Books: Orchids and Ash-Cans

Orchids and Ash-Cans*

The jungle folk of Manhattan The Story. Most stories are made of a few fibres carefully twisted together in a single strand. This story is of many fibres woven into an outspread fabric, almost without design. Here a thread enters, twists about this other thread and that, and then departs from the unfinished fabric. The only limitation which restricts the weave is that the warp is stretched from some time in the ’90s to the present, and the woof extends from the East River to the Hudson.

Some of the threads:

Ellen Thatcher, born of an ailing mother and a poor little ambitious father follows the most persistent thread in the book. It leads to elopement with Jojo Oglethorpe, a career on the stage, love and liaison with wastrel Stanwood Emery, marriage with Jimmy Herf, newspaper man, and finally a third marriage with a lawyer-politician.

Bud Korpenning, rawboned youth from up state, comes to the city seeking work. He never finds it. Finally the dark waters swallow him and his past.

Congo Jake, a French sailor, hops ship in Manhattan. He is a wild boy and chases the women; goes off to sea again, comes back after learning bookkeeping in the Orient, turns bootlegger, makes a million perhaps, goes to jail for six months, marries curly-headed little Nevada Jones, who has been mistress to several men.

Gus McNiel, a milkman, finishes his round one bitter cold morning, stops for a drink in a saloon, is run down by a train on Eleventh Ave., gets $12,500 damages from the railroad and rises to be a Tammany politician of note.

George Baldwin, a young lawyer, in practice for three months without a case, reads about McNeil’s accident in the paper, seduces the milkman’s wife, pretty Nellie McNiel, gets Gus his damages, grows successful, marries for social position, keeps Nevada Jones for a time, goes into politics, makes love to Ellen Thatcher Oglethorpe Herf, starts to kill her, gets a divorce, finally induces her to marry him.

Jimmy Herf, of well-to-do parents, left an orphan at 16, revolts against conservative life, becomes a newspaper reporter, war correspondent, husband of Ellen for a time, father of a child, friend of Congo Jake, divorced; finally he leaves Manhattan with 28c in his pocket.

James Merivale, Herf’s cousin, follows the line of least resistance, does as he is told, gets into the best clubs.

All told there must be literally several hundred characters: tramps, Jewish clothing workers, actors and actresses, office workers, pampered wives, bounders, a bob-haired bandit, storekeepers, good-for-nothings, capitalists, mistresses, seamen, crooks, waiters, hotel clerks—sweating and swearing and suffering, drinking and wenching, and maiming the King’s English.

The Significance. What Mr. Dos Passos set out to do was, obviously, to draw a portrait of Manhattan. He has done a good job, an impressive job. The book is fragmentary and disconnected, told in little scenes, shuffled up almost indiscriminately. One may live in Manhattan for years without ever knowing more than two or three of the types he presents (although the people he presents are nearly always more than types—they are individuals), but the fact that a Manhattan dweller may not see his town as Mr. Dos Passos does, merely shows that the writer has done a thorough job.. The spectacle is unsavory, but it is strong and there is no other like it.

The Author. It was in 1921 that this young Harvard man, John (Roderigo) Dos Passos, first made a splash in the literary puddle with Three Soldiers, a realistic book about the War, a book that made war look too nasty to suit certain parties, although others looked upon it and recognized the ugly face of a monster they had met. Since then Mr. Dos Passos has wandered into poetry (A Pushcart at the Curb) and into essays (Rosinante to the Road Again) as well as continuing in the well-beaten track of the novel.

Spies

THUNDER ON THE LEFT—Christopher Morley—Doubleday, Page ($2). It is a children’s party, Martin’s tenth birthday. The imaginative little fellow invents all sorts of games for his guests: “Stern Parent,” “Quarrelsome Children.” Then Phyllis, one of the girls, says that grown-ups have a wonderful time. Wouldn’t it be nice to be grown up? Martin has an idea for another game, “Spies”—to find out whether grown-ups really have a good time, so as to know whether one wants ever to be grown up.

It is a score of years later. There are the same children—grown up— at a house party. There is Phyllis, the wife; there is George, her husband (and who is he but little Martin grown up?); there is Joyce, the little girl whom Martin liked— and besides there is Martin, in body a man but really little Martin never-grown-up. Then begins the game of “Spies.” Martin, the child, sees them, their petty annoyances, troubles of the spirit and of the flesh brought on by the loss of childhood’s simplicity, and his meeting them with that simplicity puts them all in strange confusion. Little Martin in a man’s body learns and learns. But just before he learns the final tragedy of growing up, the game is over; mercifully the clock turns backward.

The smoke of candles is still blowing off birthday cake, the children are being taken home and Martin is spared the full knowledge of what he is growing up to. And grown-up Mr. Morley in his own wistful type of fantasy has played the theme of lost childhood.

Gallery

A GALLERY OF CHILDREN—A. A. Milne—McKay ($3.50). The author of When We Were Very Young (TIME, Jan. 19) recaptures hearts with these diverting stories for children. The book is one of those big, square, thin books, meant to be read while lying on your tummy, on the floor, in the flicker of firelight. Exquisite pictures, in color, by H. Willebeek Le Maire perfect its charm. There are twelve tales. You like each one best, as you read it, and re-reading them repeats the experience—either backward or forward. Typical verse:

Diana Fitzpatrick Manleverer James Was lucky to have the most beautiful names.

How awful for Fathers and Mothers to call Their children Jemima!—or nothing at all!

But hers were much wiser and kinder and cleverer;

They called her Diana Fitzpatrick Manleverer James.

The babies are irresistible, the irresistiblest a Miss Waterlow, aged one—”a tremendous age to be, and often she would lie on her back and laugh to think of all the babies who were None.” The grown-ups are true to life, ridiculous persons when they are Fathers, but when they are Mothers—lovely beyond words.

*MANHATTAN TRANSFER—John Dos Passos —Harper ($2).