Indelible: A Story of Life, Love, and Music, in Five Movements
by . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1922. x+297 pp. $1.75.
THE publishers offer Indelible as, among other things, an ‘ example of the new spirit in American fiction.’ Possibly it is; but not a very thoroughgoing or uncompromising example, if the new spirit in its several varieties is to be represented by Sherwood Anderson or Floyd Dell or Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis. A good deal of matter early in the book, and also some few outcroppings later, do indeed suggest that Mr. Paul is willing to be construed as another spokesman of the tendency lately catalogued by Mr. Carl Van Doren as ‘the revolt from the village.’ But Mr. Paul gets nowhere with his promise — or, if you prefer, his threat — to present one more study of Main Street in its resistance to the creative and free temperament; and he soon abandons even the pretense that he is contriving a drama of character against environment. If the truth must be told, he first assembles all the apparatus necessary to a specifically sociologic tragi-comedy, and then all but deliberately scraps this apparatus to make an innocuous old-fashioned Glad Book. The scene is set for the marriage of the two ardent young musicians and idealists. They love each other, the shy, gawky American lad and the tempestuous Russian Jewess, with an intensity reinforced by their common passion for music. The question is, What can they make of life together, in the face of their racial heritages and implacably hostile social backgrounds? But the question is not so much answered as superseded. The two are torn apart by an accident harrowing enough to render the play of ordinary social forces merely trivial and negligible; an intensely personal and emotional drama takes the place of the problem so carefully formulated; and we have to decide for ourselves whether the first half of the book amounts to a false start or the second half to a begging of the question.
Indelible is not, in short, a first novel remarkable for its freedom from obvious faults. But it is very truly remarkable for the positive qualities of which its defects are in a way the excess. There is life in the book, in the characters, in the very style (despite occasional interpolations in overwrought polyphonic prose); there is a kind of humor, as honest, as true, as American as Huck Finn—a kind which really makes you laugh; and, almost above all, there is a quite professional sanity on the whole subject of music and musicians. The ineffably pretentious nonsense that is talked and written about the art of music is talked and written by those who do not know a bassoon from a tuba, and who spell ‘clarinet’ with an o in it; one never hears it from musicians. Neither does one hear it from Mr. Paul, whose musicians take their art the way actual musicians do, as naturally as a carpenter takes his tool-kit. This trait alone would be enough to recommend his story to the gratitude of the judicious.
WILSON FOLLETT.