THE TOP RUNGS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29146, 5 March 1960, Page 3

THE TOP RUNGS

California Street. By Niven Busch. Jonathan Cape 414 pp. Pax. By Middleton Keifer MacDonald 286 pp. Poule de luxe. By Susan Yorke MacDonald 256 pp. These three outstanding American novels convey a message and pinpoint a moral. In different ways each of them sets out to prove that the pursuit of happiness, a legitimate national aspiration, tends to become bedevilled by complex ambitions which by their very nature are destructive of real values and consequently of hope for human felicity. "California Street” has a King Lear motif, though the rugged determination of Anchylus Saxe to defeat the machination of the two daughters who seek to rob him of his journalisic kingdom is devoid both of self-pity and timewasting recriminations. Anchylus has risen the hard way to proprietorship of the San Francisco “Day.” Marriage with the boss’s daughter had helped him in his early years, but his love for the high-minded, gently born Jessica Rupke is deep and genuine, though he can never match her socially. Of his three daughters only Pamela, child of an early indiscretion, and adopted with characteristic nobility by Jessica, matches her father’s capacity for true affection, and he himself is not the object of it. Alexandra, beautiful and tempestuous, elopes at her coming-out dance with a man she doesn't love, and thereafter goes her amoral way, promoting scandals which are duly recorded in the social columns of the “Day” by the gossip-writer, Letty Meeker, who is Alexandra’s remorseless enemy. Sharon, equally selfcentred, marries Brad Iverson, an ambitious journalist, and thenceforth finds herself offered up single-mindedly to her husband’s career. Within a few days of their mother’s death both women combine with their father’s business enemies to oust him from his throne; Alexandra, for the sole purpose of sacking the insufferable Letty, and Sharon obediently pursuing her thankless role of power-builder to Brad and the chain of newspapers he serves. In the grim test at the stockholders’ meeting only Pamela, secure in a humble but happy marriage, aligns herself on her father’s side, and the situation builds up to a strong climax. Of Pamela, Anchylus says “There’s love in her . . . that was what my late wife had love. Rarest thing in the, world. Lots of talk about it. How many people ever felt it? . . . ” It is a fitting tribute, and a fitting comment on his strife-ridden world.

In “Pax,” the authors (Middleton Keifer is the joint pseudonym of two public-relations experts) set about exposing one of the more merciless rackets in American big business. Th? firm of Balen Pharmaceuticals has a respected name. Their profits are steady and their products are mostly to be had only on a doctor’s prescription. When Al Shively, the none-too-scrupulous head of the advertising department, discovers that a harmless cold-cure which had failed in popularity can be transformed into a tranquilliser without altering its basic ingredients, he determines to exploit this discovery to the full, and have it sold over the counter without any cramping safeguards. The fortuitous arrival of Bedford Montrose, a naive young Army officer fresh from a U.N. assignment in the embattled Far Easterin state of Baopnung, to convey his personal thanks to the firm for sending drugs to repel an epidemic, gives Shively a hea-ven-sent opportunity to further his plans. Together with Joe Logan, public relations officer of the Balen organisation, he induces Montrose, shortly to be known as Buddy among his nation-wide admirers, to go on a lecture tour,

ostensibly to stress America’s part in championing underprivileged nations, but actually to pave the way for Balen’s new project. Buddy proves immensely popular as a lecturer, but the processin of his set speeches, and his own inherent vanity gradually undermine the integrity which is his main drawing-power The promptings of a crooked politician a fatal charm with avidly amorous women and the whole demoralising set-up of a streamlined publicity contrive together to ruin him, though his bare-faced exploitation of a madly infatuated girl hardly seems in character Shively over-reaches himself and comes near to kil’ng his firm; Buddy’s grandiose S’hem for becoming a Congressman falls through and he loses his girl. The boomerang effects of crooked dealing was never more fitly demonstrate’. than in this very powerful book “Poule de luxe” is a skilful tour-de-force, the subject being the competitive spirit of multimillionaires in which art has no relation to any of its avowed objects, but provides the counters in the gambling game for fame between tycoons. Music is Genevieve Crownendam’s obsession, and the inner core of her ambition is to outshine her husband Old Jasper, whose pet pursuit is Old Masters, as a patron of genius in the social columns of the New York press. Almost as incredible is the unswerving determination of Micheline, the one-time waif, to become old Jasper’s mistress in order to acquire from him his New York mansion as a setting for her lover’s musical activities. Installed in a luxurious flat by Jasper, Micheline is well acquainted with the interlocking worlds of art-dealers and patrons; it is her cherished secret that none of them is aware that she is acquainted with any_jof the others. None of these glossy, over-indulged naive individuals have any human appeal but the inevitable implications of tragedy H a world so full of rivalries and cross-pur-poses have a kind of fascination for the reader. Micheline achieves her ambition though not by the means she has so painstakingly employed and is thus enabled to marry her lover. What their chances are of happiness in the hothouse world they must inhabit is anyone’s guess.