Books: Table-Rapping Utopia

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Gradually James Prince got control of the Temple. His followers, mosty women, wore the world's clothes, sat tatting when they should have been minding the children. The young people played croquet and practiced to be mediums. James Prince won all but Isaiah and the oldest Templers to his belief in Hunger-ology, Care-ology, Womb-ology. By the time he came to construct a Machine Messiah according to the directions of Benjamin Franklin and the Association of Electricizers, the children were quarreling and no one in the Temple was working. The Machine was a complicated tangle of magnets, coils and rods. "Good 'Lantic Ocean," ejaculated the neighbors, "what a contraption!" James Prince's notion was to have Dinah, the Temple's purest virgin, conceive immaculately a spiritual impulse to set the Machine working. After nine months of elaborate preparation Dinah, mesmerized on a bench beside the Machine, went through the agonies of birth.

Another of James Prince's notions was that the way to find your spiritual counterpart was to breathe deeply. To public opinion, that sounded like Free Love. The stories of how Dinah went every day to the laboratory to nurse the Machine made things worse. One day a mob arrived at the Temple, burned a few buildings, destroyed the Machine and sent James Prince packing. But Isaiah got Dinah and it looked as if the Temple would carry on.

The Author. Constance Robertson, who has written one other novel, Enchanted Avenue and a mystery, Five Fated Letters (under the pseudonym Dana Scott), was born in the house of her grandfather, John Humphrey Noyes, founder of famed Oneida Community (1842 to 1880), one of whose concerns was breeding the Superman; consequently it was kicked around by public opinion till it was changed to a corporation which now manufactures silverware. The Templers are as authentic as a composite photograph. Everything in Seek-No-Further but the happy ending actually happened in one of the two dozen or so 19th Century communities which tried table-rapping and socialism.