Books: Good Bread

GREENBANKS—Dorothy Whipple—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

After so much pretentious pastryware, cunningly but cheaply contrived by city haif-breeds, an honest book like Greenhaul, is as good as good bread. Many a long-cheated stomach should welcome it with enthusiastic rumblings. The story starts plainly and unprepossessingly enough, like any drab, overpopulated family novel: it is laid in dull, provincial, middle-class English surroundings—but instead of developing soporifically or solemnly, pseudo-tragically, pseudo-greatly, Greenbanks gradually, increasingly, compellingly turns into that rare phenomenon: a very good book.

In the initial shuffle of the Christmas party that introduces all the Ashtons and their in-laws, the real heroine of the story is lost, but only temporarily. Grandmother Louisa knew her husband deceived her, even on his dying day. She knew that of all her sons and daughters Charles was the incompetent, but Charles was the one she loved best. She knew Kate Barlow, who had made a “misstep” in her youth, and whom she tried to help, was making a martyr of herself to no good end; she could have told Rachel her favorite granddaughter, many a sad, true thing about what was ahead of her. But Louisa always refrained. She said what she thought would help: when she really wanted to talk she talked to herself or to Bella, the maid, who wanted to get married but was so set on it she scared all the men away. By some talent worth any amount of cleverness, Authoress Whipple has made old Heroine Louisa the kind of human being that human beings instinctively, almost unanimously admire. ” ‘Mmmm,’ said Charles. ‘The French have an expression “Bon comme le pain.” When I heard it, I thought of you. You’re good, like bread; you’re essential, you know. Mother. The world couldn’t get on without people like you.'” Readers of Greenbanks will close the book with a grateful nod, admit that Charles was absolutely right.

The Author— Dorothy Whipple was born some 30-odd years ago, in the midst of her Lancashire material, even more in the midst of a large & lively family. Grown-up enough to do her bit when the War came, she tried to be a Red Cross nurse, but ”fainted at operations, cried when the patients cried, and was sick when they were sick, so that was no use.” She went into an office instead, married her boss, who is now Director of Education for Nottingham. Greenbanks, which was the September choice of the English Book Society, is her third novel (first two: Young Anne, High Wages). Says Authoress Whipple: “I begin each novel gaily, then I get drawn in, it becomes an extremely serious business, it looms up and covers my life. I live like a hermit during this time. I weep over the sad parts. Chekhov says this is a bad thing to do, but I can’t help it.”

Feminist Apologia

EARTH HORIZON — Mary Austin—Houghton Mifflin ($4).

Autobiographies almost invariably contain an apology; some have little else. In Earth Horizon Mary Austin’s apology, never explicit, is to be found in her generally defiant tone. “I don’t see why it should be so much the literary mode just now to pretend that ideas are not intrinsically exciting and that one’s own life isn’t interesting to one’s self.” Hiding her personal pronoun behind her name, she writes of herself sometimes as ‘T.” some-times as ”Mary.” The rising generation may find little to attract them in aging Mary Austin’s reminiscences, but more than a few intransigeant oldsters will read them and sigh.

Mary Hunter Austin has had a hard life and it has not softened her. “I have never been taken care of; and considering what that has meant to women in general. I feel a loss in the quality of charm and graciousness which I am unable to rationalize.” Born in the Middle West just after the Civil War. Mary Hunter got off to an apparently crippling start. But she had the virtue of independence: at 7 she had made up her mind to be a writer, to write “all kinds” of books. The family moved to California. Mary married one Stafford Wallace Austin. She soon found out what he was like. “That nothing in Mary’s married life turned out as she expected it was due in part to discoveries she made within the year, which it would have been convenient to have made earlier. The first of these was that her husband had no natural qualifications for the calling of vineyardist.” So Mary went to work to support herself, got jobs in a boardinghouse, as teacher, actress, journalist, press-agent (for the Panama-Pacific Exposition). Finally she divorced Husband Wallace. Mary found she liked the Southwest, wrote about it in “all kinds” of books. Though she never got to Easy Street she was soon a familiar figure on Bigwig Boulevard. Some of her friends: the late Poet Sterling, the late Jack London, Herbert Hoover, the late great Theodore Roosevelt, May Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, the late Amy Lowell, Diego Rivera, Emma Goldman, Willa Gather.

Now 64. Mary Austin lives by herself (with a secretary) in her Spanish-Colonial house in Santa Fe, likes to be considered an authority on Spanish and Indian culture in the Southwest. Though she does not admit in so many words that her life has been happy, she does think it has been successful: “The totality of my experiences is that I have been faithful to the pattern, and it has not disappointed me.”

Yesterday

OUR TIMES: VOL. IV, THE WAR BEGINS, 1909-1914—Mark Sullivan—Scribner ($3.75).

Like prosperity, Mark Sullivan’s subject is just around the corner. This fourth volume of his monumental encyclopedia of Our Times (1900-1925) brings the story up to 1914, just before the outbreak of the World War. Future historians may praise his industry, value his skill in collating facts, but contemporary readers will enjoy him like” a gigantic family album. The sprightly, numerous illustrations (photographs, cartoons, advertisements— 250 of them in this volume) by themselves would make a book worth poring over.

Some events of the five-year period Author Sullivan has raked together: sinking of the Titanic, the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries fight, forced dissolution of the Standard Oil trust, electrocution of Police Lieutenant Charles Becker for instigating the murder of Gambler Herman Rosenthal. Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Halley’s Comet, Ford jokes. Suffragettes Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, Evangelist Billy Sunday, the two-step, grizzly bear, bunny hug. Actress Lillian Russell, erection of Manhattan’s Woolworth Building. Louis Bleriot’s flight across the English Channel, nude “September Morn.” dawn of psychoanalysis in the U. S., Politician “Uncle Joe” Cannon.