Books: Fiction: Oct. 18, 1926

Pride’s Bed

The Story.* Sometimes, in a small U. S. town, even in no town at all, you come upon a great house alone in its grandeur. It will have been built by some man whose intensity raised him above his fellows to the position and estate demanded by an acquisitive nature. If the house is still owned by relations of the builder, you may not see in them many traces of the old blood. But should you find the builder’s kin elsewhere, and fallen on hard days, mark how often some intensity of the old blood will have been its own undoing.

The house in this story of Myra Henshawe stood behind a tall iron fence in a ten-acre park at Parthia, Ill. Myra, an orphan, was John Driscoll’s great-niece and he brought her up there, a forceful, coarse old Irishman and a vivid, a wild little girl. She had jewels and many gowns and a Steinway piano. She rode keen horses. The town band played at her parties and serenaded John Driscoll on his birthday; he had bought the bandsmen their silver instruments and when they played for him he treated with his best whiskey. He had wrung a great fortune out of contract labor in Missouri swamps.

Myra became a beautiful young woman, short, plump, like a dove in repose, in action very erect, vital, challenging. Her spirit and swift wit were of a sort that old John Driscoll could understand, “racy, and none too squeamish.” He was probably proud of her the snowy night she left his house, penniless, after two years of intense, secret waiting, to marry the man whom she loved and he did not. He was certainly proud of her when, after willing his house to pale-handed nuns, founding a women’s refuge” in Chicago and providing that Myra could always go to that refuge free and have pinmoney, he knew that she would sooner go to the river.

It is Myra’s story, but her young years with that illiterate, powerful old man made her much that she was. With such love as she and Oswald Henshawe had, another woman might have stayed happy. But ambition for him and hatred of their poverty ate her heart. Her wit sharpened when they called on his stuffy, kindly German business friends. She had been formed for distinction, for surroundings of ease and dignity and charm. Childless, she needed scope to spend herself without stint on her friendships, for she had that concentration of affection which makes individuals of its most commonplace objects and the constancy of spirit which keeps attachments with fine people inviolate in their highest mood. Deathly poor and dying bitterly, long after her bright New York days, she spent gold pieces, hoarded in an old glove, that masses might be said for her gracious friend, Madame Modjeska, years dead.

Dying of cancer in her sixties in a Pacific coast boom town, with loutish roomers clumping overhead and with no love left for her patient, tender, ineffectual husband, Myra was bitter over her self-defeat, until the end. Passion had made her a lowly bed; she had writhed on it for years. She still could laugh at some of life’s absurdities. Some of its beauty was still warm to her—Heine’s poems, her own lovely hands. But her steely pride was turned upon itself, ‘her mortal enemy. Not even religion could resign her to the indignities of poverty. When she felt her time upon her, she stole off alone to a Pacific headland, to watch dawn break over the sea.

The Significance. This is a very short story; very complete, very intense, very subtle. A rare woman’s whole life is told and her time etched in around her with a touch as sure as it is delicate. It adds immensely to the literature of places as well as of people, particularly with a violet, snow-powdered December twilight in old Madison Square, which once was “like an open-air drawing room.” What the work represents spiritually, no reader will soon show another, save that the tragedy of a strong, restrained nature, devoid of falsity or baseness, is a moving thing to watch, to experience.

The Author. Willa Sibert Gather spends months on end riding over her brothers’ ranches in the Southwest. Then she buries herself for more months, of writing, in New York. The emotional maturity of her characters, their frequent arrival at or tragic necessity for spiritual self-reliance (see A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House), must be a reflection of their author’s real acquaintance with solitude. Miss Gather is nearly 50 now; sociable when she likes; vigorous, cheerful, charming. But more and more she is a recluse who, having had experience as country girl (Nebraska), college girl (Nebraska State), reporter and editor (Pittsburgh Leader and McClure’s Magazine), teacher and archaeologist, enough to “last a lifetime” is increasingly a subtle artist after the Wordsworth formula, “emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

Smithness

SMITH EVERLASTING — Dillwyn Parrish — Harper ($2). Pippa did not prevaricate; all’s well with the world. Here is a story which begins and ends on that vast plain inhabited by the innumerable Smiths that you see in the telephone book, the Chevrolets, the shaving mirror—the moderately comfortable, easygoing, unawakened small-bore men and their fussing, darning, worrying, loving wives. Martin and Emelie Smith are as concerned over the whereabouts of a pet pipe, moths in the clothes trunk, the working of the front door latch, the “niceness” of a family party (the only kind they ever achieve) as they are convinced of the future greatness of their stupid, bespectacled little boy, Martikins. Then, when the pipe turns up, when the latch is post-poned again, the party over, their everlasting Smithness becomes contented retrospect. Martikins emits a flash of adolescent near-greatness, marries a vivid girl, almost becomes a pianist, and the Smiths are hurt, alarmed, until the flash is extinguished. Everlasting Smithness shows now as endless piddling, now as hope eternal. It ends as everlasting Smithness, a vegetable condition as happily comfortable as it is unadventurous. Symptomatic of the prevalence of Smithness are the prodigious sales, not only of romantic fiction for vicarious thrills, but of American Tragedies, dismal Main Streets and kindred counter-depressants. This book, which mirrors Smithness with shrewd, quaint brightness, will never have such sales. It is not among the Smiths’ failings to stare at themselves in a looking glass, though they do like going to Coney Island and seeing how awful they seem in the exaggerating panels of the “crazyhouse.”

Dillwyn Parrish, onetime soldier, droll bachelor, is brother to Anne Parrish, author of The Perennial Bachelor, which was no family portrait. Very gentle irony is one of their joint possessions; another, fondness for funny, homely words like “confab” and “scraption”. Once they wrote a book together, Knee-High to a Grasshopper, peopled with frogs, bugs, hoptoads and other small creatures you find in a meadow. This is Brother Dill-wyn’s first novel, joyous reading and a book of mark.

Drunks, Drinking

DRY MARTINI (A Gentleman Turns to Love)—John Thomas—Doran ($2.50). Middle-aged Willoughby Quimby belongs to that class of mankind known variously as “men of the world,” “high livers,” “parasites,” “epicures” and “drunkards.” ‘ He lives in Paris, where he conducts his dissipations “as the debauchery of a gentleman should be conducted.” Unexpectedly the duties of fatherhood settle upon him, and it is related how Mr. Quimby strives to be an adequate parent to “eminently sex-conscious” Elizabeth, his debutante daughter, who arrives upon the Parenthetic practically unannounced. (Mrs. Quimby had been given custody of the child twelve years previous.) Other characters: Suave, philandering Conway Cross, “envied hero of many a whispered tale along Dan’s brass rail”; Dan himself, “greatest barman of his day in Paris”; Frank at the Ritz and George at the Crillon; Joe Zelli, “the original one”; old Matthew Stone “who spent all afternoon getting drunk enough to speak, and all night getting drunk enough not to be able to speak”; young Ward Johnson, who came to Paris four years ago but had never been able to stay out of Dan’s long enough to catch the boat home.

Strangers, at first sight of tall, blond, softly circumloquacious Author John Thomas,* have exclaimed: “What? That fellow knows his Paris? I don’t believe you!” Others know better the onetime (1923-24) Book Editor of TIME.

NON-FICTION

Plato Horsed

PLATO’S AMERICAN REPUBLIC— Douglas Woodruff—Button ($1). Picture Socrates in Scranton, Xantippe at the Zenith Woman’s Club, Alcibiades in Akron. Fancy Agathon asking questions about the Volstead Act, Lysis hearing that the U. S. has hundred of colleges and also Kansans who believe in an ape-shaped Devil that invented grapes.

The scene is in Athens, 1925, where interest in Americans has been stimulated by a U. S. proposal to buy the Parthenon and Acropolis complete and transport them overseas. “Truly a strange way,” says Socrates, “of honouring the Athenians.” Socrates has sunk somewhat from his onetime dignity. He stoops to puns and not a little hackneyed horseplay about U. S. pie-eating, the substitution of football for education, the divinities, Modern Science and Big Business, and their oracles, the Card Index and Henry Ford. But much of the dialogue, which Socrates conducts with prospective emigrants eager to hear what befell him on a lecture trip, digs deep and strikes-sparks: Economic causes of the Civil War, States Rights v. Federalism, traffic problems (“A youth is not granted the dignity of manhood until … he first prove himself by parking a car” . . .), Progress (“whose will they declare it to be that there shall be made as great a number as possible of all objects that men make” . . .), Machinery (“more deadly than the Wooden Horse himself”), the wool trade (“the old fable of the wolf in sheep’s clothing”). An effect at once precious nd provocative is obtained by reproducing the classic style. For any who have forgotten the classic style:

‘”They have named a city after Plato*,’ said Agathon.

” ‘They will name a city after anybody,’ I [Soarates] answered.

Conning the Cosmos

THE NATURE OF THE WORLD AND OP MAN—By Sixteen Members of the Faculty of the University of Chicago—University of Chicago Press ($4). Not all Chicago freshmen, only those of “superior intelligence,” are permitted to take a survey course, designed to show man his position in the universe, which the 16 authors of this book give annually in formal lectures.

It is a fashion today to impart information metaphorically. Poetic astronomers will tell, you that if the earth were a grain of clay on a tennis court in New Orleans, the sun would be—a baseball in Chicago! These 16 Chicago scientists are not, however, of the poetic cut. They conceive it their job to state facts with direct dispatch.

Professor Forest Ray Moulton leads off by providing ground for his colleagues to stand on, locating the earth in the solar system, the solar system among the constellations and galaxies. Professor Rollin T. Chamberlin follows, to explain how the earth came to be where it is. (It was his father, T. C. Chamberlin, who with Dr. Moulton originated the theory that earth did not form from one of many whirling gas rings left in space as the sun shrank together, but originated separate from the sun as a core to which planetesimals [“star dust”] were slowly attracted.)

The appearance of life upon the earth is still mysterious to science. Professor Chamberlin can but describe the conditions that were favorable for it, leaving Biologist Horatio Hackett Newman to describe life itself. Beside its familiar phenomena of metabolism, growth, reproduction, adaptability, Mr. Hackett, frankly mechanistic, sets down the point that, while undefined, life is no more of a “mystery” than electricity, light, energy, matter.

The next critical point, Evolution, is simply treated as it is now regarded by the civilized world, as a law of nature. The evolution of animal from vegetable life is also dealt with simply, by showing the absence of a clear dividing line at or near the lowly, ambiguous bacterium.

*Real name: John A. Thomas.

*More precisely, six: Plato, la.; Plato, Pulaski Co., Ky.; Plato, Houghton Co., Mich.; Plato, Minn.; Plato, Mo.; Plato Center, 111. Of these, Plato, Ga., was doubtless the “city” Agathon had in mind. Its population is by far the largest: 238. There are 13 Homers, from Alaska to Texas; one Homer City, (Pa.) ; two Homersvilles (Ga., Ohio). There is no Socrates, no Xantippe, but in Missouri there is a Huzzah!