am proud to be the writer I I am not.

But I am proud to be the writer who still aspires to be the writer I am not and is ready to struggle on and on CAMPBELL. SUBLIME TO RIDICULOUS Van Dor en to Kerouac 1 tlf FANNIE HURST with Miss Hurst not the obses-' 1 skm with diet which was to come much later in life but a sensitivity, a self-repugnance. These feelings showed up in her early writing, to. An her heroines became long, lean, and droopy' like a Reylon ad. Book Two begins with her entrance as a freshman into Washington University.

A new world unfolds here for Fannie. She becomes intoxicated with the delights of intellectual pursuits and acquires an awe for the scholarly which was to follow her all her life. During this period of he had two sons, taught and wrote. Some of his finest pages here trace various poems to the moment of grief, happiness or triumph which Inspired them. One pupil was Whittaker Chambers, whose persistent "cloak-and-dagger air" made it too difficult for Van Doren to believe his stories about danger-" from Communist murderers or about the Hiss affair, either.

But this book ignores the hurry-burly and melodrama, though it has its heat and passion and This is tranquility itself. Only Mark Van Doren would ever have known an Army captain who tiptoed into the barracks to l' spread blankets over his chilly recruits while they slept. "The world, I am certain, ia a terrible place, but I am just as certain that II love it." be writes. The world lis pretty happy to have him 'aboard, too. No one else ia his literary generation has written such engaging reminiscences.

-THE DHARMA BUMS. By Jock Kerouac. Viking. $3JS. Ray Smith is riding a freight out of Los Angeles when we first meet him, the narrator and spokesman for Kerouac, in mis new novel by the leading representative of out fictional young Beat Generation.

He is in the company of a "Dharma bum," a religious wanderer, a man seek- log truth; be is one himself; and he will spend most of bis time in this story, as he tells it, with the original D. Japhy Ryder. Japhy is often seen in the full lotus position, that is, crossed legs with ankles on thighs, and telling his juju beads; and there is a whole Oriental ethical vocabulary to which, these busy-body truth-seekers constantly revert: Salapattl, bhikku, Buddham, Sarnam, Gocchami, Kwannon, Kasyapa, Tathagata, Maitreya, ON THE WEST SIDE of New York's Central Park, sandwiched Id among the glistening white towers wherein dwell the' wealthy nabobs of pardon the expression the garment center, is a modest brownstone structure known as the Hotel Des Artistes. -Fronting on a comparatively quiet side street instead of on Central Park West, so that its occupants do not have to trip over the cloak-and-suiters, the hotel ia home to as varied a collection of artists and writers ever assembled outside of Greenwich Village ia toe old days. To reside la the Hotel Des Artistes tor one thing, that the artist fat his struggle toward the ultimate whatever it is) has passed the starving-ia-a-garret stage but has not quite arrived at the Connecticut-couatry-estate stage.

But for some whose talents have placed them la the posJ- Moa of being able to buy a Connecticut country, estate for every day In the week, or month, the Hotel Des Artistes still provides enough of the old nostalgia to use as a headquarters while in fee city. Among these is Fannie Hurst, whose floppy black hat going in and out of the lobby lends possibly the classiest note of distinction the Hotel Des Artistes will ever have. For whatever anybody says about Fannie Hurst that she was a spoiled rich girl; that she basked in the limelight of her husband, the late distinguished pianist Jacques Danieison; that she was a hack writer who hit on a cheap but successful formula nobody an deny that she brought romance into the lives of millions of poor shopgirls. -v ELSEWHERE on these pages today is a review of Miss Hurst's -latest work the memoirs which almost everybody of distinction i cashing off nowadays when he or she approaches the magic three" score-and-ten. Two things seem worthy of comment about Fannie Hurst's -autobiography in addition to the formal review.

One is her choice of a tkle "Anatomy of Me." This is probably the happiest and most fitting title she could have chosen, for Fannie's anatomy, outside of her writing, probably has occupied more of her time than anything else. When It was fashionable to be nothing but akin-and-booes, Fannie would starve herself until the poor thing looked like an illustration for a oke she used to tell about Constance Bennett's disrobing looking like "the an veiling of a golf Then when that style changed and the full figure became do; sfgueur again, Fannie would purposely abandon her diet and immediately put on not twenty but twenty pounds too many, 'v v- THE SECOND noteworthy comment about Fannie Hursf autobiography is that she personally admits she's got quite a nerve offering her memoirs in the mid-Twentieth Century. "Actually," Hiss Hurst admitted in an interview last week with aa Associated Press writer, "this la not a very fashionable autobiography. I never had to Mft myself from an alcoholic valley, I bad no spectacular vices to overcome, no up-from-the- gutter experience, no rags-to-ricnes, Bttlo turmoil. My book has none of the Ingredients to meet tfao current tread.

It Is quieter and concerned with a conflict of (he spirit which may not be so interesting to the public." AS A BORN WRITER-that's really the only kind there are Fannie Hurst reached a stature that made her a friend and confidante of several literary greats, among them Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Preiser. that la not the only world in which she lived. Like another great writer, William Faulkner, she was primarily fan 1 teres! ed la the small people," and so for many years she lived with "the small people" to see what made them tick. Servant girls and department store clerks, bus drivers and people forced to live in tenements these were her concern, and so she moved into the slums of New York and worked in the sweat shops of the Garment Center (whose owners are her neighbors uptown near the Hotel Des Artistes). THAT'S the Fannie Hurst that not many "big people" knew.

And note she is again an acknowledged craftsman in her trade ad-' nutting something else about herself in her twilight years: "It was a sort of compulsion to do my memoirs. To write an honest autobiography is a painful experience it hi tearing your veil of illusion and yoa suddenly Rod yourself standing naked before your own eyes. And there is a certain security in veils. But if yoa have the compulsion, you persist even if it draws yen on to the cliffs edge. Yoa must go on." is bard to envision Fannie, the self-confident Fannie of the floppy black hat who used to sweep through the lobby of the Hotel Des Artistes as majestically as a Fifth Avenue bus, admitting ati tbeee secrets about her inner anatomy, but she goes on: "Autobiography realty a an expression of egotism it has be.

And aa author writes on the assumption that people are going to be interested." But, and here her honesty fakty shines, she adds: "In the first place, no human being going to demote himself, even to himself. Always, even when admitting be was wrong, it Is hard to take the blame, to admit was his fault, tor matter how hard wo may try. one sees oneself grotesquely a one sees oneself In a Coney Island mirror no matter how hard one tries to come clean." In a way, it Is too bad we have already dropped the three-score-and-ten hint about Fannie's age. On second thought. It's dashed unfair to use a generality like that about somebody born Oct.

19, 889. which very plainly makes Famue Hurst not 70 but a vastly cFannieHursl, we'll gladly forget the poetic three-ncore-and-ten reference and leave her at 69. She can stay 69 for several years if she likes. If it were possible, we'd even make ner fa, or 49 again. v- THAT'S THE LEAST anyone oouM do for the creator of the immortal "Back Street." Bodhisattva Mahasattva, mandala, sutra, Diprankara indeed when Ray mentions Sinatra, or Cheddar, you're caught unawares and think for a moment it's still the higher life instead of a.

crooner and a cheese, i' There is a lot of drinking of California wines, and every now and then the boys turn earthy and common on us, dance in the nude, and Indulge In "yabyum," which means -in Kerouachese a good time with the girls. But this ia in the main a search, in which prayer takes a part, for a sew and better life. The boys go climb a mountain, undergo the trials of the witderness, look down on a promised land, and come out of ft grandly self-sufficient, in krve with the unsullied air of snow-covered peaks, and scornful of cities, determined to be better men and sit on a rock and meditate themselves into a state of goodness and grace. This is more "On the Road," the no 1 which first called Kerouac to our attention; Ray bums rides on freights, or hitchhikes, or rides by bus up and down the Pacific coast, cornea oast, goes west again, never stays still. W.

G. ROGERS. "The Finest in Stationery and All the heat in Books COOK MART on the Arcade In the Village Dial HI SS-m THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK VAN DOREN. Harcourt, Brace. $5.75.

The name Van Doren for Mark, Pulitzer prize winning poet who here tells his enviable story; tor Dorothy, his wife, the writer and editor; for Carl, his brother, Pulitzer prize winning historian, biographer and novelist; for Irita, the editor who was Carl's" wife; and indeed alsofor Charles, son of Mark and Dorothy and most widely known of them all for his phenomenal success on TV's "Twenty-One" quiz program (he name of Van Doren, then, solidly and eminently established ia American 'letters, must be familiar to every reader. Who is not in debt to their books, or to the. magazines and papers they edited, or has not studied in- their classes, or met some: one else 'who did? i Chief of the tribe today is this autobiographer, doctor's son, born in Hope, 111., in 1894, brought up in nearby Urbana, graduate of the University of Illinois, Columbia Ph. and author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry, novels, short stories, biographies and other literary works. "We were a reading he says; "my parents believed in books, and had many in the house." Though it also seems his -first teacher had to pick him up bodily and carry him, screaming and kicking, into his first class, he was committed early and irrevocably to reading and writing.

He followed his brother Carl in and out of college, editors' chairs and publishers' offices and, by one year, onto the Pulitzer honors list, and said of their first "I merely missed him as a wall would be missed if it fell out of a house." He traveled abroad in the 1920s and again in the 1950s. In between.