Untitled Book Review

The Fountain, by Charles Morgan, has been selling at the rate of 1000 copies a week since its publication the first, of June. The novel of the summer, its setting and contents are provoking a good deal of table talk. Now comes the early harvest of new fiction to challenge its position.

THE three novel,’which I shall treat briefly here have in common only one trail: each is a study, psychological either in theory or in practice, of character under emotional stress.

Major A, Hamilton Gibbs in Under low (Little, Brown, $2.50) introduces us in his first paragraph to Philip Jocelyn, Master of Arts of Oxford and snbmaster in a second-rate English preparatory school, and admirably keeps Jocelyn’s point of view until the last paragraph of his highly compressed, swiftly moving narrative. The story is that of Jocelyn’s somewhat tardy realization at thirty-five of himself, his thwarted desires, his true satisfactions in life. The discovery, which bursts upon lnm in Southern France through a passion For the country and through a new scrutiny of his own name, that he is in reality French and not English at all is surely a bit unconvincing, given even his ultra-artistic temperament,. But it serves to help in motivating the story of his mistaken love for an English girl and his ideal, natural passion for Jeanne Ricou. As a story the book is sufficiently teasing to be for the hour absorbing; as a venture into psychology its effect is, to me at least, disappointing.

Ellen Glasgow in The Sheltered Life (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50) is interested not in psychological theories and ideas but in actualities, not in why her people act as they do but in how they act. And she has written very well an extraordinarily convincing and satisfying story. Laid in Virginia, in the town of Queenborough, the action, much of it mental, centres about, the Archbald family, every member of which, from the old General to his granddaughter, Jenny Blair (the central figure), is so clearly drawn as to be unforgettable. Aunt Etta’s repressions, Mrs. Birdsong’s complexes, Cora Archbald’s self-deception, the old General’s thwarted yet splendid life, Jenny Blair’s premature adolescence — all these exist, nay, live with no need of analysis or of psychological terms to bolster them up and rob them of their own vitality. Personally I find in this story of Miss Glasgow’s her best work. It has power alike in its restrained pathos and in its equally restrained yet cruel irony; its treatment is as objective as that of Hardy, and yet, like Hardy, its author leaves us assured of her own sympathy through the rhythm of her phrases and through her fine choice of settings and details. Few tragic endings have been handled more admirably, so far as I know, in American fiction.

Lastly, and well deserving of the place of honor, is Helen Grace Carlisle’s We Begin (Harrison Smith, $2.50). This is by all means Mrs. Carlisle’s best work to date and gives pleasure and confidence to those of us who have watched her promising but somewhat chaotic and unstable progress through three earlier and quite different novels. We Begin is the story of the Pilgrims, at Serooby, in Holland, on the Mayflower, and in Plymouth. Obviously years of careful research have been spent in gathering its materials, and it may well serve as a dramatic and interpretative complement to such a splendid and valuable work as Samuel Eliot Morison’s Builders of the Bay Colony, even although Mrs. Carlisle ends as Professor Morison begins, even although she deals with Plymouth and the Separatists and he with Boston and the Puritans,

The motivating action of the book is the love of John and of Eleazar Dexter, Nonconformist brothers of Serooby, for Anne Brewster, their prayers and struggles to obtain her hand, the triumph of John over Eleazar, Eleazar’s awful vengeance in the new land of America. Yet, fascinating as is every page, the story itself, with all its incidents, its scrutinizing analysis of motive, its swiftness of action, is less captivating, to me at least, than are the mere facts it presents for our delectation and amazement. Embedded as they are in the narrative, skillfully made necessary to it, they nevertheless stand out with their own drama and partake of that, older, more stirring meaning of ‘fact,’ an act or a deed, which existed through the past centuries even to Jane Austen. Thus we read how Anne Brewster Dexter collected in Leyden provisions for her family of five, not only for the voyage but for the home-starting in the new land one hundred firkins of butter, barrels of biscuit, smoked herrings, pickled eggs, round Holland cheeses; how she packed her napkins of Serooby flax, her good sheets, her bolster eases and pillowbeers, her woollen settles, her children’s crickets, her high-posted bed with its curtains, her cullender, her candle moulds, her ’poss for beating the clothes’; how ’with aromatic herbs among them to fight the mould’ of the ship she stowed away a woolen ‘biggin’ for the baby’s head and a bib marked ‘in blue sticking “God bless the Babe!” Books, too, she carried, the children’s hornbooks, Coote’s English Schoolmaster, The School of Fertile, the Child’s Book of Nurture, Lily’s Grammar, ‘ Pythagoras, His Table,’ the Bible. Even for these spirited catalogues alone the book would be immensely valuable and interesting.

Objection might be made to Airs. Carlisle’s manner of telling her story. Her frequent change in narrators is perhaps destructive to the unity of effect, the lack of sufficient variation in the method arid style of the narrators, Anne and John, perhaps impairs the individuality of each and hence the author’s powers of characterization. The concluding chapters savor somewhat of melodrama. From time to time the reader questions whether .Mrs, Carlisle is wise to endow Anne Dexter with a psychological insight which seems to belong to the twentieth century rather than to the seventeenth. Nevertheless, the book as a whole is a distinct contribution not only to American fiction but to American history as well, and deserves to be received with gratitude and admiration.

MARY ELLEN CHASE