Miss Lulu Bett
by . New York: D.Appleton and Co. 1920. 12mo, viii+264 pp. $1.75.
THE publishers of Miss Gale’s latest book assist its circulation by means of a review which ranks it with Mr. Frank Swinnerton’s Nocturne. This is a grave injustice. Both Nocturne and Miss Lulu Bett challenge perfection; they are condemned by the very nature of their being to define either the zenith of art or the nadir of collapse. In this exacting kind there is good and there is bad, but no indifferent. Nocturne is a flawed masterpiece, and, as such, in the category with the poem of the famous apothegm, ‘A “pretty good” poem is like a “pretty good” egg.’ Miss Lulu Bett is without flaw. Its natural peer, if comparison there must be, is Ethan Frome, The most gifted of the younger British and Anglo-Irish impressionists — who, by the way, do not share our inane superstition that no good thing ever comes out of America — will accept it with ungrudging admiration.
Miss Lulu Bett shows a heightening and focusing of all Miss Gale’s familiar merits, perfectly isolated from the faults which one had come to think of as well-nigh inseparable from those merits. The sprawling diffusion of her earlier realism is here reduced to a rapid, almost brusque impressionism. Nor have we merely a long manuscript cut down by blue-penciling details. Such pieces of work as this result only from an increased rate of vibration in the artist’s percipience, a higher pressure, a finer nervous tautness of vision. The book is eloquent with condensation. A dried old woman, in a sudden unique moment of expansiveness, rehearses the drama of her young life. ‘At the end she yawned frankly, as if, in some terrible sophistication, she had been telling the story of some one else.’ That, for all comment. ‘I ain’t never lived what you might say private,’ says Cornish, the man of the music store, who rescues Miss Lulu from the accident of her bigamous marriage. ‘ I ’ve lived too private,’ answers Miss Lulu, with the terrible simplicity and finality of an old maid awakening to self-appreciation after having let herself be browbeaten all her life by the brother-in-law who has given her a home. This brother-in-law, Dwight Deacon, ‘seldom spoke as a man speaks who has something to say, but as a man who makes something to say.’ The book does not just contain felicities: it is stamped with felicity. We can show it to Europe without the sign of a blush in deprecation of our provincial rawness. W. F.