NUMBER ONE—John Dos Passes—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).
John Dos Passes' first novel since Adventures of a Young Man (TIME, June 5, 1939) is a sad, harsh, funny companion piece to that disenchanted odyssey of a left-wing idealist. The hero of the former novel was young Glenn Spotswood, whose altruistic hopes wound up in death at the hands of Spanish Fascists. Hero of Number One is Glenn's tougher elder brother Tyler, private secretary, ghost writer and political handyman to Chuck Crawford, who calls himself Number One and is the most noisome, best-drawn demagogue in U.S. fiction.
Tyler Spotswood, in his early 405, can still sourly remember the Washington childhood he spent "in a yellowback walk-up apartmenthouse off a stagnant tree-choked street, with a preachy bookish father who was always broke and a sweet mother with trailing sleeves and a goody-goody kid brother who was a hopeless sap." For the hopeless sap, the mother's boy, idealism was all but inevitable. For the harder, more intelligent Tyler, cynicism was just as surely the outcome—cynicism, and that fatal softness towards unscrupulous proficiency to which cynics are liable.
Chuck Crawford, who combined the curly poll and hyperthyroid eyes of Huey Long with the minnesinging methods of "Pappy" O'Daniel, was crook and virtuoso enough to infatuate Tyler. Tyler gave him all his craft, all his nerve, all his strength, short of the little it took to totter through stale beds and suicidal bottles and to nurse occasional fantasies of the pleasure it would be to shoot his boss and make off with his hardheaded wife, Sue Ann.
"Chores for the People." Even when he was just a Congressman, and a couple of timid, rustic constituents paid him a Washington visit, Chuck Crawford could blather, "I ain't nothin' but ole Chuck Crawford that used to help you do your chores those cole mornin's while the missus was rustlin' up breakfast, an' now I'm here doin' chores for the American people."
Chuck is seen down home (apparently Texas) in the whirlwind campaign which takes him into the U.S. Senate. The day's timetable alone, as it revolves in Tyler Spotswood's drink-ravaged brain, is as sharp as a newsreel — "8 o'clock, Pleasant Valley; 10 o'clock, Oddfellows' Hall in Arrowhead Springs; noon, Poplar Fork, barbecue at the ball park, baseball game; 3:30 at the livestock exchange in Harmony, auction off prize mule; Eberhart in time to talk to the workers coming out of the packing plant; then Horton, the Mexican Market, Sam Houston Square, Technical High School, torchlight parade starts Sabine and 12th, then the big meeting at the Grand Opera House."
The campaign goes better & better for 80 solid pages: Chuck's big white Lincoln and the sound-wagon (complete with hillbillies) which herald it; his miserable, bladder-bursting, exploited little boy; his ocarina solo in Every Man a Millionaire, the campaign song he wrote for himself;* Tyler's talks with gambling Campaign Funder Norman Stauch and other politicos; and such Crawford orations as the following: