The Professor's House
by . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1925. 12mo. xi+283 pp. $2.00.
The Professor’s House is a thoughtful and penetrating study of a middle-aged idealist’s inner rebellion before he lays down aspiration and takes up fortitude instead. The Professor, Godfrey St. Peter,— lover of beauty, sensitive, highminded, wholly unworldly, though no fool, — finds his life in a sort of backwater. The three women who form his family are more or less preoccupied, in their different ways, with the material things that to him mean so little. To none of the three is he spiritually necessary. His wife is less interested in him than in the rejuvenating flattery of her delicately’ flirtatious relations with her admiring sons-in-law. His older daughter, never wholly sympathetic, is complacently absorbed in her husband, the young Jew, Louie Marsellus, and in lief rather greedy enjoyment of the fortune left to her by her former fiancé, Tom Outland. And his younger daughter, once his darling and close ally, seldom turns to him except to pour out, now and then, her ugly envy of her sister’s greater prosperity. Not only in his personal relations, but in his work, is the Professor in a backwater. He has taught for many y’ears, indifferent to advancement, but always with the humble and eager hope of being helpful to the occasional student willing and able to receive what he has to give. Such students, however, have not been numerous. The last volumes of his Spanish Adventurers, the thrilling work of fifteen years, have been published, and the creative impulse seems dead. And young Tom Outland is dead — his ideal pupil, his closest friend, for all the difference in their ages, and his strongest stimulus. In short, the Professor’s ‘golden years’ are over.
To a reader inclined to carp, it may seem a little arbitrary that the incident which arms the Professor with a new philosophy and restores his grip upon life should have precisely that effect; but of the reality with which he and his household are presented there is no question. Louie Marsellus, the kind-hearted and florid young Jew, is drawn with particular skill and with a grave, implicit humor. In Miss Gather’s work one does not look for humor as a major element; nor does The Professor’s House take one by surprise in this respect. It is suggested that the Professor himself is endowed with humor, but this is hardly demonstrated; his jocose passages with Augusta the sewing-woman, notably, are not altogether light-footed.
If one were a draughtsman it would be an interesting and an active exercise to make a design which should depict the very curious course of the narrative. Surely many filaments representing unfinished trails must go spraying off at the edges. And surely at the heart of the design must stand the crystalline chapters called ‘Tom Outland’s Story,’ the story of the ‘little city of stone, asleep’ on the blue mesa — symbol of an ideal beauty not to be realized.
ETHEL, WALLACE HAWKINS