Books: The Southampton Story

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LAND I HAVE CHOSEN—Ellin Berlin—Doubleday Doran ($2.50).

By any standard, Land I Have Chosen is a remarkable first novel. It is remarkable for: 1) its plot, a rigorous, old-fashioned narrative with beginning, middle and end; 2) its portrait of Anne Brooke, a well-meaning, attractive girl who begins as a Long Island debutante, ends as a Nazi sympathizer. But the book's chief interest is that it is the work of Mrs. Irving Berlin.

The Story. In 1928, at Southampton, L.I., Anne was in her element. She wore a short white dress, drove a blue car with red wheels, went to all the parties, sang, danced, shivered at the thought of growing old, and struggled with the great problem of her life: should she marry Paul Craven?

Nephew and heir of a fabulously wealthy speculator, Paul was handsome, broad-shouldered, faithful, devoted to Anne. At ler first girlhood dances he had been a protector among the strange, stony-faced little boys in their first dinner jackets. Anne intended to marry Paul, but would not set a date, and when he left for Chicago on business—warning her not to have a last fling in his absence—she was half relieved to see him go.

She should have listened to him. Under the surface of Southampton talk about Al Smith, the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, life was more like the life of Tsarist Russia than any debutante could understand. In Paul's absence, Anne fell in love with Marco Ghiberti, a mysterious Italian visitor (Southampton had just recovered from the visits of Lindbergh and the Prince of Wales) who was rumored to be nobility. It was a joke. Marco was a Harvard law student whose father had run a restaurant in Italy. Nothing spoiled the joke except that Anne had promised to marry Marco.

When the story got around, the girls passing Anne and Marco hummed I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby. Scraps of conversation from adjoining tables reached them: "I haven't laughed so much since that Russian prince turned out to be a soda clerk. . . ." Anne broke down, sent Marco away, married Paul.

The remainder of Land I Have Chosen is the story of Anne's disintegration. With a hidden satisfaction she found herself watching the great fortunes crash in the Depression, was ashamed of herself for not feeling sorry. Presently she was no longer ashamed of herself. Running parallel with the story of Anne is the life of Lisa Blessing, a German actress who accepts the U.S. as Anne, in the end, accepts Nazi Germany.

Less well done, Lisa's story complicates the book, blurs its outlines, is tiresome reading compared with the vivid scenes of life & death on the Southampton beachhead. Readers are likely to forget the long talks about politics. They will remember Anne's shock at seeing Marco at her best friend's wedding, the families crowding together in poverty after the suicides and heart failures of the crash. When rich Uncle Bruce Craven went broke, and was charged with having stolen $6,500,000, Marco was the lawyer on the other side. When Uncle Bruce asked his friends how his trial was going, somebody handed him a package. It contained a revolver and a note: "This is the gun that Albert used."