Erie Water
(Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, $2.50]
THE MAN of the MONTH
WALTER D. EDMONDS’S ERIS WATER is as fresh arid as full of sap and racy flavor as an apple. It was evidently written by a man for whom the rustic landscape is a passion only less strong than his passion for unspoiled human nature. One feels hopeful of the American novel after reading such a book by so young a man; because if the newer generation of novelists, after saturating themselves with American life, past or present, can still present it with so much of faith, hope, and charity, this suggests that they are penetrating below the surface — which until recently they found ugly and monotonous — to the roots and finding them sound.
Of course Eric Water deals with events of something over a hundred years ago; but there is little in it. except manners and customs, that cannot be duplicated to-day in any similar environment. Jerry Fowlers still marry quiet wives, whom they neglect for their work or for a woman more romantically interesting, and as like as not they return to their quiet wives in the end; and women are still unable to see why men love lifeless things, like canals, which they have made. And the world is still full of restless Epicureans, engaging nonentities, quiet workers, large-hearted women, fiery Irishmen, puzzled Negroes, futile dreamers, and men of vision, such as crowded the roads, dug the ditches, worked the farms along the route of the Seneca Turnpike in 1817. It is the reality of these scores of people and the warmth with which the rural landscape is painted that make the book seem not a historical novel at all. And this effect is greatly heightened by the skill with which the author has caught the very tone and cadence of popular speech. No one could do this who had not lived long and lovingly in one spot and tuned his ear to words as they are spoken and not as they are written in books.
The double theme of love and work — of Jerry and Mary Goodhill, a redemptioner, whom he marries, and of the construction of the Erie Canal and Jerry’s building of the locks — is carried through with quiet strength and is engrossingly interesting; but the book dwells in the mind as an experience in the open air — a long, leisurely tramp, punctuated by moments of excitement, but, on the whole, one in which the senses respond sharply to odd but half-familiar impressions and the mind is incessantly caught by quaintness, beauty, humor, and homely truth. One will not soon forget the gypsying on the ‘piece of grass against woods.’ with the wedding among the ‘movers’; or the horse, Bourbon; or the fight between O’Mory and Jay-Jay; or the finding of Norah in the cabin in the woods; or ’the water coming through,’ when the Canal at last is flooded.
R. M. GAY