Books: Ten Dullest Authors Lawrence Number One

Ten Dullest Authors Lawrence Number One —James Tied for Second

Epilogue to the recent syndicated siege of ” Books That Have Helped Me Most,” “Books to Take On a Desert Island,” and their like, eleven well known writers and critics, questioned by Vanity Fair, ” Who are, to your mind, the ten dullest authors “I ” make frank confession of their pet literary abominations. The questionees are as diverse as possible —George Jean Nathan, Christopher Morley, Edna Ferber, James Branch Cabell, Hugh Walpole are five of the number — and they certainly agitate the pedestals of many accepted literary deities, old and new.

Dostoievski, George Eliot, Browning, Cervantes, Rabelais, Whitman, James Joyce, James Barrie, Amy Lowell, Kipling, Conrad, Dickens, Scott, Wordsworth, Wells — all have their staunch supporters for the poison ivy wreath. Some of the critics give reasons. Comments Thomas Beer upon St. Paul, his second nominee : ” They left him alone with the Christian church and he made it what it is today.” Upon Blaise Pascal : ” I am told by one young enough to be an authority that ‘ Pascal’s sad, burning thought descends to the inmost seat of being.’ Let it work while I sleep.” Ernest Boyd describes J. M. Barrie as ” the sentimental Scot raised to the nth degree, Harry Lauder without kilts.” Elinor Wylie remarks of George Eliot: “her dark brown binding got into her style.” H. L. Mencken, voting for Eden Phillpotts, says candidly: “Phillpotts seems to me . . . the worst novelist now in practice in England; certainly no small eminence,” while Christopher Morley explains his only putting down nine items instead of ten thus : ” I thought it best to leave one place open in case Burton Rascoe (a fellow-nominator) should publish a book.”

Oddly enough, D. H. Lawrence, enbeavered idol of the ultra moderns, leads all the rest in the race for oblivion. His name appears on five lists, while no other candidates, except Henry James (three) and Paul Claudel (three), have more than two supporters.

Perhaps the number of those omitted is even more interesting than the list selected. ” What ! No mention of X? Of Y!” one cries at once. “Of Z and all the other secretive letters of the alphabet?” It is suggested, however, that you make out your own list.

Homer Croy

Bucolic Missourian, He Sings of the Modern Farm

The author of West of the Water Tower* is tall, shy, wears a loose Oxford tie, is actually modest. He is also from Missouri. That, however, is not why he published his very successful novel anonymously. Homer Croy, having been a writer of humorous stories in the past, was afraid that the public wouldn’t take him seriously when he wrote of the problems of adolescence and smalltown life in the Southwest. I had met him when his Boon Stop had just been published. He has changed little since then, except in the matter of his literary style.

Croy was brought up in northern Missouri, and loves it. He says that he thinks most people misunderstand the nature of the country. It is as much Southern as Northern, he avers, with some of the characteristics of both sections. As a child he remembers being brought in from his father’s farm and seeing the water tower looming on the horizon. To him it meant the romance and the mystery of the town.

He has just come back from gathering new material in old fields for his next novel, which is to be a realistic portrayal of modern farm life — farm life with all the latest devices of agricultural colleges and modern science, including radios and player pianos — farm life as it is lived in Missouri. Most American farm novels, he says, have been stories of remembered boyhoods. His will be of things as they are now. Moreover, he plans to tell his story with the addition of humor. This will be no grim comparison to Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have been courageous enough to destroy a 30,000 word start on the new book,” he said, “if I hadn’t sold the motion picture rights of West of the Water Tower. At any rate, it takes courage to destroy that much copy, doesn’t it?”

I think that Homer Croy is one of the most honest craftsmen I’ve ever encountered. He disarms the critic by telling him exactly the things he had already thought about West of the Water Tower. He is modest, determined and hard working.

To me the character of the father in this latest novel of Croy’s is one of the most powerful in recent fiction. It is a sort of American counterpart of Archdeacon Brandon in Hugh Walpole’s The Cathedral. Adrian Plummer, however, is more robust. He is the product of a sturdier holiness, a perfervid American protestantism. If I have grown a trifle weary of the realistic sex novel, it is my fault, not Homer Croy’s. He has done an excellent piece of work in West of the Water Tower. It is now being dramatized, incidentally, and, I hear, is to be the next motion picture made by the always appealing Glenn Hunter. J. F.

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion.

STRICTLY BUSINESS — F. Morton Howard — Dutton ($2.00). The crew of the Jane Gladys were happy rascals — their ways and their tricks were peculiar, mirthful and nefarious — the tradesmen of numerous English ports spoke with pain of their uncanny agility in avoiding the payment of little bills. But when the Jane Gladys was sold, they found themselves stranded in Shorehaven — penniless but for their wits. How well their wits served them in gaining occupation and fortune from various unsuspecting persons furnishes the theme of the ten more or less interlocking short stories in the volume. Occasionally they overreached themselves. But in general their merry rogueries were highly profitable. An amusing book in the W. W. Jacobs tradition.

LONELY FURROW — Maud Diver —Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). Colonel Ian Challoner, soldier-civilian, lover of India, was married to a wife who hated the country he loved — a wife whose devotion went chiefly to her sons and then to dress and a rather feeble social ambition. After 20 years of marriage, Challoner finally fell in love with the woman he should have married in the first place. But the situation was impossible — there was no way out; so Challoner finally succumbed to enteric fever like a gentleman, happy at least in the knowledge, that he had had to sacrifice neither his love nor his ideals, and that his favorite child, a daughter, Eve, having found out her mother’s shallowness, would henceforth befriend the woman he had really loved. An old-fashioned three-decker of a novel, leisurely, mildly interesting, carefully written, far too long.

BAROQUE — Louis Joseph Vance—Dutton ($2.00) Whenever twins appeared in the Barocco family, one of them was sure to be a bad egg. This was annoying because the twins always died at the same moment — it was one of those things that ran in the family. Well — take one good, beautiful female twin, one evil, crafty male twin, mix with a young American lawyer and shake up with the Camorra, a proper number of daggers, assassinations, chloroformings, police, drug-smugglers, good intentions, etc, etc.— let virtue triumph on the last page — cool, serve, then sit up all night till you finish the book. A thriller that does not belie Mr. Vance’s well-earned reputation as a literary chef of ingenious mysteries.

* Reviewed in TIME, June 11.