American Scene

OUR post-war fiction, as personified by Mr. Sinclair Lewis, was strongly realistic and somewhat pessimistic. Then, as attention turned to Proust, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, the psychological novel took command. And is there now evidence to show that the simpler form of direct narration is returning to favor?

FROM the four novels before me this month — all by American authors — one might conclude that our fiction is turning from the psychological to the historical. It does not seem wholly a coincidence that the four are all dated in the past, all present the pageant of life rather than the analysis of an individual personality, and all owe a large part of their appeal to a veracious recording of external fact. I was struck, also, by noticing that all tell ‘simple stories,’ with little comment, in which the main personages are representative of rather primitive society. In all the sense of time and place is strong.

Rollo Walter Brown’s The Firemakers (CowardMcCann, $2.50), said to be the first volume of a trilogy, is a story of the coal region of southern Ohio, during the closing years of the last century. It narrates the struggle of Luke Dabney, a young miner, and his sweetheart, Valencia Boyd, a school-teacher, to free themselves from their environment. The central theme is the same as that which Mr. Brown has long been defending in essay and lecture — the importance of artistic creation in the shaping of a happy life. Luke and Val seek happiness in expression through the making of pottery; the mine and its environment symbolize an uncreative activity that cannot fully satisfy the soul; but the author has avoided allegory, and the story of Luke’s struggle to master the mystery of the potter is both interesting and exciting. At the end he appears to have failed, but one feels certain that he is not beaten.

It is a moving story, and convincing, though the best writing in the book is that which deals with the life underground in the mine and aboveground in Company Row. The author impresses one as knowing thoroughly not only the methods of mining but the people who engage in it. He presents with power the emotions of miners caught by a cave-in and waiting for days for rescue, and recounts with humor and pathos the genesis and progress of a strike. One grows to know these men and women and to respect them deeply. It is an excellent first novel and suggests little criticism except that some of the incidents seem manipulated and that the treatment of the mine owners savors too much of a laborite tract.

Hunting Shirt, by Mary Johnston (Little, Brown, $2.00), resembles The Great Valley as much as any other of her works, as far as the characters and setting are concerned, but it is conceived in a quite different vein. It has the simplicity and lyricism of an old ballad. A young Virginian of the late eighteenth century, in love with a maiden of his town, learns that she has lost a necklace, which has been picked up by an Indian chief of his own age. He vows to retrieve it, and the entire romance is a narrative of his search. His lonely and perilous journey takes him into remote settlements; he fights against Indians at a frontier fort; he is compelled to spend weeks in the dead of winter in a cave; he finally meets a white girl who has for years been brought up by Indians. Story and style are poetic. The reader is refreshed by the smell of forests and of wood smoke. Hunting Shirt, the hero, and his Indian opponent, Fire Tree, may not be believable, any more than are the heroes of old romance; but the wise reader will forget for the time being modern realism and will give himself up freely to the style, which is really beautiful, and to the glamour of the wild woods.

Oliver La Farge’s Sparks Fly Upward (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), the incidents of which occur about 1840, has something of the same simplicity. It narrates the story of Esteban, an Indian, member of a Central American tribe, who, adopted and reared as a young man of high caste, can never forget his origin. A military genius, he rises rapidly in the regular army until he becomes a general. But his duties require him to oppress his own people and at last he leads a revolution against the class of his adoptive father. The division of his sympathies is symbolized by his love, on the one hand, of Favia, his young stepmother, and, on the other, of Marta, his Indian soldadera or camp woman.

I have never before so clearly perceived the motives and ideals that lie behind a Central American revolt or understood so well why the people of that troubled region are in a constant state of revolution. But much more important artistically are the power and speed of the narrative; the rich color of the life and its background — conveyed with almost no elaborated description; and the sense of a fated man, who rides the crest of destiny almost without exercise of will. The portrayal of Esteban and of his mother and his soldadera, and of all the various officers of the army, is admirably clear-eut and economical. Instead of complex analysis the author has kept faithfully to almost pure narrative and dialogue, and yet he has not only told his story with speed, but has managed to suggest a complete political background. One might say, perhaps, that by avoiding individual psychology he has been able to imply the psychology of two races in conflict.

Merle Colby, the author of, All Ye People (Viking Press, $2.50), has, as far as I know, never written a novel before. It is reported that he inherited from an ancestor a diary which formed the nucleus of this book, and his chapter headings consist of quotations from the ‘ Life and Errors of John Bray, though this is ostensibly the diary of his hero, the chapters themselves being expansions of these themes. On a final page he acknowledges his indebtedness to a vast number of obscure and anonymous compilers of data concerning life in America in the period just before the War of 1812. There can be no doubt that an immense amount of research went to the preparation of his novel, and for a few pages I feared that his ’data’ might submerge his story. But they never do. Indeed, the really astonishing documentation is in general handled with such ease that it gives to the narrative a circumstantiality and convincingness rare in historical writing. I was reminded of that excellent novel, Rome Haul, but was equally reminded of the Lavengro of Borrow. For All Ye People is in plot a reversion to the oldest of novel techniques, the picaresque, — even though the hero is a clergyman and not a rogue,—in which a whole civilization is suggested by telling a multiplicity of adventures, all happening to one hero, who takes to the open road. Here we follow John Bray from his home in Vermont to Ohio and back, then to Providence, Boston, Philadelphia. At the end, with the girl of his choice, he is off once more to the West.

I am afraid that one cares less than one should what happens to the hero, for he is not entirely comprehensible. But one can have only praise for the vivid panorama, with its countless vignettes of life, as concrete as the descriptions of Sinclair Lewis, but as romantic in their aura of past times as the ad ventures of Lavengro. And throughout the novel one feels the pulse of the march of the land-hungry, almost as instinctive as migratory birds, seeking freedom and opportunity in the new West. The author has intended to build up a picture of Fredonia, the western empire of a century ago. He has succeeded, and he has written a fascinating book.

R. M. GAY