Owen Johnson

He Never Wrote “Flaming Youth”

When Owen Johnson was a boy at Lawrenceville, he must have played the part of a boy for all it was worth; likewise when he was at Yale, where it is known that he entered into undergraduate activity and argument with heat. Presently, he must have entered, too, into the life of the world, as his The Salamander bears witness. The F. Scott Fitzgerald of his generation, he has maintained his ability to report manners and customs with humor, combined with insight and decorum as his new novel Blue Blood* proves.

Owen Johnson is thoroughly of New York City. He likes it. He likes its peopleeven though he may recognize their charming weaknesses. He enjoys its clubs and its life. He will impress you, when you chance to meet him, as a pleasant, somewhat detached gentleman who looks at life with the eyes of a reporter, yet lives, himself—a most difficult feat, and one which those cursed with too much sense of humor cannot accomplish. Yet there is no denying Mr. Johnson’s sense of humor —witness The Varmint, The Tennessee Shad, the later Skippy Bedelle.

His father is the dignified Robert Underwood Johnson, onetime editor of the Century, more lately U. S. Ambassador to Italy, recipient of many honors from many countries and recently author of a volume of chatty reminiscences, Remembered Yesterdays.

The younger Johnson has written many novels, countless short stories,a play and other types of literary fodder. Those who suspected him of writing Flaming Youth could not very well have known his conservative habits. To see him in golf clothes is to be assured that he never could have indulged in the frankly disturbing pages of that sexed masterpiece. Incidentally, when I discovered who actually did write it the other day, I had a bad half hour.

For a time it looked as though Owen Johnson was about to become embittered by changes in social custom he notes about him. His The Wasted Generation, although a most popular book, to me, at least, seemed muddy in its psychology; but after a new venturing into boy life in Skippy Bedelle he seems to have sloughed off his coil of weariness and there is renewed vitality of vision in Blue Blood. He has been married four times and lives in the town of his birth in the proper season; in Stockbridge in the summer.

J. F.

*BLUE BLOOD — Owen Johnson — Little Brown ($2.00).