Linden on the Saugus Branch

IN Linden on the Saugus Branch the cosmopolitan Elliot Paul offers, in the form of a boyhood memoir, an elegant blend of fact and fiction. It is very like his The Last Time I Saw Paris in mood, but at the same time very different in content, as different as Paris is from the outskirts of Malden, Massachusetts. It is a fact, I presume, that Mr. Paul was born and raised in that desolate region; but beyond that, the mixture of probable, possible, and highly improbable is so smooth that the taste of the original ingredients disappears.

A small town in Massachusetts at the turn of the century is Mr. Paul’s scene, and his stage properties are the usual ones — horsecars, the village drugstore, the little branch railroad that connected Linden to the big city, the local drinking place, and the church. There is the feeling of the near-by sea, and a smattering of local legend; and through the book are sprinkled magic names that will douse the exiled Bostonian in ninety-proof nostalgia — Cobb, Bates & Yerxa; Houghton and Dutton; Raymond’s (where, although Mr. Paul does not say so, U bot the hat); the Castle Square Hotel; the North Station.

The book jacket refers to the anecdotes in Linden on the Saugus Branch as fortified memories. Well, that’s the way anecdotes should be treated — liberally fortified with invention. Mr. Paul starts, for instance, with a neurotic young schoolma’am. There is one in every town, and I assume Linden was no exception. He provides a Rabelaisian explanation for her condition, a melodramatic denouement to her story, and a sentimental happy ending. If it is not the real story of the schoolma’am, it is what it ought to have been. Oscar Wilde told us, after all, that the function of art is to inform life.

The reader must accept Mr. Paul’s memories on their face value; or else he will occasionally find himself in a mildly argumentative state, and inclined to quarrel with the author’s blithe intimations that this particular spot in the coastal swamps of New England was populated with gourmets, philosophers, liberal thinkers, lovable spinsters, open-handed uncles, priapic males, and indulgent females. Fortification or no fortification, one must register a formal protest at the idea that the collective love-life of any New England village in the early nineteen-hundreds could have been as feverish as in Mr. Paul’s Linden.

In these days of universal insecurity, the sense of the past grows stronger, and with it the irrational urge to step back across the years and make life what it should have been instead of what it was. Mr. Paul demonstrates that this can be done, at least in a book.

RUSSELL MALONEY