Invisible Woman*

Invisible Woman*

Is Herbert Quick the Howells of Middle America?

The Story. Iowa was no Elysian field about 1890. A third generation still labored to smooth out the social and economic rough-hewing of the first settlers. The graces and sensibilities of the populace were those of thrifty corn-and-cattle men, of boomtown merchants and lawyers and journalists. Politics seethed with hot conflicts between the farmers and the railroads, the people and the state political machine. Woman’s influence was just becoming visible.

A tornado sweeps the story on its way by uprooting pretty Christina Thorkelson from her father’s farm and depositing her as a secretary in the law offices of Creede, Silverthorn and Boyd at the county seat of Mon-terey. Creede is one of the state bosses; working under him Christina learns enough of political mechanics to revolt against them and insert a monkey wrench unexpectedly at the state convention. Oliver Silverthorn, Creede’s partner, whom Creede sought to sidetrack in the circuit court, is the beneficiary of Christina’s thrust and they marry in the end rather perfunctorily.

Through Christina’s life there moves the shadow of her mother’s youth. Magnus Thorkelson, Christina’s father, married Rowena Fewkes, an ignorant squatter girl, the day after she bore a son to her seducer, Buckner Gowdy, now the millionaire landowner of Monterey County. Christina is keenly sensitive to the stigma of this half brother, Owen Gowdy. But Owen wins his standing in society—and a rich pat-rimony—by dint of a somewhat startling genius for land economics, and the aid of Christina’s employers.

A residue of comic relief collects about Uncle Surajah Fewkes, who emerges from the poor house into ludicrous wealth via a patented self-opening farm gate.

The Significance. The Invisible Woman completes a trilogy of the Middle West, of which Vandcmark’s Folly and The Hawkeye were the first two parts. The whole work, no less this third part than the others, verges upon the heroic, as to both quality and proportions. The Middle West has been chronicled by Hamlin Garland, but not without streaks of sentimentality to blur what might have been the strong lines of his large frescoes. The Middle West has been photographed—by the bitter-brilliant young egotist, Sinclair Lewis, at close range under a leaden sky; and more mercifully, more delicately, by Willa Gather. Booth Tarkington has written Middle Western idylls, often tinged with gentle parody. Vachel Lindsay has chanted and shouted, Carl Sandburg has mourned and exulted over parts and phases of the Middle West. None of these has ever contrived its epic.

Nor is the epic yet, in Mr. Quick’s trilogy. Mr. Quick has something less the building power and much less the veiled iconoclasm of W. D. Howells, New England’s classic figure. But of Howells’ power for wide and accurate scrutiny, he has enough to warrant a proximate parallel if not an analogy. The Quick trilogy burgeons forth, out of a mind well rooted in human and literary subsoil, as the richest, most comprehensive fiction that has yet ap-peared against the Middle Western historical background.

The Author. John Herbert Quick was born to his destiny “near Steamboat Rock, Grundy County, Iowa.” After living most of his life in Iowa he is now, at 63, a large-landed resident of West Virginia. His interest and energies—as schoolmaster, lawyer, editor, author—have been in-tense and abundant, centering chiefly on history, politics and the lot of the farmer. His public service has ranged from counsel for the Citizens Committee of Sioux City, when he “prosecuted boodlers” in 1894, to membership on the Federal Farm Loan Board (1916) and head of the Far East Red Cross Commission (1920). Besides his fiction, Mr. Quick has written much of a practical nature—on agricultural problems (The Real Trouble With the Farmer), on rural education (The Brown Mouse}, on American inland waterways.

Black feelings

THE QUAINT COMPANIONS — Leonard Merrick—Button ($2.50).

To find Leonard Merrick treating of miscegenation is something of a shock, like seeing an amiable young lepidopterist drop his butterfly net and go in for heavyweight pugilism.

Elisha Lee was a large black English Negro. His big soft tenor voice made him rich, enabled him to smoke fat cigars, wear silk socks, fur overcoats, diamond rings, roses. But Elisha Lee was lonely, both as animal and artist. He wanted a white woman to love him. And when he obtained pretty Ownie Tremlett for his wife it was only because she could not resist vulgar luxury in the face of frowsy widowhood in Brighton. They soon hated each other bitterly and a weakling mulatto baby was the core of their hate. Lee drank and died. Ownie reverted to a frowsy lodging house and dyed her hair.

Then the tale begins again with the mulatto weakling, David Lee, in whom the soul of a poet grew. His poems won him the love of a deformed little country mouse, Hebe, who painted pathetic pictures, wrote him beautiful letters and cowered from his sight for shame of her crumpled body. He cowered from her sight for shame of his color, and all the more so when she impulsively sent him a picture of her lovely sister, in place of her own likeness. When Hebe discovered David’s secret, she loved him notwithstanding. When he discovered hers, his bitterness was vile. He recovered, but without much grace, and this second climax is shaky. The baseless sentimentality with which it breaks off, cannot, however, alter the validity of the black Elisha.

More Moore

CONVERSATIONS IN EBURY STREET— George Moore — Boni, Liveright — ($2.50).

From the library edition of his works Mr. George Moore withdrew his book of criticism, Impressions and Opinions, substituted the present volume of conversations “to revive a form in which criticism can be conducted more agreeably than in the essay.” To 121 Ebury Street, London, he invites his friends: Walter de la Mare, John Freeman, Granville Barker, Edmund Gosse, many others. Graciously, in the candlelight, by his comfortable hearth, he spins for them the shining web of his prose. Hardy is damned; Balzac exalted; one learns that the writing of George Eliot is “without pleasure,” that boiled chicken has never appeared on the table of George Moore, that the Lady of Shalott, is the one poem whereby “poor Tennyson” justifies his existence, that shad, the finest of all fish, has not been eaten in London in the last fifty years. “I cannot write,” says Mr. Moore. “I have lost my taste for reading; I can only think.” Someone recently stated that Mr. Moore had pimples on his soul. That, though not easily demonstrable, may very well be. There are none, however, on his intellect, and he thinks in singularly clear and beautiful English.

*THE INVISIBLE WOMAN—Herbert Quick —Bobbs Merrill ($2.00).