• U.S.

Books: Fiction: Oct. 17, 1927

12 minute read
TIME

Woodcutter’s House

The Story * Metabel Adams walked over the hills from Early. It was the spring her father died. “Trembling and meek he stepped into Jordan’s dark icy water, the cold tide froze him, and he came out again in Zion with a look of peace; he seemed to be saying humbly to the angels, ‘I don’t amount to much, but I feel friendly.’ ”

Metabel felt lonely; and, save for her dog, Musket, she was all alone as she stepped through the woods that lay along Hemlock mountain. Finally she came to a little low cottage where she went in and stayed. In the cottage lived Uncle Henry, a severe and matter-of-fact person, with his nephew Joseph. There was also Isaiah, an old grey horse and a wasp who lived in the attic and was the largest apple-owning wasp in the county. Down the valley, in Wayne, there lived Prissy Deakan who had, the summer before, put up no less than twelve dozen jars of jelly. She, Metabel felt, had an eye for Joseph; she would have liked to change him over and make a somebody out of him.

Joseph was a lazy boy who could do nothing better than cut down trees neatly. But, what Uncle Henry, who raised the biggest lettuce heads ever seen in those parts, could never understand, was why Joseph refused to cut down the ash trees. Metabel came to know the reason when she met one day a little green god sitting in the woods and talking to some mice. He preferred ash trees to live under and Joseph knew it. Joseph would never have cut down an ash if St. John Deakan had not come to dinner one night and brought his daughter. She made Joseph pick up his ax and begin to chop through the thick dark trunk of an ash tree she wanted for lumber.

After the tree fell the small and peaceful deity made Metabel crawl into the bruised tangle of branches so that when Joseph found her there he would think the top part of the tree had fallen on her. There was a thunder storm that night, and Musket, who was an old dog and had just had a somewhat exhausting love affair, was annoyed at having to sniff about the damp slippery woods all night. In the morning Joseph found Metabel and promised that he would not cut down any more ash trees. He even kissed her.

But, before they were married, Metabel noticed that Joseph was beginning to look as if there was more business in life that making a tree fall neatly. He was cutting down ash again, to get money for a store dress for Metabel to be married in. The little god of good humor advised her to go back to Early; he showed her the road. “All summer long the valleys around Early are as green as the sea. But in the autumn they are like yellow pools; over them the clouds swim slowly in the sun, trailing their cold blue shadows across the hills. . . .”

Metabel went back to Early, and before she had been there a day, the little god was waiting to see her.

The Significance. The most thoughtful person in the book is undoubtedly Musket, who had once belonged to a fiddler and had danced for applause and pennies. He argues with Isaiah and ably contradicts the horse’s somewhat somnolent stoicism. But the other animals also are very intelligent and wide awake; even the discarded god possesses a highly commendable pacificism. Only the human beings seem less sly and sillier, as they scamper or march through the fields and forests. Foolish as they may be, and irrational, they nevertheless contrive a gentler, more persuasively absurd behavior than the people of real life, whom they in few ways imitate.

Author Nathan has no ax to grind in the woodcutter’s house. He does not try to chop his characters into the resemblance of human beings; wisely he whittles their faces into sharp slants of gayety or sorrow or surprise, then lets them scuttle through pages that are dotted with tiny country towns, woods lying under a summery enchantment, barns with the smell of hay and leather in them, and roads that lead out of Early over Hemlock to a house that is hard to leave.

The Woodcutter’s House lacks the strength and warmth of Jonah. But its delicacy, more attenuated even than that of The Fiddler in Early, is flexible and lovely like a web stretched between trembling leaves. Author Nathan finds anything completely human too clumsy for his dexterous art. He blows books like bubbles filled only with the light smoke of an emotion through a pipe so fragile that even the pressure of corn-silk would break its narrow bowl.

The Author is fond of eating lettuce with sugar on it. He is an expert archer, a fine fencer, a composer, a competent sketcher. These things are not his hobbies. He does them all the way he writes—deliberately, precisely and with a certain distinction of style. Robert Nathan was born in 1894. was educated at private schools and Harvard, has lectured at the New York University School of Journalism and lives in Manhattan where he often rides in the subways. Born Again

THE MAN WHO WAS BORN AGAIN —Paul Busson—translated by Prince Mirski & Thomas Moult, John Day—($2.50). Paul Busson died in 1924. He studied medicine and served in the Austrian army. His novel is a grotesque, exciting and impudent tale of student ribaldry, army debauching and mystic romance. His hero watches his own head fall into the French Revolutionary basket, and starts life again. If you care for the grisly, the sensational and the macabre, you will find it in the experiences of Baron Melchior von Dronte of the late 18th Century, who took love and drew blood as he chose, swashbuckled, shuddered, grew morbid and inspired at will, and tamed his soul to a point where it mastered death itself. A graphic and brilliant book, though it is not written for little children or those subject to nightmares.

Unmarried Father

AN UNMARRIED FATHER—Floyd Dell—Doran ($2). The title is no decoy; Norman Overbeck, engaged to one Madge, has a bastard son by one Isabel, who refuses to marry for legitimizing purposes. Not knowing what to do with his brat or with himself, Norman goes to Chicago, works, suddenly decides to marry Madge, then, receiving a come-on telegram from Isabel, he goes to marry her. Author Dell, whose mouth waters at the thought of Greenwich Village, has never quite understood that more than a lovechild or a liaison is required to produce a great or even a very good novel. Yet, with a hand which has acquired competence in the production of Moon-Calf, Janet March, Love in Greenwich Village, he accomplishes sound characterization, sound story telling.

Something About Eve

SOMETHING ABOUT EVE—James Branch Cabell—McBride ($2.50). Gerald Musgrave, like all of Mr. Cabell’s other figures of fluff, peregrinates among sarcastically supernatural personages. His love affairs concern ladies whose names and somewhat primitive passions derive from Eve. Like all other mortals in a life which is, after all, no more than what Author Cabell calls “a comedy of fig leaves,” Beau Musgrave attempts to reach but does not succeed in reaching the Marches of Antan, the dream kingdom of Gods and poets. It will again be easy for critics, nauseated by the crude impetuosities of much modern writing, to forget that Mr. Cabell, behind the somewhat pretentious fig-leaf of an elaborate and graceful style, has not quite been able to conceal a lack of the large ideas which he so suavely disdains.

NON-FICTION

Around the World

DAILY NOTES OF A TRIP AROUND THE WORLD—E. W. Howe—Minton Batch ($3.50). Ed Howe, 22 years ago, started around the world. Every day he would write a few items in his diary and send them back to the Atchison Daily Globe, of which he was the editor. His notes lack the pretentious elaboration of most writing travelers ; they have a quiet wisdom, a genial transplanted and migratory U. S. humor. For example: “We saw a whale today, but it amounted to no more than this: a spout of water shooting up out of the ocean a mile away. This is the way travelers ‘see’ whales.” Author Howe, now reprinting the book which was published the year after his tour, explains his new and condensed version: “Travel letters never grow old, if reasonably well done in the first place.” The travel letters of Author Howe, will not grow old very quickly.

Caravanities

THE AMERICAN CARAVAN—Edited by Van Wyck Brooks, Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, Paul Rosenfeld—Maeaulay ($5). This fat volume, comprising stories, verses, plays, essays, “improvisations” and novelets by present day U. S. authors, is perhaps in-tended to be a sort of elaborate vaudeville show by means of which the 72 performers may attain to the consolidation of a literary movement. It is, though, too miscellaneous a collection to represent the movement of U. S. letters, or any literary movement. Its final importance rests, in fact, upon the highly heterogeneous merit of such contributions as Ernest Heming way’s “An Alpine Idyll” (story) Edmund Wilson’s “Galahad” (novelet), and other inclusions—notably those of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Archibald Macleish, Eugene O’Neill. It is marked, or marred, also by one of Gertrude Stein’s more successful attempts to achieve unintelligibility, and by an attempt, less successful, at humor by one W-tt-r B-nn-r, who is presumably the poet of whom it has been said: “He Witter Bynner better plumber.” Romantick Lady

Fauntleroy’s Mother. At Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England, Nov. 24, 1849, was born the creator of Lord Fauntleroy, a Lady of Quality, Sara Crewe. Frances Hodgson Burnett-incurred the hatred of thousands of little boys whose mothers, in imitation of the precise little lord, sent them to dancing school clad in velvet breeches and fancy white collars. Now grown to manhood many of them tremble at her name, and forget that as many thousands of little girls thrilled to Sara Crewe and found magic in The Secret Garden. *From the start this creator of best-sellers was an incurable romanticist, “a gay, sweetly imaginative little person, *Dryading and romancing, whatever might be the situation or the subject.” In the U. S. she still dramatized life with a vengeance; but put her mystical sentimentalizing to practical usage, and in 1868 her first story was published in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Later one of the most affluent of authors, her first payment was a check for $15. There followed years of personal romance and writing success. Beauty of persons, high spirits, literary ability, combined with unflagging sentiment, brought her into the centre of the U. “S. intelligentsia of the day of which Richard Watson Gilder was paterfamilias. Perhaps no author of popular romances and theatrical successes ever lived her romances with such consistent and determined verisimilitude. She reversed the ordinary processes of life. She did not escape from reality in her writing. Life was so rosy, so dramatic, so covered with the eiderdown of sentiment that her stories and plays seem real when placed beside the recital of one day’s events. Her letters are remarkable outbursts of highly colored optimism. She was obviously brave, and the death of a son, Lionel, found her strong in belief and self-comfort.

The Book. A son’s loving portrait of the mother he worshiped and adored. Marred for some by the use of terms of endearment and intimate details of a deeply emotional family life, it yet gives a vivid picture of the middle period of U. S. letters. As a study of a woman author of the most popular type, it can scarcely be excelled. One touch of humor would have ruined it, but one must look in vain for the touch. To have led a life so untouched by reality and to have passed on that vision to a son who turns biographer without losing a glimmer of its roseate intensity, is, in itself, an achievement.

The Author. Vivian Burnett (now aged 51) sat to his mother for her pen portrait of Lord Fauntleroy. There are four pictures of him in his tribute to and portrait of her. One of them shows him at Harvard. The velvet breeches never irked him. Patriots

PATRIOTS OFF THEIR PEDESTALS— Paul Wilstach—Bobbs Merrill ($2.75). “The desire for intimacy is the flower of admiration.” With this as a credo, Author Wilstach submits anecdotes upon Washington, Franklin, Henry, Hamilton, John Adams, Jefferson, John Marshall, Madison. Most of his papers are a little jerky, a little insignificant; they seem to betoken rather an unjustified, smirking familiarity, than a sincere familiarness with the great men Author Wilstach writes about. Yet surely more valuable than the cherry tree extravaganza is this example of George Washington’s eccentric democracy: “Washington walked among the fishstands at the foot of Market Street. ‘Auntie, that is a fine shad you have there,’ pointing to a fine one in the fisherwoman’s basket. ‘Yes, General, let me send it home for you.’ ‘No,’ said he, ‘put a string through its gill. I reckon a man can carry home his own grub.'”

*THE WOODCUTTER’S HOUSE—Robert Nathan—Bobbs, Merrill ($2). *HE ROMAN-TICK LADY (Frances Hodg son Burnett) The Life Story of an Imagination — Vivian Burnett — Scribners ($3.50).

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