Books: Calculated Climbing

How a Girl Got Over Being “Small Town”

The Story. This is the true story* of Cinderella, how she grew in the smoky Midland†town, full of belching mills and little people, how she took a husband as a stepping-stone to Manhattan, how she buried him as a stepping-stone to Paris, how she made several people her stepping-stones to fame as a pianist, and then, after a little experimenting, how she found she had nowhere else to step.

Its theme is its title: Possession. Ellen Tolliver would not let herself be possessed by the dirty, mean little town where her father, a brokendown politician, and her mother, a purposeful woman, had brought her into the world. She would not let herself be possessed by the adoring little husband who worshiped her while she was meeting the people she wanted to meet, those who lived on a larger scale. It was hard on the people who wanted to possess her and could not. She pitied them but that was all. Her mother she left behind. Her husband pined for her and killed himself. But she was Cinderella. She was bound for the palace.

She had an example before her eyes in Thérèse Callendar, daughter of Dikran Leopopulos (a Levantine banker of Constantinople), reared in a French convent and carried off down the Bosporus in a clipper ship by a young Yankee merchant from Manhattan. When Ellen knew her she was old and ugly but a shrewd dowager in society and in business, and although she carried biscuits in her reticule and nibbled them when she became excited, she was not at all innocent and was very able.

So Ellen went to Paris, where she worked and maneuvered herself into her “palace.” When she had gained it, she was willing to share it. Her mother came to enjoy it a little. There was a prince, too, that she admitted to it. But he wanted possession, immediate and complete, not of the palace but of her. So she emancipated herself again, leaving the others quarreling over possession of her infant son, while she looked back on them safe in the only kind of possession to which she could submit —self-possession.

The Significance. In this his second novel, Mr. Bromfield has painted a large canvas, the small town in all its smallness, Manhattan both as the little clerk sees it and as society lives it, and Paris, the cosmopolis. Having a large canvas, he was not as economical as he might have been. He spent 500 pages telling a story that might have been more effectively set down in 400, and could have been written by a master in 300. It is a good story, not because it is much of a story but because the characters act convincinely, from the heroine who begins chilly and learns to be cold, to her son, ten minutes old, “a lusty, tomato-colored child, which appeared to cry, Ala-as! Ala-as! Ala-as!”

The Author. Louis Bromfield, a young fellow whose first book, The Green Bay Tree, made its mark among first novels, put forth his second novel not as a sequel but as a companion piece for his first. It covers approximately the same time, the first quarter of the present century, and includes several characters of his first novel, including Lily Shane. He takes himself seriously and promises to make these “panel novels” into a screen, “which, when complete, will consist of at least a half-dozen panels all interrelated. . . .”

True Stevenson?

THE TRUE STEVENSON, A Study in Clarification—George S. Hellman —Little, Brown ($3.50). Mr. John A. Steuart, Robert Louis Stevenson’s recent biographer, hung much of Stevenson’s soiled linen on the line; Mr. Hellman lovingly completes the task. The reader expects the true Stevenson to stand revealed in a book so entitled; he finds instead, the results of research in the labyrinthine congeries of a life not wholly free from error. The effect is that of the distorted reflection of a beloved face and figure in a freak mirror. The implications of the book may all be true; to collectors of Stevensoniana, keen for a strange light on familiar facts, these new records of the relations of Stevenson with women who walked the windy streets of Edinburgh, with Mrs. Sitwell, and with Fanny Osbourne before she became his wife, have an interest all their own. One learns that the destruction of a novel in which a street walker was the leading character is “a grave loss to literature — chargeable against Mrs. Stevenson,” as well as the suppression of Stevenson’s lyrics. To Stevensonians the book is indispensable. But many will hold that a truer Stevenson lives in Graham Balfour’s biography and the letters edited by Sidney Colvin, both anathema to the present author because of their suppressions.

An entire chapter is devoted to letters to Mr. Hellman from Katherine Osbourne, first wife of Stevenson’s stepson and collaborator, Lloyd Osbourne. In the last of these letters she expresses the belief that the forthcoming book on R. L. S. will be “after my own heart.” “Do you think I have helped you all I can?” asks Mrs. Osbourne. “I still have some letters you have not seen. I could send these. You were the first to shatter the ‘damned’ angel myth. Much is due you for that and for gathering together the early verses. I am sure Stevenson knows and blesses you for it. Any further revelations come best from you.”

In the New York Times of March 4, 1914, appeared excerpts from Mrs. Stevenson’s will, among them this: “To Katherine Durham Osbourne, of incredible ferocity, who lived on my bounty for many years, at the same time pursuing me with malicious slander, I leave $5.”

Hay-Chaser*

FRIENDS OF MR. SWEENEY—Elmer Davis—McBride ($2.00). They had called Holliday “wildcat” in his college days, but 15 years later he was a little hay-chaser, turning bald, with a toothbrush mustache, a wife going away to attend meetings for her “movements,” and a job as a subeditor on one of those journals of opinion that “flourish” in Manhattan with 3,000 circulation. A college friend of his from the great open spaces of the West blows in and shows him how to “put on a front.” The chilly doorman of an exclusive night club tries to bar them out, and the friend brushes past him with “We are friends of Mr. Sweeney.” Holliday tries being a friend of “Sweeney” and in one night picks up a tiger woman “and two pistols from the hands of desperate men,” aside from mastering the millionaire tyrant who makes up the deficits of his paper. The hay-chaser turns carnivorous and goes after the meat. He gets it because this is light fiction and satirically apt.

*POSSESSION—Louis Bromfield—Stokes ($2.50).

†Midland—”Middle West.”

*Term for an ass that keeps plodding because a wisp of hay which he never gets is held before his nose.