Books: Eccentrics

Nowadays Biographers Have Fun

Lord Timothy Dexter,* like Cleon of Athens, was a humble tanner. He bought Continentals when they were becoming a curse. Alexander Hamilton funded the nation and Tanner Dexter moved into the show house of Newburyport, Mass., the Hub of that day. There was madness in the fellow, and method. Jibes and second sight pricked him to ship warming-pans and mittens to the Indies, coal cargoes to Newcastle. His profits startled. When he feigned dunce and cornered whalebone, the corset-makers “swarmed like hell-houns.” He spelled worse than Chaucer, published oftener, drank constantly, crowned “a haddock-hawker his private laureate with a wreath of parsley.

He was most famed for his self-conferred title and his lordly mansion. Bristling with minarets, crowned with an eagle, this latter was approached through a triumphal arch surmounted and surrounded by regiments of heroes carved in wood, from Adam to Timothy Dexter. Long dead, he kept the world gaping.

Appended to Author Marquand’s account is Lord Timothy’s own opus, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, admonishing: “Now I toald the all the sekrett Now be still let me A lone Dont wonder Noe more. . . .”†

Mormon Joseph Smith, Patriot Ethan Allen, Painter James M. Whistler, Mother-of-Faith Mary B. G. Eddy and Pioneer David Crockett are not such unfamiliar uncommon Americans** as:

Peter Cartwright, man of might and faith from Virginia. He tongue-lashed the backwoods yokelry until they jumped up, tore hair, foamed at mouth, shrieked remorse, fought Belial, collapsed exhausted but good Methodists.

John S. Mosby, “the Mad Anthony Wayne of the Confederacy.” His flitting guerilla cavalry swooped up 6,000 Federal prisoners. He cut a lock of his hair and sent it to Lincoln, who laughed. He invented the phrase, “the solid South.”

Susan B. Anthony. Snubbed by a male at a temperance ballyhoo in 1852, she mounted the Chautauqua platform, wore Turk-cut trousers, for Women’s Rights.

George Francis Train. Boston-bred, he rode gold booms to great wealth; was offered the presidency of Australia. He introduced streetcars to Europe, projected the Union Pacific railway, owned half Omaha. He built a hotel in 60 days, circled the globe in 80, again in 62. He spent $2,000 a week, then proved he could live on $3. Never criminal, he went to jail 15 times, being president of “murderers’ row” in the Tombs, Manhattan. He liked peanuts, squirrels, speed and free argument. Aged 74, he dictated a 100,000-word autobiography in 35 hours.

Martin Scott, of Vermont, was such a prodigious marksman that a raccoon made the immortal remark: “Capt. Martin Scott? Oh, then, I may just as well come down for I’m a gone coon!”

The Significance. Our biographers have fun these days. It is always time for sober-sided tomes about the orthodox great, but now is an hour when the public, jaded perhaps by its own mass, particularly relishes hearing about noted nonconformists, exotics, eccentrics. Lately we have had P. T. Barnum, Brigham Young, John L. Sullivan, Joseph Pulitzer, Paul Bunyan, buccaneers, hoboes, gypsies, jazz-boes.

The Authors. Joseph P. Marquand fellow-townsman of Lord Timothy Dexter, took rank in U. S. letters with Black Cargo, a well-told tale of the slave trade. His present work, eked from scanty material, suffers slightly from padding but maintains a sardonic flavor well suited to the subject.

Don C. Seitz, retired journalist (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The New York World), is a gentleman of terse humor that is itself uncommon.

Stem to Gudgeon

CAPTAIN SALVATION—Frederick William Wallace—Minton, Balch & Co. ($2.00).

When dirty weather gathers in this book, as it does continually, the seas thunder, spurt, hurl, burst, cascade, career and cannonade. Poops lurch, hatches groan, bulwarks drown, spars shiver, tumults surge, canvas flogs, human limpets cling to wreckage with bleeding nails, battered limbs, frozen hands, grim resolve. It is a fast-sailing tale of clipper days, stoutly and thoroughly rigged from stem to gudgeon, commanded by a cultured swashbuckler from Nova Scotia, a hammer-fisted, hell-bent “bluenose” skipper, with Nietzschean ethics, Vulcanic muscles, the passions of Poseidon, the luck of Lucifer. When his clipper Aphrodite goes down off Patagonia, this skipper’s redemption is made cinema-credible by a bleak, briny coast, driving rain, starvation and the steadfastness of a childhood sweetheart.

Soil

WILD GEESE—Martha Ostenso— Dodd, Mead ($2.00).

The bleak but fertile plains of Manitoba at dawn and dusk. Over them a short but beamy shag-pate, Caleb Gare, walking as though bent against a wind, whispering greedily to his black acres, caressing his blue-flowered flax in secret, eyeing his sows by lantern-light. In his cabin, a wife and children dulled and spavined by the cruel toil he holds them to with a miser’s malice. Jude Gare, the one stalwart, deep-breasted daughter, who defies him, she having heard the wild geese honking down the high heavens. The night of Jude’s escape, prairie fire drives Caleb to his beloved’s bosom—the bottomless muskeg.

Of dirt-farm life some of us have learned aplenty, but this rendition, by a Norwegian girl from Minnesota, was awarded a $13,500 first-novel prize.

PRAIRIE—Walter J. Muilenberg— Viking Press ($2.50).

The same sort of thing, written with more sophistication than Wild Geese and more dramatic power, staged on the virgin soil of Kansas. Here the man conquers, despite an anemic wife and a son who deserts.

“Souls”

HERBS AND APPLES—Helen Hooven Santmyer—Houghton, Mifflin ($2.50). THE MISTY FLATS— Helen Woodbury—Little, Brown ($2.00).

Here are two tomboy daughters of two country doctors. Each grows up with a “soul.” Each itches to write. Each goes to Greenwich Village to do so. Each gives it up and goes home. Both books are first novels, by Helens, and published in Boston. There ends the coincidence.

Author Santmyer taps a brimming current of village life in Ohio. The rarity and validity of Derrick Thornton’s talent are deeply impressed. Her unachieved love is made a vital experience. Her rediscovery of life’s universal imminence is compelling and beautiful. The book is richly written.

Author Woodbury, younger, less articulate, begins to run dry right after some pretty baby babble between sensitive little Linda Bradley and her hug-and-kissy mother. Hardly a trickle remains by the last chapter, where Linda resigns herself to giving up her poetic playboy, stifling quietly at home.

*LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER OF NEWBURYPORT, MASS.—J. P. Marquand—Minton, Balch ($3.50).

†Knowing Ones having “complaned” that the “fust” edition of Lord Timothy’s Pickle had no “stops,” he inserted in the second edition a pageful of hieroglyphs, “and they may peper and solt it as they plese.”

**UNCOMMON AMERICANS.—Dun C. Seitz —Bobbs-Merrill ($3.00).