BOOKS
471
was a professor at San Francisco State; Nixon reflected an instant, then
said, "You need a bigger auditorium up there."
John F. Kennedy may have shown us more style than substance
during his short time as President, but at least it was exciting having
him in the White House. Lyndon Johnson may turn out to have rather
more substance than style-not a bad thing perhaps. But Richard Nixon,
to judge by
Mark the Glove
Boy
(Harris's first job as a boy was deliver–
ing gloves), would have given us neither style nor substance; winning
was all that seemed to matter to him: "Mr. Nixon was unaware that
private success might exist side by side with public loss, for he was of
the breed of American Success, whose standard was quantification, elec–
tion, publicity, the certification of numbers, and the adoration of the
majority. He knew no other ... he possessed no farther vision of the end."
Mark Harris is for vision, not larger auditoriums. And if impartiality
eludes him here, he succeeds in suggesting that, once attained, it need
not be a virtue.
Richard Kluger
TOO MANY VOICES
THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS.
By
Muriel Sperk. Alfred
A.
Knopf.
$3.95.
SEVEN DAYS OF MOURNING.
By
L.
S. Simckes. Rendom House. $3.95.
The Girls of Slender Means
is a detached, ironic eulogy of a
group of gently impoverished, middle class young ladies-rectors'
daughters, publishers' assistants, elocution teachers-working in London
during the final war months of 1945, and residing at the May of Teck
Club, a hostel of Edwardian origin which exists for "the Pecuniary
Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below
the age of Thirty years...." Cast in the (approximate) present, in
which one of the girls is a successful gossip columnist, another the owner
of a thriving model agency, the novel looks back to "long ago in 1945"
when "all the nice people [in England] were poor, and few were nicer,
as nice people come, than these girls at Kensington who ... gazed out
on the green summer evenings" with a light in their eyes "that re-
