The Perennial Bachelor
by . New York: Harper and Brothers. 1925. 12mo. viii + 338 pp. $2.00.
BUT there are four of them, and three are girls. The story of their futile lives, drifting to inconspicuous disaster through days made up for the most part of pleasant details, is told in a demure book, delicately gay as a costume of the last century. We Americans like to take our fiction sadly, if one may judge from the widespread popularity of the unillumined records of sordid lives, presented with defiant exasperation, which pass muster again and again as The Great American Novel. This book has a different tone. The author must have had as good a time writing as we have reading. If, at the end, the reader is harrowed deep, as deep as by Babbitt, he has at least had a great deal of amusement en route.
Is the difference in the art of the book, or partly in the subject? The New Englander is surprised to learn how Southern in coloring was life in Delaware fifty or sixty years ago. The social environment does not appear to have held any more intellectual or spiritual stimulus than that of the contemporary Middle West. But it had charm. And it is agreeable to read about gentlefolk, even if they have no brains and, with one or two exceptions, mighty little character, Middle-aged readers will revel in the fun of the carefully described properties — the bustles, the tidies, the songs, the crocheted fringe round the cage of the canary bird, the Rogers Groups appearing at the exact historical moment. Have the changes in taste in feminine attire and house decoration between 1850 and 1920 ever before been noted with such delightful accuracy? The notes on the fancywork are sufficient justification in themselves for the invasion of fiction by women! How one sympathizes with Lily, finding when she calls at her old home that the iron calla-lily fountain had been banished! There is a keener pang when Maggie, knowing her time to be brief, makes her visit. Could anyone so render the varying tastes who had not lived through them? Or the sentiments, so perfectly corresponding to the decoration on the surface, of so perennial a humanness below?
One can be just as relentless with a sense of humor and an enjoyment of daily living as with a chip on one’s shoulder. Indeed, the more one is in love with life the more relentless one can be. The picture of these well-bred, affectionate, wellmeaning people ruining one another’s lives is all the sadder because it is often gayly told. Poor Aunt Priscilla, killing Mamma with the toadstools so lovingly gathered and nicely prepared for her luncheon, is a sort of central symbol. What shall we say of Victor, the inane and the pathetic, around whom his womenfolk so fatuously and tenderly revolve? This at least: that it was not only the women of the last century whose lives lacked point. Poor Victor! He loved his sisters and he had no vices. Maggie redeems the book to nobleness. In one chapter, where she is in church at the sad crisis of her fate, the purest religious passion suddenly flames out, explicit, cleansing.
The author’s own writing is fancywork, of a choicer type than any she describes. She places her stitches with delicate precision, and the story grows under her hand with the effect of a fine tapestry in faded colors. It, is no wonder that her story received the Harper prize.
VIDA D. SCUDDER